Spring book reviews from South Seas Books

Spring book reviews

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

The Unfolding

by A.M. Homes

Published by Granta Books ISBN 9781783789146 $32.99

A prize-winning novelist, essayist and creative writing academic at Princeton, A.M. Homes has turned her hand to a speculative parable exploring the swirling madness of America’s politics. Her central character (only ever referred to as the ‘Big Guy’ but seemingly inspired by Walter Annenberg, a businessman and diplomat credited with introducing Thatcher to Reagan at his Palm Springs estate), confronts the loss of his candidate and a country he no longer recognises after Obama is elected president in 2008. Accustomed to control, success and having the country as his to ‘tame or claim’, he pulls together a group of those similarly inclined and resourced to hatch a longterm scheme to ‘protect and preserve democracy’. The democracy sought, naturally, is one which is controlled by and rewards those they consider worthy, and this cabal of privilege is prepared to burn the place down to get it. As he schemes to disrupt public life, the Big Guy’s private life is disturbed as his family scrambles out from under him and throws his own personal history into disarray. Archly satirical at times, perhaps best exemplified by the author’s full deployment of a Bombe Alaska’s metaphorical qualities, the novel bears witness to the decline of the ‘Grand Old’ Republican party to an organisation at home in dystopia’s darkest recesses, an incoherent enraged actor at war with the future and itself. The book’s humour and human interest fails to screen a terrifying examination of America’s riven politics, economy and society, of a country engaged in a new civil war.

Metronome

by Tom Watson

Published by Bloomsbury ISBN 9781526639554 $29.99

In the wake of climate catastrophe, where the melting permafrost has released toxic spores into the atmosphere and has led to the application of strict population controls, a couple live out their twelve-year exile on a barely hospitable northern island. Sentenced after having and harbouring a child without permission, they have lived on their wits, rapidly diminished supply drops and prophylactic pills required every eight hours to survive the effects of the spores. Awaiting their release, they confront their own history and each other as they face a world which has moved on without them, to a point now beyond their comprehension. In this dystopian debut, the author’s focus remains tightly wound around the basic, claustrophobic life of the couple, only lightly sketching the world outside their croft and its pressing immediacy. The uncertainty surrounding their release and the fate of their child has driven a secrecy-fuelled wedge between them, compounding the challenge an ever-more threatening physical environment poses. Channelling the likes of Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, Tom Watson’s writing is assured and his story intrigues as it builds. This book may not appeal to those searching for a rapidfire, plot-driven narrative following a steady, rationalised progression. But for those who enjoy filling some corridors of uncertainty on their own, who are able to enjoy time elastically rather than as rigid measure or empowering a conclusion, there is much to beguile here in this exploration of time and the various motives propelling us to carry on.

The Foghorn’s Lament:

The Disappearing Music of the Coast

by Jennifer Lucy Allan

Published by White Rabbit (Hachette) ISBN 9781474615037 $35.00 At first glance, studying foghorns presents as a pursuit for an engineer or mariner if anyone is to dedicate time to it. Yet musical performer, producer and archivist, Jennifer Lucy Allan is smitten by them, both literally and figuratively, by the enormity and variability of their sound, and by their place in human industrial and cultural history. She has dedicated herself to placing or maintaining them in our thoughts as foghorns are retired from maritime service, the last lighthouse keepers grow old and their memories fade. It seems that foghorns were never terribly effective at ‘shout[ing] down death’, at saving wrecks and lives. Always outranked by lighthouse beams in the eyes of mariners, they have eagerly been made redundant by satellite navigation. Despite this, and their remote location at the far rocky reaches of our islands, continents and world, the author draws from a considerable range of sources to find an important, if changing, place for them in our continuing cultural consciousness. Maritime history, heavy industry, lighthouse architecture, Ray Bradbury’s stories and some uniquely individual people are invoked alongside music theory, and ‘acoustic ecology’ to value foghorns historically, emotionally and physically. It’s no mean feat to find heterogenous delicacy and nuance amidst such sonic booming. Neither lament nor requiem, this book faces squarely against our predisposition towards erasure with an array of lyricism, nostalgia and deeply fascinating esoterica to salvage a ‘steampunk fantasy in sound and machine’.

City on Fire

by Don Winslow Published by HarperCollins ISBN 9781460756478 $32.99 Don Winslow’s latest offering doesn’t lack ambition. The commencement of a multivolume series, he harnesses the themes and storylines of Homer’s classic Iliad to ground a modern American crime saga set in the coastal New England of his youth. There is ample scope for such Homeric themes as fate, pride, respect and hubris when exploring power struggles between the Irish and Italian crime syndicates for control of various rackets during the 1980s and 1990s. That a fragile truce may falter over competition for a beautiful woman, the conflict escalating as the pendulum swings between rage and honour, is a story as familiar to audiences of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, as it was to the ancient Greeks. The world over, ‘gang warfare’ remains a staple of modern urban life. This renowned American crime writer makes it his own of course, with his particular brand of fatalistic world weariness given voice among those for whom violence punctuates the ups and downs of every day and is always the solution. At heart, this is a book about family and enemy, loyalty and betrayal, the fault lines between generations and clans. Its politics are as timeless and as inevitable as human desire.

The Night was a Bright Moonlight and I Could See a Man Quite Plain:

An Edwardian Cricket Murder

by Gideon Haigh Published by Scribner ISBN 9781761108266 $19.99 George Vernon, the well-connected only son of an acclaimed English amateur test cricketer, stands accused of wielding the willow to rather less admirable ends when a fellow station hand in Queensland’s far west is bludgeoned to death. The ensuing trial in Brisbane and its immediate aftermath, long forgotten until now, was a cause célèbre at the beginning of the twentieth century, the brutality of the crime spiced with overtones of class and empire. Combining true crime and cricket is something of a sweet spot for this acclaimed journalist and author who has written prolifically about both, and the story is well worth the re-telling. For all of its mystery and intrigue, bread and butter for the true crime writer, the book’s real appeal lies in its rendition of the ends of the English imperial ambition and those who inhabit it. Rather than being the purely natural manifestation of his character, Vernon’s decline towards being accused of murder was as much the destiny of those abandoned ‘superfluous sons’, dispatched with short term remittances ‘to ricochet round an unfeeling empire’.