#49: A Rhinestone Button -- Gail Anderson-Dargatz

A crow flew up from a fence post as they passed. The first crow Job had seen that year. His mother had always said that you should look to the first crow of the season to tell you what your year would be like. If you saw a crow resting, then you could look forward to a relaxing year. A crow flying in the air made for a busy time. A crow coming in for a landing meant things would slow down after a busy start. Job couldn't remember what a crow taking off meant.

Job, pretty as a Botticelli angel and innocent as a lifetime of church-going and strict parenting can make a grown man, is a farmer in Godsfinger, a small town in Alberta. The town's named because it lost its church to a tornado, then lost the new church to another. And religion is a force as strong, here, as the round of seasons or the community itself. Job, farming alone after his parents' death and his brother's departure to theological college, is content with the neatness of his life: he bakes as well as any of the women in town, and there's always work to be done on the farm.

But Job is different, and not just because of his looks. He sees sounds; his is a world rich in synaethesia (the rounded glass egg of a vacuum-cleaner's hum, the tawny rose blushes of chickadee wings) and only gradually does it become apparent that there is a great deal missing from Job's neat, 'tightly-coiled' life. This revelation, vouchsafed to the reader well before Job realises it himself, is spurred by the arrival of Job's brother Jacob, his wife Lilith and their son Ben, fleeing minor scandal and the loss of Jacob's position as pastor. Job's childhood friend Will is exposed as gay, and Job is found guilty by association. Under his brother's influence, Job becomes caught up by the evangelical drive of preacher Jack Divine, and tries to reconcile his own wordless, shaky faith and his search for something missing with the religious certainty (and its undercurrent of casual, quotidian misbehaviour) that he sees in others.

Job's life is complicated by each social interaction. There's the waitress at the cafe, Liv, who wears 'broomstick' skirts and mocks his faith; Jacob's lack of interest in the realities of farming life, and his denouncement of crop circles as the work of demons; Lilith and Ben, both with demons of their own; Debbie, the girl from a radio dating show who finds her soulmate between the door of the cafe and Job's table ... Temptations on every side and nothing solid, safe or certain.

And throughout the novel there are ducks; a tame duck wearing a diaper, a duck falling dead out of the sky into Job's arms, a duck flying into a tornado ...

A Rhinestone Button is full of the imagery of rural life, and it contains one of the most compelling descriptions of a tornado that I've ever read, the air pulling out of a man's lungs, the noise like a freight train, the upward spiral of blossom.

The quiet desperation of Job's life looked like peace to me at first, but I was drawn into the claustrophobia of small-town life. And it's a tale that ends happily, or more happily than it might have done, though to my mind there's as much loss as gain.

#48: Theft: A Love Story -- Peter Carey

I could not see why she would tolerate him but of course this is the LIBERTY given to those of so-called genius that they are permitted to act like TOTAL MORONS.

This novel reminds me of being cornered by the personable drunk at a party: the voices are loud and distinctive and larger than life, and one can't help nodding and smiling regardless of whether one actually, in the cold light of day, likes the characters at all.

Carey is an Australian writer through and through; every facet of country, history, culture fascinate him and is spun large. Theft is his take on the Australian art world. The novel's protagonist, Michael Boone (a.k.a. Butcher Bones), is an acclaimed Australian artist recovering from a divorce in which the Plaintiff won custody of their son and -- possibly worse -- of most of Boone's paintings, necessitating a criminal act and subsequent stay in prison. Released, Boone once more shoulders the burden of his 'damaged' brother Hugh, an idiot-savant whose voice is compellingly clear and who is wholly reliant on his brother.

...not since the bawling screaming murderous year I ran away to study life drawing at Footscray Tech had it ever once occurred to me that it might be possible to be ever free of my brother's bony elbow, his stinky breath, his sweaty sudden arrivals in the middle of my sleep.

The brothers are holed up in the back of beyond, abusing Boone's sponsor's house and his credit at the local store in order to produce Art, when Marlene squelches across a flooded creek and into their lives. She's gamine, clever and married to Olivier, who has the dubious distinction of being the son of famous painter Liebowitz, and morally entitled to verify his dead father's works. Boone is a great fan of Liebowitz, and one senses that this connection, as much as Marlene's plans to resurrect his career (a department-store show in Tokyo, a trip to America), that greases the slippery slope on which Boone finds himself.

