Shirley Kossick
new fiction
Anita Brookner habitually limits her fictional cast and her 20th novel, The Bay of Angels (Viking), is no exception. The narrative centres on Zo Cunningham whose widowed mother’s second husband takes her to live outside Nice and buys Zo a flat in London.
With her wonderful gift for precise description, Brookner contrasts the gloom of London and the sunshine of Nice, where Zo spends the happiest summer of her life. But this idyll is short-lived and soon Zo must accept the slow disintegration of her dreams. Oddly, though, Brookner’s well-worn theme of a lone woman confronting her destiny is neither depressing nor hopeless. In fact, with her psychological acuity and meticulous prose, Brookner’s new work is as compelling as ever.
While one expects polished writing from the experienced Brookner, the assured style of two debut novels is more surprising. In the evocatively titled Music for the Third Ear (Black Swan), Susan Schwartz Senstad recounts the painful experiences of Mette, the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
Her parents’ suffering impels Mette to take in two refugees from Sarajevo. But instead of docility and gratitude, she and her Norwegian husband encounter only confusion and anger and become entangled in a heart-breaking child fostering drama.
Senstad’s descriptions are unforgettable, such as the faces of Mette’s traumatised parents, which “resembled those of children shaken from a nightmare yet still in the grip of a monstrous netherworld”. Not surprisingly, comparisons have been made with Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, who has remarked on Senstad’s profound insights.
Charlotte Adderson depicts Holocaust atrocities more graphically in her stunning debut The History of Forgetting (Review). Malcolm, an ageing Vancouver hairdresser, is appalled by his lover’s advancing Alzheimer’s and the emergence of a long-suppressed anti-Semitism.
When a colleague is bludgeoned to death by neo-Nazi thugs, Malcolm is sickened, while the effect on Alison, their young apprentice, is overwhelming. Together this odd couple makes a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, a town that ironically has grown prosperous through its terrible tourist exhibit. Both shocking and partially cathartic, the visit leaves unanswered the re-iterated question, “How to believe in anything after Auschwitz?”
Turning again to established writers, Amy Tan manages a fresh approach to her favoured themes of memory, conflicting cultures and mother-daughter dynamics in her fourth novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (Doubleday).
Chinese-American ghostwriter Ruth Young is estranged from her mentally declining mother until she comes upon a diary of things LuLing “must not forget”. Her account of childhood in a Chinese village with the disfigured Precious Auntie is harrowing, but it gives Ruth new insight into, and compassion for, her mother’s blighted existence. Ultimately, too, it helps Ruth to heal her own life.
Also about a difficult mother-daughter relationship, The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver (The Women’s Press), concerns 11-year-old Eva’s grief at her father’s death five years earlier. Her mother’s distress is aggravated by the dread that Francis has passed his mental disorder on to Eva.
Parallel with this is Burl’s story, a lone and lonely beekeeper whom Eva gradually befriends. Graver’s treatment of character and plot development make rewarding reading with a new world to me at least of bee lore as an added bonus.
Also published by The Women’s Press, Stevie Davies is an inventive and versatile writer. Her new novel, The Element of Water, focuses on the end of World War II and the estrangement of two childhood friends.
While Michael Quantz abhorred the excesses of Nazism and gladly discarded the past along with his uniform, ruthless SS officer Paul Dahl remains a clandestine Nazi. The setting is a school for children of British servicemen near Lake Pln, formerly the headquarters of Admiral Donitz who, as Hitler’s successor, took charge of Germany’s surrender to the Allies.
Thirteen years later Dahl’s daughter arrives to teach at the school and, inevitably one feels, falls in love with Michael’s son. But Davies goes well beyond straightforward romance, moving smoothly between 1945 and 1958 and examining the nature of guilt and responsibility, cruelty and prejudice. She handles these complex themes with depth and compassion while simultaneously emphasising the tenacity of mankind’s will to survive.
Similar themes dominate Nowhere Else on Earth (Heinemann) by Josephine Humphreys, especially survival. Though the North Carolina setting could hardly be less like Davies’s landscape, there are remarkable parallels in the two writers’ comments on the ravages of war, in Humphreys’s case the American Civil War.
The narrator is Rhoda, a teenager of mixed Scots and Indian descent, who recounts the plight of a forgotten remnant of the Lumbee Indians caught between the warring parties. Eking out a living in the back-breaking turpentine trade, her people’s condition is aggravated by “the macks” (or Scots) who want their boys to replace runaway slaves, the Home Guard that press-gangs youngsters into building Confederate defences and marauding troops from both sides.
Against this embattled background Humphreys depicts not only treachery, avarice and brutality, but also kindness, heroism and love. She tells an action-filled and gripping story, illustrating above all the durability of the human spirit.