Imperium by Robert Harris

Now this is what historical fiction should be – accurate, well researched and the history itself robust enough so that it doesn’t have to be propped up with all kinds of fanciful love affairs and other assorted bits of rubbish. This is the story of the early part of Cicero’s life as he rises from being a simple lawyer through the various ranks of the senate to become consul. Along the way he deals with all sorts of famous personalities including Pompey and Julius Caesar. The political manoeuvring is riveting, especially since it’s based on fact. I can’t wait to get into the next in this series. I have to amend my star system because although it’s not 5 stars like great literature is 5 stars, it certainly is in the historical fiction genre.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

What I like about Sarah Dunant is her research. This historical novel is set in Ferrara in the 1600s in a Benedictine convent. At the time the Council of Trent had passed stringent new rules governing life in convents, banning the small luxuries of life such as music (other than the organ), books, visits from families and the like. According to Dunant about half of all noble women ended up in convents so they weren’t really vocational places in the way that they are today. Families who couldn’t afford large dowries to marry their daughters could put together the smaller dowries to place the left over women in the convents – they were more communities of women who worked and amused themselves in a holy sort of way but possibly no holier than very devout married women outside the convent. This story is about an unwilling conscript who is trying everything she can to be reunited with her lover outside. The major character though is Suora Zuana, daughter of a doctor who has ended up in the convent on his death but acts as the official medicine woman in the place. She ends up deeply involved with the girl and her fate. This is a terrific historical novel, one that gives you some insight into what the politics of these places must have been like, and the role of women at that time. 3 1/3 stars

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I really loved the originality of The Time Traveller’s Wife and Niffenegger is trying to replicate something of that here – but it’s a ghost story and while I could accept the time traveller thing, I was less willing to suspend disbelief for this one. I really didn’t like any of the characters much, nor did I find them plausible. The story is about twins whose aunt, the twin of their mother, dies and leaves them her flat in London. And of course she haunts the flat. The twin thing continues with a lot of grief about dependence and jealousy, and when a love affair with the dead aunt’s boyfriend begins, then all sorts of difficulties ensue. The blurb says it’s a book about ‘love, loss, identity’ and perhaps so, but there are so many little hitches in this book – the character of the aunt, the logistics of the action, I don’t know, so many things – that for me the whole thing just didn’t work. Some reviewers have described it as ‘bewitching’ and if you want to explore the fantasy of ghosts and death being only the beginning of another phase of existence, maybe. Very quick easy reading – on a plane perhaps – but not as good as her time traveller tale. 3 stars

The Women in Black by Madeleine St John

This book was written quite some time ago by a classmate of people like Clive James, Germaine Greer and Bruce Beresford. It’s a witty, entertaining little social commentary describing the lives of four women who work in what was possibly Mark Foys in Sydney selling women’s clothing. I liked it because it reminded me so much of my childhood – the way anyone who was not Anglo-Aussie was described as ‘continental’, the sexist and moralistic attitudes that while we lived with them were pretty stifling but in retrospect are quaintly amusing, the expressions that have disappeared from the language now. It’s an Australian version of a Nancy Mitford novel, not great literature but delightful all the same. The character of Magda the Continental is memorable indeed. 3 ½ stars

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Somebody – my friend Kathy I am almost certain – recommended this book to me. As I was reading it I thought, ‘This man writes like John Banville.’ On the back cover, afterwards, a reviewer describes ‘prose of Banvillean grace’. Aha! Vindicated!

This isn’t a book for people who want story. Having said that, of course it’s got story: a rather endearingly distant, solitary Dutch banker, Hans, and his wife go to live in Manhattan just before 9/11; after the terror, she leaves him and returns home to England with their child, a separation that lasts for a couple of years with him travelling home regularly to see the child, while she works out whether she wants to be with him or not. Eventually he moves back to London and they manage to reunite. Underneath all that is the story of the relationship he has with a man called Chuck in the two years he is living alone in New York. Hans meets Chuck through his interest in cricket – he joins a West Indian team to fill in his solitary hours. Chuck is a Trinidadian who wants to build a cricket stadium in the US, but he’s also a bit of a dreamer, a bit of a gangster, a bit of a mystery. Information about Chuck is patchy, as in all real life relationships – Hans doesn’t have the benefit of the novelist’s omnipotent eye. It’s a sometimes tender relationship, sometimes ambivalent, which is of course how authentic relationships work.

But we know the plot from the beginning so the book isn’t about that. It’s about the internal life of Hans, the fluctuations in relationships that are so hard to identify with their unspoken understandings, their miscommunications, their lies, their poignant moments, the way one small action can change the course of your mood. On the larger scale it’s about post 9/11 and the impact it’s had on New Yorkers as individuals. There are some unforgettable images in this novel – one of a child in a row boat on the water under the stars at night, afloat in the universe; one hysterical moment where a cop pulls a gun on an inflatable Ronald McDonald that is threatening to escape its handlers; a time where the wife says she feels she would like to stay in the marriage because she feels a responsibility to see her husband through his life. Much of the man’s internal dialogue really resonates.

