‘Journey from Venice’ by Ruth Cracknell

2000, 271 p

Ruth Cracknell was a much-loved Australian actor- sharp, eloquent, funny, rather patrician in an ‘older woman’ sort of way. Although, of course, her character Maggie Beare in ‘Mother and Son’ (where she plays the devious elderly mother whose hapless adult son returns to live with her)  was none of these things!

I had to keep flicking to her picture at the back of the book to remind me that she was the author, because her celebrity is almost inconsequential to this story.   It’s not so much Ruth Cracknell here, but Mrs. Ruth Phillips, mourning the death of her husband Eric.  It’s as woman and widow, mother and grandmother that we meet her, not as a ’star’.

This is a beautifully constructed memoir.  The preface starts with Eric’s funeral, with  parts are written in italicized third person, as if she is watching herself going through the ritual.  She then moves back in time to their arrival in Venice for a holiday together and the pace of the narrative moves to a slow sort of travelogue, overshadowed by the certain knowledge that death  is hovering over them like an unseen, malevolent force.  This sense of foreboding permeates the book, even when Eric is finally well enough to fly home to Melbourne where cancer is diagnosed.  The title is well chosen: I kept thinking of Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, but Eric does not die there. He recovers sufficiently to be medi-evacuated back to Australia, has two precious trips back to the family home for Sunday lunch, and some weeks later dies of the cancer, not the bleeding that initially threatened his life.  And so, by the end of the book, we return to the funeral and we, too, grieve.

While waiting in Venice for him to recover sufficiently for the trip home, the tourists leave as the summer season ends, the deeper water laps at the floor of her ground floor flat, and Ruth becomes aware of the sheer inconvenience of living (as distinct from visiting) Venice.  That holiday, so eagerly anticipated, so richly enjoyed for the first few days becomes instead a stark, lonely, bewildering exile.

This is, instead, a journey from Venice, not to it, and in the weeks they have together, they fall in love again- a different sort of love, suffused with the knowledge that it is all they have left.  They truly do live “in the moment”: the sharing of a blood orange is a sensuous joy, and she sees and loves anew the stripped down, solid core of the man she has been married to for over 40 years.

It was interesting to read this book after recently finishing Caroline Jones’ book about her father’s death.  This is a much more grounded, sane and adult book, and one that gives much more comfort.  It is beautifully written and constructed, and it shares the poise, groundedness and authenticity of its author.

 

‘The World Beneath’ by Cate Kennedy

2009, 342p.

Rich and Sandy are 40-something leftovers from the 1980s, still stuck in the victory of the Franklin River blockade that they look back to as the high point of their lives.  They met on the campaign and shifted to a small hippy country town together but their relationship broke up while their daughter Sophie was very young.  Sandy immersed herself in the companionship of her earth-mother friends, while Rich headed off around the world as a photojournalist.  Neither has moved on at all from their dreams of the early eighties: Sandy’s dreamcatchers and pottery are now tatty, dated and twee, while Rich’s career in photojournalism finds him washed up in the dead-end of editing  infotainment  segments for morning television.  The story opens as Rich re-establishes contact with his moody, anorexic, goth 15 year old daughter Sophie, and suggests a bushwalk to Cradle Mountain as a new start to their relationship.

Sandy is reluctant to let him back in to their lives; Sophie is curious and at first attracted by his footloose approach to life, especially compared with Sandy’s smothering neediness and flakiness.  But Rich, in his own way, is just as stuck in the 1980s as Sandy is,  just as blind to Sophie’s anorexia and just as flawed as a parent, whatever his initial attractiveness.  When he encourages Sophie to go for a walk off the tourist trail, they get lost and Sophie loses her illusions about him.

These are very human characters, and Kennedy teeters of the verge of parody, especially with Sandy.  She hones in on Sandy’s ineffectual, rather vacuous new-age, earthmother persona and Rich’s self-deception, cynicism and lack of commitment.  Sophie is a sullen, sneering adolescent, cocooned in her technology and affected world-weariness.  But there’s a recognizability about them all too, and an element of send-up that lacks the venom of  Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, to which this book has been compared.

This gently-skewering parody is acutely done, but after a while it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But the second half of the book picks up pace and it becomes a real page-turner: I was literally sitting up in bed, wanting to finish it but despairing at how late it was becoming as I kept reading.

