Richard Hawley
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Best books cds & dvds of 2007
Put down the mobile phone and step away from the computer screen: with Christmas and the holiday season almost here, it’s your right as a busy Kiwi to take a break, kick back and treat your imagination to a feast. Back by popular demand, the Listener’s crack team of reviewers serves up a summer banquet of great reading, listening and viewing.
BEST OF BOOKS
NOVELS
THE AMALGAMATION POLKA, by Stephen Wright (Faber, $37.99). Uneven, and sometimes tumbling to preachiness, but still a novel in the class of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Geraldine Brooks’s superb March. An entirely unsentimental and vivid account of the antebellum US and then its Civil War. The craziness that Wright dramatises is based on historical fact. In its slave plantation scenes, the real craziness of racism is personified in one babbling old monster who sticks maddeningly in the mind.
ANIMALS, by Keith Ridgway (Harper-Collins, $25.99). A frantic chronicle of one disastrous week in the life of an increasingly unhinged illustrator, Animals succeeds entirely through the power of its narration: an unnamed, hyper-aware protagonist, often trapped in observation, with each diversion prompting a stream of obsessive detail. As these incidents suddenly combine in one calamitous chain, Ridgway takes us through furious cycles of information overload and memory blanks – it’s an addictive, nerve-jangling combination of hilarity and dread, and more than enough to get the reader through one of the more demanding and intelligent novels to come out of Britain this year.
ARLINGTON PARK, by Rachel Cusk (Faber, $28). I am woman, hear me mutter. Cusk cements her position as satirist of (and for) the middle-aged middle-class mum, with this painfully funny account of a day in the life of several women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Struggling with jobs, kid, husbands, conspicuous consumption and crushed expectations, they’re simmering with despair – but in a polite, witty, British sort of way. You find yourself wishing they’d get really angry and do something about it. But perhaps that’s Cusk’s point: woman hath no hell like a fury scorned.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Díaz (Faber, $38). Admire the dazzling skills of Dominican-American fiction writer Junot Díaz and this decade-in-the-making novel: the “Suburban Tropical” tale of overweight sci-fi geek Oscar is a love story, both comic and tragic, a wild ride through Caribbean history and literature, and an acute, original portrait of immigrant culture in the US. Exuberant, smart and provocative.
CONSEQUENCES, by Penelope Lively (Penguin, $45). A light touch characterises Lively’s 14th novel, which hopscotches through a family tree established by happy chance and then roughly pruned by a series of sudden tragedies and tough choices. Think of this as a fictional counterpart to Lively’s “what if?” anti-autobiography, Making It Up. The settings are beautifully evoked, notably a primitive farmhouse that is, very briefly, a bower of domestic bliss, and which keeps its gorgeous secrets until the end of the novel.
DARKMANS, by Nicola Barker (Harper, $38.99). Barker’s Booker-shortlisted Darkmans is an epic ghost story set in Kent, which contains among other things: medieval jesters; drug dealers; Kurdish immigrants afraid of lettuce-leaves; homicidal woodsmen; malicious birds; architecturally gifted children; master-forgers; and a mint-condition Lada. Not only does it all make sense, but its 800 pages brilliantly dismantle modern life in southeast England. If this year’s Booker had been awarded for ambition, linguistic muscularity and literary energy, Darkmans would have easily won: it’s a brave, hilarious, exciting novel.
DEATH OF A MURDERER, by Rupert Thomson (Knopf, $52.99). Deserves reading just for its dark audacity. A humble, slightly depressive cop has to work a nightshift guarding the body of a prisoner who has just passed away. The deceased, though, is Britain’s most mythical and shudder-inducing child-killer, Myra Hindley. The book’s meandering sections are worth the wading just to get to its moments of real class, most of which involve Hindley’s ghost, who appears through the night wearing different outfits, including a desperately creepy lilac suit. Thomson makes her believable, compelling and strangely warm. Quite a feat, really.
THE DELIVERY ROOM, by Sylvia Brownrigg (Picador, $28). Anyone looking for a compulsive read to tide them over the calm Christmas period will relish this. Set in 1998, it’s the tale of mature psychotherapist Mira Braverman who counsels a confused clan in her Camden Town office while NATO bombs her homeland, Serbia. Mira’s professionalism is beset by partner Peter’s diagnosis of terminal lymphoma and her fraught relationships with pediaphobic stepson Graham and his pregnant wife, Clare. Combining intelligent international political debate with humane portrayals of personal disaster, The Delivery Room is one of 2007’s best reads.
DIVISADERO, by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury, $49.99). A haunting tale of connection and consequence, Divisadero is set in California and France. As with everything Ondaatje writes, it is the power of the past that drives this story of two sisters and the boy they grew up with on their Californian farm.
DREAMQUAKE, by Elizabeth Knox (Fourth Estate, $28). Knox winds up her two-part historical fantasia with a bang in this alluring sequel to Dreamhunter. Set in a past that somewhat resembles early New Zealand, the novels follow a young girl into a vocation that is both thrilling and threatening: she harvests dreams for the entertainment of city folk, but is increasingly haunted by nightmares. What Knox does best is animate the familiar landscape and render it both strange and compelling. The denouement is no less shocking for being so inevitable. Reader, the earth moved.
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