A COUNTRY TOO FAR: WRITINGS ON ASYLUM SEEKERS edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally

 A COUNTRY TOO FAR: WRITINGS ON ASYLUM SEEKERS edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally

I really can't write a review of this book that could possibly do it any justice, other to say that anyone with half a thinking brain who lives in Australia (primarily), and New Zealand (only because it is the next landfall after Australia) should read it. The following link is by a reviewer (Australian) for The Guardian newspaper, and it says everything that I want to say, but so much better. I urge you to read it.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/28/a-country-too-far-review-book-review

Other than the Aboriginies in Australia, every single person who lives in the countries of New Zealand and Australia migrated to these islands. The asylum seekers who are the subject of this anthology of writings are also seeking a better life. Their much publicised fates once, that is if, they reach the shores of Australia would make most of them wonder why they even bothered. All the contributors are well known Australian writers, with the exception of one who is well known in New Zealand, and they write a mix of fiction, poems and non-fiction mostly from the perpectives of the refugees  themselves - men, women and children. There are also a few writers who have written stories from their own family history which, although not about the asylum seeker/boat people we see nowadays, are every bit as relevant as the current hopefuls.

This is a problem that will not go away.  Australians burying their NIMBY heads in the sand are going to be creating more troubles for themselves. After all how hard can it be for a country of 23 million to treat with dignity and compassion a few thousand desperate migrants a year.

THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

First off, it is huge, 771 pages. Secondly it took 11 years to write. Thirdly it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A very big book in so many ways. It is also very very good - engrossing, page turning, full of surprises and twists, exquisitely drawn and very human characters, a terrific story, and after so many pages, an ending that really is quite satisfactory. Author Stephen King said about it "a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind." Little more to be said really.

If you can apply yourself for that number of tightly typed pages, and allow yourself to be lost in the tale, this really is a fabulous read. 13 year old Theo Decker happens to be in the museum with his mother when a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother. In his panic, fright, and confusion he comes across a seriously injured an elderly man who gives him a ring and indicates to a picture on the wall, which Theo pulls off the wall and flees. This chance encounter and acquisitions dictate Theo's life for the duration of the story.

I really loved this novel, although it is a shade too long perhaps....there is no doubt it is very wordy, and there are places in the story when I wished it would just hurry up and get on with it, but the author's mastery of the language and how she simply carries you along with the train of thought sort of takes over until before you know it, things are happening again. Not having been a 13 year old boy, I don't know how their brain patterns work, but here is a child desperately trying to survive with no parents, no love, no direction, growing into a man probaby suffering from Post Traumatic Stress, with the only constant in his life being a small priceless painting some 350 years old. I couldn't put this down, and found myself drawn to it,  having to sneak-read another page or two in the long compelling saga.  

DIPLOMATIC LADIES: NEW ZEALAND'S UNSONG ENVOYS by Joanna Woods

 DIPLOMATIC LADIES: NEW ZEALAND'S UNSONG ENVOYS by Joanna Woods

Joanna Woods is highly qualified to be telling the story of New Zealand's 100 year history diplomatic representation through the eyes of the spouses and daughters of its various diplomats. For 22 years she herself was the wife of a diplomat, representing New Zealand in Rome, Teheran, Bahrain, Washington, Athens, Paris and Moscow,  rising up the ranks from a lower level secretary to ambassador.

It does all sound incredibly glamorous and sophisticated, representing your country at the highest level, all those parties, meeting interesting and influential people from everywhere, the travel, the domestic help, education and many expenses paid for. But the reality of this life is actually quite different, and having worked in the foreign service myself, albeit some 30 years ago, I was able to observe how tough this life can be on the spouse and the family. Even though I was not a spouse, so much of this book rang true. I can still see the sadness on the face of the wife of the Head of Mission as she farewelled her children back to school in New Zealand for another protracted period of time. 

In most cases, the NZ mission is one of the smallest in any foreign city hence there is less support available especially when something goes wrong. Family life can be chaotic with children usually going to boarding school back in New Zealand, only seeing their parents in school holidays. The result is many children grow up not feeling as if they are a New Zealander or from any other country for that matter. It was only in the late 1980s that spouses were allowed to work in the country that their husband/wife was sent to. Prior to that the spouse, usually the wife, was expected to be the one who kept the home fires burning. I can recall at the post I was sent to in the mid 1980s that two of the spouses were husbands  - neither was allowed to work, there was literally nothing for them to do. One left half way through the posting.

