Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan (2001)

Richard Flanagan has catapulted up my list of favourite Australian authors after reading Gould’s Book of Fish. This novel is crazy and quirky but at the same time includes serious themes. The writing is amazing and I feel the characters that populate the story embody the types you would have seen in Australia’s convict era.

Flanagan is daring us to believe in his story by increasingly making it more crazy and ethereal, culminating in the main character, William Gould, turning into a fish by the end of the novel. Or at least writing that he turned into a fish. Gould is a forger, a thief and an all round underhanded criminal so there is very limited signs that suggest we should believe the story he is writing haphazardly around the pictures of fish he has painted.

Nonetheless, there is plenty to be extracted from this novel. There are moments of profoundity, especially when Flanagan deals with the concept of time and how it passes quickly with little fanfare about those who lived their lives during it. This becomes one of the main themes towards the end of the story when Gould is on a mission to show the world, or at least the rest of Tasmania, the truth of the penal colony on Sarah Island. He even worries at the thought of not being remembered once he is gone.

We can also take out of it a real sense of terror at how some convicts were treated back in the early settlement days. Various forms of torture and punishment were employed and heavy sentences handed out for what can easily be considered minor offences. There also pervades through the novel an unsavoury representation of early settlers attitudes to Indigenous people. There are many relatings of mass slayings and even the general thought that they were closer to other animals than humans is professed by some in the novel. An attitude that, unfortunately, was all too real.

Flanagan’s writing is some of the best I have read. A mark of a great author, for me at least, is being able to create your own metaphors and similes and use them instead of the old and worn ones. What I mean by this is instead of using a simile such as “it was as hot as the sun’s surface”, a great author will relate a story previously and then use an aspect of that to finish the simile. This helps remind us of the previous part of the story and often increases the comedic value of what is written. Flanagan is a master of this.

I would say Gould’s Book of Fish is equal parts serious and outrageous. We can easily tell the difference and I don’t believe Flanagan lets the story go too crazy. It is a quality read that gives insights into the history of Australia, thoughts on time and its importance and many, many laughs.

The Shining – Stephen King (1979)

My first furore into the writings of Stephen King has been an interesting one. Given King’s wide appeal, I always thought his books would be for, want of a better word, dummies, a la the Dan Brown audience. Books that involve physical descriptions of characters adding more to their personality than anything else, with short chapters always ending on cliff hangers and big build-ups with fast, untidy endings.

This was not the case with The Shining and it is why I’m grateful I finally picked up a King novel. The Shining does everything you want a horror story to do. It has a small cast of characters that are deep and add meaning to the story. It builds tension slowly and then heaps it on during crucial moments and, above all, it is imaginative and totally original. Sure, the idea of haunted houses is a staple of the horror genre but King takes The Overlook, the menacing hotel with more than its fair share of chequers in its past, and turns it into its own entity. A living, breathing, and importantly, thinking existence.

The novel begins with Jack Torrance being hired as the winter caretaker of The Overlook. I wouldn’t go as far to call Jack a bad person but he definitely finds himself in the useless category. A reformed alcoholic who lost his teaching job for punching a student who had slashed his tyres. A man with a volatile emotional state that is quick to anger and then repentant of his actions and, yet, the process keeps perpetuating. The insights into Jack’s mind that King affords us also goes a long way to forming our opinion of this man. We see a selfish Jack in these inner thoughts. A man who thinks his talent as a writer is being hampered by his wife and son and although he loves them both, he certainly harbours bitterness towards them.

Danny, Jack’s son, is the one the novel is named for. He has the shining, a special ability to sense, feel and even hear what people are thinking. Along with this is his ability to often see the future or what may happen in the future. Being a 5-year-old, this is hard for Danny to understand and grasp, especially the idea that not everyone is like this and so he learns to hide what he feels and sees due to the reactions he receives.

There are two other primary characters. Wendy, Jack’s wife and Danny’s mother, is protective of her son and weary of her husband. She desperately wants to accept Jack as reformed but memories of what he was like are hard to erase. This presents itself in her behaviour, something Jack notices often. She has an uneasy feeling about The Overlook but the alternative of her mother’s place is out of the question. Dick Hallorann is the chef at The Overlook and he also has the shining. In fact, it is Dick who names it thusly. He is the one who receives a distress call from Danny when the hotel really becomes menacing and threatening.

The idea of pre-cognition and seeing the future have a long literary history, but pairing it with the idea of this advanced horror house is wonderful. It creates a struggle between the hotel and Danny. Danny knows this place is bad but also knows his father needs the job. The hotel wants Danny’s power and will try to do anything to absorb it.

This provides the backdrop of the climactic finish. The Overlook uses Jack to get to Danny. It possesses him in an attempt to extract the shining from the child. This is cleverly done over the duration of the novel with Jack increasingly growing further away from his family and fixating on the house’s history. He is easily wooed with the hotel’s promise of grandiosity and his willingness to prove he is of managerial material is twisted into a murderous rampage.