There’s a kind of melancholy running through it that I associate with modern day America. It’s highly critical of American foreign policy and culture, it’s angry and at times desolate. Netherland is an intelligent and witty book, beautiful reading for someone with the time and patience to spend on absorbing every phrase. 4 stars

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I count Margaret Atwood among my favourite writers but I do find her scifi stuff creepy. This book is a sequel to Oryx and Crake, which I didn’t like a lot. It is set at the same time and involves a different set of characters who are affected by Crake’s actions in setting off a pandemic virus that wipes out the world. Some of the characters from Oryx and Crake appear in this as well, so it’s quirky and, I’m sorry, contrived. Essentially it tracks the wiping out of the population of the genetically modified world, who live in walled compounds or crime-ridden pleeblands. In this book the Gardeners cult plays a central role. They’re fundamentalist greenies, who predict the end of the world, and plant little arks of supplies around the place to ensure they survive. The story is told first person by Ren/Brenda, a child who grows up in the Gardeners commune but is returned to the compound, and in third person from Toby’s point of view – she’s a refugee from violence who becomes a sort of strong, herbalist beekeeper, saint type of woman. The plot is simple – the virus, the fall, the struggle to survive, the beginnings of reconstruction – and the characters straightforward, so the story rests on a combination of the horrific detail of human behaviour under stress and the what-next shock value of all the things that this futuristic world has invented and the way values have changed, which is almost voyeuristic and a bit scary as some if it is not beyond the realms of possibility. 3 stars

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly

I am really annoyed that I spent time reading this. I usually avoid thrillers but somehow the hype got me in and I read this one. It’s all on the back cover – a detective in LA gets involved in a murder case with Triad suspects. His daughter lives with his ex-wife in, you guessed it, Hong Kong, a detail which is emphasised so often that you have no doubt about what’s going to happen to the daughter. The ending is just lame too. But then it is a thriller, so what did I expect. 1 star

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This is another book that had good reviews. It’s about a woman, obviously Olive Kitteridge, and her character and certain parts of her life story are told through a series of almost short stories. Some of the stories are about her and some about the people whose lives she has touched – girls she’s taught, neighbours etc. It’s quite cleverly done as her rather unsympathetic character unfolds and you piece the story together to come to a grudging sympathy for her after all. Although there are some men in it, notably Olive’s husband Henry, it’s essentially told from a female point of view. There are some sad little vignettes in here - the girl whose mad mother ruins her relationship, the family trying to cope after their son kills his girlfriend – and there’s definitely a theme of craziness running through the characters. Strout comes to grips with all sorts of human difficulties such as the place of love and passion in long and enduring marriages, the role of overbearing mothers in their children’s lives, unrequited passions and other Oprah-style fascinations. But overall it was a dark sort of book that I shouldn’t have read while I had the flu! 2 ½ stars

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Why are historical fiction books so darned long? This one goes for 700 pages and I am not sure why I stuck with it. It’s a mystery of sorts, told through the diaries of four different people living in Oxford under the reign of Charles II in the 1600s. There’s Marco de Cola, a travelling Italian merchant, James Prescott, the son of a noble killed for treason, Dr Wallis, a mathematician and priest, and Anthony Wood, a historian. A priest, Dr Grove, is murdered and the whole story revolves around that and the part that Sarah Blundy, a poor servant girl, plays in it. Every story adds something to the tale and by the end it all comes together as a kind of political thriller thing. It wasn’t a satisfying story, a stupid premise that isn’t believable, and the writer tries to write each person’s contribution in what he imagines to be the style of the time, except of course it isn’t, so the language is tediously overblown and completely unauthentic. However for historical fiction lovers, it might be fun. 2 stars

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

This is a hugely complex, long and incredibly detailed book set during the period that spans the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of World War I. It is about the lives of several families, the Humphry Wellwoods, the Basil Wellwoods , the Benedict Fludds and the Prosper Cains largely, and the huge group of people connected with them. Olive Wellwood is a writer of fairy tales and she is creating a book for each of her seven children and it’s that that strings the story together. It begins with a boy Phillip who has run away from the potteries and is found and quasi-adopted by the Wellwood Cain group and apprenticed to master potter Benedict Fludd. The saga flows from there.

It’s a dark sort of story as the individuals wrestle with their own failings, some of them very grim indeed, and the ideas of responsibility at a time of enormous social change in England and Europe. There’s a mass of detail about the Fabian society, about the intellectuals and philosophers of the time, about concepts like free love, about the new ideas of psychoanalysis, and of course about the craft movement in England. The book is littered with appearances by people like Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst, Kenneth Graham, Rupert Brooke and George Bernard Shaw which adds a sense of reality but leaves you reeling as you try to grapple with all their 'stuff' – suffrage, homosexuality, censorship and so on.

The writing is strange, often very simple as if narrated by a child who lists the chronology of events without going into any kind of analysis. So it reads ‘and then this happened and then that and then that and then so forth..’ At times I found this style quite annoying, adding unnecessary length – this book is over 600 pages long. It’s densely packed with references to events of the time but these references are almost in passing, listed not explained, sketchy, so only the most avid historian of the period would really understand the significance of them, either as real events or in terms of the novel. You feel you must stop and look up chapters and chapters of history to get a sense of what it is all about.

I came away feeling a bit overwhelmed and quite exhausted by this book but glad to have learned a bit more about the Fabians and ready to look into this period of history in greater depth. 31/2 stars