Aussie Author Book Review No 8 - Belinda Alexandra's Silver Wattle plus author interview.

I've just finished reading Belinda Alexandra's Silver Wattle. It didn't take me long as I was rivited! I love her emotive style of writing. She leads me right into the story through her wonderful settings and characters. I loved her two previous novels - White Gardenia and Wild Lavender and have had Silver Wattle sitting on my bookshelf for months.

Belinda brings her love of other cultures to her books, and Silver Wattle begins in glorious Prague. It’s the story of two Czech sisters, Adela and Klara, whose nefarious stepfather murders their mother – and plans to murder them too so that he and his fancy woman can have their inheritance.


The girls flee to Sydney, Australia to live in safety with their uncle and his wife, an Indian who had been saved from committing sete. Indian culture and early Australian bigotry is explored through Ranjana. Things go smoothly enough for awhile. Klara is a talented but highly strung pianist, while Adela turns out to be a gifted photographer who eventually makes a career in film. There is an interesting sub theme about the early days of the film industry in Australia and how American distributers sabotaged the development of Australian cinema which was flourishing, but Adela marries one of these distributers (a) because he clandestinely supports her career and (b) because Beastly Beatrice cons Adela’s beloved Dr Philip into marriage and Adela is on the rebound. Unrequited love is a powerful theme throughout the novel.

Adela's character is the most interesting I think. Belinda Alexandra draws on her own love of wildlife to paint a picture of a character deeply moved by native animals (she raises a pet possum that she plucked from a dead mother's pouch) and wildlife is the major recurring theme in her photography. In real life, the author is a volunteer rescuer and carer for the New South Wales Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service (WIRES.)

Alexandra keeps the tension going throughout the novel and I couldn't put it down. There were so many mysteries to be solved...

I'm re-posting an author interview from auslit. If you like the sound of this author, read on...
 
Belinda Alexandra – Author Interview

Posted on October 4, 2010 by auslit

For those not familiar with your fiction writing, how would you describe it?
Sweeping, epic stories usually with historical backgrounds. I’m very interested in how massive historical events such as wars impact on the individual lives of my characters. Each story is a journey of endurance, courage, love, tragedy and triumph. My style is clean cut with an eye for sensuous detail and a touch of magic realism.
You have depicted a number of early to mid twentieth century settings in your novels, from the border region of Japanese occupied Russia and China during World War 2 in White Gardenia to provincial France at the outbreak of the war in Wild Lavender, to 1920s Sydney in Silver Wattle, to Tuscany during Mussolini’s rule of Italy in Tuscan Rose. What kind of research do you do for your novels?
Apart from the academic research to understand the history of those times, I pore over as much first hand material as possible – almost like an actress preparing for a part. I read the newspapers, learn the language of the culture I am writing about, read the interior design magazines, popular novels of the day and listen to the music. I even research cookbooks of the country and era to make sure any recipes given are true to the times. For Wild Lavender I learned to dance the tango, which is how I ended up meeting my husband.
You have written, “I’d studied modern history for my HSC but had been bored mindless by the endless essays on the political causes for war. I was interested in the impact these catastrophic world events had on individual people.” What advantages, in terms of storytelling, does concerning yourself with particular characters offer over trying to make your characters symbolise political ideas?
It’s very important to me that my characters live and breathe authenticity – that they are never wooden. Therefore I do spend time focusing on their particular beliefs and mindsets so everything they do and say (even when they contradict themselves) makes sense to their point of view of the world. I obviously have very passionate ideas about world peace, the nature of human beings and animal welfare and some of my characters do too … but as I don’t have all the answers myself and am constantly learning, I put my characters on a search for their own truths. This way they can be inspiring (or dreadful) but they are always human – as opposed to one-dimensional characters voicing political points of view.
Who is one of your favourite fictional characters, and what makes them stand out for you?
Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I first read that book when I was 16 years of age and the ability of Carton to transcend life and death through love made a huge impact on me.
You have written, “The end of my novels always comes to me first – I see the end of the story and then I have to work out who these characters are and how they all got to the position they are in.” Could you give us an overview of how you worked back from the ending to develop the story for one of your novels?
This is a bit tricky to do without spoilers. But I can say that working this way gives my work a sense of narrative drive. I see a character that has been through a lot, who has learned something very important, on whom truth and knowledge weigh heavily … and I have to answer what’s happened to them and how they got there.
If you could attend your ideal 2-day fiction writing workshop next weekend, what would that involve?
Not doing any work, I need a rest! Seriously, I love improving my technique and although I do spend time working on exercises most of my improvement comes from studying books where the story grabs me from the opening sentence and gives me plenty of ‘ah-ha’ moments by expressing life through the characters. But my style always has to be my own … so my ideal weekend would be talking to other fiction writers about life, about what inspires them and absorbing the energy that I get from being around other creative minds, but basically being left to work on my style and technique on my own.
Do you read much fiction by Australian authors, and do you have some favourites?
I am always hanging out for the next Kim Wilkins and Kate Morton novels. I love how their stories unfold. I have always admired the styles of Helen Gardner and Drusilla Modjeska. Their styles are different to mine – I often find Gardner’s work a challenge to my vision of beauty, but that’s good. It’s always good to be challenged.
What is the one piece of advice you would most like to offer for new fiction writers?
That good writing is all in the rewriting – whether you do that revision on paper or in your head. Keep working and layering a scene until it is just there so clearly before you in every sensual detail. A scene that breathes with life has a lot of thought behind it, whether conscious or subconscious.
What is next for your fiction writing?
I am constantly challenging myself to become a better and better storyteller. I’m currently working on a novel set during the Spanish Civil War.