While this is thrilling, what makes The Shining a true horror story are the events littered along the way that raise the tension and leave you with a slight sweat on the brow. The topiary with its hedge animals is involved in a thrilling game of chase with Danny. The catch is that they only move when your back is turned but you have to have your back turned to get away. You never see them move but they increasingly appear closer and Danny has a scratch on his leg when he makes it back to the hotel. Another horrific event is Room 217 where Danny is forced by his curiosity to look inside. He finds something truly terrifying in there, something that contradicts Hallorann’s promise of “they can’t hurt you”.

There is so much that separates this from just your run of the mill pulp fiction. The story is highly original and flushed out so well. We feel we understand the characters and their thought processes thanks to King’s creation of detailed back stories. The language isn’t verbose but we don’t need this in a horror story. We need tension, suspense and a real belief that things might not turn out well. These are all delivered in ample amounts. If King’s other works are anything like this, there is no wonder he is aptly named the King of Horror.

The Detour – Gerbrand Bakker (2010)

This is very much a minimalist novel in the true sense of the word. The writing is often short and sharp, the dialogue follows the same pattern, mundane events are recorded list-like and there is not much in the way of real action or story progression. What this means is the novel relies heavily on its characterisation.

The main character is a woman who is fleeing her marital relationship after confessing to an affair. She travels to rural Wales were she rents a farm. The farmer, who was friendly with the previous owner, comes across as somewhat of a pig with an air of ownership over the woman almost. She is disgusted by him and it is not surprising his crass sexual advance is rebuffed with indifference.

A boy seemingly stumbles onto the property with a dog and the woman immediately strikes up an amicable relationship. It feels like the boy has a sense that the woman isn’t telling him everything but similarly, he is holding back as well. The husband, while playing a smaller role, is one of the stronger characters. It is clear he is quite a relaxed man that is prone to intense fits of emotion. He burnt down, albeit accidentally, his wife’s office when he found out about the affair, but he has come to terms with it and just wants her back, if she will come back. He strikes up an odd relationship with a police officer, both travelling to Wales to find the wife.

It is a sad novel but this is often conveyed through the woman smelling the old musk of the deceased previous owner, what she calls old woman smell and attributes this smell to herself. Also, she cries a lot and there is a thought that she is ill. It is never discovered if she is physically ill but I got the feeling her illness was more mental than physical. There are plenty of allusions to physical discomfort and not being able to do things, but this level of lethargy is often seen with a number of types of depression. Also, author Gerbrand Bakker has said he wrote this novel during a dark time in his life.

A recurring theme is the loss of the geese on the farm. They begin with 10 and whittle down to 4 by the novel’s end. I was expecting this theme to have a bigger impact on the story, to tie in more than it did. I felt it became a footnote in the end and nothing more.

Due to the slow pace and build of the novel, it needed a strong finish. It was poignant but not as forceful as you’d like. The Detour is a novel for a certain feeling, a certain time. It isn’t very long which makes it easier to get through but it’s not the type of novel you would want to read all the time.

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green (2012)

The Fault in Our Stars may be a young adult novel but that shouldn’t limit its target audience. It is a novel that is extremely well written and tells a courageous story of young love. What makes it courageous is the two star-crossed lovers both have cancer. Cancer is awful no matter what age you have it, but there is something more devastating about young people with cancer. Maybe it’s the thought of lost opportunities and time or maybe it is just thinking how on earth someone so young can deal with such a problem. I tend to think it is both and more.

Hazel Grace Lancaster is forced to lug around an oxygen tank to help her breathe thanks to the type of cancer she has. It is stage 4 thyroid and the only thing that has kept her alive has been a new miracle drug that only works on a small proportion of people. She meets Augustus Waters in a cancer group session and it is clear this is no ordinary teenage boy. Apart from the fact that he lost one of his legs to sarcoma, he is very confident and seems to take control of the situation even when it seems impossible to do so. He is immediately fond of Hazel and expresses this quite bluntly. My favourite line from the novel comes from Augustus:

“I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”

Would anyone expect a cancer sufferer to say that? Yet, it makes complete sense as they, of all people, would appreciate the simpler pleasures.

Author John Green makes it clear at the beginning of the book that this is a fictional work but it is hard not to think that, some way or another, he has had experience with youth cancer. He writes about it so well and with so much emotional depth that there must be something other than an amazing ability to empathise from the outside.

He raises questions of identity by asking how much of a person is themselves and how much they are the cancer. Fate also plays a big part in the novel, almost a character in its own right. Why do these children have cancer? Who or what decided that? Yet, if either Hazel or Augustus didn’t have cancer, then they wouldn’t have met. This is the fault in the stars from the title. That Hazel and Augustus could only have been brought together by both having cancer. It is a cruel fate but a very real one. Another issue surrounding cancer that is dealt with is that of the patient guilt. Often cancer sufferers try to cut themselves off from people and relationships as they feel if they were to die, it would cause pain to anyone near them. Hazel is worried about her parents and also about Augustus and, at first, she tries to distance herself but, in the end, she can not help but love them.