There are some fantastic interviews with the author: one on the Radio National Book Show and another at The Ember, and good blog posts by Lisa at ANZLitlovers and Kerryn Goldsworthy at Australian Literature Diary.  I must admit that, particularly after reading the interviews, I found nuances and depths in the book that I hadn’t picked up on at first reading.   I’m not sure why this is- I was aware of the references and paradoxes in the book, but almost needed to listen (or read) someone talking it over for them to coalesce for me.  I’m not sure whether this reflects a weakness in the book, or in me as a reader, or whether this is the sort of book that is best shared with others and talked about as much as read.

This is a good book.  I wonder if its references to MySpace and ipods will date it, but the observations of character and the wonderful descriptions of landscape will sustain it even when Sophie is just as dated and twee with her early-21st century technology as Sandy and Rich are with their 1980s idealism.

‘Jasper Jones’ by Craig Silvey

2009, 299 p.

Set in 1965, this book opens with a dilemma.  Charlie Bucktin, the bookish, nerdy, teacher’s son is startled by a knock at the louvres of his sleep-out when Jasper Jones, the town ‘bad boy’, calls him out into the backyard.  Somehow or other Jasper Jones cajoles him into assisting with the disposal of the body of a young school acquaintance that Jasper found hanging from a tree in his special place in the bush.  This young girl was Jasper’s secret girlfriend and Jasper is terrified that he will be blamed for her murder.  For me, one of the main problems with this book started at this point: I just didn’t buy into Charlie’s involvement and why two innocent boys would dispose of the body.  Hence, the whole premise of the plot was shaky for me as a reader.

For me, the book didn’t start well.  It took almost 25 pages for young Charlie to be faced with his opening dilemma.  The book then spooled into an equally long conversation between Charlie and his Vietnamese friend Jeffrey about the respective qualities of superheroes.  There is a self-indulgence about the length of these digressions and internal dialogues, and an indulgence too in the number of themes the author crams into the book: first love, friendship, bullying, police brutality, racial prejudice, marriage breakup, incest, youth suicide, social exclusion.

As if this wasn’t enough (and it is!) the book is framed within a homage to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.  This, too, is rather heavy-handed.  We have the hermit misfit, the childhood taunts and dares about ‘raiding’ his house, the trips through the forest at night (albeit, not dressed as a ham) and the revelation of a mild father standing up to a bully, evoking Atticus-Gregory Peck (indivisible) shooting the rabid dog.

All of this suggests to me a lack of good editting in curbing an energetic young author.  And he IS young- his Wikipedia entry claims that Craig Silvey was born in 1982.  At this point, though,  I have to doff my hat.  He is writing about small town life set 17 years before he was even born and he doesn’t put a foot wrong.  He captures beautifully a world where television was incidental, where kids’ consumerism was limited by pocket money, where community events were not so strictly segregated and segmented by age brackets and where kids had a wider geographic zone not necessarily under the constant surveillance of their parents.  He portrays well the anxiety about disappearing children and the perceived, if brittle,  authority of community figures like mayors and police officers.  There must have been careful research here and the book carries it effortlessly.

I’d be really interested to know how readers much younger than I respond to this book.  It would lend itself well to film, and the coming-of-age aspect and the nostalgia for a simpler time would endear it to baby-boomer viewers- in fact, possibly more than to the young adolescent readers for whom it was probably written.

‘My Father’s Moon’ by Elizabeth Jolley

I have to admit to not being a fan of Elizabeth Jolley.  I know that she’s highly thought of:  a good reading friend whose reading judgement I trust  (and who is probably reading this post!) very much likes her. So why do I find her so off-putting?

I’ve really tried: I’ve read several of her books but find myself being repelled by the mustiness and acidity of her female characters.  They’re like a prickly heavy British overcoat: they’re like Hetty Wainthrop and Hyacinth Bucket; like a whiskery old Aunt.  Even in the books set in present time (given that she stopped writing about ten years ago), there’s a dissonance about these characters, as if they are out of time.   Her novels are often set in Australia, but there seems to be an innate Britishness about them.

I’ve seen her described as “disturbing” and perhaps this is what I’m alluding to, but I’m never really quite sure whether Jolley’s writing is deliberately subversive and edgy.  I think her dialogue is often wooden- or does that reflect the awkwardness of the characters she’s describing?  I think that her books seem to jerk around without a strong narrative thread- or is she being very clever and post-modern?  Is it bad writing?  Or good writing?  I really don’t know.

