The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010)

"Old Man Hung makes the best pho in the city and has done so for decades. Where he once had a shop, though, he no longer does, because the rents are exorbitant, both the hard rents and the soft - the bribes a proprietor must pay to the police in this new era of freedom."

Camilla Gibb's latest novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, explores the classic trope of Old World vs. New. In it, American raised Maggie Ly returns to Vietnam in search of information about her father, an artist who disappeared into Communist re-education camps after the fall of Saigon. Her search leads her to Old Man Hung, an itinerant pho seller who once owned a shop frequented by artists, but whose memory of Maggie's father and his fate is, at best, spotty. Maggie is brought into Hung's circle, which includes Tu, a young Vietnamese tour guide who is caught in the clash between the conservative values of his community and the ever growing American cultural influences, and who joins in Maggie's search for answers.

Stories such as this can sometimes be problematic, in that they leave themselves open to accusations of cultural appropriation, but Gibb tells the story with a great deal of sensitivity and respect and the complete absence of exoticization is one of the novel's many strengths. Gibb crafts a story and characters that compliment Vietnam's complex history, showing a nation that has been the victim of forces both outside and within, but also a nation with enough strength at its core to endure. The nation portrayed in the story is one in transition, the features of hardline Communism still apparent in some aspects, but one that is also begining to embrace Capitalism. It is also a nation struggling against popular perception of itself as provincial and unsophisticated, an image which artists such as Maggie's father and the others who frequented Hung's shop challenged with their work, but which was buried during the course of cultural cleansing re-education.

Gibb's prose is engaging and the story often powerful. The characters and the community in the novel are crafted with care, with Gibb slowly revealing the depths of both as the story progresses. Though The Beauty of Humanity Movement never quite attains the weight of her previous work, 2005's Sweetness In The Belly, it's still an excellent read and certainly one of the best books of 2010.

Annabel (2010)

"After the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch."

Kathleen Winter's Annabel is a delicate and sensitively told story of ambiguity. It centers on Wayne Blake, born with both male and female sex organs and raised as a boy by his parents, Jacinta and Treadway. Treadway is the one who makes the decision to raise the baby as a male and then spends Wayne's childhood trying to impress upon him the ways to be a "man." Jacinta, meanwhile, longs for the daughter who never was while becoming lonelier and lonelier in her marriage and Thomasina, the neighbor who delivered Wayne and is privy to the family's secret, becomes a beacon of acceptance for Wayne, though she struggles over how much to tell him.

Identity is obviously a major theme in Annabel and Winter allows both Wayne's male identity and his female identity, known as Annabel, to flower as the novel progresses. Though the secrecy that surrounds him for much of his life causes him some pain, primarily through his inability to understand why it is that he seems to be a frequent disappointment to his father, Wayne is more or less at peace with his nature. He is not afraid or ashamed of his female self, though he longs to embrace that identity more fully than he feels that society would allow.

Annabel is a complex, thought provoking, and touching character study. Winter deals with the subject in a direct way and allows her characters to become fully fleshed and distinctly human. Annabel is a wonderful book about the yearning to belong, one which is relatable to anyone. It will grip from the first page and remain with you long after you've reached the last.

Started Early, Took My Dog (2010)

"When she was murdered his sister was just three years older than his daughter was now. Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let's face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman."

With Started Early, Took My Dog Kate Atkinson continues the adventures of private investigator Jackson Brodie, first introduced in Case Histories. Here Jackson has been charged with finding the origins of a woman who was adopted as a child, an adoption which it appears was performed illegally. Per usual in the Brodie stories, this is just one of several interlacing threads which will dovetail as the story nears its conclusion. Also per usual, Jackson isn't the "star," exactly; he's the figure who connects this novel to the previous novels but within the context of the novel itself, he's not necessarily any more important than any of the other point-of-view characters.

The novel is divided into three plot threads: one following Jackson, another following Tracy Waterhouse, a former Detective Superintendent now working mall security, and the third following Tilly Squires, an actress losing the battle against dementia. As the story gets started, all three come into possession of things that don't belong to them: Tilly is always wandering off with things that don't belong to her and is later baffled as to why she has them; Jackson takes a dog from an abusive owner; Tracy buys a child from a parent she deems unfit. The three plots weave in and out of each other (and touch on a long dormant murder mystery) until finally coming together in the story's climax. Although the mystery element is well-conceived and executed, Atkinson uses it less as an end of itself and more as a means of exploring the relationship between society and women, including the limitations imposed on women by society and the dangers posed to women by society (the root story of the mystery is set against the backdrop of the days of the Yorkshire Ripper).

Atkinson's novels are never anything less than delightful, though her Brodie novels are not as resonant as her earlier, magic realist works. Her prose style is deeply engaging and she draws us into the lives of her characters in a way that makes it look astonishingly easy. Started Early, Took My Dog is a very enjoyable book, albeit flawed. The Tilly plot, for example, feels uncomfortably shoehorned in and there are a few loose (although ultimately minor) threads left dangling at the end. Nevertheless, it's a great read, the kind of book you'll find you hard to put down.

Dahanu Road (2010)

"It always started with the rubbing of knees. Then Shapur Irani would shut his eyes tight, as he was doing now, as though by sheer willpower he would be able to transport his grandson into the past. Slowly the tightness in Shapur Irani's eyelids increased, until they fluttered like the wings of an injured bird, and he took Zairos with him to an older, more promising time."

With The Cripple and His Talismans, The Song of Kahunsha and now Dahanu Road to his credit, Anosh Irani is swiftly becoming one of the most reliably excellent novelists working in Canada. His latest novel combines elements of the immigrant story, the disenfranchised minority story, the family saga, and the star-crossed love story to form a richly layered and deeply moving tale.

The story centres of Zairos, a young man with no cares save for his father's war on household mosquitoes and his grandfather's lonely life on his grand estate. His grandfather lives behind the veil of his memories, of the time before the death of his beloved wife, a time of pride and happiness after having endured being driven out of Iran. Visiting the estate one day, Zairos finds the body of one of the Warli workers hanging from a tree. The suicide brings Zairos into contact with the man's daughter, Kusum, but it also hints at events of the past, at threads which have long tied Zairos' family to Kusum's despite the seemingly insurmountable class differences between them.

Irani draws stark divisions between his characters, showing the chasm that exists between Zairos and Kusum as existing not only due to custom but also due to Zairos' own psychology. He longs for Kusum but for every step he takes towards her, he takes two steps back. He's brave enough to take Kusum out in public for the local gossip to see, but he's too cowardly to correct his mother when she mistakes Kusum for a new house servant. The relationship between the two is complex and carefully explored, though it is far from the only compelling plot in the novel. Though I don't think Dahanu Road is quite as good as The Song of Kahunsha (though, to be fair, I think Kahunsha is a masterpiece), it's a great novel nevertheless, the kind you find yourself reading slowly so that you can savour each and every development and because you don't want to be done with it.

Freedom (2010)

"'I'm guessing that you've already had the opportunity to be frustrated with people who aren't as bright as you are. People who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident to you. Who don't even seem to care that their logic is bad. Have you never been frustrated that way?'

"'But that's because they're free... Isn't that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it's a pain in the ass sometimes.'"

What is the price of freedom? What horrible compromises must be made in order to make gains in this world? The characters of Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, find themselves continuously faced with the necessity of compromise in order to achieve their goals. It's a family drama in which the patriach, the almost tirelessly idealistic Walter Berglund, finds himself working for a giant, earth-destroying (and war profiteering) corporation in order to preserve some small portion of land as a nature sanctuary; the matriarch, Patty, finds herself forced to choose between the sexual satisfaction she might find with Walter's best friend, Richard, and the satisfaction she feels in every other respect with Walter and which she knows she could never find with Richard; their son, Joey, must find a way to reconcile his vision of himself as a freewheeling, self-made playboy with his love for his childhood sweetheart and a rather inconvenient sense of guilt over how he will make his fortune.

Franzen moves back and forth between various perspectives and styles of narration. The novel opens with an overview of the Berglunds from the outside, as they are seen by their neighbors. It then shifts to a much more interrior view through an autobiography written by Patty (to which it will return near the end) and then shifts again, offering chapters from the perspective of Walter, Joey, and Richard. Franzen is ultimately able to paint a very expansive picture of this one particular family, getting deep into their psyches and exposing all the natural cracks that can (and perhaps inevitably will) occur in human relationships.

Freedom has already long since been praised to the heavens as a masterwork, though to be honest its reputation is what made me wait so long to pick it up. After all, how could any book live up to that much hype? But, having now read it, I have to say that it is worthy of all that ppraise. It isn't a flawless book - I felt that the Berglund's daughter, Jessica, was woefully underrepresented - but between Franzen's finely wrought dissection of the minutiae of interpersonal conflicts and his exquisite prose, it's an excellent novel that you won't want to put down.

The Talented Miss Highsmith (2010)

"The 'truth' of Pat's life... is misrepresented by the long lines of dates and hours, the crisp lists of appointments and appearances, the solid sense of case histories completed, that make chronological biography such convential reading - and such conventional comfort, too. Except in her aspirations, Pat Highsmith was never a conventional woman - and was never, ever a conventional writer."

If there is one thing that Joan Schenkar's comprehensive biography of Patricia Highsmith isn't, it's "conventional." Schenkar unfolds the facts of Highsmith's life in a non-chronological fashion, organizing the facets of the writer's life into sections and jumping back and forth in time as it suits her (though there is also an appendix which reiterates the information in chronology order). This works not only to bring a tight focus to every aspect of Highsmith's life, it also somewhat unsettles the reader by making it difficult to find your footing, a feeling that puts you perfectly in the mood to read about Highsmith, whose fiction is rooted so deeply in the dark and the sinister.

Schenkar spends a fair bit of time examining Highsmith's complicated romantic entanglements with many women and a few men, but The Talented Miss Highsmith never becomes a gossip book by virtue of the fact that Schenkar is constantly tying Highsmith's love life back to her work. Her relationships - often dramatic and inspiring violent thoughts - did not just feed her work, but were so essential to her ability to work that her writing sometimes suffered for lack of a relationship to help give shape to her life. The picture Schenkar paints is of a woman drawn to nastiness who has more than a little in common with her protagonists, most of whom have murder on their minds. It's a very dark portrait though, at its core, there is also a deep appreciation for the work that made Highsmith famous.