Another interesting character is author Peter van Houten. He wrote “An Imperial Affliction”, which is Hazel’s favourite book. The ending of this book plays a major role in the plot. It is about a teenager with cancer but it doesn’t have an ending. Hazel is very keen to find out what happened to everyone in the story. It is a complex sequence of events that are highly entertaining and engrossing. It sees Hazel and Augustus travel to Amsterdam in search of the answer and it also opens the window into the life of a man who is very complicated and jaded but, perhaps, didn’t handle it as best he could. Whether or not the intention was there, I see this book with no ending as a metaphor for enjoying life while you have it. We can’t be sure if there is something after life, but we know for a fact that there is life, so let’s enjoy that and stop worrying about what comes next.

The novel is funny, interesting, but above all, sad. Cancer is always present and the impending finality of it is pervasive. The last 50 pages of the novel were near impossible to get through. Yet, even after that, you finish reading feeling like you’ve just experienced something special.

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn (2012)

This novel was a sensation when it was first released and is being turned into a film, which is usually a sign the novel was a commercial success. However, I generally find these books become successes because they are written for a mass audience. That is to say, the language isn’t as elaborate and the story is quite linear. Gone Girl certainly can’t be tarred with this brush as the writing is, more often than not, sophisticated and the story is certainly not linear.

It really is the story of a strange relationship that is hidden behind a wall of mystery by author Gillian Flynn. It begins with the disappearance of Amy Dunne, the quintessential American sweetheart. The first half of the novel oscillates between Nick Dunne’s account after his wife’s disappearance and excerpts from Amy’s diary covering the last five years, the time the couple have been married.

We increasingly become aware that Nick is lying to the police and that he has no idea of who his wife really is. Her diary appears to be directly contradicting a number of things Nick is presenting as fact. There are a number of bomb shells, but the biggest one is dropped midway through the novel and this turns everything around, even who we think the good guy is.

I enjoyed the first half more than the second, even though I kind of expected the big twist. I felt the writing flowed well and the chapters combined nicely. The second part seemed a little lazy in comparison to the first half. Things seemed to fall into place easier for the characters, without needing a proper set up. The first half was questioning our ability to find the truth amongst the lies where the second didn’t really require any ground work and was relying on suspense that wasn’t fully formed.

The first half discussed themes of pubic opinion, such as the first thought in any disappearing wife case is that the husband murdered her and hid the body and how people are quick to judge based on little things like facial expression and perceived lack of sympathy in voices. The second half is really an account of a psychopathic being who formulates and calculates to get their own way without any remorse for the actions they do. While this fits into the story, it was quite a big leap away from those previous issues and it felt like the issues in the first half were never revisited.

Gone Girl is a story that will keep you entranced for the first 200 or so pages, with chapters concluding on cliff hangers, but this fades away as you progress with increasingly less and less keeping you invested in what are, ultimately, characters that have little human elements in them.

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (1929)

‘A Farewell to Arms’ is the story of love found and lost amidst the backdrop of World War I. Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver for the Italian Army though he is English by nationality. Whilst on the front, his knee is hit by shrapnel and he is taken to a hospital in Milan. This is where the love story picks up when he becomes acquainted with nurse Catherine Barkley. Their love is immediate and immense. It is a real old style love story in the beginning with professions of love and what was considered decent being observed.

However, this representation of decency is eroded quickly and it is almost as though Hemingway is challenging the establishment on this. Frederic’s and Catherine’s love is no less abundant even though they don’t follow the standards of the day. There are numerous hotel visits and even the hospital is a setting for their consummation. It appears Hemingway was not a strong believer in marriage being the key indicator of love and there is no denying that Frederic and Catherine are deeply in love.

It is clear that Hemingway is against everything the war stands for and perhaps this is why he, himself, enlisted in the ambulance corps rather than a fighting unit. He was also injured by shrapnel so there is a clear connection between his protagonist and himself. Hemingway writes “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” , a clear message that the “honor” and “courage” expressed in war often resulted in damage done to real places and real people. This sentiment is capped off by Frederic’s desertion during the Italian retreat, for which he is nearly executed by Italian Army officials.

Frederic meets up with a pregnant Catherine and they decide to flee to Switzerland where they enjoy possibly their most happy of times. However, this is shortlived and tragedy soon strikes with the novel ending in quite a grim state. Comments such as “This was what people got for loving each other” signify the tone Hemingway takes the novel to but perhaps the best summation of the emotion Hemingway evokes is expressed through what is commonly referred to as the ‘Nada Ending’ (highlight below to see the quote – very big spoiler):

“Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”

Ultimately this ending did not survive Hemingway’s meticulousness but it is a clear indication of the tone he takes in the novel.

Hemingway’s style is distinct with the use of “and” combining sentences other writers would separate. He is also very astute at describing scenery as is the case on Page 1: “In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.” It is clear that Hemingway has visited a number of the places the novel is set in but the scene is certainly set by the characters and events rather than the places.

Reading ‘A Farewell to Arms’ will guarantee you two things. The first is that Hemingway had a bleak view of the world in general. The second is that there is no doubt about Hemingway’s talent and why he was considered one of the greatest writers of his generation and of all generations.