The novel's told in alternating voices, Michael and Hugh. Michael is driven by opinions, ego and a brash bravado that begins to seem hollow once he leaves his native land and finds himself a nobody in the dog-eat-dog American art scene. Though of course he has Marlene ... Hugh's voice is a delight, reminiscent of Carey's take on Ned Kelly: capitalisation, repetition, a skewed yet sane and perspective on the world ("The turning indicator was flicking ticking at an awful rate like the heart of a sparrow or a fish -- how can they bear it?"), and underlying it all a devotion to his brother, a devotion that's reciprocated to an unexpected degree.

The subtitle of the novel is 'A Love Story', but like the title itself it's open to interpretation and reinterpretation. Is the love story only about Marlene? Is the theft is only about the missing Liebowitz? I can think of several answers, and the one I like the best has to do with the strength of the bond between Michael and Hugh, and how it's tested, and what matters most in the end: not love, not even art, but that bond. (Marlene gets away with a great deal, as long as she doesn't pose a threat to Hugh.)

Boone's sheer delight in his art and his media is infectious: this novel made me pick up paintbrush and acrylics for the first time in ages.

#47: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time -- Liz Jensen

A time-travel romance as sugar-dusted as the heroine's favourite Danish confections, with a caper stolen straight from generic Scooby Doo and a stock cast -- the tart with a heart, the adorable orphan, the mad professor, the dashing archaeologist -- this is fun and frivolous and a headlong read.

I'm not sure it works as science fiction; the science is just a little too flaky and improbable. But it's an effective fantasy, and maybe (as one Proper Printed Review suggests) it does border on magic realism.

Charlotte is a good-natured prostitute in Copenhagen in the last years of the nineteenth century. Beset by an elderly dependent, Fru Schleswig (whom Charlotte is at pains to stress is not her mother, she finds honest employment at the house of Fru Krak, who's due to be married to a Pastor and who wants the house cleaned top to bottom.

Charlotte discovers from her friends Else (now a florist) and Gudrun (a laundress, dreadfully scarred by something that befell her in the basement of Fru Krak's Gothic mansion) that all is not as it seems. Fru Krak's husband, the Professor, went missing -- as did many others, never to be seen again -- and the secret to his disappearance lies in the cellar.

Accidentally propelled through space and time to Greenwich, just after the millennium (the green laser-beam is still operational, which it wasn't last time I was there), Charlotte -- pausing only to discover Google and the joys of online shopping -- finds herself the Forlorn Hope of a group of Danish refugees. And finds herself falling head over heels in love ...

It's first-person all the way through, in the gossipy and affectionate voice of Charlotte, whose journal is one long letter to her beloved reader (though I'm not sure that reader's ever identified). One nice stylistic touch was the use of '&', rather than 'and'. And of course all the stylistic eccentricities, the constant changes of tense, can be put down to Charlotte's ebullience and her excellent but hard-won grasp of the English language. Though for a woman who staves off boredom by reading dictionaries, I expected better than this:

I am saved by a single word, which you can look up in the dictionary, as I have done, under the letter I. You will find it somewhere between 'importune' and 'imposter' ... IMPOTENCE!

Not in my dictionary, love.

Given the title one might've expected more smut (though, in fact, the title is perfectly accurate): there's just enough to make this a saucy spicy naughty-but-nice novel, and Charlotte knows (who better?) that sex is nothing if not amusing. Great fun, and I shall look out for more by Jensen.

#46: Evil for Evil -- K J Parker

A beautiful design like yours encourages luck to happen: you attract it, like decoying geese.

In the second volume of the Engineer trilogy, the plot becomes more tortuous. Ziani Vaatzes' plan, his Machine that may or may not mean the end of the world, moves into another phase, with the help of his new recruit Daurenja -- a monster of a man to look at, with an impressive CV that enables him to solve engineering problems that baffle Vaatzes.

Meanwhile the Eremian nation is on the run, though there's a creditable resistance (organised by Miel Ducas, who's still driven by duty even while acknowledging it as a form of that monstrous thing called Love) and the Mezentine army is finding occupation a little more troublesome than anticipated.

And Veatriz, plus ineffectual husband Orsea, find themselves thrown on the mercy of Duke Valens (who is sulking about not being able to write long rambling letters to Veatriz now that she's part of his court).

The glory's in the detail, though: the neat understated revelation about the instigator of Vaatzes's original deviation from Specification; the gradual sense that, for all Vaatzes' doomy scheming, there might be a greater plot in motion that he's merely another component of; the exploration of the many and varied ways in which men and women may be made into weapons; and the realisation that, without Duty and all that chivalrous nobility, Miel Ducas (still the most likeable character, for my money) is the very worst sort of weapon, a loose cannon.

