Book Reviews

Will Tabitha get the correct result? by Paula Xiberras Here, There and Everywhere by Paula Xiberras

HOUSE OF CORRECTION Pierre’s Not There

BY NICCI FRENCH Sean French and Nicci Gerard, the authors that together make up the moniker, Nicci French are feeling the constricts of COVID on their craft with their book House of Correction had to be launched online. I’m delighted to hear of a Tasmanian connection when Sean tells me that he and Nicci are keen to visit Tasmania someday having heard a lot about it from Peter Conrad who taught Sean at Oxford. The authors usually plan together the details of their novel then research and write independently. They send their chapter drafts off to each other to edit. The writers always know where their story will end and because of the usual Agatha Christie complexity need this careful planning. Both authors have backgrounds in sociology and psychology which is helpful in their craft. Sean and Nicci believe that thrillers are popular with adults just as children like witch and ghost stories to frighten them. Creepy stories are an interesting way to explore the themes of everyday life in a safe way. The story is set in a Agatha Christeque style village where the aptly named Tabitha lives. Tabitha is a misfit, an outsider who does not fit into the community, so it is not a surprise when she is accused of murdering a man in her house. We learn that the murdered man was her former teacher who took advantage of her during her school years. In the course of the book Tabitha sacks her lawyer and attempts to argue her case alone. House of Correction by Nicci French is out now published by Simon and Schuster.

BY URSULA DUBOSARSKY This story has long been a desire for Ursula Dubosarsky. It had its origins in when she visited Paris 30 or 40 years ago and literally walked backstage into a puppet show. Since that time she has yearned to write a story about puppets. In this story the protagonist Lara goes along with her mother to clean an old house at the edge of the harbour. The cleaning has the feeling of an exorcism as the woman cleans the house, meanwhile Lara witnesses a marble seemingly roll itself along the ground to her. From the shadows appears a young boy who sent the marble in her direction. The boy, Pierre tells her he is looking for his grandmother and that wolves ate his mother and father. His story is a warped nod to such fairy tales as Little Red Riding Hood. Our heroine accompanies Pierre to find his grandmother. Along the way Lara is transformed into a dog and again with a nod to another fairy tale, this time Sleeping Beauty is involved in helping wake a sleeping bear. The book starts off in prose but changes to poetry with the transformation to the puppet show. In the puppet show there is a puppet that looks just like the real life Pierre. This story has long been a desire for Ursula Dubosarsky. It had she visited Paris 30 or 40 years ago and literally walked backstage into a puppetshow. Since that time she has yearned to write a story about pu In this story the protagonist Lara goes along with her mother t the edge of the harbour. The cleaning has the feeling of an exorcism as the woman cleans the house, meanwhile Lara witnesses a marble seemingly roll itself along tground to her. From the shadows appears a young boy who sent th direction. The boy, Pierre tells her he is looking for his grandmother and that wolves ate his mother and father. His story is a warped nod Riding Hood. Our heroine accompanies Pierre to find his grandmo Along the way Lara is transformed into a dog and again with a nod to another fairy tale, this time Sleeping Beauty is involved in helping wake a The book starts off in prose but changes to poetry with the tra puppet show. In the puppet show there is a puppet that looks ju Pierre. When Pierre does find his grandmother his family magically tran being eaten by the wolves. It is at this point that Lara return Was it a dream? She is told by her mother that the old man who is cleaning had kept puppets. His family had been killed in th Sean French and Nicci Gerard, the authors that together make up the moniker, Nicci French are feeling the constricts of COVID on their craft with their book House of Correction had to be launched online. I’m delighted to hear of a Tasmanian connection when Sean tells me that he and Nicci are keen to visit Tasmania someday having heard a lot about it from Peter Conrad who taught Sean at Oxford. The authors usually plan together the details of their novel then research and write independently. They send their chapter drafts off to each other to edit. The writers always know where their story will end and because of the usual Agatha Christie complexity need this careful planning. Both authors have backgrounds in sociology and psychology which is helpful in their craft. Sean and Nicci believe that thrillers are popular with adults just as children like witch and ghost stories to frighten them. Creepy stories are an interesting way to explore the themes of everyday life in a safe way. The story is set in a Agatha Christeque style village where the aptly named Tabitha lives. Tabitha is a misfit, an outsider who does not fit into the community, so it is not a surprise when she is accused of murdering a man in her house. When Pierre does find his grandmother his family magically transform too, alive after being eaten by the wolves. It is at this point that Lara returns home. Was it a dream? She is told by her mother that the old man who had the house she is cleaning had kept puppets. His family had been killed in the war. The man was the boy Pierre, whom Lisa had accompanied on the search for his grandmother. A toenail reminds her of the validity of her experiences.