Joanna Woods has taken just a handful of NZ's diplomatic wives, beginning with the establishment of an official NZ office in London in 1896, the first embassy in Moscow straight after WWII, being in Saigon when it was overtaken by the Viet Cong, early days in Samoa and Tonga, having the first coup in Fiji occuring on your doorstep, being in New York on 9/11, a dalliance with Pierre Trudeau, and driving across borders during the Kuwait hostage crisis in 1990. And many more. The stories and memories are riveting to read, and yes, it is slightly gossiply in style, but what a marvellous homage to the many, many unsong heroes  of New Zealand's diplomacy.

They say that behind every successful man is a woman, and for our diplomats no truer words were spoken. For much of New Zealand's diplomatic history, the spouses have generally been women - strong, intelligent, highly educated and feisty women. Increasingly the spouses are men - the spouse during the Kuwiat hostage situation is a man. Gay and lesbian spouses are also increasingly recognised and taking their rightful place as representatives of New Zealand.

This is a great read, not just of lives far removed from daily life in New Zealand or anywhere for that matter, but of the place that New Zealand has gradually made for itself in the world and the high esteem it is held in, plus giving  us eye witness accounts of a number of events that have shaped the twentieth and early twenty first century.  

 

LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson

LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson

This novel continually reminds us that our lives hang by a thread - life can be whipped away from us in the time it takes to take a breath. In one instance we have baby Ursula dying at birth because a snow storm prevents the doctor getting there in time. In then next instance her life begins again with the doctor present. In another instance, her mother Sylvie has the foresight to perform CPR - probably unknown in 1910; and in yet another scenario Ursula lives because Sylvie dredges up a pair of scissors and frees the cord from around baby's neck.

Does it all sound far to bizarre? Well, yes it is, but the story or should it be stories of Ursula's life are so comfortably wrapped and contained within such familiar and known boundaries - everday day family life, young adulthood, sibling rivalry, pre-war Germany, the Blitz and the war in general - that it  doesn't feel at all unfamiliar and weird. As we know life is full of what-if moments, and we all wonder how things would have panned out if we had chosen a different path. So in this book, amongst other deaths, Ursula drowns. In the replay she is is saved from drowning, and in another it is another child who drowns. As a young woman, again there are different versions which all have different outcomes. Some good, some not so good. By the end of the book we really have no idea exactly how Ursula's life happened: maybe the idea is that each reader takes the lives they like and puts them altogether to create Ursula's life. We know of course that she didn't try to kill Hitler in the 1930s, but just imagine if she had succeeded!

As weird as all this description so far sounds, it does work, and the result is this wonderful book about Ursula, her family who become as familiar to the reader as Ursula does, and her life, or should that be lives. It is the quality of the writer, of course, who makes all these threads hang together, and Ms Atkinson is superb. Her story of Ursula is as much a commentary on England from 1910 to post-war and the effects these times had on the average person who lived through them. Her sections on the London Blitz are simply amazing and many reviewers have commented on how vividly she portrays what London and its residents went through.

Many reviewers on the likes of Good Reads think it is just plain weird and strange and completely implausible. But don't let that stop you from becoming immersed into Ursula's life, and if you can get past the time changes and jumping backwards and forwards through history, this is a really worthwhile book. 

BLOOD: THE STUFF OF LIFE by Lawrence Hill

BLOOD: THE STUFF OF LIFE by Lawrence Hill

This book arose out of a lecture series given by the author at the University of Toronto. Divided into five chapters, which I guess represent five lectures he gave, this book is difficult to give a label to. A mix of science, biology, medicine, history, social commentary and personal memoir it covers all sorts of stuff about blood:  the good stuff in our bodies that carries around oxygen that keeps us alive; the bad stuff that carries diseases such as HIV, malaria, plague; who invented blood transfusions; Lady MacBeth and that damned spot; blood as a weapon of power; his musings on blood being thicker than water or not; do men and women have different blood; human sacrifice; drug taking in sport; and taking up most of the book blood as a factor in race, culture and ethnicity. And this latter theme is really what the author is looking at in his exploration of blood and what it all means.

By way of background, Lawrence Hill is a successful Canadian author, whose black father and white mother migrated from the US to Canada when they got married in 1953 to escape the difficulties such a union at the time brought. He grew up in a family very involved in human rights, and most of his writings are concerned with issues of identity, especially race. For those of a certain age, you may be surprised to know that the author's brother is Dan Hill, he who sang that tear jerker song of the 1970s 'Sometimes When We Touch'. On googling their images, to me they look nothing like brothers, and I can understand his fascination and intense interest in looking at how our origins and blood lines define us. But more importantly perhaps how others see us and may label us differently from what we ourselves think we may be.

This, then is the crux of the book, and although it wasn't quite what I thought it would be, it really is a most interesting and informative read. There may be a little too much self-indulgence on the part of the author, but in a world where peoples of different cultures, religions, races, and ethnicities are meeting and having children of their own, these are very real issues that he is bringing up. It made me feel good to be an NZer, where on our five yearly census form, under the 'Which Ethnic Group Do You Belong To' there is a space for 'Other' where increasingly people are simply putting 'New Zealander' rather than identifying themselves as just one of the many others listed.