I, for one, can't wait to read it.
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It's been released - The Distant Hours by Kate Morton, author of The Forgotten Garden and The House at Riverton (The Shifting Fog)

The Distant Hours, the novel that Kate Morton fans have been waiting for with great anticipation. I got my hands on it the other day and it's a winner! If you enjoyed The Forgotten Garden and The House at Riverton (The Shifting Fog) you will love this. View Kate's video first, where she explains the inspiration for this novel and how she just had to sit down and write, write, write, because the story just couldn't wait.

This is the Aussie cover! It's just gorgeous.

Her dress was incredible, the sort you expect to see in films about wealthy debutantes before the war, or hidden on the racks of up-market charity shops. It was organza, the palest of pink, or it had been once, before time and grime had got busy, laying their fingers all over it. Sheets of tulle supported the full skirt, pushing it out as it fell away from her tiny waist, wide enough for the netted hemline to rustle against the walls when she moved.

I'll start with the blurb from The Book Depository:

From the international bestselling author of "The House at Riverton" (or The Shifting Fog) and "The Forgotten Garden" comes a brand new tale of love, mystery, betrayal and dark secrets...

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Millderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother's emotional distance masks an old secret.

Evacuated from London as a thirteen year old girl, Edie's mother is chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, and taken to live at Millderhurst Castle with the Blythe family: Juniper, her twin sisters and their father, Raymond.

In the grand and glorious Millderhurst Castle, a new world opens up for Edie's mother. She discovers the joy of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, the dangers.

Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother's riddle, she, too, is drawn to Millderhurst Castle and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Old ladies now, the three still live together, the twins nursing Juniper, whose abandonment by her fiance in 1941 plunged her into madness.

Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother's past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Millderhurst Castle, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in the distant hours has been waiting a long time for someone to find it...

My Review

This  book will lead to sleep deprivation. You will find yourself totally engrossed in The Distant Hours! I've loved reading both of Kate Morton's previous novels, The Shifting Fog (The House at Riverton) and The Forgotten Garden, so I knew what to expect and I wasn't disappointed. I was hooked from the Prologue which is a deliciously descriptive excerpt from The Mud Man:

"It is moonless. It is moonless when the Mud Man comes. The night has slipped on a pair of fine, leather gloves, shaken a black sheet across the land: a ruse, a disguise, a sleeping spell, so that all beneath it slumbers sweet."

