- The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister (St Martin's Griffin) - This
novel blends whimsy, magic realism, coming-of-age self-discovery, fairy tale
archetypes and young adult fiction. Emmeline is raised by her father, alone on
an island which can only be reached once a month when the tide is right. He has
a machine, which can capture scents and print them onto slips of paper, like a
Polaroid camera for images. He puts these scent papers into small glass bottles,
stoppered with different-coloured wax. The scents do not last forever, and he
begins to burn them individually to release memories, until a tragic accident
forces Emmeline to leave the island and return to the mainland. Emmeline’s father has educated her through
stories, foraging and fishing, sitting her down for a lesson every morning.
There is an element of Miranda and Prospero, and her awakening to the brave new
world enables the author to indulge in the trope of an ‘alien identity’
discovering and describing technology. She learns to read people through their scent, like a dog does. When rescued and taken to school, Emmeline is
bullied for being different and for her intense sense of smell and her natural
style – she doesn’t understand falsity and masking. Later, her mother, Victoria takes her to a
make-up counter and buys all the products after the ‘transformation’. Emmeline goes to work for her mother creating scents to make people spend money. Often she omits a significant element, to force the body to fill that absence. "And what if that missing thing could make a person need to buy
the things around them?” Of course, the skill is used for capitalist gain, but
the sentiment is true for art – visual, performance and written – the best
leaves something for the audience to do; to provoke a response rather than
telling them exactly how they should think and feel. Many aspects of the novel are unconvincing, and it is not enough to pass this off as magical realism when they relate to plot points. Neither is it satisfactory to suggest they don't matter as this is a coming-of-age young adult fairytale, with Emmeline learning to 'be her own person'. Who else would she be?
- In Memoiram by Alice Winn (Viking) - In Memoriam
is reminiscent of Atonement and Testament of
Youth as it covers the doomed generation of young men who went to war and
never returned, either because they were killed or changed irrevocably. Also
discernible are elements of Pat Barker’s Ghost Road novel, wherein, like
the WWI poetry we all studied in school with the benefit of hindsight and
distance, we can plot the way innocence, ideology and excitement turned to
disgust, betrayal, anger and frustration. Our characters transform from
schoolboys worried about their families and duty to wounded and embittered
cynics whose promise was destroyed by a class system into which they had no
input. And at its heart it is a love story between Gaunt and Ellwood, two young
men coming of age in a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Winn writes in linear style, with sharp, clear
sentences, avoiding excessive adjectives, but with a profoundly moving poetry. There are echoes
of Blackadder Goes Forth in the trench talk, where there is resentment
of the upper class automatically being made officers and promoted to captains,
having authority over men much older and more experienced than them. Meanwhile the men are
falling without class distinction in a horrifically mundane manner. “At nine,
they went over the top. West’s head was shot off before they had gone two feet.
Elwood paused to look at his brains. Pritchard had always said he didn’t have
any, but there they were, grey and throbbing and clotted with blood.” The section set in a prisoner of war camp is almost a
comic diversion. “It’s astonishing how well an English boarding school prepares
one for prison.” All the prisoners are bored, chatty and trying to escape,
while the guards are generally good-natured and long-suffering. In Memoriam is Alice Winn’s debut novel. It may not be an
original topic, but it is excellently written. She writes captivatingly about
things of which she can have no first-hand experience: life in the trenches,
male sex, and English public schools with a ring of authenticity. I look
forward to her next offering.
- Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test by Marlene Zuk (W.W. Norton & Company) - Subtitled, How Behaviour Evolves and Why It Matters, this book answers that question immediately. “If
we assume that intelligence is predetermined, we are less likely to think
interventions, say in the form of social programs to improve learning in
children, will be effective. On the other hand, if we assume everything can be
altered by our actions, we may blame the victim, as is sometimes seen in the
suggestion that those with cancer or other serious diseases could have avoided
their plight by diet or exercise, or that people can just think their way out
of depression.” The nature/ nurture question is repeatedly addressed as a 'zombie idea' - one that keeps springing back to life no matter how many times it has been disproved. Most recently (in 2017) a New York Times article titled ‘The
Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido’ argued that we are simply stuck with brutish men who can't or won't examine their destructive sexuality because it's just basic male behaviour. The book also questions the theory of exceptionalism, which puts humans above other species and supposes that other species are intelligent or sophisticated the more they are like us. “It doesn’t make sense to simply pick on an
animal, no matter how beloved, and try to rank it according to a scale that
only works in a single dimension or on humancentric traits… In other words,
dogs are good at things that make sense for dogs to be good at.” The idea of lizard brain is popular because it allows us to classify less-desirable behaviours and dismiss instincts as a holdover from the past. It is simple to understand, doesn't require complicated scientific explanations, and is completely untrue. What is true is that environment and genes interact to produce behaviour; as illustrated in a fairly devastating section on animals kept in captivity, or in the chapter on gender. This book is full of explanations, stories and science, and it is fascinating reading.
- Orphia and Eurydicius by Elsie John (Harper Collins) - In this adaptation of the Greek myth, the sex of Orpheus and Eurydice are switched, but it also concerns the story of a true love of equals without society's gender-ascribed roles. Orphia learns fighting from her brother (Apollo) and poetry from the muses; her poems make flowers bloom and waters move. As Calliope, the muse with responsibility for epic poetry, instructs, "No riches on earth compare to the arts. Tell me - what is it to feel, to express, to take delight, to see oneself reflected, to experience the stories of others?" Many of the stories Orphia learns are different from the male-centric myths that have been handed down: Hera, Medea, Atalanta and others all have greater agency. The gods use mortals as playthings and their assistance - like the advice of the Oracle - is to be treated with caution. Orphia plays games with Eurydicius and they converse as equals, as she notes, "He was gentle, and sweet; thoughtful and quietly kind. They were not the qualities that men prized, but I thought they were among the greatest qualities a man could have." When Eurydicius dies, Orphia uses her poetry as a challenge and a weapon in her desire to return to him, and when she goes to the Underworld she refuses to go gentle into that good night. "I will speak the two of us into legend, if I have to draw each letter from my own marrow. I will become poetry as I die." This is a beautiful retelling of a classic myth incorportaing poetry, creativity, unconventional love, and the courage of women who refuse to be silenced.