The war is possibly a metaphor for the wolves Pierre told her killed his family. The book demonstrates with Lara’s transformation into a dog/wolf that we cannot blame individual people from a nation for what has gone before and we should be able to trust again. The book is given a resolution where Pierre, now absent from the house, and like the title says ‘not there’ is reunited with his grandmother and family again. Pierre’s Not There by Ursula Dubosarsky is out now published by Allen and Unwin.

THE COLONY

BY AUDREY MAGEE / ALLEN& UNWIN $29.99 The unnamed Gaeltacht island, ‘three miles long and half a mile wide’, lies just off the Co Mayo coast. It boasts a population of 92, comprising just twelve families who mostly speak a dialect of Carrowteige Irish. The first visitor, on that fateful summer of 1979, is an English traditional landscape artist, known only as Mr Lloyd. He has come to paint the island’s wild beauty, birdlife and soaring cliffs with the intention of exhibiting these works in his forthcoming London exhibition. He also wishes to impress his estranged, art-dealer wife in the hope of winning back her affections. Shortly after Lloyd’s landfall, a second visitor, Jean-Pierre Masson, arrives. Masson, popular with the islanders, is a French linguist who is returning to complete a thesis he has been working on for the past five years. He specializes in ‘languages threatened with extinction’ and is endeavouring to preserve and protect the ‘ancient and beautiful’, Carrowteige dialect. The two visitors, neither of whom suspected the presence of the other, are soon drawn in to interpersonal conflict over turf supplies, accommodation, language and local traditions. The islanders, welcoming, reserved, patient and hospitable, differ in their thoughts and responses to the two warring interlopers, while having their own ideas on what in their environment is worth cherishing. On the island we meet family matriarch, pipe smoking, Bean Ui Fhloinn, her daughter Bean Ui Neill, who caters for the two visitors together with her daughter, the beautiful Mairead, who models for Lloyd and sometimes slips in to Masson’s bed. Lloyd discovers that Mairead’s son James, who wants to leave the island, displays a natural aptitude for painting and he promises to take James to London to exhibit his art and enroll him in art school. Interspersed with chapters of island life, Magee has inserted bulletin like vignettes focusing on 1979 Irish atrocities, including the Mullaghmore assassination of Lord Mountbatten. In this, her second novel, Magee, with her luminous, lyrical prose has produced a thought provoking work of stunning beauty and deep insight. In addition, The Colony more than captures the only outcome worth emanating from any fine novel; after the final page has turned the reader is left with resonating thoughts and a sense of wonderment. This beautifully realized fable is an expertly woven portrait of character and place confronting aspects of our disappearing cultural heritage. The Colony is a work which will undoubtly feature prominently in the year’s literary plaudits and prizes. - Reviewed by John Hagan. See Q&A with Audrey Magee

THE CANE

BY MARYROSE CUSKELLY / ALLEN & UNWIN $32.99 In Mackay (Queensland) on 21 March, 1972, 14 year old Marilyn Wallman left home on her bike to catch the school bus. Soon after, her brothers found her schoolbag and abandoned cycle by the roadside. Marlyin was never seen again and the reason for her disappearance has never been identified. In 2018, Maryrose Cuskelly was awarded the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing for her essay, Well before dark, which focused on Wallman’s vanishing. With The Cane, Cuskelly has now returned to some of the themes from that essay as the basis for her first foray into fiction. Set in North Queensland during the early 1970s, Barbara McClymont scours the cane fields near the (fictional) town of Quala for her 16 year old daughter, Janet, who has been missing for weeks after leaving home to babysit a neighbour’s children. The police have no leads and Quala is enveloped in an atmosphere of suspicion, impatience, distrust and dread. Children of the town sense a malevolent presence, with Janet being the second child who has, seemingly, died in mysterious circumstances. Senior constable, Carmel Maitland (one of the novel’s three narrators) is sent to investigate and is puzzled that during the month following Janet’s disappearance the police investigation has turned up so little – no body, no witnesses and no likely suspects. Maitland starts to compile her own ‘persons of interest’ list which includes Janet’s boyfriend, Joe Cassar, teacher Eamonn Sullivan and his housemate, Peter Parslow. Of course Maitland cannot overlook the fact that Janet might have engineered her own vanishing act.

