The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood

It is the 1970s in Canada and Marian MacAlpin is a modern city girl living the bachelorette life and in the first part of the novel she shares that life and her thoughts through a first person narrative.

Her job with a market research company is satisfying enough while hardly stretching her recently graduated status and she rubs along in a shambolic symbiotic fashion with flat-mate Ainsley, united by a common enemy in the shape of the woman downstairs, their landlady. And there is a boyfriend, handsome and soon to be well-heeled lawyer, Peter. All is fine, normal; maybe, when she thinks about it, even boring. Maybe Marian needs a change, but one is coming as Peter stumbles into a proposal that Marian readily accepts.

A change occurs in the second part of the novel. Marian seems to cede, willingly, much of her autonomy to Peter. Much but not all. Within her, unconscious seeds of resistance sprout. Her body begins to reject certain types of food, increasingly and inconveniently narrowing her choice of diet. And her mind dwells on a strange young man she first meets during a survey, then repeatedly bumps into. And her story is now told in in the third person.

The tension between the conventional trajectory of her normal life and the subliminal intervention of her mind and body is played out in typical Atwood style (though this is a very early work). How will it end? In a short part three, but whether told in first or third person could hold the key.

What could have been a standard story of conflicted relationships becomes in Atwood’s hands a memorable, slightly off-kilter, fine piece of writing.

The Riders – Tim Winton

Fred Scully, wife, Jennifer, and young daughter, Billie have left a settled life in Perth, Australia to tour Europe. Jennifer has given up a well-paid job in order to give rein to her creative urge to be a writer, poet, painter or something equally artistic. Scully accommodates her, taking on casual labouring jobs to put food on the table. Then on a whim they (or she) decide to buy a rundown bothy they stumble over in rural Ireland. It is a wreck and while the girls return to Australia to sell up and settle affairs, Scully knuckles down to making the uninhabitable habitable.

That is where chapter one kicks in as Scully spends weeks in the cold wet wilderness working and living hard with only the local postie for company. It’s done by mid-December, but when Scully waits at Shannon Airport arrivals only Billie, an ‘unaccompanied child’ turns up on the connecting flight from London. No explanation from the airline and Billie goes mute on the subject.

Scully is at a loss. Where is Jennifer? Why has she jumped ship? Through choice or necessity?

To find her and get an explanation or at least closure, Scully sets off to check out their few contacts in Europe – Greece, Paris, Amsterdam – dragging Billie along with him. There are adventures and misadventures; and some hidden truths emerge. Questions are asked though mainly Scully asking himself did he really know his wife at all.

The trip around Europe, necessarily on a tight budget, is uncomfortable and hectic; and the writing brings that out in breathless style. There is also a couple of mystical episodes that have allegorical significance (and provide the title).

Does Scully track down his missing missus or find any answers? It is a page turner to the end to find out.

Chernobyl – Serhii Plokhy

The whole disaster of 26 March 1986, the build-up, the flare-up, the clean-up and the cover-up, is brought into focus in this ‘History of a Tragedy’.

It starts with the ill-planned and poorly conducted test shutdown and moves swiftly onto the desperate but futile efforts to quell the unquellable runaway reactor. That is followed by the failure to recognise or admit to the scale of the escaping radiation, with the safety of the population a mnor consideration compared with the need to maintain the fiction that the Soviet nuclear power stations are safe and protect the reputations of politicians, engineers and scientists involved. When that becomes clearly problematic, the scapegoating begins, and blame is apportioned where politically convenient. But in vain, the disaster and its effects are too big to cover up indefinitely and Plokhy is convinced it plays a big part in the eventual break up of the Soviet Union.

These components are all explored in forensic detail, and detail is the word; this is no sensationalist overview. The reader is provided with the frightening science of radioactivity and the oppressive politics of the soviet state where jobs and party position go side by side in an unhealthy mix. It inevitably involves some heavy reading, not so much the science as the politics, with unfamiliar Russian names populating unfathomable national, regional and local regimes that operate at the Party, government and industry level, all having a finger in every pie.

Plokhy does his best and brings out the broad themes effectively, and while he gives a balanced account he does not sit on the fence as to where he feels the faults lie. So, it makes for an authoritative, interesting, informative account, as digestible as such an account could be. But best not read it within fifty kilometres of a nuclear power station, unless you live there, in which case read it soon.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The book-packing journey reaches Nigeria, in the early sixties, a time of post-colonial optimism and promise for the lead characters in this novel – two Nigerians and an Englishman who has made the country his home.