Schenkar does an excellent job at examining how Highsmith's works came into being and, without being overbearing in doing so, makes a solid case that European readers (who embraced Highsmith's work) recognized something that somehow escaped North American readers, who mostly relegated her to the arena of genre writers instead of literary talents. This is not to say that The Talented Miss Highsmith is blindly adoring of its subject - Schenkar maintains objectivity and is frank about the shortcomings of several of Highsmith's works, particularly the later ones - but simply that it belies the notion that so-called suspense writing is somehow a lesser form of fiction. I can't imagine someone finishing this biography without feeling inspired to seek out some of Highsmith's fiction, which is perhaps the highest compliment you can give to a biography of a writer. With its engaging style and fascinating subject, The Talented Miss Highsmith is a book you won't be able to put down and that you'll want to start reading again the moment you finish it.

Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (2010)

"After his death, memory of his politics was conveniently erased and he was refashioned as the quintessential author of boys' adventure stories. He thus became, and remains, perhaps the most misunderstood figure in the American literary canon."

Jack London wore a lot of hats. At various times he was a sailor, a rancher, a tramp, a manual labourer, a proselytizer, and a prospector, amongst other things. His one truly consistent occupation was that of writer, an occupation at which he laboured diligently for most of his life. In Wolf biographer James L. Haley traces how London's disparate experiences informed not only his writing, but also his very ardent socialism. From a young age London was exposed to the harshest realities of life and ever after he would gravitate towards those people most abused by the Capitalist system.

Haley goes to great lengths to show the development of London's political views as well as his eventual disillusionment and resignation from the Socialist party. This aspect of London's life is fascinating, particularly in terms of how he reconciled his beliefs with his own growing wealth, and Haley touches on how London moulded his Socialism to his own circumstances, arguing that the exploitation of the labouring poor is the enemy rather than Capitalism itself.

However, as much depth as Haley gives to London's political beliefs, he does take a rather soft approach to allegations of London's racism. His strategy of simple denial (so simple that it verges on dismissive) is also applied to the possibility that London had sexual experiences with men, and throughout the book he dangles these questions in front of the reader only to quickly deny their plausibility again and again, making some bizarre assertions in the process. Stating, for example:

"That [homosexuality] was practiced in dark corners of the Sophia Sutherland there can be little doubt, but whether London accepted this as a requisite of being a man among men in this womanless environment - his frank exposition of it to Michael Monahan suggests that he may have, but his full-bore heterosexuality in the company of women may suggest otherwise - we don't know."

Becoming an fervent ladies man and serial philanderer may be a sign of uncompromising heterosexuality but it may also be a sign of overcompensation for past same-sex indiscretions. London's sexuality and his feelings regarding race are likely more complicated than a simple "yes" or "no," but Haley's treatment of these questions illuminates very little.

Still, Wolf is a very readable and engaging book that actually focuses on the development of the subject as an artist rather than devolving into a laundry list of the subject's sexual partners, a trap into which a fair number of biographies fall. Wolf is a biography that clearly has a lot of respect for its subject as an artist and, whatever its flaws, I think that Haley does a good job in reminding us why London is essential to the American canon.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010)

“They were gone for a very long time. When they returned, Troy had been abandoned, its moss-stained walls as worn as mountain-sides, the rusting hulks of war machines decaying on its parapets amid the tatterdemalion shells of factories. The levels of the Greek palace had multiplied, gone deeper – now it resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth.” (from the chapter “Agamemnon and the Word”)

In his ingenious and exquisitely written debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachery Mason takes the characters and legends well-known from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and looks at them from a variety of different perspectives. The premise of the novel involves the discovery of a series of fragments, each presenting an alternate account of the characters and stories connected to Odysseus. Here we have multiple versions of Odysseus’ homecoming, of his adventures and the figures he encountered, even a variety of characterizations of Odysseus himself. In some stories he is the Odysseus that we have always known, cunning and brave and blessed by Athena; in others he is cowardly and will do anything to avoid fighting. In one story (told from the perspective of Polyphemus) he is a pirate who maliciously mutilates an inhospitable hermit. These portrayals play on aspects of Odysseus’ personality that have always been present and taken together they give us a full and very complex picture of one of mythology’s most celebrated heroes.

Odysseus is not the centre of every fragment and in some he does not figure directly. One story, for example, recounts the myth of Theseus and ends with an abandoned and betrayed Ariadne transforming into Calypso. Another explains the Iliad and Odyssey as elaborate chess manuals, and one reimagines the odyssey as belonging to Alexander the Great, who longs to emulate Achilles but finds that he has more in common with Odysseus.

Each story is beautifully written, full of striking imagery and wit. The stories are told in very precise fashion but are self-contained so that the novel can be opened to any chapter and enjoyed. Prior to the novel’s publication it would have been easy to argue that there was absolutely no need for more Odyssey inspired stories, but The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a terrific addition to the mythological canon.