Book Reviews

As the burning of the cane eventually commences, smoke and tensions escalate exposing Quala’s dark heart. Cuskelly skillfully depicts the cane fields as treacherous and menacing while exemplifying the latent misogyny, parochialism and narrowmindedness associated with 1970s Queensland outback life. She also introduces something of the violent history of the cane fields replete with the itinerant island workers who toil away during the harvest season. Cuskelly deftly exposes the racial tensions and small-town intrigue fermenting under the thin veneer of Quala. If you enjoyed reading Wimmera and/or The Dry, you will relish this atmospheric, zingy, outback mystery. - Reviewed by John Hagan.

FACTS* AND OTHER LIES

BY ED COPER / ALLEN& UNWIN $32.99 ‘Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening’ – President Donald J. Trump. And he should know! Coper welcomes us to the ‘disinformation age’, with ‘disinformation’, according to the author being statements/information deliberately designed to deceive, as opposed to misinformation, which may be merely unintentional. Armed with this definition, I immediately flicked to the index to search for ‘Morrison’, and I was not disappointed. There he was, acclaimed with a dossier of 27 ‘significant lies and falsehoods’, and cited in the good company of D J Trump (credited with 20 falsehoods for each day of his presidency), YouTube, Rupert Murdoch, Craig Kelly, Alan Jones and Russia’s Internet Research Agency - to name but a few. We all know that politicians lie; they rank as one of Australia’s least trusted professions. Coper, in his exploration of the topic, gently leads the reader on an absorbing historical journey commencing in Ancient Greece and ending in the very halls of our own parliaments thousands of years later. All the way from Socrates to Scomo, so to speak. The relatively recent development of computers and the ever expanding internet heralded an era of unfettered access and opportunity to quickly spread disinformation. Coper explains how this malaise has arisen leading to a fractured society, how (and why) disinformation is so difficult to combat, and what we (consumers) can do to prevent its seemingly rampant spread in Australia. The media too, in all its myriad of forms, cops Coper’s forensic scrutiny to reveal how many self interested actors (shock jocks and news paper proprietors included) operate from the same dark and deluded playbook in order to deflect and deceive. Thankfully, the disinformation malignancy challenging modern society can be tackled (and defeated), as Coper outlines how we can defy and defuse the disinformation imbroglio. This book is arguably essential reading for anyone wanting to cut through the increasing, unbridled hype before we are all condemned to disappear down the disinformation sink hole. But then, do we really care? - Reviewed by John Hagan.

56 DAYS

BY CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD / CORVUS $29.99 Budding architect, Oliver, meets computer assistant, Ciara, in the selfservice queue of a Dublin Tesco supermarket. Both have recently arrived in the city; she from Co. Leitrim, and he from England. That encounter was 56 days ago, the same week COVID-19 reached Ireland’s shores. Soon, initial

attraction gives rise to a promising relationship and three weeks later, in order to remain together in the face of the national lockdown declared by Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, Ciara moves in to Oliver’s spartan apartment just off Harold’s Cross Road. Now, in continual 24 hour contact, can Oliver and Ciara still manage to hide their own dark personal confidences from each other? Five weeks after Varadkar’s edict, neighbours, alerted by a foul smell emanating from Oliver’s flat, call the Garda. Detective Inspector Leah Riordan and Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly are duly dispatched to investigate. They find the decomposing body of a male, deceased for two weeks, face down in the shower. Who is the corpse? If a murder has occurred, how was this done since the doors to the apartment are locked from the inside? The perfect crime? Riordan and Connolly set about unraveling the mystery and delve in to the background of the two lovers, uncovering hitherto cosseted secrets. Following on from a device used in a previous novel, ‘Rewind’ (soon to be on-screen), Howard adeptly continues to keep the reader off balance with her disparate, immersive storytelling. Expertly using alternating timelines (50, 33, 23 days previously), and points of view (recounted through the eyes of Oliver, Ciara, Riordan), Howard skillfully transports readers from the present to the past and back again, creating an atmospheric, seamless and totally original narrative. Her brilliant plotting is well supported by superb character development in an engrossing tale which weaves timely topics into a gripping, immersive thriller, with a number of breathtaking final twists. A compulsive and entertaining read which hopefully will bring Howard the widespread acclaim she so richly deserves. Postscript: During the first half of last century, female writers such as, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham were amongst the leading crime/mystery novelists, selling millions of books worldwide. Fast forward to the 2020s to discover a slew of fine, Irish, female, crime/ mystery, authors like Howard. Amongst these are, E D Thompson with ‘I know I saw her’ (reviewed in the November /December 2021 edition of Irish Scene), Hannah King’s, ‘She and I’, Edel Coffey, with ‘Breaking Point’, and Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, ‘Trespasses’. All the action by these emergent novelists is set in Ireland, arguably heralding a new genre of ‘Hibernia noir’ bestsellers. - Reviewed by John Hagan.

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