Short takes: Fiction

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Thomas Christopher Greene: Mirror Lake

This story of love, friendship and betrayal set in a tiny Vermont farming town is an ambitious project from a first-time author. Greene weaves his double-stranded tale across the decades, between the 1940s and 1990s, setting up pockets of narrative and emotion that echo nicely back and forth. His narrator is satisfyingly flawed, in some ways an unpleasant but archetypal modern guy: Nathan Carter, in his early 30s, has yet to settle down after an early adulthood of serial monogamy and commitment-phobia. An emotional loner, he nevertheless befriends a reclusive old farmer, Wallace Fiske, who eventually tells Carter his tragic story of love gone wrong. As Fiske's story unfolds, we see it reverberate in Carter's own life, just as Carter himself is finally falling in love with a woman who may be too circumspect to love him in return. It's a bit cliched in places, but Greene has nevertheless largely succeeded in creating a voice, a mood, that carries the beautifully paced story convincingly through to its intriguing end.

Century, $34.95

* * *

Valerie Martin: Property

Set on a sugar plantation in Louisiana in the 1820s, this dark novel is narrated by Manon Gaudet, the miserable, spiteful wife of the barbarous plantation owner, and owner of a slave woman who has born her husband two children. No trace of 21st-century sensibility here. Slaves are property, their lives forfeit to their masters and mistresses; no fellow human feeling is apparent. Yet beneath the whites' self-lies, hatred and cruelty, in the place where guilt should be, lurks instead a terrible fear of their subjugated slaves, and indeed at this period, and in this book, there are violent uprisings in which escaping slaves take revenge. For all that, Gaudet is a convincing woman of her time. We cannot like her, yet we can learn from her and greatly admire the author's honesty. Beautifully written and utterly, horribly believable, the novel attempts no unbelievable transformation, no modern-day humanistic epiphany, just an uncovering of what Gaudet herself (albeit selfishly) describes as "lies without end".

Abacus, $34.95

* * *

William Boyd: Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart

Logan Gonzago Mountstuart's autobiography, "this riotous and disorganised reality" that spans the 20th century, has had fabulous reviews all over the place and is now out in paperback. He travels through 85 years and several continents, rubbing up against the extraordinary, the tragic, the humorous: Oxford in the 20s, Paris in the 30s (Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway), Spain in the civil war, wartime espionage, the dreadful Duke and Duchess of Windsor, New York's art world, Baader Meinhof...

"An addictively enjoyable read," says the Literary Review.

Penguin, 26.95

* * *

John O'Farrell: This Is Your Life

This attempt at comic satire on our celebrity-obsessed culture, a coming-of-age story for those who think you can get something for nothing, is made boring by its predictability. Through a series of events involving the death of a famous comedian, a couple of lies on Jimmy's part and the media's enormous gullibility, Jimmy leaves his drab life behind and becomes a mega stand-up comedy star, all without ever having told a joke in public. Sappy, crappy and tedious.

Black Swan, $26.95

* * *

Kathleen Tessaro: Elegance

I had high hopes of this one - it seemed such a good idea, and it's so nicely packaged. Louise Canova, whose marriage is failing, finds an ancient self-help book, an A to Z encyclopedia of style, and decides to follow it to the letter and see what happens. Unfortunately she's so stupid and wearisome, her husband so dreadful and their relationship so empty that we lose interest even before we get to "A" which, in this case, is very much for asinine. Unfinishable.

HarperCollins, $34.99