Macintyre review

A splash of genres

Pam Macintyre

This splash of books demonstrates that the vigorous publishing for the young adult market embraces subjects as varied as mental illness, bullying, sleuthing in medieval times, crime in the present, defending an occupied Australia and two dead mothers; and is written across the genres of realism, fantasy and historical fiction. But how much is enticing to the adolescent reader?

John Marsden’s second instalment in the Ellie Chronicles, Incurable (Macmillan, $29.95 hb, 242 pp, 1405036990), is set in a divided Australia, with an uneasy border separating the original inhabitants and the invaders. The mixture of details of farming life, Ellie’s struggles with the troubled Gavin, and the heady excitement of liberation raids across the border — intensified by a chase by a homegrown sociopath — produce the winning blueprint of youthful derring-do. Marsden is the Steven Spielberg of adolescent fiction when it comes to a chase scene. Ellie has her suspicions about the identity of the ‘Scarlet Pimple’, there is romance in the air, and events are shaping around Gavin’s unreliable emotional and mental state, but this is very much a middle book with central issues still to be resolved.

Cat’s Mountain (Puffin, $16.95 pb, 194 pp, 0143302299), by Allan Baillie, has its share of tension, too. When the bullied and cowed Catherine (‘Cat’) arrives to spend a week at her grandmother’s place in the mountains, the school bully’s words dog her every step. Cat’s self-esteem is low, and it seems that her bête noire, Brena, who calls Cat ‘Stupid Cow’, might be right when she sets out on a hare-brained overnight mission to find her grandmother on the mountain. The plot thickens when she returns to Mud Hut and finds Gran caring for a badly wounded Darcy, and his volatile, gun-toting ‘secretary’, Libby, whose experience of bullying as a child and in prison mirrors Cat’s experiences. Baillie’s narrative techniques are usually quirky, and Cat’s ascent up the mountain mixes third-person narration with second-person dialogue with herself, about what she thinks Brena might do. But the point becomes laboured, and we start to lose sympathy for her. Libby and Gran are recognisable stereotypes, the tough ex-jail bird, and wise, resourceful older woman, respectively. There is growth in Cat as her protective love for her Gran empowers her. Baillie is a democratic, stylistically interesting writer, but his purposes, and construction of story to meet those ends, are too apparent in this narrative.

Another bullied young adult is the central character in Barry Jonsberg’s strange Dreamrider (Allen & Unwin, $16.95 pb, 215 pp, 1741144612). Overweight Michael Terny is clearly disturbed and delusional, imagining in graphic detail the killing of two classmates. At his seventh school in four years, he is apparently targeted by a systematically cruel bully and befriended by the caring Leah McIntyre. His father has given up on him, and his loving stepmother tries to be sympathetic. To escape the awfulness of his life, Michael practises ‘lucid dreaming’, and believes it gives him the power to change things in the real world: to do good to those he likes and to exact revenge on his enemies. Alert readers, particularly those who know about anagrams, or who have been clued in by The Sixth Sense, will begin to suspect that the world is not what it seems, as presented to us in the first-person voice of Michael. Less sophisticated ones will be surprised at the revelation at the end. This is clever writing, and Jonsberg’s depiction of contemporary schools is biting. But I am not sure about his aim in this book. Is it to give voice to the mentally ill and thus invite us to sympathise? Is it to help us to understand the illness and the sufferer? I think Dreamrider’s cleverness works against both those intentions.

Nothing is quite as dire in the lives of Greek Australian cousins Aliki and Liza, in Irene Savvides’s Aliki Says (Random House, $17.95 pb, 294 pp, 1741662060). Structurally inventive, the book opens and ends with e-mail messages between the two girls and includes poetry, chat-room transcripts, snippets of King Lear, stories of Ariadne and Arachne, and a dead mother’s thoughts. Also, the cousins speak to each other in that original vernacular of teenage girls. I am all for a style that is playful, but in this case it is no substitute for unconvincing characters and an overly complicated plot. Aliki is the extrovert, and Liza the quiet one, so the author tells us, but the difference is only apparent in the dialogue given to them. Savvides can bring a place to life, as she does in the descriptions of the Greek village that the girls recollect visiting as children. The plot centres round family secrets, an old lady’s guilt about meddling, an adolescent girl missing her dead mother and resenting her stepmother, and a mother and daughter who don’t get on, but it fails to emotionally engage the reader: we observe and move on.

Also with a distinctive mode of telling is Nine Hours North (Penguin, $19.95 pb, 210 pp, 0143003763), a punchy verse novel from a newcomer, Tim Sinclair. Twenty-one-year-old Adam is teaching English to businessmen in Japan with his girlfriend. As end-of-course students, they imagined that escaping Adelaide would change their lives, but Adam feels hemmed in by unfulfilling work, a claustrophobic Nagoyan apartment, and a four-year relationship that is spiralling to its conclusion. Adam hasn’t immersed himself in the expatriate life, undertaking only part-time work and main-taining his distance from a culture that, to him, seems implicated in his plight. He is moping and drifting when Marianne enters stage left, and he falls for her. This jolts him out of his lethargy. While this is an ‘internal’ story of Adam’s growth, recognition of some hard truths about himself and desire to control his fate, it is also very cinematic in style, with a poet’s metaphoric and playful use of language and a verse novelist’s capacity for witty vernacular.