By the time an author releases a third novel, I'm prepared to be disappointed, as often, like a film sequel, it disappoints. However, "The Distant Hours" was everything that I had hoped it would be...and more! It had all the elements that make a great mystery: a gothic castle, family secrets, a literary mystery, and tragic love.

 It is long (500 pages.) Some may find this a little off-putting...but I enjoyed every second of it because Kate Morton's prose has gone up a notch, it is descriptive and brings her characters and Milderhurst Castle to life:

We stood facing one another across the dulled corridor for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she moved. Slightly. Her arms had been hanging by her sides, resting on her skirt, and she lifted one a little, leading from the palm, a graceful movement as if an unseen thread stitched to her inner wrist had been plucked from the ceiling behind me.

The "book within the book" in the form of Raymond Blythe's The True History of the Mud Man is done so well. I want to read The True History of the Mud Man now! Morton should totally publish it ;-) But one of the things that Morton does in The Distant Hours is celebrate the written word. I love what she says about librarians: "it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader".

I'm not a librarian, but I love the sentiment - as I love this book. Grab it. You'll be sorry if you don't.


'And then we're going to dance, dance, dance..."

(All quotes from pp. 71 - 75.)

This is my 7th Aussie Author Challenge Book Review. Click on the kangaroo on my side bar to read more.

Aussie Author Review No 5 - Lovesong, by Alex Miller

Aussie Author Book Review: Lovesong, by Alex Miller Time for another Aussie Author Review. Today my rave is about the great Aussie author, Alex Miller. I must admit I read my first Miller novel only a few months ago, loved it, then was pleased to find that Miller has written many more novels. Excellent. Beautiful.

She said nothing to his earnestness, his desire to impress her with his belief, his urgent need to acknowledge between them a binding commitment. She was thrilled to hear it on his lips. But it was too much. It was too soon. It weighted her down. She wanted to hear it and she didn’t want to hear it. What she wanted was to laugh with him. To run and play and hide with him, the way children play and hide and tease each other. This story is at once exotic and homely, telling of the sweetness of love and the sometimes awful cost of it. Sabiha is content working in their small Tunisian cafe in Paris, serving their regular clientele of North African immigrant workers. But when an Australian tourist, John, stumbles upon the cafe, her world begins to change. Soon deeply in love, the pair are married and John becomes part of Sabiha’s world. All that will complete their happiness is for Sabhia to bear the child she has always known she will have. But when the child does not come, a tragic series of events unfolds. In Australia several years later, an aging writer, Ken, meets the couple and their young daughter at the cafe they open in Carlton. Ken is intrigued by the family, and especially by the sorrow he sees in Sabiha’s eyes, and is drawn into their story when John seeks him out as a confidante. Lovesong is a beautiful story of love, loss and passion. Interwoven with Sabiha and John’s story are glimpses of Ken’s story, past and present. With its vigorous undercurrents of melodrama, its tides of sentiment, it certainly approaches the condition of song, perhaps of opera. At its core is one darkly gorgeous woman's inner music, her private pain. It is no ordinary love story but, in a most rewarding way, it is a conventional novel, a genre traditionally rooted in the struggle between desire and constraint .As the title suggests, the story is a smooth as one of the songs which Sahiba sings to her customers, carrying readers through the years and twists of the story and leaving them thinking long after the final note is sung. "A magical tale ... A classical shape and tenor, like a de Maupassant tale fleshed out. And an interesting ending, making the author so deeply complicitous. A little flick like a master calligrapher makes when they lift the brush after a perfect, single stroke." —David Brooks Romance and desire, longing and solitariness, transience and creativity – Alex Miller does it so well. Beautiful. Well worth adding to your reading list. Have a good week, Click on the 'roo for more Aussie reviews. Denise

Aussie Author Challenge - Review No 3 - The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton

 Hello there. This is my Review No 3 for the Aussie Author Challenge 

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

Kate Morton is a young Australian writer who lives in the Brisbane hinterland. She has been a fan of fairy stories since her childhood and has used this love of fantasy in this big, fat, delicious novel. The book, a work of historical fiction, is peppered with a wonderful set of characters and places where the reader feels part of the unravelling mystery.

