JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

A World of Other People by Steven Carroll

A World of Other People rightfully co-won the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Fiction in 2014, and is a literary fiction novel set in 1941 during the Blitz. This novel traces the love affair of Jim, an Australian lot in Bomber Command, and Iris, a forthright Englishwoman finding her voice as a writer. The two struggle to build their future together amidst secrets and malign coincidence, and their lives are plagued by the constant presence of society’s disapproval.

Steven Carroll is a wonderful writer, weaving beautiful descriptive prose alongside realistic, haunting dialogue and characterisation. A World of Other People documents Jim and Iris over many years, and through circumstance, coincidence and life, the two weave in and out of each other’s lives over the years. In most cases, they disappear from each other’s lives not out of choice, but out of necessity or pure circumstance.

Steven Carroll is able to describe their lives with such detailed, imaginative prose, that this story, which really only possesses enough of a plot to be a novella at most, has become an illustrious novel filled with multi-dimensional characterisation and class act writing. The reader becomes immersed in Iris and Jim’s love story, both doubting their future together, and fighting for it.

There aren’t many sub plots in this book that accompany Jim and Iris’ storyline, but since Jim and Iris are separate for most of their lives, Steven Carroll uses those times in the story to follow each of their storylines and show the reader the two sides to the couple. Steven then brings them together for short periods of time to emphasise both their compatibility and their intense need for each other during that time in their lives.

The pace is extremely slow and the plot seems almost non-existent, but by exploring this young couple and their time (or lack there of) spent together, Carroll pulls on heartstrings and produces a beautifully written but heartbreaking novel.

My Score: 7/10

Room by Emma Donoghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it’s where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it’s not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

This book is devastatingly heartbreaking, but beautifully crafted at the same time. It’s gut-wrenching and inspiring and makes you view certain things quite differently upon completing the book.

The main character is Jack, who has just turned five years old and he and his mother live in a locked room. Well, not really a room, but a garden shed converted into a soundproof, foolproof cell — they are captives, and Jack’s father is the man who kidnapped his mother when she was nineteen. She is now 26, and desperate to get out of the room.

This book is written from Jack’s point of view, which does a fantastic job of showing us that this room is Jack’s world. He doesn’t think the world exists outside of this room. He doesn’t understand what the beach is or what fresh air is or what running really feels like. He and his mother have a tv, but she’s made him believe that everything on it is make believe and a fantasy (so that Jack doesn’t ever feel like he’s missing out on anything). She is his entire world, and she’s done everything she can to protect him and keep him healthy and keep his questions answered (to his best ability).

The man who kidnapped Jack’s mother is called Old Nick, and since he lost his job 6 months earlier, it’s quite clear that he’ll need to get rid of his house soon. This means he won’t be able to keep Jack and his mother there, and she realises that he’s probably going to get rid of them, so she hatches a plan to escape the room.

Emma has written the dialogue so well — she captures Jack’s naivety and innocence, but also his mother’s frustration and desperation and heartbreak. And she also masks it as well. Jack only knows so much, and his questions highlight how little he is aware of.

This book is wonderful, but also hard to read. It is a ‘read in one sitting’ book, and it’s an eye opener.

My Score: 10/10

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state. So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a home of their own, they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month – swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But then, unknown to each other, Stan and Charmaine develop passionate obsessions with their ‘Alternates,’ the couple that occupy their house when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire begin to take over.

I am a huge Margaret Atwood fan. I haven’t read all of her novels (who has? There’s about 40 of them. Who has that kind of spare time?) but this is the best one I’ve read so far. Yes, I enjoyed this more than The Handmaid’s Tale. More than Oryx and Crake. And more than last year’s release, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales.

Whilst I was reading The Heart Goes Last, I was trying to work out why I loved it so much. Were the characters any more three dimensional than in her other works? No. Was the plot development any more realistic than her other works? No. But there were a few things that I think set this book apart from the others.

Other than literary novels and young adult novels, I love campus novels (stories set within a university campus). That is, novels that are set within a secluded and enclosed environment. The characters seem trapped. The entire plot of the novel takes place at the same location, and it’s almost like the characters can’t escape their problems. It’s fantastic for a reader, and this kind of enclosed setting/environment is seen in The Heart Goes Last. The main characters, Charmaine and Stan, volunteer for a social experiment where they live within a gated community. The spend every second month working in the community, and every other month locked in prison.

Margaret Atwood does a fantastic job of creating characters that are flawed but realistic as well. They might be narrow minded, but they offer interspersed societal comments that reflect well on their current situation. They might be ignorant, but they’re ironically very aware of their own feelings and emotions and desires. In The Heart Goes Last, Charmaine and Stan aren’t the most likeable. Stan seems complacent and unassuming and well, a little boring. Charmaine is the real star of the book, but she at times seems naive and silly.

The novel is meant to be funny. The most absurd and bizarre things happen, including robots that people can have sex with. Prostitute Robots, I call them. And it makes the book seem like black comedy. Odd, utterly bizarre characters and odd, utterly bizarre happenings within this social experiment.

