Cat’s Eye

As Elaine prepares for the exhibition, the story flashbacks to when she was eight, and her family first settled in Toronto. Her family consisted of her father, a university teacher of entomology; her mother, a reluctant homemaker; and her older brother, Stephen, a science nerd. Elaine was a girl who, due to moving around a lot, didn’t know what other little girls were like. She would soon learn.

She befriends two local girls, Carol and Casey. At the end of her first year at school, her father takes the family on another four-month bug hunt. When Elaine returns, a new girl, Cordelia, is now friends with Carol and Casey. Not long after, Elaine begins to be bullied by the three of them, with Cordelia leading the assault.

The bullying seems much more subtle than in most stories about children coming of age. It is more psychologically sophisticated than one would expect from tweens. Cordelia tells Elaine that she is not normal and that she will help improve her.  One of their main ways of helping improve Elaine is to make her walk metres in front of them when they go to and from school, thus isolating her from the group so they can point out her faults behind her back. The bullying takes a serious turn when Elaine almost drowns. Then, an act of severe bullying has Elaine deciding she doesn’t want help to improve anymore.

The bullying has a substantial effect on Elaine’s life. It destroys her self-esteem, and she begins to self-harm. Carol and Casey move out of the area and disappear from Elaine’s life. Elaine also has a reprieve from Cordelia when they go to different high schools. This allows her to turn the tables on Cordelia when she returns. Eventually, Elaine leaves town to attend art school but always wonders what became of Cordelia.

The bullying makes Elaine wary of other women. She claims to be much more at ease with men like her brother. Elaine grows into a very cynical adult regarding human relationships.  This cynicism heavily influences her art, which is mistaken for feminist verve by her fans, making Elaine even more cynical.

This is not a novel that idolises growing up. Atwood started writing the story in the 60’s but then stopped. She only returned to it after having children. Did that experience give her an inkling of how vicious little girls can be to each other? Cat’s Eye is a disturbing novel. In some ways, it is more troubling than The Handmaid’s Tale. It is disconcerting that Elaine’s parents did not notice or do anything about Elaine being bullied and failed to see Elaine’s self-harming. It appears her mother was too busy with her own interests, while her father, who enjoyed teaching Elaine about insects and the scientific method, showed little interest in her life.

The novel smashes the idea of a sisterhood between women. Throughout her life, Elaine is wary of other women and very cynical about their motives. She thinks the fans of her art, the majority of whom are women, have no idea what her art is about. She thinks of herself as not being part of female society and being different from them. She would rather run into a bear in the woods than another woman.

Elaine turns to men for her emotional support. She gets some indirectly from her brother and then has two long-term relationships: one where an older man is in control and the other where she takes the lead. But it is her art that fulfils her most. Her art is where she takes revenge on those who have wronged her. While preparing for her hometown exhibition, her reminiscing results in an epiphany that gives her room to move past Cordelia.

The writing is up to Atwood’s usual superb standard. Once again, Atwood plays around with point of view and tense, as Cat’s Eye is one of those rare novels written in first-person present tense. Elaine has a unique voice, changing from an innocent who desperately needs to fit in to a scarred adult who prefers to be an outlier. It is yet another of Atwood’s books that was nominated for The Booker Prize.

This novel should make readers think about how their childhoods made them the adults they are.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel set during the Spanish Civil War. It was written by Ernest Hemingway who was a war correspondent during that war. It won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

The plot of the story seems very simple to begin with. Robert Jordan, an American fighting on the side of the revolutionary communists against the fascists, is assigned the task of blowing up a bridge behind enemy lines. Its destruction will stop fascist reinforcements from being sent to an upcoming major attack by the revolutionaries. It sounds simple, but the plot is complicated by many events and challenges, especially the various characters involved. Almost all of the novel takes place before the attack on the bridge, so we are kept waiting to find out for whom the bell tolls. Will Jordan successfully blow up the bridge, or will he die trying?

Initially, Jordan needs to contact a small group of partisans to help dispose of the guards at the bridge. The partisans are led by Pablo, who has a mountain hideout not far from the bridge and who has previously participated in other acts of sabotage, including blowing up a train. But Pablo has become a disillusioned drunk and is paralysed by fears of his own mortality. It is up to his wife, Pilar, the rock of the group, to keep the partisans together.

