In short - Fiction
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 19, 2009
DANCING BACKWARDSBy Salley VickersFourth Estate, 272pp, $27.99This subtle, witty and beautifully written novel takes place almost entirely aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise ship, in which Vi Hetherington has decided to travel to New York rather than catch a plane. Her mission is to see a man she hasn't seen for many years and she is uncertain enough about the reunion to have chosen the ocean in order to give herself time to think about it. It's clear almost immediately that she's not the cruise type, asking herself in the opening line: "What on Earth have I done?" But she has a cabin with a balcony and makes the most of this privacy to enjoy the beauty of the sea.Most people over 40 spend a lot of time wondering how and why we made the choices that have shaped our lives and Vi Hetherington is no exception; during the six days of the cruise, as she encounters passengers, thinks about her grown-up children and mulls over her past, the reader learns Vi's journey, and her whole life, isn't quite what it seems and the reunion holds the biggest surprise of all.WHAT CAME BETWEENBy Patrick CullenScribe, 192pp, $27.95This book is a hybrid of a novel and a short-story collection, of the kind that Frank Moorhouse christened "discontinuous narrative". The stories are told in the stripped-down deadpan mode of minimalist realism, of the kind associated with Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, and it's an unforgiving style that can sometimes backfire €” the saying goes that "less is more" but sometimes less is just less.Cullen, however, manages to infuse his quiet storytelling with the poignancy of what remains unsaid. The stories are all set in one street in Newcastle, in the decade between the earthquake and the closing down of the steelworks, and tell the interwoven tales of several families in a small city where jobs, houses and marriages all need to be monitored and negotiated while everyone tries to stay financially and emotionally afloat.There's been a shift in recent Australian fiction to a focus on the regional and this book is part of that: a vivid evocation of an industrial port where daily life is dominated by the ocean and the dust.HAPPINESSBy Denis Robert, translated by John InnesSerpent's Tail, 160pp, $23.99Quite a fuss has been made about this little piece of erotica, originally published in France in 2000 and newly out in translation. Two characters, a man and a woman, muse and reminisce on alternate pages about an affair that's now finished. Both are married to other people and both are frankly in it for the sex, about which they are quite explicit: 160 disconcertingly clinical pages of who put what where.It's all very French, except in one particular: they don't seem to be enjoying themselves. They talk about pleasure a great deal but don't seem to be experiencing any, except in the brief, sterile sensations of sexual compulsion without affection. They seem neither to admire nor be fond of one another and there's a kind of icy, joyless narcissism about them.In between the clinical and mechanistic descriptions of their sexual encounters and the unconvincing protestations of the woman that helplessness and submission are really fun, the reader's main impression is that these people deserve each other.PICK OF THE WEEKTHE MEMORY COLLECTORBy Meg GardinerBlue Door, 368pp, $32.99Not long after the red-haired, blue-eyed teenager Seth Kanan and his dog have been kidnapped from Golden Gate Park, forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett is called to the airport, where a red-haired, blue-eyed man has been behaving dangerously on a flight. She manages to persuade the police that he needs to be hospitalised rather than arrested but it's only when she sees the state of his brain on the MRI that she realises the true extent of the damage: she has never seen anything like it and whatever it is has deprived Ian Kanan of the ability to form new memories. What has happened to Kanan's brain and where and why?This is Gardiner's second Jo Beckett book and it's good enough for the reader to make an effort to find and read the first one. It's not in the class of Val McDermid and her character Tony Hill, with its events more blockbusterish and its characters less noir and less complex, but the focus on events inside a character's brain as the driving force behind crimes and stories is always more interesting than just the crimes and the stories.The Memory Collector is a well-paced and well-structured thriller in which a large cast of characters and a great deal of detail have been cleverly managed so that the story, despite its frequent changes of scene, rolls on smoothly. If anything, it's rather too easy to work out what's going on; the book may be a thriller but it is not really a mystery. Gardiner seems far more interested in character and motivation than she is in keeping the reader guessing.But apart from those readerly pleasures of being kept, suspenseful and uncertain, in the dark, this book has everything else that a thriller fan could wish for: kidnapping, industrial espionage, spectacular comeuppances for the villains, an extremely scary biological weapon, a car chase with guns, a dramatic riverboat ride through an African wildlife park, two love stories, two incident-packed international flights and a feisty heroine with an interesting job.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald