“Truth” by Peter Temple

Readers who first came to read Peter Temple through his very popular and lyrical “Broken Shore” may be a little surprised with “Truth” – I am one of those - I was surprised that is -but then not disappointed.

“Truth” features Inspector Villani, chief of the Victorian homicide squad who was a Melbourne based senior colleague of Joe Cashin in the earlier, novel which was set in a sylvan Victorian country setting. This one by contrast takes place almost wholly in the urban setting or at least it feels like that.

It is a tough uncompromising style of cop novel. There are a couple of gruesome murders being investigated by Villani and his squad. Along the way there are several compromising issues and incidents involving the inspectors and their seniors. Villani himself, is faced with leadership issues, moral questions and a series of major personal versus career crises – with his wife, daughters, brother and father for starters. It is realism plus and all takes place over a relatively short period of a week or even less It is packed with detail brought out with terse dialogue and in depth backgound detail - a movie almost in the making I think.

On the dialogue which is a special feature of the novel’s style – one cannot help but note how terse and realistic and probably authentic it is. I found I needed to read very carefully to keep up with what was going on in the different scenarios and to understand the conversations between the police especially. Temple makes no compromises - he has said that he likes to challenge the reader and indeed he does. You have to literally sit in on conversations – and work out was has gone on before between the conversationalists; fill in the dots; remember earlier references – a sort of literary and concentration puzzle - I think rewardingly so. Apparently his American publishers have requested and are getting a 200 words plus dictionary for the book in order to clarify the Victorian police patois for fans there. In this book especially Temple does remind us of some of the very best of American detective and thriller writers. I wonder, is Melbourne the new crime capital of the world?

I also liked the personal dilemmas Villani faced in this fast paced story involving his daughters, his superiors, his lover and especially with his father. The father is an idiosyncratic character who will not leave his semi rural property with the advent of nearby bushfires. Villani senior’s sons – the chief inspector and his doctor brother are involved in a remarkable series of scenes on this theme towards the end of the book. So there is plenty of personal, family interest throughout the novel along with the action. Villani is a well-drawn successful career policeman and maybe the authenticity of the writing holds up best in encapsulating for the reader what it is like to “live” an intense career like this. I think this is a very fine thriller which meets the criteria for being a work of literature.

What is the “Truth” herein? - Varied I think. The quickly realised truth at the end is a little stunner but then the realism of the book has conditioned you for it.

Faye

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall was the 2009 winner of the Man Booker Prize, probably the most prestigious award for novels in the English speaking world. Unlike many winners of the award, it is not a dauntingly challenging work, demanding dedication and concentration from the reader. Wolf Hall, though a book of 650 pages, is acccessible and readily enjoyable, whilst being intelligent and stimulating.

It is an historical novel, set in one of the most colourful and dramatic periods of English history, the years 1529 to 1536 during which Henry VIII divorced Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, and during which the English Church broke with Rome. The cast is a large one, though rarely confusing, and a very wide range of social settings and types of people appear. But at the centre is Thomas Cromwell, a man of humble origins who rose during this period to be the king's most trusted adviser, and the possessor of great wealth and influence. The novel is recounted in the third person, and usually in the present tense, and we encounter Cromwell in a wide variety of situations, and intereacting with everyone from the king to labourers and people on the fringes of society.

Mantel creates an attractive Cromwell. He is a man of affairs and no otherworldly saint, but he is a loyal servant first of Cardinal Wolsey and then of the king, a good friend, an often compaasionate opponent, a devoted family man, generous to the underdog. He is the most competent of men, a lawyer, administrator, and financial manager of immense skill, a competent linguist in several languages, but also able to turn his hand to cooking a splendid dinner or shoeing a horse. Perhaps as a central figure Cromwell is a bit too perfect, but Mantel is very skillful in making a somewhat unlikely hero attactive to the reader.

Mantel's skill in evoking early Tudor England is immense. She clearly has done extensive reaearch, but her learning is worn lightly, and the world she creates is fascinating, vivid, and convincing. There is no sense of anachronism: one does not have the sense here, as often with historical novels, that some of the characters have twentieth or twenty-first century mindsets inside clothing from centuries past. The language is modern but not jarringly so: the reader is not challenged by any of 'ye olde Englishe speeche'. It is, however, not always easy to know who is speaking. Mantel avoids guidelines of the 'Cromwell replied' kind. The reader will probably find it useful to assume that he' normally means Cromwell.

Modern attitudes to Thomas Cromwell have probably been shaped in large part by Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, which commenced life as a radio play in 1954 but is better known in the 1960 stage version and the 1966 film. In Bolt's work Cromwell is an unscrupulous and ruthless opportunist who contrasts with Thomas More, the saintly martyr for freedom of conscience. There is evidence (including an interview available on YouTube) that Mantel set delibertely about presenting a diametrically opposite view. Her Cromwell is clearly a true 'man for all seasons'; her More, though achieving a certain dignity as his end (which is also the end of the book) approaches, is a shabby, mean-spirited, cruel, religious fanatic. He is probably the closest thing to a villain in Wolf Hall , which generally allows its characters to speak for themselves, and to engender in us some sympathy for their situation and point of view.

It has been suggested that Mantel uses the freedom of the novelist to shed new light on the history of the period, but her work is of course not history, and leading Tudor historian David Starkey has described it as 'tosh'. Certainly not all historians views Cromwell so sympathetically. Past generations admired him as an important creator of the early modern English administrative system and as a man who did much to make England Protestant, but more recently he has been widely viewed as vicious, unscrupulous and cruel, and outraqesously avaricious.

Mantel is said to be working on a follow-up novel dealing with the remaining years of Cromwell's career (which of course ended on the executioner's block, like that of so many who served Henry VIII). This reader looks forward to it with eager anticipation.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers(1917-1967) was born in Georgia , USA - and is identified with a very highly regarded group of white Southern women writers of the early/mid twentieth century including Katherine Porter, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. All of these women are particularly fine writers of both short stories and novels and add a special dimension to our understanding of the social Southern experience of the time, including domestic race relations. The above four are all well worth reading - I like Eudora Welty and would recommend her but Carson is a special favourite of mine and I am very happy to introduce this gem of a novel. By the way these four are referred to as the Southern Gothic Writers - which I imagine comes from the similar story backgrounds and settings and the fact that there is often a seemingly ominous feel to the short stories especially. Carson , who has written short stories, is best known for her novels several of which are regarded in American literature as masterpieces, particularly the one we are reading and , "The Heart is a lonely hunter" and "Ballad of Sad Cafe" - all of which were made into films.

"The Member of the Wedding" takes place for the most past over a couple of days in a small Southern town in the United States. It was published in 1946 and was also a very successful play as well as film starring Julie Harris. It is a simple plot about an imaginative precocioius girl of 12 years who fantasises that she can escape her humdrum life as she sees it by teaming up with her brother and his new bride on a grand adventure tour of the world - hence the title. Frankie imagines she is a part of their lives and they will want to take her with them as they start off from the wedding. Read in one way it is a novel about escape by an immature person who wants glamour in her life - a novel about adolescent misunderstanding and just reading the world wrongly . As such it sounds overly simple but what sets this novel on another plane is the imaginative range of the telling and its insights; the three main characters and their intense exchanges around the kitchen table and the dark humour and drama which is beautifully worked through by this very fine writer. Frankie is a real character in her own right - not a charicature.

The novel explores 'connectedness" via the thoughts and conversations of the three main character, Frankie Addams ; the coloured housekeeper and minder of the motherless Frankie- Berenice Sadie Brown and a six year old cousin John Henry West. These are such memorable people by the time you have finished the book that , it is not a cliche to say, you feel you know them. The three share an evening meal and talk but also Frankie has a few adventures in the town - one of which is troubling with a soldier from a nearby camp .

All the dimensions in this novel are strong - the atmosphere in the town, the weather, the ambient sounds , the domestic arrangements and the meal and details like the inappropriatness of the clothes Frankie has chosen for the wedding . The dialogue is cleverly interwoven with Frankie's thoughts especially at the memorable kitchen meal of the three on the night before the wedding . Frankie in simple terms makes a fool of herself at the reception and we see it coming . But Frankie is not really alone - she is supported by her caring adults - her father and Berenice and moves on as most adolescents do .

The book is full of memorable sequences - I think of the piano tuner in a nearby house - the significance of this sequence is the affect the sound of the ascending notes as the piano tuner does his work has on the three conversationalists. The passages where the author has Frankie helping out a monkey and his grinder minder down town is tender and full of wonder. Perfect descriptions abound - like "A jazz sadness quivered her nerves" and when Frankie goes into a down town bar for the first time she notes "the beery odour reminded her of a room where a rat has died behind a wall".

The race relations are handled without sentimentality and are salutary to read. Sadie is a pivotal character in the book from various viewpoints not the least of which is her open discussion on the way she would like the world to be - the connectedness theme again. Little John Henry is a well described charater too . They are each very important to the strength of the book.

I recommend this strongly for the brilliance of the writing and psychological exploration. It is a small treasure and a very strong work . I hope you will enjoy it.