I love it because of that. I love it because Margaret Atwood never does what you think she’ll do. She never does what she’s done before, and she uses beautiful, lyrical prose to flesh out her characters, no matter how unlikeable they may be.

My Score: 9/10

The Bees by Laline Paull

Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen. Yet Flora has talents that are not typical of her kin. And while mutant bees are usually instantly destroyed, Flora is reassigned to feed the newborns, before becoming a forager, collecting pollen on the wing. Then she finds her way into the Queen’s inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous. Enemies roam everywhere, from the fearsome fertility police to the high priestesses who jealously guard the Hive Mind. But Flora cannot help but break the most sacred law of all, and her instinct to serve is overshadowed by a desire, as overwhelming as it is forbidden…

This book is very, very original. It is written from the point of view of a bee named Flora, and the book presents a dystopian and almost totalitarian society. Flora doesn’t seem to think too many things — she doesn’t dwell on her situation or her surroundings, and her actions are described more often than her thoughts are. And yet, she is so vivid to the reader. We come to understand who she is and what she wants and we come to understand her purpose in this novel. Laline has done a fantastic job of creating a fleshed out, three dimensional character within this dystopian (and extremely unique) environment.

For the first fifty pages, I almost felt like I was reading another language. There are specific terms for bees within each level of ‘society’ in their hive, and their life and their actions and their ‘work’ has been described with a specific terminology. It does take a bit of getting used to — the writing style is very descriptive. The author goes into great detail about Flora’s world and what she sees in that world.

Since this entire novel is written from the point of view of a bee, the reader has to adapt to what their threats are, and thus, what the ‘tension’ is in the book. Bees fear wasps and spiders and rain. Naturally, readers don’t find those as threatening, but we are forced to imagine the situation from Flora’s point of view.

Laline must have done a fair bit of research before writing this novel, because there are a lot to things to be learnt from the day-to-day life presented to us readers. Bees do dance to communicate, and the different ‘work’ that is performed in a hive is true to reality. However, I do think this novel would’ve been better had it of been shorter. It’s about 100-150 pages too long. By the end, I just wanted to finish it. I’ve read a lot of reviews where readers felt the story dragged on and it got monotonous and that The Bees would’ve been better as a novella or short story. I agree. I would’ve liked to have seen this cut down. But, it is fascinating and it is extremely well-written and it’s a great piece of literary fiction.

My Score: 7/10

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organisation that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Finishing this novel felt like finishing a marathon — a long, exhausting marathon where I needed to concentrate on every sentence or I’d miss some vital information. Don’t get me wrong, this novel is fantastic. The writing is beautiful and the characterisation is marvellous and the development of the story is organic and realistic and believable. BUT this novel is an absolute beast. It’s 600 pages of big paragraphs and no chapters. That’s right. There are NO chapters in this novel, just sections. And each section ranges from 80 pages to 150 pages.

Franzen writes flawed characters so well, and pretty much every main character in this novel has a major flaw. Pip (the main character) never knew her father and later in life, she makes a habit of forming inappropriate attractions towards older men. She seems to willingly make mistakes or serious errors in moral judgement, but she is unapologetic and seems unwilling to learn from her mistakes. At times, she seems like a passive character, overshadowed by the characters Tom and Andreas and unsure about her place within the storyline.

Franzen creates these almost unlikeable, flawed characters so that readers can’t not talk about them. I had to take a couple of breaks when reading this book just so I could chat to a couple of my friends who’d read the book. I even stopped reading Purity and read two other novels before going back to it. I needed a break. This book is literature at its best, and each sentence is vital to the storyline. At one point in the novel, an entire storyline was actually a flashback and I didn’t realise. I obviously must have missed the sentence where that flashback started. Franzen gives you the backstory of pretty much every main character, but there always seems to be some ambiguity to their character, and it seems that the only way the reader can come to understand this is to talk about it. And that is one of the many things that Franzen excels at as a writer.

Each section in the novel focuses on a different character, or a different time period. Some sections go into pages-long flashbacks, or pages-long tangents. But Franzen ties it all together and everything makes sense, and the characters’ motives are fleshed out through three-dimensional characterisation and his beautiful, lyrical prose. Just read these wonderful quotes from the book:

“I am in love. I’m the least beautiful girl at Los Volcanes, but I’m funny and brave and honest and he chose me. He can break my heart later—I don’t care” – page 284

“His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet” – page 349

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was” – page 517

Franzen’s characters all resonate with the reader. Some readers might even relate to these characters and find themselves drawing similarities to Pip or Tom or Andreas or some of the minor characters.

A lot happens in this book. Andreas murders someone and is haunted by it for the rest of his life, and Pip manages to track down her father. Despite the fact that the book is long and very, very detailed (almost too detailed) and there’s about 5000 tangents, Purity is wonderful and well worth the long slog of reading it. I recommend this book to every reader. Even if you only read the first hundred pages, you’ll still be able to admire Franzen’s extraordinary writing ability.

My Score: 10/10