The story is full of tragedy, secrets and discovery. There are three story lines happening, ranging from the present to early 20th century Victorian times, and all are tied together to create a suspenseful story of a family over several generations. The transitions between these periods create great tension, for example, the heat and frangipanis of the Brisbane setting is such a strong, marked, contrast to chilly Victorian England.

Morton uses wonderful descriptions, especially of the places she grew up in. As one who has experienced many a sub-tropical summer in Brisbane, her imagery captures the heat:

‘It was one of those desperate Antipodean spells where the days seem strung together with no gaps between. Fans do little else but move the hot air around, cicadas threaten to deafen, to breathe is to exert, and there is nothing for it but to lie on one's back and wait for January and February to pass...’ (Exactly, but now we have air conditioning!)

While some of the twists in the tale aren’t too difficult to predict, half the fun is finding out if you’re right and the other half is seeing which unanticipated twists Morton will throw in.

At the centre of the tale is Nell. Nell is secure in her identity and knows what she wants in life. Everything changes though, when on her 21st birthday her father reveals he is not her real father, her family is not her real family and she was, in fact, found on the Maryborough Wharf at the age of four. Her true origin and heritage are unknown. This news devastates Nell, as it would most readers, cracking the foundation of her life.

After Nell's death, it is her granddaughter Cassandra who must uncover the mystery of the little girl lost. This mystery takes her to Cornwall, to a cottage she has inherited from Nell. Here she discovers far more than she expects. In particular, she uncovers the long guarded secrets of the Mountrachet family, and of their ward, Eliza Makepeace. Eliza is the most fascinating character in the novel. From a young age she makes up stories to scare and fascinate those around her. Later, she puts these dark fairytales to paper, and these appear in the novel itself in the Victorian segment, making for a magical setting, mystery, and a fight between good and evil.

The characters are vivid, wounded and flawed in interesting ways that feel more Gothic than depressing – the story could be described as a combination of Daphne du Maurier and The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett puts in an appearance in the story.) The places are often as vivid as the characters, whether it’s the garden and cottage in Victorian England, Nell’s home in Australia in the now very trendy Brisbane suburb of Paddington, or a flat in London.

This is the second book of Morton's. If you can, chase down her other novel, international bestseller The Shifting Fog, every bit as breathtaking as The Forgotten Garden. I may review it next.

To read more reviews on Aussie books, click the kangaroo.

Aussie Author Challenge, Review No 2

 Book review: The Spare Room, by Helen Garner.

The Spare Room by much-lauded Australian author, Helen Garner, begins with a quote from Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’ This quote quieted my spirit, as did the description of Helen preparing a room for her soon-to-arrive terminally ill friend Nicola, before throwing me into what is a very intimate examination of the burden imminent death can put on the living.

The Spare Room didn’t read like a work of fiction; it seemed a factual account of two friends tested beyond endurance. Some wags have said that Helen Garner has published her diaries and called it a novel. There's some truth in this as I’ve since learned that the writer Helen Garner had nursed a terminally ill friend. Maybe that is why The Spare Room is not at all sentimental; rather it’s cruelly down to earth, a tide that surges between tenderness and brutal truth as for three harrowing weeks the women battle with each other.


When her bohemian friend Nicola arrives, weak and ill, Helen is launched into nursing care. She puts her life on hold and at first pretends to share Nicola's hopes for a miracle cure. Nicola has come to undergo a three-week program of what Helen considers quack treatments.


