GatesyRead

I picked up a second-hand copy of A Single Man in a bookshop in the Blue Mountains. I had wanted to read Christopher Isherwood since quoting from Goodbye to Berlin in my own novel, The Copyart Murders. What I found in this novel surprised me on a number of different levels. First, there was the frankness of the depiction of a gay man who has just lost his partner, Jim – we find out how later in the novel. This is 1964, and I thought about how the issue of gay marriage, topical as it is, is not new in the sense of couples like George and Jim having lived together in all-but-wedlock for years now. The description of the suburban life they have been living, with George’s silence to his neighbours about the true reason for his ‘room-mate’s’ absence is poignant, yet saved from sentimentality by the irony of George’s natural outlook on life. This leads to the second surprise in the novel – the moments of real human insight, hopeful and profound in nature. In this respect, I should have ex...

Delia Falconer's first novel was published to great success in 1997, being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1998, and reviewed favourably in the New York Times that same year. To me, this book seems to have been around for a long time - perhaps it is because it is the sort of book that appeared on a thinking person's bookshelf, or because I have seen it numerous times in the one house (a friend's cottage in the Blue Mountains, appropriately). Or perhaps it is the subject matter, and that sense of age that comes with moss and mist, and the slow time of the setting - we begin a little earlier than this in introducing the characters, but essentially this is 1907 in Katoomba, with young and delicate unrequited love. Even without reading the review comparisons, the Marquez-like magical realism, or the Australian version thereof - is seen in the spirit-seeking Aunts protagonist Eureka lives with. On another level, the Blue Mountains and the Hydro Majestic in particular...

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children , the chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born on the exact moment of India's Independence, and is imbued with special powers as a result. So, what might an Australian version of such a novel be? This is a little unfair as a question - but Peter Carey's latest novel, Amnesia has its subject (if not protagonist) Gabrielle Baillieux born on November 11, 1975, at the exact moment the Whitlam Labour government is being dismissed from office by the Governor General and conservative forces. This is the era of the cold war, of the coup against the elected Allende government in Chile, and in Australian terms - of the dramatic end to the first Labour party in office since the end of the Chifley government in 1949. Gaby's birth date, like Saleem's, is symbolic of the novel's intent and themes. In this case, it suggests the American influence over Australian politics; the retributive power of conservative forces when threatened ...

Mark Henshaw's The Snow Kimono begins in a deceptively straightforward manner with the introduction of Auguste Jovert, former police inspector, now retired Parisian. He meets a Japanese man of his age who introduces himself as Tadashi Omura, a former professor of law, now resident of the same apartment block as Jovert. Henshaw utitlises an omniscient narrative technique that allows him to move between storytellers with ease. For example, Omura's narrative, begins as such: 'One afternoon, Omura was saying, I decided to take Fumiko to see her mother's grave' (p.10). The next six or seven pages follow this line, and then we are reminded of Jovert's place as listener in the present: 'Jovert sat looking across at [Omura]' (p.17). So far, so good, as we learn of Omura's love for his adopted daughter (or the girl he has brought up as his own, from the age of three). Things get complicated from here, so that it is in many ways hard to distil; Omura tells...

I picked up Javier Marias's "false novel" A Dark Back in Time on the basis of my enjoyment of two earlier novels - All Souls (1992) and A Heart so White (1995). My memory of these two novels was sufficiently vague for me not to be warned off by a rather enigmatic back-cover description. Of All Souls , I could only recall a university novel in the loosest terms; A Heart so White had a more conventional plot and I enjoyed the bookish narrator, with his marital problems and his overshadowing father. A Dark Back in Time promises to play with narrative structures - the back cover refers to "a man named Javier Marias" and one gets the idea that the writer will be somehow writer, narrator and character in the text. Indeed, this is the case. Fundamentally, Dark Back explores the historical and personal material that inspired All Souls and in that sense deliberately inhabits that space that writers normally take trouble to avoid - that is, the 'shadowland...

Canada is a long novel - 511 pages - but in some respects it's two shorter novels and a postscript. Part One could certainly have been a book in itself, though getting the fuller life perspective is obviously what Ford is after by moving the story forward into Canada from Great Falls, Montana, where the first section takes place, to what happens next and thereafter. To make this a little clearer: Part One - 15 year old Dell Parsons and his immediate family before his parents unexpectedly decide to rob a bank and ruin their lives. Part Two - the same year and the next few months, now in rural and abandoned Saskatchewan, Canada. Dell, on his own, and in bad company through the misguided from-jail-plans of his mother. Part Three - sixty year-old Dell Parson, seeking out his sister before her upcoming death, thinking about his life since the days of his youth. There's nothing in this plot summary that gives too much away, because Ford uses the narrative foretelling technique to ...

Peter Carey has written some challenging novels over the years - novels that require perseverance on the part of the reader, even though reviewers continue to talk about their ability to 'dazzle'. This reader is an unabashed fan of Carey, and so it was very unusual for me not to push myself a little and finish the novel. Indeed, I was half way through and more-or-less gave up and the hardback sat on the shelf for perhaps two years; in December I reorganised my bookshelves to include a section (indeed, a bookshelf) of unfinished readings. Parrot and Oliver in America  emerged as one I definitely wanted to finish, and so, onto the second half! I don't know if it was the Christmas spirit, but I thoroughly enjoying my second attempt. Fearing I would get shipwrecked a second time, I picked up from where I left off, and although I was initially a bit confused about the characters (particularly Parrot) I was quickly engaged in their American travels. Some familiar themes emerged...