A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven

Don't you love it when you pick up a book, turn to the first page, and know immediately you have found something special? For me, this was one of those books. I was immediately engaged and remained thoroughly engrossed for the rest of the novel.

With May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes has catapulted herself into a top ten position on my favourite authors list. This is a wild, rollicking adventure of a book, tragic but simultaneously hilarious and moving. Jeanette Winterson calls it the great American novel of our time, and it is certainly the best book I've read this year. Which is saying something, as you know.

The book opens on a family Thanksgiving dinner. While his brother George sits at the table, ignorant of the fact that help is needed, Harold ferries plates back and forth to the kitchen to assist George's wife Jane who has prepared all the food. She interrupts him as he picks at the turkey carcass, 'fingers deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in' to kiss him full on the mouth. It is a kiss that is described as 'serious, wet, and full of desire', and like Helen of Troy's face, it is a kiss that launches a wild ride. The story takes off, galloping through a fatal car accident which leaves behind an orphaned boy, a very brief adulterous relationship, George's mental breakdown and ensuing hospitalisation, and finally a murder.

All in the first 50 odd pages. At which point I quite honestly wondered where Homes could possibly take the story next, what the next 400 odd pages could feasibly hold. But as Salman Rushdie says in his cover quote, this book starts at maximum force - and then it really gets going. The narrative speed does not stop or slow, nor does the story ever become boring. From here we are shuttled through the sometimes dirty, sometimes downright dangerous world of online dating, to the peculiar realm of alternative correctional facilities; from life at a posh American boarding school to village society in rural South Africa; from the world of academia and whispers of forgotten works of fiction by Richard Nixon to attempted car-jackings, inappropriate teacher-student relationships, a missing girl, a wedding in a senior care facility, a stroke, watered down Judaism, lots of Chinese food and the life of modern immigrants to the United States.

Harold is left bereaved, divorced and caring for George's two children, Nate and Ashley. His life has changed irreparably yet he conducts himself with aplomb. In church at the kids' mother's funeral, he brings out some Gummi bears for the kids and finds a mother behind him leaning in to ask 'how do you know about snacks?'. When Ashley calls from school, in tears and upset, Harold finds her mother's Amazon account and orders books to be sent to her. Touching moments like this are what set this book apart, charging it with humour in the midst of horror.

In the middle of the book Harold realises that he has never tried to do anything with his life, to succeed. He has always been satisfied with mediocrity or less: "...it's all coming back like a kind of psychic tidal wave, and there's a bad taste in my mouth, metallic and steely, and I'm feeling how much everyone in my family hated each other, how little we actually cared for or respected anyone but ourselves. I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt." He pulls himself out of this mire, and out of the guilt he feels for his part in Jane's death, to create a family around him that is everything his family was not - loving, supportive, close.

Harold's journey is a new-age picaresque of sorts, but without the cynicism David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole lend to the genre. His story is an uplifting tale of self-discovery and redemption, that is simultaneously unsentimental and deeply moving. And Harold himself is a genuinely sympathetic character, someone whose self-doubt is matched only by his warmth and ability to care for other people. He is the most maternal male character I have ever read, naturally taking in both human and animal strays and treating those around him with compassion and empathy.

I laughed outloud so often whilst reading this that Bibliohubby came to refer to it as 'that funny book you're reading'. But my laughter was as often prompted by astonishment as humour. Homes's writing is fresh and unexpected and compelling. I absolutely loved this novel.

Overall Assessment: 5 out of 5. Outstanding. Homes writes beautifully, and her story-telling is top tier. Such an imagination. I now want to go and find everything she's ever written and read it.

Note: This book also won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) this year, beating works by Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and Kate Atkinson. So I am not alone in my stellar assessment of it!

Carrie Tiffany - Mateship with Birds

The inaugural winner of the Stella award for Australian women's writing, and this year's winner of the NSW Premier's award, I picked up Mateship with Birds because it was a recent bookclub read (for my second bookclub; we have yet to pick a name for ourselves). I hadn't heard anything about this book when it was first suggested, nor had it yet won the prizes (though it was shortlisted for the Stella). I'm glad it was our pick last month, though, because I don't think I would have read it otherwise and I really enjoyed it.

This is a very Australian novel. I would recommend it to my North American and European readers because it will be unlike anything you have read before (unless you have read Tim Winton or Patrick White), and to my true-blue Aussie readers because parts of it will resonate with you, especially if you have family in the country.

I have a very particular way of describing Australian books that are set in the bush - and that is 'dusty'. This is one of those dusty books. One can feel the characteristic red dirt being kicked up around one's face in the dry heat as one reads. And hear the Kookaburras and Magpies. Tiffany's beautiful writing is incredibly evocative, calling to mind the unusual countryside of Australia and the slow pace of life as it unfolds on the land. For me personally, because I did not grow up here, I don't get a familiarity or true emotional resonance from Tiffany's writing - but I do enjoy reading about the dusty red centre of this unique country.

This is, on the surface, a relatively quiet book centred around the relationship between Harry, a milk farmer and Betty, a nurse, in conservative 1950s rural Victoria. Betty works for an aged care facility in town when she is not busy looking after her two children, Michael and Hazel. As a single mother, Betty has been scorned by the townspeople since she arrived many years earlier, and she leads a calm, lonely life. Harry, who lives on the neighbouring farm, is her only true friend. He too seems lonely, turning to Betty for home-cooked meals, companionship and the unexpected joys of standing in as pseudo-father to Betty's children.