Still: Valens gets married (for political reasons) and ends up betrayed by a man whose very name should've indicated he was up to no good (I missed mention of him in the first novel). Vaatzes' wife Ariessa turns out to have some secrets of her own (and I can't help wondering if one of those secrets is a change of name). Horrible things happen to Miel Ducas, not least (possibly, and at the most inappropriate moment possible) Love. Orsea's tale continues just as it ought. A quantity of sulphur is delivered, and the fine art of pottery-glazing revealed in more depth than anyone might expect from an alleged fantasy novel. . And meanwhile in the labyrinthine offices of Mezentine bureaucracy, Psellus is ending up with rather more work than he expected.

... Oh, it's all so bleak. And yet funny, and fascinating, and tragic and epic and convoluted.

(I could nitpick about Parker's overuse of pronouns -- it can be tricky to disentangle a passage such as "there were times she wished she hadn't had to marry him. It had made sense at the time, of course, when he'd [a different 'he'] explained it to her". I could remark upon the occasionally clumsy proofreading -- nobody's eyebrows narrow when they're thinking -- or the hammering-home of one point or another by frequent epigrammatic utterances on same. But through the rose-tinted spectacles of appreciation, admiration and enjoyment, I find these traits appealing.)

I am desperate to read the final volume of the trilogy, even though I suspect it will not end well for any of the characters I like.

#45: Leporello -- William Palmer

What, Leporello, does a man do when he has died and been dragged down to Hell? And then is resurrected again? It's a problem that did not trouble my ancestor in all those wretched plays. He sinned; paid, and satisfied consciences all round.

One of those books that I felt I should have enjoyed more than I actually did. This is the narrative of the infamous Don Giovanni's valet, as told by the aged Leporello himself to an unseen listener, who clearly keeps interrupting with references to the opera. Leporello dismisses these interjections testily: irrelevant, and who cares about some stupid opera? Instead, he tells us what really happened, from his early days as a peasant in an Italian village (suitably bawdy and picaresque) to his first encounter with the Don and his role in the events that spawned the opera. Here are Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Donna Elvira in their 'true' names and guises: Anna, for instance, is Eleanora, a spoilt rich girl who tricks Leporello into eloping with her, only to reveal that she's in search of a mysterious lover who promised to be with her always ... yes, the Don.

Leporello also tells the story of the moralistic masque which, in the opera, becomes a literal descent to Hell. And he tells what happens, happened, after the opera ends: the prime and decline of Don Giovanni di Tenario, a gradual descent from tragedy to darkest farce that makes us glad that Mozart and Da Ponte stopped where they did.

Leporello is not merely a retelling of the opera: it becomes plain, as the tale progresses, that Leporello and his master are of different worlds. They're divided not just by social class but by a battery of metaphysics: the Don as Enlightenment gentleman, fascinated by microscopes and natural philosophy, and Leporello stubbornly insistent on God's will and workings. There's the underlying issue, too, of whether Leporello is friend or servant; and there's the issue of whether the Don (like the Earl of Rochester as portrayed in The Libertine, of which this strongly reminded me in places) is simply an overgrown adolescent, fighting and whoring and intriguing to stave off the mortal enemy of Boredom.

The setting is magnificent and the detail credible: Leporello comes across as rather less cowardly and more sensible than Mozart's version, but perhaps at the expense of his master, who's not actually a very likeable person.

#44: Devices and Desires -- K J Parker

At the beginning of this ~700-page novel, peace breaks out between the Eremians and the Vadani. Valens, very soon to be Duke of the Vadani, is not best pleased, as he has fallen irrevocably in love with Veatriz, a nobly-born Eremian hostage, who ends up married (for political reasons) to the Eremian Duke, Orsea.

However, this is a K J Parker novel, so there is plenty of time for bloodshed, battle, feuding and treachery.

Off to the east lies the Mezentine Empire, vast and technologically superior. The engineer Ziani Vaatzes is sentenced to death for innovation, for straying from the strict Specifications that govern all Mezentine technology. In an uncharacteristically dashing escape, he evades his sentence and his captors and ends up working for the Eremians, who have just been comprehensively thrashed by the Mezentine army.

Vaatzes is a clever man, and he has a Plan. ("I use the materials available to me," he says to one of his weapons, later. "If I can't use steel, I have to use flesh instead. Not what I'd have chosen, but you do your best with what you've got.") This plan -- not wholly divulged by the end of Devices and Desires, part one of a trilogy -- is designed to return Vaatzes to his home and reunite him with the wife he loves. And the plan, the machine, is ruthless: the inevitable result of engaging the machine would be the end of the world.