On seeing the clinic, Helen’s description is telling: it ‘is painted a strange yellow, the color of controlled panic.’ She keeps her murderous anger to herself while seeing her friend naked in an ‘ozone sauna’ while charlatans chatter about the miracle of vitamin C injections which ‘sort of scoop the cancer cells out of your body.’ Nicola laughs at Helen's skepticism and explains that the devastation done to her body is ‘only the vitamin C savaging the tumors and driving them out.’ I, as a reader, think Helen is somewhat harsh – if you are terminally ill with no hope, surely you are permitted to look for a cure that may be illusory, yet offers some little hope.


The Spare Room is powerful. The illness of Nicola, the anger of Helen – it is all over quickly, a few weeks gone by in a few reading hours. Helen shares insights on death: ‘It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.’ She is so honest in the telling.


Carers in our society are usually portrayed as saintly, but Helen doesn’t hide her irritation at taking on the role; having her life disturbed, often making interjections about trips she must take. Nicola’s refusal to face reality and the impact this has on those around her is told very honestly, not a saint in sight.


This novel will haunt me for years for the things that may be ahead – illnesses of loved ones, friendships tested, loneliness, frustration, anger. Maybe there will be a house with a spare room I will be setting up, or perhaps someone will be setting one up for me.


As well-known Australian media personality, Derryn Hinch, says as his sign-off line each day on his radio program – ‘That’s Life.’

For more Aussie Book Reviews, go here.

I first published this review on Bookersatz, where you'll find lots of excellent reviews of all genres.

Aussie Author Challenge - 8 Aussie Book Reviews before 31st December 2010. My first, Breath, by Tim Winton.

I signed up for the AUSSIE AUTHOR CHALLENGE some months ago, but have not begun my reviews of Aussie books at this stage. I'd better get moving before NaNoWrMo starts in November when all other projects will be on the back burner. If you're not an Aussie, (for this challenge you're called a Tourist) but would like to post a review or 3 on an Aussie author, sign up by clicking the link above.

There are lots of excellent Aussie authors, some who're strutting the international stage and some who keep a low profile. Well, like, who hasn't heard of Germaine Greer or Mr Booker himself, Peter Carey? Not my faves, but reading is a matter of personal taste, isn't it?

This Challenge started on 1 January 2010 and ends 31 December 2010. If you are considering joining up, here are the rules:

RULES:
1. Write a challenge sign-up post on your blog  In that post provide a link to the original post:
http://www.bookloverbookreviews.com/2009/12/im-hosting-aussie-author-challenge-sign.html
acknowledging Booklover Book Reviews and put the Challenge Button on your sidebar (grab mine), linking the button to the challenge post.
2. Add your name and the direct link to your AUSSIE AUTHOR CHALLENGE sign-up post in the Mister Linky list.
3. Decide which Aussie authors you will read in 2010, although you can change your book titles or challenge level at anytime!
4. Each time you read and review a book as part of this challenge, share this with other challenge participants by adding a direct link to your book review to the list at this post AUSSIE AUTHOR CHALLENGE Book Reviews.
5. When you have completed the challenge, add a link to your completion post here: Completion Post List.

If you would simply love to read some excellent book reviews, there are over 100 already written, so click on the AUSSIE AUTHOR CHALLENGE Book Reviews link above and read to your heart's content.

Here is my first book review for this challenge.


Breath, by Tim Winton - not just another book about surfing...

Tim Winton, a major Australian novelist, is categorised by some as a sort of beach poet, a creator of sprawling epics inflected by the grandeur of the landscape they inhabit. His subject is dark and at times troubling.