CATHERINE THE GREAT: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN by Robert Massie

CATHERINE THE GREAT: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN by Robert Massie

This is a fabulous biography of a woman who changed the face of Russia in every possible way during her reign of 34 years. Born in Prussia into one of the ruling families, she went to Russian court at the age of 14, found herself bethrothed to the young grandson of Peter the Great and some three years later married to him. Like all young ladies of wealth/title, she was destined to be married off to a man/family at some stage, and by the some very good fortune she found herself at the Russian court. And so began her long love affair with Russia, determined to make it a better place than she arrived in 1744. 

She didn't succeed in all her endeavours, but by the time she died, the lands  under Russia's control had extended significiantly into what was then Poland, and as far south as the Black Sea. She presided over what became known as Russia's Golden Age, the Age of Enlightenment, and also worked very hard, with mixed succes at improving the plight of the serf class, who really were no more than slaves, and treated accordingly.

This book is a huge read - 573 pages - but easy to read and well worth the time taken. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Peter the Great, and also wrote two highly regarded biographys - one about the Romanov dynasty started by Peter the Great and the other, Nicholas and Alexandra, detailing the downfall of the Romanov dynasty early last century. Much of the narrative has been drawn from Catherine's own memoirs, and the hundreds of letters she exchanged with all sorts of famous people of the time - other European monarchs, writers and philosophers, lovers, her own advisers and generals. She was a woman of enormous intellect, focus and determination, and what she managed to achieve in her time is quite remarkable.

Numerous legends have grown over the centuries about her sexual appetite and tendencies: this book puts paid to much of it!  There is no doubt she was one fierce lady who took no prisoners, but this biography also shows much of her human side and beneath that awesome heart there was a real woman.

ELIZABETH IS MISSING by Emma Healey

 ELIZABETH IS MISSING by Emma Healey

Review copy provided by Penguin Group (NZ) via Booksellers NZ.

Wow, this novel is great, a stunning first novel, and reading all the media releases in the UK on this book, the young author is a wonderful new talent. How can someone so young - the author is only 28 -  write so eloquently and  masterfully, but above all with such compassion about the issues of dementia in elderly people. Are there even many 28 year olds out there with more than a passing interest in elderly people? That is the first surprising thing about this book. The second is her ability to get inside the head and soul of an 84 year old woman and write so knowingly about what is going on in there. There is  confusion, frustration, rage and anger, realisation that something is not qutie right, and yet in her writing the author manages to hold all the craziness together with the lucidness.

With an ageing population, issues such as dementia and Alzheimer's are just not going to go away and many of us, if we haven't already, will be facing such issues in our own parents and maybe in ourselves or spouses. So often we see old age senility from the outside - as the child, grandchild, caregiver, spouse, neighbour or friend. Not as the person actually experiencing it. I have no idea if what is going on in Maud's head happens or not, but by hokey, the author has created a very compelling and realistic character.

Maud is 84, a widow, still living in her own home with caregiver, Carla, popping in every morning, and her daughter Helen who is in her 50s, taking on the rest of the caring/supervising. Maud knows she is becoming a bit of a handful but can't seem to fully realise why that is, or what should be done about it. Her major problem, at the moment, is trying to find her friend Elizabeth - another elderly lady - who seems to have simply disappered. Maud asks everyone, all the time, if they have seen Elizabeth, and is a known face at the local police station where she regularly goes to report her missing, but of course she can't remember ever doing so! So every visit to the police station is a first visit.
Her short term memory may be shot, but her long term memory is razor sharp. She begins to associate Elizabeth's disappearance with that of her older sister in 1946 when Maud was 15. Sukey was married to Frank, and one day simply disappeared. No trace of her was ever found. In post war Britain things were still pretty tough with rationing, people  homeless after losing their homes in bombings, men or women traumatised by war time experiences, simply running away with surprising regularity. Even as a youngster, Maud never thought that Sukey had run away, and now all these years later, it still preys on her mind.

The author weaves these two different worlds in Maud's mind, as well as her interacations with the real world so expertly, so cleverly. As her mind continues to unravel, there are times when you really don't know whether Maud herself is in the present or the past. It is terrific stuff, all told in Maud's voice. A very ordinary lady who would appear to have had a very ordinary life, but has such a deep inner life as she tries to find where Elizabeth is. Watching her interactions with her daughter, neighbours, medical people and others Maud sees in her day, we also get a picture of how heart breaking losing one's mind is to those watching, the pressures and stresses they deal with in looking after someone like Maud. And all from the pen of a 28 year old. Amazing.