Short takes: Paperbacks

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Ann-Marie MacDonald: The Way The Crow Flies

Canadian MacDonald's first novel, Fall on your Knees, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book and was a bestseller internationally. This is also bound for the bestseller lists: even at 730 pages it's a compulsive read, filled with poignancy, tragedy and horror of a frighteningly prosaic kind that contrasts with its dreamlike, optimistic setting amid 1960s suburbia. "The sun came out after the war and our world went Technicolour. Everyone had the same idea. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Let's be the ones who do it right."

The Cold War, with all its ambiguous morality, is in full swing, and the McCarthy family is about to get unwittingly caught up in the spooky world of covert actions, Nazi immigration and anti-communism. Jack McCarthy is a wing commander in the Canadian Air Force, married to beautiful Mimi, with two children, Mike and Madeleine (the central character).

They move to a quiet Canadian Air Force base where the peaceful suburban routine is interrupted by the murder of one of Madeleine's friends. This murder is a convergence of events and secrets lurking below the surface of both the small community (some of the scenes are reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye), and the McCarthy family. Its effects plough into the future, into the second part of the novel when Madeleine, by then an adult, is forced to confront the meaning of it all.

MacDonald is an intelligent, witty writer, who plumbs great psychological depths in her main characters and shows enormous political astuteness. She wonderfully evokes a family, a way of life and an era in this epic work. Madeleine is a terrific creation - we never doubt her (although some of the more peripheral characters don't sit as comfortably).

Weak points: a trifle glib on the benefits of counselling, a bit much luxuriating in period or social detail when we just want to return to the plot. But overall, this marathon read maintains its pace to the finish line. A great summer read.

(Fourth Estate, $34.99)

* * *

Pat Barker: Double Vision

To read anything by Pat Barker, a former Booker Prize winner, is to marvel at her meticulous skill: her honed language that produces images icicle-like in their sharpness ("His sleep was threadbare, like cheap curtains letting in too much light") and her cool, coherent storytelling. Here, she chooses violence as her theme, overt as in war, and more covert, as in the way war and other forms of violence may ravage the human mind. Peace, we understand, is always misleading.

Stephen Sharkey is a war reporter, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, who heads north to his brother's home in Northumberland (where the land hides the border conflicts of the past, and is scarred by the foot-and-mouth bonfires of recent times) to recuperate and to write a book on representations of war - using the photographs of his friend Ben, who was killed on assignment in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Ben's widow Kate lives nearby, trying to complete a commissioned sculpture, although recovering from severe car crash injuries. Stephen begins an affair with a woman 20 years his junior; Kate hires a local man to help her with the heavy work of sculpting. Darkness and physical danger encroach. The thinking person's thriller.

(Hamish Hamilton, $34.95)

* * *

Richard Loseby: Looking For The Afghan

In Blue is the Colour of Heaven, the author, a local advertising creative director, spent months in 1990 travelling through Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, where he joined the Mujahadeen as they battled Soviet invaders. In this follow-up, Loseby goes again to the region to find out what became of his friend Nebi, a young Hezbollah mujahed who had saved his life. Loseby writes both colourfully and sensitively about his quest and the people he encounters along the way. It's more than just travelogue, though: he's a man growing towards middle age having to accept his own limitations ("the bars are on the window and Peter Pan has to fly away"), moving through places that have known the horrors of war and tyranny, and huge social change.

(Penguin, $29.95)