Yet in spite of years of apparent courtship, the friendship between Harry and Betty has never developed beyond the platonic. The 'mates' (friends) have never become mates in the sexual sense - this is one of the quintessentially Australian puns hidden in the title to the book. The other is the play on the use of the Australian vernacular 'bird', which is slang for woman, and also refers to the animal, which features heavily in this portrait of life on the land. Harry's hobby is bird-watching, and he follows with sweet affection the lives of the Kookaburras living on his farm. He keeps an unassuming diary of their goings-on, which he writes in blank verse, and excerpts of which are interspersed throughout the novel. At one point Harry speaks of being able to assess the size of a farm or estate by the size of the Kookaburra family living there, an indication of how closely entwined are the lives of animals with the lives of people in this area of the world.

With the focus on Harry and Betty, one could see this is in some ways as a love story, albeit a very pragmatic one. But it is also, essentially, a story about life in the country, and not just the lives of people, but also the lives of animals. And when I said above that this is only ostensibly a quiet book, that is because beneath the surface, this is a book seething with fertile activity. Although it is absent (for most of the book) between Harry and Betty, sex in all its forms permeates the novel - from the fertilisation of Harry's cows, to the lives of birds and sheep and other animals on the land, to the bizarre tendencies of fellow farmer Mues and the budding sexuality of Betty's children - everything in and around the farm and the earth is seen to be teeming with sexuality in a base, quotidian way that is both reassuring and troubling. One of the girls in my bookclub found that she was unable to enjoy the story as it unfolded because she felt it was overshadowed by a sense of ominousness created by the overt sexuality. I think, though, that the in-your-face fecundity of the landscape can be explained by Tiffany's desire to illustrate how ubiquitous sex is in the country, and how people are really no different to animals. In urban settings one can perhaps mask, or hide, from the sex that is inherent in most of life's activities - one can infuse it, instead, with the human construct of romance, thus disguising our animalistic tendencies. But in the country, Tiffany asserts, our base qualities are almost impossible to avoid. Milk is not produced by non-lactating cows, and lactation is caused by fertilisation. Families of birds don't grow and survive without mateship rituals. Even death is sexualised. Survival, life, sex, death - all of these are part of the same cycle.

In the midst of all this, then, there is not much room for romance. Harry and Betty are clearly close, and they are likeable - both burrow their way insidiously into the reader's heart. I found myself warming to Betty when Tiffany described the way she used her lunch hour to change out of her nurse's uniform and into stockings and a hat in order to visit her elderly dementia patients disguised as their wives, bringing a little joy to their otherwise drab existences. I warmed to Harry when his dedication to Betty's children became clear, through repeated acts of paternal protection and kindness. However, both are such quiet, socially withdrawn personalities, that without a severe interruption of some kind the line between friend and mate might never have been crossed.

I won't give away the ending, even though this is hardly a plot-driven novel. I will say that I found the book moving and rather sweet, in spite of Tiffany's effort to keep the central relationship so pedestrian.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I enjoyed this and read it quickly.

Pros / favourite parts: The writing is beautiful. Many of the passages are absolutely lovely, and these stand out starkly against the brutal reality of the descriptions of life on the land, a contrast that I'm sure was intentional.

Betty's son Michael, on why it is he will one day choose to be a farmer - "He heads out across Foot Foot's paddock towards Harry's and has the sensation that he's walking back into himself. That the day at school - lining up on the asphalt quadrangle, scuffing his shoes on the wooden floors, leaning against the concrete toilet block to smoke at lunchtime - has been a kind of skimming across surfaces; that he's moved through the day without ever putting his weight down. Here, walking across the paddock, he feels his ankles soften to take account of the uneven ground. He picks his way through the clumps of cape weed and over the mounds of dirt left by the plough. There's a rhythm to it. A way of placing your feet so they are receptive to the ground beneath. In two years' time he'll have a bitter argument with his mother about a clerical traineeship in Swan Hill and he won't be able to explain to her why it is he wants to farm."

There is a section, too, describing Harry as a little boy, entranced by the cuckoo clock on his parent's wall. One day, when they are away, curiosity gets the better of him, he finds he can't wait any longer for the little bird to appear, and he stands on a chair and removes the clock from the wall and dismantles it to discover the cogs and springs within: "At the very bottom of the clock case, in each corner, is a leather bellows. Harry pushes one of them with his finger and it makes the second half of the cuckoo sound, but with a puffed sigh at the end. The lungs of the cuckoo bird are not inside the bird itself. They are just a mechanism within the clock. The cuckoo clock is an act of ventriloquism; a callous device - the mute bird skewered to the thrusting arm - forced hour after hour to repeat its trick." This discovery upsets young Harry to the point of tears: "He thinks he might as well cry now, the crying will have to come. There will be the disappointment on his mother's face and his shame at that. But there's something more, too. He feels like he has lost something. He tries to slow his breathing now, to slow everything down, to give himself more time, but the tears have made his nose run and he's having to suck great gulps of air in."

I just love that passage. Watching my small son every day I can see his joy at experiencing things for the first time, his belief in the wondrous nature of the world. And as his mother, I so desperately want to protect him from the disappointment that inevitably comes from realising that the world is not as magical as one thinks. Tiffany's writing here so perfectly and poignantly conveys this moment of recognition for small children - it shows quite remarkable insight and sensitivity.

Cons: I do think Tiffany sometimes goes too far in her effort to portray the baseness of the sexuality in the countryside. I don't think all of the grotesque or ominous scenes were necessary - and as a city dweller myself, I found myself a bit squeamish at times, though I suppose that's the point.