Which would all be so much epic-fantasy-by-the-inch if Parker's characters weren't so richly drawn. Valens is a romantic who nevertheless manages to be a resourceful, hardheaded statesman, a skilled huntsman and an astonishingly mundane correspondent. Orsea, thrust into a position of power which he never expected, has a headful of grandiose ideas but lacks the ability to bring them to fruition. Veatriz is half of a marriage that can't provide the intellectual stimulation she requires. Vaatzes is a sympathetic character, as long as you set aside that stuff about the end of the world (and the appalling bodycounts in the battles he instigates): there's more to him, and his crime, than Parker explains in this first volume. Psellus, a Mezentine civil servant seconded to Necessary Evil (the Department of War) is a bumbling fool who'd like a quiet life, but there's a quality to him that indicates he won't get one any time soon. And Miel Ducas, Orsea's chief advisor and best friend (not to mention childhood sweetheart of Veatriz, and former heir apparent to the title of Duke) is an extraordinarily likeable character, a nobleman comfortably aware of his flaws, a good man through and through -- and an unwitting part of Vaatzes' terrible machine. Does it sound odd to say that I was angry on his behalf for what befell him?

The Engineer trilogy looks set to accomplish something rare in epic fantasy: there is, as far as I can tell, no magic. There are no gods (though characters do say 'for God's sake', &co; I take this as an aspect of Parker's way with dialogue). Early on, there's a vague mention of the Ducas family, as old nobility, being prone to prophetic dreams: but none occur. And there are a couple of dreams that might have supernatural provenance, but probably don't.

Another thing I like about K J Parker's writing: the colloquial dialogue, the tone (not exactly light-hearted but certainly not all doom and gloom), the black humour and the wry observations. Parker can make me laugh out loud at a scene where Miel is explaining to Orsea that he'd probably recognise an executed spy, what with his memory for faces, except that unfortunately they've already sent the head off to the spymasters. The humour isn't as thickly applied as in a Pratchett novel, but it's often as funny.

This novel -- purchased because of my great respect for Parker's previous 'Fencer' and 'Scavenger' trilogies -- has been sitting on the shelf since Easter, or possibly before; as soon as I'd finished it (which was in a hotel room in Lille) I ordered the next one, Evil for Evil, from Amazon (isn't web'n'walk wonderful?) because I was desperate to find out what happened to everybody.

#43: The Secret River -- Kate Grenville

This was a prison whose bars were ten thousand miles of water.

William Thornhill, a waterman on the Thames, is sentenced to death for stealing timber. Through the favour of a patron, his sentence is commuted to transportation, and his wife, Sal, and their young son accompany him to New South Wales. Sal, as a free woman, has the rights of a settler: Thornhill is assigned to labour for his own wife, which gives them something to laugh about after the nine-month voyage.

Thornhill's well-behaved, and lucky besides: within a year he has his 'ticket of leave', making him a free man -- with the single proviso that he can't leave the colony. Sal is determined to get home to England, and she knows that a man who works hard and keeps his nose clean can eventually apply for a pardon, and be free to go. She's been running a grog shop, the Sign of the Pickled Herring (the sign being a slab of London roof-tile that she picked up at Pickled Herring Wharf on her last morning in England) and saving up the profits for the long passage home.

Thornhill, though, has fallen in love. Reluctantly, slowly, without realising it: he's in love with a patch of land, a remote peninsula in the empty land miles up the Hawkesbury River, a week's round trip from Sydney and a million miles from Pickled Herring Wharf. Sal makes a deal: five years and then we'll go home. Thornhill agrees, but his heart's not in it. The freedom of the valley, the equality of the settlers, the virgin earth feel more like home to him. There and only there, a man did not have to drag his stinking past around with him like a dead dog.

But the land only seems empty.

Reports of 'outrages and depradations' are a staple of the local press: the Aborigines trying to stake a recognisable claim what they've held so lightly for so long. Thornhill does his best: he begins to recognise that there are other ways of farming, other methods of husbandry. Instead of hunting kangaroos, the Aborigines burn the scrub and wait til their prey comes to feast on new growth. But it's a precarious equilibrium and matters come to a head when the Aborigines begin to gather ...

And then comes the saddest time of all, the rest of their lives: when Thornhill sits in his mansion at Thornhill Point, his telescope trained on the hills, trying to make figures from tree-branches and shadows. Looking for something that's no longer there. And for the first time in his life, there is something that he cannot speak to Sal about: their lives had slowly grown around it, the way the roots of a river-fig grew around a rock.

The tragedy is slow and almost gentle, the story of a man trying to live a good life and failing not through malevolence or error but through sheer incomprehension. The story of the crime that has to be committed in order for them to stay.

Grenville writes Thornhill as a simple man -- a deep thinker, and not a fool, but a man who tries to create home and family as best he can in a place where there are no rules and no guidance.