The group includes Maria, a young woman who was a prisoner on the train they sabotaged. Jordan and Maria fall for each other. This stretched credibility a bit as Jordan knew he would only be there for four days, leaving once the bridge was destroyed. Still, maybe their relationship could have developed as quickly as it did due to the emotional turmoil of the war.

The novel questions the war, but it is not an anti-war book. The reader sees what various participants think about war and their part in it. Jordan slowly reveals the corrupt and fragmented leadership of the communists. Their leaders fled to safety and had little to do with the fighting. Russians stepped in and were heavily involved in organising the communist fighting effort. Some of the leaders of the revolution are drunks and psychotics. But Jordan still believes they must defeat the fascists to stop other countries in Europe from falling under the fascist yoke.

Pablo wants somewhere safe to hide. He knows that once the bridge is blown, the fascist forces will swarm over the hills he hides in to find his group. He was a ruthless leader capable of war crimes. Pilar tells a particularly chilling tale of how he executed all the fascists in his hometown. Pilar, on the other hand, is still committed to the cause. We also get a glimpse into the minds of the fascists guarding the bridge. They are fighting under the duress of execution of themselves and their families if they refuse. Some of the communist generals also freely execute soldiers who question orders.

One of the things that catches a reader’s attention is the writing’s treatment of profanity. Words like “obscene”, “obscenity”, “muck”, and “unprintable” are substituted for swear words. The most obvious is muck for fuck. I thought this might have been due to Australian censors, but no, it was done by Hemmingway in reaction to how publishers had treated profanity in his previous novels.

Another attention grabber is the detail Hemingway went into with Jordan’s battle preparations and the battle scenes. In one scene, Jordan ordered one of his partisans not to place more tree branches around a machine gun placement as a troop of fascist calvary had already been past its location and might notice the difference. Hemingway also detailed the thoughts of Jordan as he fought. His fears and concerns constantly competed with what he needed to do next and his desire to carry out his mission successfully.

The novel shows the futility of war when everyone is not on the same page. Ideas of utopia have a hard time winning against corruption and brutal ideology, especially when personal survival is a main concern. The novel takes you into the mind of a soldier committed to the cause, even though he doubts those leading the cause. The novel also exposes a turning point in world history to the reader.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great read. It is one of the best explorations of conflict I have read and deserves its accolades. It left me wanting to find out more about the Spanish Civil War.

What is it about then? It is about Bobby, who has many regrets about his one true love, his sister Stella. She may have desired a sexual relationship, which he shunned. She spent much of her life in a mental institution before killing herself, and he regrets rejecting her and not being there when she died.

The novel consists of many long conversations between men who seem intelligent but are delusional about the world around them and their place in it. Perhaps McCarthy is saying something about how deluded Americans have become in the Trump era.

In between conversations, Bobby has many adventures, from racing car driver to deep sea diver, which starts to look like an improbable Forrest Gump-type life. His adventures don’t let him escape from his regret for his sister.

The novel frequently goes into the schizophrenic mind of Stella as she hallucinates conversations with the imaginary Kid who has been damaged by Thalidomide. The Kid tries to amuse Stella by hosting pitiful cabarets of imaginary performers. Who knows why she chose a character who had Thalidomide as the drug was never approved in the US, so they did not have the flood of babies born with its birth defects.

McCarthy continues his habit of no quotation marks and no attributions for dialogue, which may not have mattered much for his other novels, like the dialogue sparse The Road, but becomes a pain for this book with its masses of dialogue. I frequently wondered who was speaking and had to go back and re-read, but even then, I found it hard to track down who was speaking.

The passenger in the title could be Bobby’s regret about not being there for his sister, or it could mean he had no control over his life and was just a passenger being taken wherever fate decides. It could also be a reference to the plot red herring at the start of the novel, where a passenger has disappeared from a crashed plane.

If you want a novel with a resolved plot, don’t touch this. Don’t frustrate yourself trying. If you want a story ruminating about America’s delusions, this might be the novel for you.

Us and Them is a collection of short stories and poems that will open your heart to the lives of others, especially the mind of its author, Anthony J Langford. The collection will have you thinking about how you interact with others, and had this reader vowing to be more open to what might be going on in other people’s lives.

About half of the stories are autobiographical scenes from the author’s life, giving insight into events that have influenced the person he has become. They illustrate his quest for adventure and his genuine desire to understand others.