That said, I’ve enjoyed My Father’s Moon more than the other works I’ve read.  It is set in London during WW II, and for me this gives the book a unity and integrity that I can’t find in her other books.  The characters act, and feel, like 1940s characters in 1940s times.  The book is written in a number of first-person, self-contained chapters but there’s not a clear narrative arc in the way they are placed:  events happen and the reader works on making the causal and chronological links, because Jolley doesn’t.   Again- is this clever writing, or lazy?

I often sense steel in Jolley’s writing, but there’s a vulnerability in the writing in My Father’s Moon.   There’s an unresolved yearning to touch and be touched by other female friendships, and a sense of distance and apartness.  Perhaps these same qualities are there in her other books as well, because there’s a strong autobiographical element repeated in many of her works.  But I think I find it less repellent in a younger woman, coming of age in a time further back,  in a British world of London streets and air raids and prickly woollen overcoats.

‘Addition’ by Toni Jordan

Grace Lisa Vandenburg is an unemployed teacher on sick leave after a breakdown triggered by a young boy’s accident in the schoolyard.  But Grace’s problems lie deeper than this: she counts obsessively and incessantly, as a way of trying to control her world and all around her.  Into this ordered and tense life comes Seamus, who is attracted to her humour and quickness, and steers her towards therapy and medication as a way of overcoming her obsessiveness.  We lose our perky, wisecracking, passionate and controlled narrator as the medication submerges her into a slow, passive inertia. Will she lose the medication or lose or her man? Or both?

This is all the stuff of good chick-lit, in this case bolstered by clever use of narrative to reveal the personality change that Grace undergoes as a result of her medication.  In this regard, it reminded me of Daniel Keye’s short story Flowers for Algernon, which was picked up as the film ‘Charly’.  I think that this use of narrative voice to denote change is one of the real strengths of the book, along with a main character who is not just sassy but also sees the world quite differently.  The book also introduced me to Nikola Tesla, a Croatian engineer who was likewise driven by the need to count, but for him it ended in madness.  The book explores the often narrow line between habit and obsession;  routine and ritual; self control and control of others; passivity and strength; eccentricity and madness.  In these regards, it steps out of the chicklit genre into something more complex.

But Toni Jordan has not been served well by her publishers, methinks.  There are several versions of the front cover, and none really does justice to a book that is more than just chick-lit.

Here’s the American version.  Who the hell is Emily Giffen? Thank you Wikipedia-  Emily Giffen is obviously the Queen of Chicklit. Her insightful blurb  calls it “A delight”. I hope that no-one offered their first-born child in exchange for such a glowing endorsement.  I wonder if her books are so nuanced?  And in case you think it’s a primary school textbook- a not unreasonable assumption really-  the cover helpfully labels it as ‘A novel’.

The English version has a little pun – “A comedy that counts”.  The lemon tart is nice and cheerful- but surely it should be a flourless orange cake sprinkled with poppy seeds- if you’ve read the book, you’ll know why.

There’s a second UK cover that sticks with the pun on counting: this time “Some people count more than others”.

One of the covers available in Australia resembles this British one, but with a sassier girl who looks more like a model and less like a schoolgirl.  The blurb cites The Age’s recommendation:  “A winning love story”.

Then finally, there’s one that perhaps gets closer to the tone of the book.  Sigrid Thornton (much loved of Sea Change) endorses it as “A stylish, witty and moving love story”.   But as the Resident Husband commented “Since when has Sigrid Thornton been a book reviewer?”  Maybe I should keep an eye on my toothbrush, lest it also get up to shenanigans.

There is a happy ending in this feel-good, romantic fiction book, and it’s good fun, engaging and heartwarming.  I gobbled it up, and shut the book with a smile.  I think we can all do with a bit of this, in small doses.  And, of course, only as part of a well-rounded reading diet.

‘Modern Interiors’ by Andrea Goldsmith

1991, 242p.

This is Andrea Goldsmith’s second book, and one that I hadn’t heard of before.  I read it for my C.A.E. bookgroup – a night of wine, laughter, affection amongst the women my daughter has dubbed “The Ladies Who Say Oooooh” (because apparently we work ourselves up into a chorus of  ‘oooooh’ at some stage during the night. I’m not sure if this is a compliment or not).