In many ways Breath is almost archetypal in its simplicity compared to many of Winton’s dark stories. Two friends, Bruce "Pikelet" Pike and Loonie, outsiders for different reasons, discover surfing, drawn to its intoxicating thrill. The breaks the teenagers surf are wild and often lonely and certainly dangerous, but they get to know some of the other surfers who visit them, including the enigmatic Sando, a lone wolf, wild-man surfer. Through Sando, Pikelet and Loonie meet Eva, Sando's wife, a former champion freestyle skier crippled by a ruined knee.

As Sando initiates the two boys into the mysteries and terrors of surfing's outer reaches, encouraging, cajoling and finally bullying the two of them into joining him in taking greater and greater risks, they become a "select and peculiar club . . . a cult. Sando and his maniacal apprentices".


But as the waves they surf grow larger, the breaks more dangerous, Pikelet grows less easy with Loonie and Sando's patronage, until finally Sando and Loonie disappear overseas on a surfing trip in Indonesia, leaving Pikelet behind. Left to their own devices, Pikelet and Eva slip heedlessly into a sexual relationship, something Pikelet believes is love and Eva sees as something quite different.

Breath is not the first time Winton has written about surfing. But in Breath that understanding is married to a sense of what Pikelet calls the "primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching".

The subject is one that allows Winton the space to unravel his remarkable linguistic gift for evoking place and the complex webs of association that bind people to the landscapes they inhabit. The repeated deployment of this gift to re-create the relatively confined setting of Winton's novels has led to him being regarded as a quintessentially Australian writer. Some reviewers consider Winton as the inheritor of the same American tradition as Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx or Jim Harrison, a tradition that for all its affinities with Carver's brand of pared-back social realism, owes its greatest debt to Faulkner.


It's unlikely Winton has ever written as well as he writes in Breath, a book that marries the lyricism of work such as his wonderful Cloudstreet to the adamantine hardness of the stories in The Turning. I love how his descriptions of the ocean leap from the page, revealing this wild landscape with a clarity and an intimacy that lets us see it all over again. Yet simultaneously this lyric imagination is further deepened by the darkness lurking behind it. For as Pikelet comes to realise, surfing may be beautiful but it is also something more: a pretext for a particular kind of male (and, as the ruined freestyler Eva demonstrates, sometimes female) risk-taking behaviour; a need for danger that is in its own way as addictive as drugs or drink or any one of a range of self-destructive behaviours.

And while Winton is not the only writer to have plumbed this dark side of surfing - the American Kem Nunn, whose work Winton has himself praised, has built a career around depicting the macho world of surfing with chilling accuracy - Breath's looping structure and glancing depiction of the damage wrought on Pikelet lends its questions about the cost of such behaviour with real poignancy.

In a way Breath is a sort of coming-of-age story, perhaps one you might normally expect to find in the work of a much younger and less-experienced writer. Yet Winton nails it.

Its seeming simplicity is deceptive, for beneath its pared-back surfaces lies all the steel of a major novelist operating at full throttle in a territory he has spent 25 years making his own.

Hope you enjoyed this review. Happy reading...Denise

Thanks to James Bradley, for his review in The Age. I have referred to some of his content.

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

Just do the following:


•Grab your current read


•Open to a random page


•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page


•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)


•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants (and anyone reading the post) can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser.
 

My first entry for Teaser Tuesdays is showcasing an Aussie book as I'm also joining the Aussie Author Challenge where if you're a Fair Dinkum Aussie you have to read and review 8 Aussie books by at least 5 different authors before the end of December this year. If you're not Fair Dinkum, you still have to read 3 Aussie books. Check the details as there are so many excellent Aussie authors.
 
Meanwhile back to #teasertuesdays and a bit of the early Aussie bush...
 

"Then the team swung out from the bush, turning into the track, sunlight striking down through young green of the red gum and jarrah saplings, splashing the big red and white bullocks inthe lead. Red, tawny, black, and white backs of the beasts moved slowly, with rippling sway, against the lighted and shadowy depths of the forest."

from Working Bullocks, by Katharine Susannah Prichard, p.5