THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley (Flamingo)
Jane Smiley is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, and in her new book she returns to rural life in the United States’s Midwest. This time, though, she goes back in time to the years leading up to the Civil War.
The eponymous heroine tells her own story, but one is kept aware of the author’s sardonic nod in the direction of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom.
Lidie recalls her oppressive father’s death, her subsequent marriage to Thomas Newton (a staunch abolitionist) and their westward trek from Illinois to stake a claim in Kansas Territory.
The tale Lidie tells of Newton and his friends trying to set up a “Free State” virtually in the midst of slave-owning zealots is intrinsically interesting and often exciting. Yet the almost unvarying pace of Lidie’s narrative voice borders on the monotonous, and her feminist liberalism and modern idiom sound an anachronistic note.
This criticism notwithstanding, Smiley is always worth reading and her descriptions of pioneer life are powerful, especially when juxtaposed with the leisure and luxury on slave owners’ plantations. Also impressive is Lidie’s observation during her peregrinations of the hardening of feeling between the “slavocrats” and the abolitionists.
VISIBLE WORLDS by Marilyn Bowering (Flamingo)
Canada is experiencing a rich literary efflorescence, boasting a crop of talented writers of which Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and E Annie Proulx are perhaps the most eminent. In her second novel (following To All Appearances a Lady, 1990) Winnipegian Marilyn Bowering shows herself to be developing into a worthy addition to this illustrious company.
Visible Worlds is a family saga spanning several decades from the 1930s, through World War II and its ensuing turmoil, up to the 1960s. The novel incorporates several interlocking stories, chief of which is that of twin brothers, Gerhard and Albrecht, who grow up apart and are further separated when Gerhard (a music student in pre-war Germany) is forced into the German army.
The other main strand of the plot concerns Fika, who undertakes a mammoth journey from the Soviet Union across the North Pole in search of freedom in Canada. The hardships she endures in the icy landscape are paralleled by the grimness of war and of life in refugee and labour camps.
Bowering’s powerful descriptions and assured characterisation keep one absorbed as she meshes together the various elements in the novel.
THE GIRL WITH BRAINS IN HER FEET by Jo Hodges (Virago)
This debut novel is set in Leicester where the author was born and where her first-person narrator is growing up in the Seventies. Jacqueline Jones (or Jack) belongs to a small “coloured” minority in a predominantly white area and lives in a council house with her severe mother, never finding out who her father is.
A lively girl who is the best sprinter in her school, Jack has all the fears and longings of the average teenager and is a believable character in a well-drawn suburban setting.
Hodges is a promising writer but the book could have done with more rigorous editing, especially in the first half.
The authentic-sounding dialogue and the energy of the narrative are engaging but, for my taste at least, some of the crudeness needs toning down and the footnotes – an incongruous device in the context – should be cut altogether.
KALIMANTAAN by CS Godshalk (Little, Brown)
In 1838, Sarawak, on the north-west coast of Borneo, was commandeered by the British adventurer Sir James Brooke. He was appointed rajah by the local sultan in 1841, a title retained by his family until 1946 when the territory was ceded to the British Crown.
It is on the colourful events surrounding the so-called “white rajahs” that Godshalk draws for her remarkable debut novel, which was 10 years in the making.
Of truly epic proportions, Kalimantaan is well written and unpretentious, giving the reader an extraordinarily vivid insight into the people of Sarawak and their imperial rulers.
The book has many violent episodes, but Godshalk is also concerned with love and with the lives of the women in her narrative. What emerges is an historical novel of some complexity (slightly reminiscent of Marina Warner’s Indigo) which is at once a take on conflicting cultures and high adventure, a love story, a psychological study of the central character, Gideon Barr and, above all, a telling comment on colonialism.