The book’s main character, Phillipa Finemore, is a wealthy widow whose adult children expect her to share the family money with them and subside into a well-heeled widow’s existence as their mother and grandmother.  Instead she sells the big family home, shifts into a terrace house in Carlton, starts a charitable foundation, travels with her deceased husband’s lover and secretary, and befriends a Jewish bookstore owner and then a 25 year old university student.

The goodies and baddies are stereotyped and one-dimensional.  There’s the grasping daughter and embezzling son-in-law; the insipid and incompetent son, and the good gay son who gets on well with his mother.  There are overdrawn parodies of the self-aggrandizing business school and a grasping evangelical preacher and his young wholesome wife.  The slabs of Goldsmith’s own opinions about the perils of family and the commodification of university education, voiced through the characters, became laboured too.

In spite of all this, though, I enjoyed reading the book.  It was almost Anne Tyler-ish in places, and although very wordy, captured emotions and descriptions well.  I felt glee at the come-uppance of such unpleasant people, so I must have been engaged with this book in spite of myself.

‘Ice’ by Louis Nowra

2008, 322 p.

I’ve now finished  the final of the Miles Franklin shortlist for 2009- a shortlist this year dominated by the literary bulls of Australian literature (Winton, Flanagan, Nowra, Bail and Tsiolkas).  I don’t know whether to be assured that the shortlist is truly gender-blind by not including a token female writer, or whether to snort that SURELY one of the many books published by female writers must have qualified.

I think this is the one amongst the shortlist  that I enjoyed reading the most.  At first it seems to be a straight fictionalized biography of Malcolm McEacharn,  a colonial entrepreneur responsible for the refrigerated meat export trade among other things.   Nowra has used some fictional licence here, but sticks fairly closely to McEacharn’s biography.  A shy, diffident man, McEacharn’s mother remarried and shifted to India, leaving him as a young worker to find his own way in the world. He falls in love with Ann, a bewitching beautiful girl. When she dies, he is maddened by grief, and the rest of his life- apparently successful with money, clothes, mansions, political influence- is just a series of layers with his love for Ann at its core.

Running parallel to this is the present-day voice of Rowan Doyle, likewise maddened sitting beside his comatose wife, who had been writing a biography of McEacharn when she sustained catastrophic injuries when attacked by a crazed ice addict.  Doyle picks up the story, based on her research, but embues it with his own feelings of grief and loss, and finds himself unable to stop writing because it is his last contact with his wife.

This juxtaposition of death/coma and ‘ice’ in its many manifestations is deliberate, self-conscious and a little laboured at times, but I found myself drawn into the sorrow and obsessive love in the book and was in tears by the end of it.  The modern narrative breaks in at unexpected places, and because the biography itself is a product- their joint product, already researched with its ending known- there is quite a bit of foreshadowing.

Louis Nowra was interviewed on RN’s ‘Book Show’ and made this comment about biography and historians:

Louis Nowra: The interesting thing about all this is that I don’t believe you can know anybody after two generations. What I’m saying is if I write about an historical character…I really don’t know Malcolm. All I know is these papers that I’ve read and a couple of interviews that he did. I have a kind of a vague idea about him. So really the novel is not an historical fiction. What I’m attempting to do is almost parody historical fiction. I’m not saying this is the real Malcolm, I’m saying this is Rowan’s version. No one can possibly know about people more then 50 years into the past, I think…

Ramona Koval: So you’re talking about straight history as well?

Louis Nowra: I think straight history is fine, but once you start to second-guess characters, once historians start to identify with a character, I think you become very much on slippery ground. Like my grandparents, for example, I have learned a lot about their lives when I wrote my first memoir. At the same time, they are tremendously vague for me because I don’t have their values, I don’t have their sense of morality and I don’t have their sense of how they fought so hard for money. So I cannot judge them. And the same is with historians. I actually think that sometimes there’s a bit of flimflam that goes on.

Through his character Rowan, Nowra (hah! an anagram!!) backs away from claiming ‘truth’ from his writing.  He tells his comatose wife that he’s found extra information to add to her already-completed  research; he reads her research notes and moulds them into an explanation that is more consonant with his own emotional response to grief, rather than a straight biographical account.

And as Nowra says in this interview, ‘Ice’ is very much a love story and a meditation on the narrow line that divides love from obsession.  It’s not unlike ‘Wanting’, one of the other Miles Franklin shortlist for 2009, but it’s more tender in its approach.  I hope it wins, although I suspect that ‘The Slap’ will win, and that ‘Wanting’ should win.  But I can always hope, can’t I?

‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas

2008, 483p.

It’s doing well, this one.  Plans for a television series; won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.   The Miles Franklin is awarded for any ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’ .  [An aside: I hadn't realized that a play could win it.]  Certainly, The Slap portrays Australian life of  the backyard barbeque of inner-ish  suburb of Northcote, Melbourne in the 2000s in all its domestic, self-absorbed, middle class glory.  When one of the fathers slaps an obnoxious four-year old he triggers off much tut-tutting amongst the witnesses that ripples out into broader questions of discipline, family loyalty, abuse, friendship, class, religion, ethnicity, suburbs- the lot.  Everyone’s here- the yuppie bayside suburb Greek boy made good; his cousin married to the Indian vet; the Sex-and-the-City writer who wants to do more than write soap opera scripts; the earth mother and her drop kick partner; the young gay adolescent boy struggling with his sexuality; the Greek grandfather; the Aboriginal muslim and his Aussie wife.  Yep- I think that covers every inner-city suburban stereotype we need.

The book is told in long chapters written from the perspective, but not in the voice of,  people who were at the barbeque and witnessed the slap.  For some, it was just that- a spur of the moment slap to a child behaving badly; for others it was a violation of the rights of the child and his parents; others saw it as a criminal act; yet others as an unspoken manifestation of other domestic violence.   These chapters work well: they are long enough for a reader to shift into the character’s mindset, and because they move forward chronologically, they keep the plot unspooling.

There are actually two slaps- or at least physical encounters with this same little brat-  in this story, each bookending the first and last chapters of the book, and yet we don’t see them in the same way- largely because of  the other knowledge we have gleaned about the characters along the way.   Much of this other knowledge is fairly unattractive.  It uncovers infidelity, jealousy, class envy, prejudice, vindictiveness, self-centredness  and dishonesty. To be fair, it also uncovers loyalty to family and loyalty to friends, but even these things look rather shabby and unhealthy too.

Gerard Windsor reviewed this book in the Sydney Morning Herald where he described this book as “a strikingly tender book”. I didn’t see it this way.  I think it’s a jaundiced book, populated with human, recognizable but ultimately unlovely people.  I’m not convinced that it’s high literature: it smacks of the four-part miniseries- almost like Big Brother in the Backyard.  Perhaps the same sense of voyeurism is what keeps you reading, to find out what people just like you are going to do in this situation.

As a Port Phillip District resident, I enjoyed reading about my Melbourne home town.  The Heidelberg Court House is just down the road,  I know the streets that he’s talking about.  I know these people too. As  inner suburban, middle class, university-educated, chardonnay-sipping Melburnites older than 25, we’ve met them all one way or another.  It truly is “Australian life in its 2008 phase”, but somehow I think I’ll feel a bit short-changed if it wins the Miles Franklin.  Is “reality reading” (like reality television), authentic and identifiable as it is, the same as “literature”? I’m not sure.

‘The Pages’ by Murray Bail

2008, 199 p.

To be honest, I’m not absolutely sure that I ‘got’ this book.  I am wary with Murray Bail- the first time I read ‘Eucalyptus’ I found it pleasant enough though underwhelming, but on a second reading wondered why I hadn’t picked up on the brilliance of its structure the first time.   Does ‘The Pages’ have another level as well?  But should you have to read a book twice in order to understand it?

In many ways ‘The Pages’  reads as if it is a complement to ‘Eucalyptus’.  Where in ‘Eucalyptus’ we had an antipodean Scheherazade weaving stories from the landscape, in ‘The Pages’ we have an antipodean Wittgenstein who travels the world and returns to immure himself in the solitude  of his  shearing shed to write his philosophy of the emotions.  In ‘Eucalyptus’ we have stories hanging like leaves, evoked by the names and appearances of eucalyptus trees ; in ‘The Pages’ we are left with sheets of paper, largely empty except for single, aphoristic thoughts.