Ugwu has just landed a plum job as houseboy to Odenigbo, an academic at the regional university, and sees it as a great opportunity to make his way in the world. In and out of the house is the beautiful Olanna, Odenigbo’s girlfriend; she comes from a wealthy and well-connected family who think she is slumming it with a lecturer when there are richer suitors available. Richard Churchill is a would-be writer obsessed with the ethnic artefacts of the country, who finds himself at odds with the ex-pat community he has landed in.

That social sphere overlaps the Nigerian elite, which is how he meets and falls for Kainene. Olanna’s non-identical but equally striking twin sister. Ugwu is not without love interest too, as he reaches adolescence and dabbles with the local servant girls while holding a torch for an old friend in the village. All in all, things are looking good for the trio, and any wobbles are of their own making.

But ethnic and religious divides in the new republic cause tension, envy, suspicion and eventually violent revolt, civil war and the secession of East Nigeria. That is where Ugwu, Olanna and Richard live, and they soon take up roles in the newly declared state of Biafra, flying its flag featuring the eponymous half a yellow sun.

We know how that ends; not well for Biafra. For the likes of Ugwu, Olanna and Richard the initial inconveniences and shortages soon give way to life changing events, brought vividly to life by the author (Adichie drawing on her family history).

The characters are well drawn, there is investment in the well-being of the trio, and the setting convinces as authentic, which all makes for a compulsive page-turning read.

Uncommon Type – Tom Hanks

Thirteen stories, some linked, and a series of small-town newspaper diary pieces (‘Our Town Today, with Hank Fiset’), form this collection by actor, now author, Tom Hanks.

The subject matters are generally slices of contemporary American life, though some take the author’s showbiz world as their milieu. The stories are well constructed with authentic characters, plots that lead somewhere interesting and conclude satisfactorily. And while that may be unfashionably old school, it works for this reviewer; the newspaper pieces, less so. The reference in each story to an old model of typewriter (Hanks collects them) is forgivably unobtrusive and serves to provide a title for the anthology.

A pleasurable and varied collection inevitably read with Hanks’ distinctive voice in mind, which does no harm to the experience at all.

The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale

The boy in this Victorian true-crime story is thirteen year old Robert Coombes. For over a week in July 1895, with his father away at sea, he and his younger brother, Nathaniel, maintained the fiction that their mother was away visiting relatives. But as they pawned family valuables, visited the test match at Lords cricket ground, and played cards with a simple-minded family friend the smell from the upstairs bedroom was getting worse and worse.

Kate Summerscale takes the reader steadily through the fateful week and then through the discovery and investigation of the murder (for such it is), and the trial and punishment of the perpetrator, combining a forensic approach to the detail of the case with a rich contextual analysis of the social history of the period in London’s East End.

The title should maybe have a question mark appended as Summerscale weighs the evidence on the boy’s actions – wicked by nature or by the circumstances of his upbringing and environment. And the story continues well after 1895 and far beyond London as surprising new evidence comes to light on Robert Coombes’ later life.

The writing sucks in the reader, hungry for detail and resolution yet happy enough to be taken off at interesting tangents that never outstay their welcome. A fascinating and enthralling read that engenders wonder at Kate Summerscale’s depth of research, so lightly worn.

The Visible World – Mark Slouka

This novel, and it does purport to be a novel, is in three sections: ‘Memoir’, ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Novel’.

In the memoir the narrator tells episodically of his childhood growing up in 1950’s America, the son of Czech parents. The comings and goings of other émigrés, the stories told, the chat overheard, and secrets eavesdropped indicate a family history of drama, romance, tragedy and an aftermath that still echoes down the years into his own life.

In the intermezzo he travels to Prague to investigate wartime events. The details of Czech history, the facts, are in the national record to be uncovered, but unravelling the part in them played by his parents defies his efforts.

Not to worry, the novel section re-imagines it all anyway. In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942 there is the palm-sweatingly tense drama of the resistance struggle; romance, bitter-sweet enough to tug the heartstrings; tragedy, inevitable but in an unexpected way and all the worse for that; and an aftermath, articulated with more difficulty but still thought-provoking.

It is reasonably well written, particularly the third, novel, section that in truth could stand alone.  Is the preceding memoir Slouka’s own? The dedication references his parents ‘who lived the years and half the story’ but the standard disclaimer says it is all fiction.