KEY POINTS:
Christine Leunens was born in the United States but now resides in New Zealand. A former fashion model, she traded the catwalks and soft-focus lenses for the dusty mazes of university libraries and the ramblings of bearded and bespectacled English professors. After completing an MA in English literature, Leunens decided to write an epic, historical novel.
What she achieved is both epic (read: long) and historical (read: predictable), but it is also dark, disturbing and totally unrelenting. Caging Skies begins in late 1930s Austria. Here we meet Johannes Betzler, a regular kid who lives a regular life with his common or garden variety parents, his diabetic sister and aged grandparents - he is the poster boy for normality.
But the sudden death of Johannes' sister, combined with the outbreak of WWII, is the catalyst that propels him down a self-absorbed path where reality, like a rare bird, flutters from his grasp. Johannes' transformation begins when he joins the Hitler Youth. Here, he revels in the messages of hate and superiority and dreams of being one of Hitler's elite guards.
After he loses an arm and half of his face in a bombing raid, Johannes' dream fades and he morphs into a far more sinister version of Victor Hugo's Quasimodo - he is bitter and naive and, ultimately, utterly evil. Now housebound, Johannes quickly discovers that his parents are hiding a Jew, Elsa.
Rather than turn her and his parents in, as they had feared, he surprises himself (but not us) by falling in love with the object of his hate. But Johannes is not really in love: he has confused this positive emotion with power and obsession. As the story unfolds, the reader wants one question answered: will Elsa free herself from the cage, the mental prison that Johannes has placed her in, and fly away or will she perish under his constant scrutiny? This book is reminiscent of John Fowles' The Collector.
But Johannes lacks Frederick Clegg's verve and intelligence - in fact, he is such a paranoid loser that it is virtually impossible to engage with his troubled narrative. In its essence, Caging Skies walks the fine line between romance and horror: disfigured hero imprisons the object of his affection for her own good.
It is a hackneyed proviso, and, to be honest, has been done far better elsewhere. Johannes should have taken Quasimodo's simple advice: "The owl goes not into the nest of the lark." Bridget van der Zijpp is a product of the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University. Misconduct is her first attempt at writing fiction and her first published work. It should be no surprise, then, that the work is raw, self-conscious, and lacks the polish that comes with experience.
It is mid-life crisis time for Simone. She is 40, suddenly single, out of work, and desperate to have a baby. She has just caught her man sleeping with the neighbour and has imploded, destroying his car, the "other woman's" clothes, and what little self-respect she had left. Her life is a trainwreck, pure and simple. The question is: can she get it together or is she doomed?
Simone's friends throw her a 40th birthday party and quickly pack her off to an isolated seaside hamlet so she can put herself back together again. Rather than work through her problems alone, Simone finds herself surrounded by an eclectic assortment of aged villagers. She becomes a surrogate daughter for them - fetching milk, fixing the plumbing, making up the fourth hand at bridge, preparing cappuccinos at the local coffee shop and so on.
They accept her immediately - she is one of the gang: another of life's cast-offs. At no time, however, does the reader really feel they have a handle on just who Simone is, or even what she looks like. I am still not sure if she's a brunette (although I assume she is), whether she is tall or short, curvy or athletic - it's a total mystery. On one hand she professes to be a 40-year-old loser, while, on the other, 25-year-old surfers are knocking themselves out to bed her (not to mention 19-year-old accounting students).
Simone thinks and acts so much like someone in their mid-20s, that the reader soon forgets she is supposed to be middle-aged - her characterisation, therefore, is as conflicted as she is. Unfortunately, van der Zijpp's debut work, like her protagonist, is in need of a makeover, some refining and, most importantly, a reality check.
The reader is simply unable to suspend disbelief and buy into Simone's world - it is far too constructed, with the authorial hand clearly visible behind each and every forced metaphor. I desperately wanted to like this book, but just like Simone's man, I found myself expecting more, and, in the end, was unable to commit to the overall superficiality it offered.
* Steve Scott is an Auckland reviewer.
Caging Skies
By Christine Leunens (Vintage $27.99)
Misconduct
By Bridget van der Zijpp (Victoria University Press $30)