Snap back a few centuries. Felicity Pulman’s Janna Mysteries are set in medieval England at a time of civil war between Matilda and her cousin Stephen. They feature a young woman, Janna, whose mother died in the captivating Rosemary for Remembrance (2005), the first in the series. Janna suspects her mother, a herbalist, was poisoned, and she flees the village when her house is burned by superstitious locals. The second in the series, Rue for Repentance (Random House, $19.95 pb, 299 pp, 1741661137) takes up the tale as Janna, to escape her enemies, disguises herself as a young man and is joined en route by Edwin, who is escaping a brutal master. The town of Winchestre is her destination, in the hope of finding her father, about whom she knows little but has high hopes. But first there is a mystery to be solved at the manor where she and Edwin find work, and a romantic sub-plot as Janna’s affections are torn between the Norman nobleman, Hugh, and the villein, Godric. This is engaging reading. The well-researched past is presented as attractive, with resonant dilemmas for Janna, such as being a woman in a patriarchal society, class oppression and suspicion of those who are different. It is very much a middle book, with readers having to wait for the final pieces of the puzzle to be found and put in place.

Also set in medieval times, but in France and Jerusalem, Catherine Jinks’s Pagan series (1992–96) depicted the twelfth century, the Crusades and Knights Templar like no other. Pagan himself is an unforgettable character, and those same skills of characterisation and evocation of a period are evident in Pagan’s Daughter (Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 324 pp, 1741147697), set in Languedoc, in 1227. Ideally, this would be read after reading or rereading the earlier series, or after brushing up on the Albigensian Crusade against the heretic Cathars, though the author provides chapter notes and maps as she goes.

Jinks’s gritty evocation of the sights, smells, sounds and attitudes of the period, and of the ruthless cruelty of battles, transports the reader to that time. Through Babylonne, daughter of Roman Priest Pagan, and a Cathar mother, Lady Mabelia, she portrays religious suspicion and persecution, alongside ideas of nationhood: the people of Languedoc spoke ‘oc’, not French, and resisted fiercely, though un-successfully, the French’s continuous, violent attempts to annex them. However, with the same even-handedness that she portrayed Saladin, Jinks has Babylonne come to love the quiet Roman priest, Isidore, once scribe to her dead father, who has come to save her from the troubles that are brewing, and to explain her father to her.
The author’s passion and relish for this period is infectious. While both hers and Pulman’s books have central female characters who are resourceful and tenacious, imaginative, smart-mouthed Babylonne is the one who leaps off the page (as do all Jinks’s characters, so that we feel Babylonne’s pain when her friends are tortured or killed in battle). Babylonne tells her story in the breath-less first-person, present-tense style of the former series, with healthy doses of cynicism and satire: there is plenty of her father in Babylonne. Surely her adventures have only begun.

The following two titles are the picks of the bunch. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Red Shoe (Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 183 pp, 1741142857), set during April 1954, interwines Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of ‘The Red Shoes’ with a crisis event in a family, and the Petrovs’ defection. Three sisters — Elizabeth, Frances and Matilda, the youngest, through whose observant, childish perspective we learn most of the story — live at Palm Beach. One day, men in black cars and black suits arrive next door, one of them with a gun. With them is a man who looks ‘strange to Matilda’. This is a time of returned soldiers, fear of the Reds, the Cold War and Dien Bien Phu; legacies of war haunt the book.

Matilda’s book of fairy tales is her companion; she under-stands the world through the prism of the Arabian Nights, magic spells, the Argonauts and the Andersen fairy tale. As always, Dubosarsky captures with startling clarity the voice and perceptions of a child, her remoteness from the adult world, and her naïve ‘knowingness’.

Interspersed throughout the book are extracts from the Sydney Morning Herald of the period, covering polio outbreaks, tuberculosis, the H-Bomb and Petrov’s asylum. While the setting is idyllic, these are tense days: Matilda’s shell-shocked father tries to commit suicide, Elizabeth has a ‘nervous breakdown’ and refuses to return to school, and Uncle Paul is an ambiguous presence in the family when Father is away in the merchant navy. Betrayal and reconciliation run beneath the surface, with the symbol of the shoe knitting together the strands of the connected stories. Matilda is not the redemptive child of nineteenth-century fiction, but an agent of truth in the manner of a child in another fairy tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.

Garth Nix is one of our most original and challenging fantasists, and reissues of his earlier fantasy/horror The Ragwitch (Allen & Unwin, $15.95 pb, 306 pp, 1741148057) and the futuristic Shade’s Children (Allen & Unwin, $16.95 pb, 334 pp 1741148049) are heartily welcomed. Sir Thursday (Allen & Unwin, $14.95 pb, 315 pp, 1741145880) is the fourth title in the current Keys of the Kingdom series. In taut prose, Nix constructs inventive, allusive, complex fantasy, at once serious and satiric.

Things are hotting up for earthling Arthur Penhaligon. The Rightful Heir has been drafted into Sir Thursday’s army, while in his own world he has been replaced by a Nithling, a Spirit-eater who is spreading a mind-controlling mould. It is up to the gallant Leaf and the exceptional Suzy Turquoise Blue to defeat it. The two threads of the story run in anxious parallel; gradually revealed are the political machinations of Sir Saturday and Lord Sunday. Even in the tensest moments, at the height of battle, there is room for a droll jibe and the odd potshot at pomposity, military formalities and temper tantrums. There is more to Nix’s fantasies than breath-holding suspense: Arthur is not the boy who was drawn into the House in Mister Monday (2003). He has some hard decisions ahead of him: the more he uses the keys and the Atlas, the less mortal he becomes. He is needed in one world, but his home and family is in another, and there are three books to go. This series gets better and better.

Pam Macintyre is the Editor of Viewpoint and teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne.