Books read in March

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in March. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

Gem Squash Tokoloshe – Rachel Zadok (4.3)
Faith is a child growing up on a farm in South Africa. Her father is away on business most of the time and he comes home at the weekends, until he stops coming. Her mother, Bella, fills her head with tales of fairies and bad spirits, who lurk around the house and come out of the paintings, until she is terrified to close her eyes.

Her life is unusual, but she is a resilient child with childish concerns who hates the eponymous gem squash, which are served boiled up for dinner on Sunday night and are supposed to remind Papa that home was the best place to eat. Mary, who used to work on the farm, tells Faith about the tokoloshe, an evil spirit who steals their souls while they sleep because the land they live on doesn’t belong to them.

Not only is the first hint of the deeper apartheid that Faith doesn’t understand, but it naturally gives her nightmares. Bella counters them by telling her that tokoloshe are afraid of gem squash and if she eats enough of them they will protect her. Such inventive stories are appealing until it becomes uncertain as to whether Bella actually believes them herself. With her mysterious father gone, Faith’s mother drifts into madness.

Nomsa is brought in to help about the place, and Faith befriends her, not caring that she is black and that little white girls are shunned when they go to market with their black housekeepers. The child becomes protective of her mother, perverting the natural order of care. Young Faith sees things she should never have to see, as Nomsa is raped and murdered, and her mother is violently abused. But even in these horrific incidents, there is beauty in description.

Faith copes by diminishing herself physically and metaphorically, and she is taken in by her mother’s sister in Johannesburg. She grows up with a brittle personality, constructing a defensive shield out of sex, alcohol and drugs and seems to be heading into the same spiral of madness that saw her mother locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Part two of the novel is fourteen years after the ‘incident’ when her mother dies and leaves Faith the farm. Faith returns to a place full of unreliable memories but sharp evocations of place, where she struggles to remember the events of that fateful night, persuade the hostile black workers living on the farm to work for her, and to become a young secure woman although she feels desperately alone. The first section is the better part of the book, as Zadok captures the youthful voice expertly.

There is a nightmarish quality of fear in this novel. You can almost feel the heat, smell the sharp tang of sweat and taste the metallic texture of dry earth and blood. The cover illustrations by Yoko Ikeno of faintly menacing silhouettes against a glowing orange background are reminiscent of Jan Pienkowski, while the writing reeks of Toni Morrison in spiritual phase. It is disturbing, haunting and achingly beautiful.

Paula Spencer – Roddy Doyle (3.8)
In this novel, we catch up with Paula Spencer, the anti-heroine from The Woman Who Walked into Doors. It’s ten years since that book finished, she hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days, and she’s learning how to be a recovering alcoholic. By trying to control her life and take little steps with small expectations, she is getting through one day at a time and things are slowly getting better. She has learned to be satisfied with the little things, and they really are achingly simple. She is keen on keeping lists because it’s all slipping away, and she is proud of minor advancements, such as remembering to take a bag to the shops.

Paula has to rebuild her relationships with her children and allow them to hate her. She knows she has no right to be a part of their lives and it is genuinely heartbreaking to see how she has hurt them. She can’t dwell on the past or wallow in guilt; she has to accept it and learn to deal with the present. Her daughter, Leanne is a borderline alcoholic and as Paula watches her drink vodka she feels unqualified to comment. She talks about nothing with her, but when Leanne is drunk, they come to blows.

Roddy Doyle’s distinctive style suits the story as he writes credible dialogue with dashes and repetitious short sentences. Silent thoughts are no different from words spoken aloud. Paula Spencer is an immediate novel with contemporary concerns. Roddy Doyle mentions the smoking ban, ratemyteachers.com, Liverpool winning the Champions League Final in Istanbul and Kylie Minogue getting breast cancer.

The setting of this novel may date it but the sentiments won’t. It is bleak at times and absolutely heart-wrenching, but there is hope. You can try and put your life back together. You can emerge from addiction, but you have to accept that you can never go back. There are no easy answers or feel-good flights of fancy in this novel. It’s good, grim and realistic. And it’s short, sharp and painful – Roddy Doyle at his best.

People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks (3.5)
This novel follows the imagined history and developments of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a medieval Jewish prayer book recovered and saved by many people who have risked a lot to preserve it. Now it is in the hands of expert book restorer Hanna Heath, who attempts to understand what, other than its age, makes it so special. As she finds various things within the book, such as a butterfly wing, a wine stain, a white hair or a grain of salt, the reader is transported back to their origins and so we learn the journey of this talismanic book and the characters whose lives were touched by it.

Hanna examines the book from a forensic angle as she gathers evidence about its origins. She tracks the book through Venice, Vienna, Sarajevo, Tarragona and Seville, searching for clues, cracking codes and solving mysteries and riddles en route. I assume, if The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, that this sort of thing is very popular.

Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for March, but People of the Book is far from high-end literature. The characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue is creaky and unconvincing. Hanna harbours deep competitiveness and resentment towards her mother, who isn’t at all realistic. Hanna herself is not a likeable character, which isn’t a problem per se, but she is arrogant, and guilty of over-explaining to the reader to prove her credentials. She also keeps harping on about her Australian background, which isn’t actually relevant.

The sections featuring Hanna are irritating but they are thankfully interspersed with fictional accounts of times of historical significance in which the Haggadah played a part. The book shadows the Diaspora of the Jews, but there are also similarities with other religions. The novel is fairly simplistic and the religious/political elements are not exactly subtle, but it makes for a good read, nonetheless. I’d recommend it for a holiday book – it will pass the time and it really won’t matter if you leave it on the plane.

The Tenth Circle of Hell – Rezak Hukanović (4.5)
This memoir of life on the death camps of Bosnia argues that Dante was wrong, Hell consists not of nine circles, but of ten. This is the tenth as narrated by Rezak Hukanović, a journalist, radio announcer and poet in the city of Prijedor who survived the Omarska and Manjača camps. He writes of his experiences in the third person, referring to himself as Djemo because he felt that the brutal events he endured and witnessed must have happened to someone else.

In an almost Orwellian nightmare, Bosnians were rounded up by the Serbs in 1992 and sent to prison camps where the ‘guards’ were people with grievances against old neighbours or teachers. At night they called out lists of names of men whom they would beat for no reason. Some returned with broken bones and some never came back at all. It is terrifying how quickly these people turned against each other and how brutal and bestial they became if they scented weakness or a chance for revenge.

The physical agony was bad enough, but the mindless degradation was pervasive.
The prisoners had to hope for outside help or that the guards would recover some humanity. The prisoners themselves attempted to help each other whenever they could, bringing meals to the sick and trying to mend broken bones. While some attempted to remain positive, others simply attempted to remain alive as the sense of hopelessness became routine.

The Tenth Circle of Hell is a powerful but depressing memoir. When we read Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn we shook our head and said we could never let these things happen again. But we did. If these people never forgive each other, the shame is all of ours.