But among that desire to open up, it is a book of regrets, of things not said and done. In one story, he is haunted by a girl crying on the streets of New York and his failure to ask her what is wrong, instead being like all the other people who just walked past her. As he says in one of his poems, “It is always worth it, To reach out, Even if it doesn’t go well”. The collection also ponders aging and its effect on us.

It is a book about someone looking back at their life and contemplating what he could have done better.

Collectively, the poems and stories had me contemplating how well I have lived my own life.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct. We say we care but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.

Anna is the main protagonist, a successful architect, who, rather than face her mother’s pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. She frequently forwards articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taking responsibility for what is happening around her, and in the world, generally by staying uninformed and deferring action to others.

The novel has elements of magic realism that work. Other reviewers have likened it to The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen, a book I enjoyed. It was full of characters deceiving others and themselves.

Much is going on in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. I was particularly interested in it as I have an elderly mother the same age as Francie, whose mental capacity and stamina have been declining in the past few months after a fall, and I wonder how I would respond if she, like Francie, lying in a hospital bed in pain, requested the last rites. Would I have the courage of my convictions to let her pass? It’s a bit like how the father with dementia drew me into The Corrections, as my father was battling dementia when I read that novel. But then climate change, the destruction of the planet, and my feeble attempts to do something about it come to the fore. I hope this novel will get me to do more.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a novel that will get people and possibly bring to the surface their guilt and fears.

It is an utterly compelling read.

Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read non-genre literature to see what the other side is up to. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors. This is a review of Purity, the fourth of his novels that I have read.

Purity’s plot revolves around secrets, with one secret being the main character’s search for the identity of her father and another about a cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of a journalism job. She was raised by a controlling but loving mother who always got her way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down, as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an investigative journal, while Leila is a hard-nosed reporter who works for Tom. They are lovers, even though she is married.

When Wolf offers Purity a job that requires her to relocate to his secret base in Bolivia, the lives of the four main characters go from circling each other to intermingling. But each of them is so caught up in their own sense of what is morally right that they find it hard, in some cases impossible, to share their lives with others. In Franzen’s critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, the characters were trying to hide their true selves from the world. Similarly, in Purity, the characters, for the most part, are controlled by their secrets.

As usual, Franzen divides the novel into lengthy sections told from one of the four character’s points of view. Franzen spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads as they attempt to justify their actions and reminisce on what they have done. I found Andreas Wolf’s life as a church councillor in East Germany compelling as he tried to stay under the radar of the Stasi, even though his father was a high-ranking East German official. When Andreas “escapes” from East Germany, his secrets ensure he is never free.

But the story revolves around Purity and her search for her father’s identity. Her strict upbringing by her mother and lack of a father leave her longing for a father figure. This leads to a desire for a relationship with older men, be it the older married man living in her share house, or perhaps Andreas Wolf, or… While searching for her father and love, she leads an otherwise aimless existence ruled by cynicism.

I very much enjoyed being in the heads of the main characters. Their search for an ethical meaning to life often made me contemplate my own machinations. As I read, I pondered the possible consequences of their secrets being exposed and was frequently surprised by what happened. While not in the same class as The Corrections, Purity is entertaining and thought-provoking.

Caught Between Love and Loss

This story begins as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy who buys a block of land in the bush and decides to build a house on it, but then gradually becomes a story about his girlfriend, Rachel, as she struggles to define what her relationship with Richard is. Is he just a lover or perhaps a potential long-term boyfriend? Is she in love with him, or is she just in love with the idea of building a house and living in a beautiful rural Australian setting? The house becomes a metaphor for their relationship as the reader wonders whether it will ever be complete. The story tugs at the heart as you hope they can find a way to really connect.

A Refugee’s Rage

In contrast to the first story, A Refugee’s Rage is a very angry story. It is the story of a sixteen-year-old Romanian refugee, Alexlandru, in Rome. He has had to look after himself for most of his life and will do anything to survive. He is a volatile character who readily resorts to violence. The story is written in the first person, so the reader sees the world almost exclusively through the eyes of someone who is not only a refugee in a foreign land but, in many ways, a refugee from society. One day, he meets a Syrian refugee, Ara, and the story revolves around their attempts to survive and whether his desire to survive will allow him to develop a relationship with her.

I think the linking factor between the stories is that both main characters are searching for a place in life. The writing is excellent and frequently poetic (Anthony J. Langford has authored a few books of poetry).

I thoroughly recommend this book’s stories, as they will engage the reader while taking them out of their comfort zone.