Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Everybody I know has been recommending Crossing to Safety, after it appeared on the bookclub show on TV I think. This is a fine, mature, understated book about the relationship between friends and between partners. There was a lot to love about it: It’s beautifully written, with elegant and accurate language. Stegner knows exactly what word to use. There’s not a lot of drama to it, so it’s a quiet novel about the day to day detail of a lifelong relationship and it’s all the more authentic for that. The characters are utterly believable. I kept finding shadows of myself in the domineering Charity, which was uncomfortable. Yet in a way I could understand why she was as she was: immensely capable, motivated only by the wish to help others, yet trapped by her gender, her five children and by the age in which she lived. These days she’d be a corporate lawyer working in social justice or something. Not that any of this is even hinted at in the novel. She’s happy with her life, sees no other choices lost, but organizes the people in her world because it is simply better that way. Stegner was quite old when he wrote this book and you can see his maturity and the wisdom that comes with it. He understands about relationships, so partners can be overwhelmed and exhausted by each other yet still be utterly dependent on one another like old vines that have intertwined. Mmmm, wonderful.

The Joy of Sin by Simon Laham

We heard this writer speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney a few weeks ago and I was so fascinated I bought the book. He’s an experimental psychologist in the field of human behaviour and his book is a collection of really interesting research that looks a few of what could loosely be categorized as ‘sins’. That’s a conceit really: a device on which to hang his information. It’s not really about sin at all but that doesn’t matter at all. It’s a great book to read but of course because it’s a collection of experiments it’s unlikely that I’ll remember any of it in a fortnight’s time.

The Magus by John Fowles

This is the third time I've read The Magus, and I do admit I'm losing patience with it as I get older. It's the story of a schoolteacher, a fairly unpleasant selfish young character, who goes to Greece to escape a love affair and to teach on an island school. He meets a local man, Conchis, and becomes involved in a series of mysterious, theatrical events that utterly confuse him about what is truth and what is fiction. Through it all he begins to learn about himself and about his life and finally comes out of it all a changed man. He finally understands that with free will comes responsibility. The book was originally called The Godgame and the premise is really very silly: that a wealthy man on a remote Greek island could play god and invent and carry off these masques is ridiculous. And it is pretentious. But it's still a compelling narrative and I did find myself utterly absorbed by it all over again.

The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies

I really, really liked these novels. The trilogy was published in 1980, and set sometime earlier than that I think, so it’s dated –contemporary but, as somebody once described it, deals with the ‘universal now’. That’s such a great term to describe the continuing relevance of character and theme. The first tells the story of an amateur theatre group in the small Canadian town of Salterton who are putting on their annual performance. It’s the lightest of the three and focuses primarily on the characters and their relationships as they struggle to produce The Tempest. Some of these characters reappear in the other two novels. The second begins with the publication of an engagement notice pertaining to two of the characters, and then explores the ripples, including law suits and family feuds, that this causes. The main character in this book is the newspaper editor, an absolute delight of a character, who abhors the pomposity and wordiness of his colleagues and all the guff and politicking that goes on in small communities. The third begins with the death of one of the characters and the subsequent establishment of a trust to support a young artist and then follows her development, a break away from Salterton really and indeed from most of the characters we knew earlier. Robertson Davies writes that sort of social satire that I love so much, but with a generosity of spirit that you don’t find in some other harsher critics. There are some truly awful people in Salterton, and he doesn’t shy away from that, but there are also people who are a real-life mix of good and really quite bad whom he treats with compassion for the human condition. While his books approach the soap opera intensity of small town gossip and intrigue, he also talks about much bigger things, touching on the spirit and art and philosophy. What might sometimes tip over into didacticism is counterbalanced by wit and and an enjoyment of the outrageous (by the standards of the 1980s of course.) So while the trilogy is long – about 800 Penguin pages – it’s a page turner as well as being thoughtful and educated, and beautifully written to book.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My friend Kathy, who lent me this book, suggested that it was a book to be read carefully and slowly. And she was right. Every word, and every idea, counts. The narrative is about Tony, who has a half baked affair with a girl Veronica when they are at university. After they’ve broken up she takes up with his friend Adrian. The second half of the novel takes place forty years later as Tony looks back on the relationship. I’m not going to write all the detail here because if anyone happens to read it, it will spoil it. While there are a couple of truly arresting moments in the plot, the book is not as much about the detail of the story (indeed anyone reading it for the narrative alone would struggle to maintain their commitment) but more about our perceptions of the past. Early in the novel the four friends at school, smart-arsed would be intellectuals, discuss history with their teacher. Adrian describes history as ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ And that’s what I think this book is about – Tony’s flawed memories, which inform his attitudes towards other people and his subsequent interpretations of their actions, and the inadequacy of the documentation that he spends the whole second part of the novel seeking in Adrian’s diary. It is a novel about the loss of Tony’s certainty. And what a novel. Finely crafted, sparsely populated with almost Alan Bennett-esque characters, in an almost anonymous setting. Indeed I don’t think I’ve read a novel where setting mattered less any time recently. And the language – wow. Every word matters, and every word is carefully chosen even down to the title where ‘sense’ I am sure means ‘meaning.’ You must think and you must read every sentence. Now that’s brilliant writing.

The Citadel by AJ Cronin

This is of course a very dated book (published in 1937) and reminds me a lot of the Delderfield genre – British countryside, middle class professional, small town life, gossip and intrigue. I have a sentimental spot for books of that period though and so read this through this morning at 3.30am when I couldn’t sleep courtesy of too much rich French food last night. It’s a quick and easy bit of entertainment. The story is about a young doctor from a poor background struggling to make his way in the world, his marriage to a young schoolteacher and how he loses his ideals as he is absorbed into a medical world obsessed by wealth and status. It’s sentimental, at times almost melodramatic, but needs to be read as a period piece ie you have to suspend judgment of the sexism and other norms of that time. The BBC made a mini series out of it apparently, which probably says it all. Read it when you can’t sleep!

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

I think I’ll chuck this book out. It has won all these literary awards but I must be a philistine, because I struggled for weeks and weeks to get through it. It was ostensibly written for teenagers and is an introduction to all the different schools of philosophy through history. From my point of view it was almost like a textbook – an old bloke giving summaries of each of the different schools of thought to a kid who listens and asks obvious questions like ’ Can you give me an example’ or makes comments like ‘I’m beginning to see what you mean.’ Well I didn’t. It’s all strung together with a sort of mystery about the lead characters, Sophie and Alberto, and the solution is a strange philosophical trick involving existentialism (I think). It was lost on me, but I did persevere and hats off to those who did enjoy it and appreciate its content.