The plot, such that it is, operates at two levels.  Erica, a competent, articulate academic philosopher, has been engaged to assess and edit for publication an archive of papers left by Wesley Anthill,  a peripatetic and largely self-taught philosopher who returned from travelling Europe to his family pastoral property, where he locked himself away to write a philosophy of the emotions.  Erica travels out to the outback homestead to examine the materials, accompanied by her psychoanalyst friend Sophie who is recovering from yet another failed relationship, this time with a married man.   While there, Erica sinks into the quiet rhythms of the pastoral lifestyle shared by Wesley’s brother Roger and sister Lindsay, who indulged  and supported their eccentric brother’s writing.  Erica comes to appreciate and love Roger’s  earthy, grounded ‘philosophy of the hand’ which is such a contrast to the laboured and hard-wrung philosophy that Wesley had grappled with, alone in his woolshed and now nothing more than sheaves of paper, expungable with the simple act of spilling a cup of coffee.

The second plot involves Wesley’s own gradual quest for knowledge, stepping tentatively from autodidactism into formal academia, then moving around Europe in the footsteps of other philosophers.  Although he fled Australia because he felt it unreceptive to philosophy, he returned there, after tragedy, to find and write his own, original philosophy.  An essentially solitary man, he seems ill-fitted to write a philsophy of the emotions.

The pacing of this book is unusual.  It unspools slowly, like a laconic country story, and when I was approaching the end of the book, I wondered how Bail was going to finish it in so few pages. It ends with a string of disconnected thoughts that just hang there.     It’s a big book: themes of philosophy, psychoanalysis, words, Europeanness, Australianness ; and yet not much happens in the book.  It’s complex but simple.

If this sounds ambivalent and contradictory, it’s probably because that’s how I found the book.  I’m not sure if it’s brilliant or banal- which is very much the way I felt about ‘Eucalyptus’.   Miles Franklin winner? Well, ‘Eucalyptus’ won the Miles Franklin a few years back- so obviously many people detected at first what I took two readings to find.  Perhaps ‘The Pages’ is like that also, but I tend to think that put up against novels with a stronger story, ‘The Pages’ will be seen as too elusive, too strange.

‘Wanting’ by Richard Flanagan

2008, 261 p.

I haven’t see Baz Luhrman’s Australia (and nor do I think I shall), but I wasn’t surprised to hear that Richard Flanagan had worked on the screenplay.  From the comments of those I’ve spoken to who have seen it, the film  seems to elicit a shifting discomfort in its audience – as if the viewer is not quite sure whether it’s a parody or not; whether to go with it, resist it or mock it.

It seems that Flanagan has quite a skill at unsettling his reader by playing around within genres.  As with Luhrman, you’re always very much aware of the author there, constructing, drawing together, working, and so the work becomes performance as much as narrative.  This was particularly the case in Gould’s Book of Fish which I think is probably the best ‘Australian’ novel of the last five years- a wild, inventive riff on a historical character that was also beautifully, carefully, lovingly presented as artefact.

Wanting is in much the same vein. It  plays within the historical fiction genre, leaping across continent and plotline to draw together Charles Dickens, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin,  the young Aboriginal girl Mathinna, George Augustus Robinson, Wilkie Collins- a whole cast of mid-century ‘historical’ characters.  As a reader, you’re constantly aware of Flanagan moulding and threading his different storylines, and his deliberate construction of ironies, opposites and parallels in the surface and ‘true’ stories in the book.  I noticed that he used the term “motley” several times in the book and on his website, and he uses it in the sense of the costume, the trappings of the fool who jeers and capers while he tells the truth.

Flanagan on his website shrugs off the research he has done for this book:

These notes are for those readers who wish to discover something more of the historical truth behind some of the characters and events mentioned in Wanting. Perhaps because I am drawn to questions which history cannot answer, and because these characters and events thus become the motley thrown over the concerns that are the true subject of this novel, I am disinclined to research. Accordingly, I have leaned heavily on a very small post made up of only a few books. I do not know if they are definitive, only that they were useful.

He’s being too modest here: the historical research holds up well, but it doesn’t hamstring him as it so often tends to do with ‘historical fiction’ in more reverent, tentative hands.   He uses it as a playground, a trampoline, an arena in which he can write about bigger truths that cannot be held by a single act in a single lifestory.  The quote from the back cover “We have in our lives only a few moments” has all of the schmaltz and extravagance of  Baz Luhrman’s red-curtain trilogy- in fact, for me, the cover evokes  red velvet, sunset and blood-, and yet the phrase also captures the paradox of the historical ‘actor’ and the banality, humanity, and  tragedy of small actions, petty desires and fleeting decisions when they are writ large on the historical stage.