Tag: pedophilia

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Hybrid Publishers, literary fiction, Publisher, Robert Hollingworth, Setting

‘The Colour of the Night’ by Robert Hollingworth

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The-colour-of-night

Fiction – paperback; Hybrid Publishers; 321 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

When I first came to the UK in 1998 and told people I came from Melbourne, the first thing they wanted to talk about was the Australian soap Neighbours, which is set there. At that time Brits were such fans of the show it was screened twice daily. I still remember staying in a youth hostel in Glasgow and being holed up in my room by a backpacker from Northern Ireland who knew all the characters and storylines inside out but mistakenly thought many of the locations, including the suburb Erinsborough, were real places.

I mention this because if Neighbours is your only reference for what life in the Melbourne suburbs is like then this book by Robert Hollingworth will shatter all your illusions — but in a good way.

The Colour of the Night follows the lives of a group of neighbours living in a terrace of three houses on Frederick Street in an inner-city suburb. They don’t know each other when the novel opens but by the end they’re all familiar with one another in ways that are sometimes surprising and sometimes shocking.

Meet the neighbours

Stefanie and Simon are married artists, with two children — 18-year-old Jess, a Goth with a drug habit who self-harms, and James, who lives in a bungalow in the back garden and has a job in roadworks.

Next door lives divorcée Adele, who has given up a career in nursing to make more money as an escort, and her son, Elton, who has dropped out of university and spends his entire time online.

Then there is Nikos, a Greek landlord, who rents out the terraced house on the corner to two tenants: Arman, a refugee from Afghanistan who now drives a taxi, and Benton, an Englishman who has an unhealthy interest in children.

Drawing all these neighbours together is Shaun, an 11-year-old boy, orphaned by the Black Saturday bush fires. He has a great affinity for nature — “He entered the bush as other children entered an interactive game, although Shaun’s console control was little more than a snapped stick, his keyboard the whole forest, his mouse a mouse” — so when he moves to the city to live with his aunt, Adele, and cousin, Elton, it comes as somewhat of a shock.

Technological advance

The author, who takes his time to introduce each of these well-drawn characters chapter by chapter, explores many themes in this intriguing novel, including the city versus the country, and nature versus digital technology. He deftly builds up a series of interconnections between everyone (which occasionally relies on a smidgen too much coincidence, but that’s by the by) and in doing so shows how the concept of community in the real world has often been lost, perhaps because we’re too busy building up our social networks online.

There are minor disasters — a DIY basement excavation has repercussions for the entire terrace, for instance —  a blossoming love affair and a case of adultery, but Hollingworth doesn’t resort to cheap operatics: he keeps things fairly restrained and, to his credit, doesn’t let his narrative succumb to predictable outcomes.

It feels like a thoroughly contemporary novel, focusing as it does on how quickly our world is moving in terms of technology. This exchange between Elton and Shaun, whom are just eight years apart in age, is but one example:

… Shaun asked on an impulse, ‘Elton, what did you do where you were my age?’
‘What I do now, I guess. But the computer games were pretty basic. Google was new, no Instagram, no Twitter or Vine, no Tumblr or Kik or…’
‘What did you do when you were five?’
Elton tried to think. ‘It was a different world then, Shaun. You couldn’t do stuff that we take for granted today. Just 64 kilobytes. Unbelievable.’

The Colour of the Night also asks important questions about spirituality, our connections with the natural world and our relationship to art and culture. It’s filled with great dialogue, intriguing characters (with even more intriguing back stories) and brilliant descriptions of people and places. But when all is said and done it’s just a great story well told about contemporary life in modern Australia. And, needless to say, it’s far more authentic — and entertaining — than any episode of Neighbours.

Please note that you won’t find The Colour of the Night in book stores outside of Australia. However, you can order a copy direct from the publisher or buy an electronic edition from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Alissa Nutting, Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Tampa’ by Alissa Nutting

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Tampa
Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber and Faber; 272 pages; 2013.

I’ve read a lot of outrageous books in my time, but Alice Nutting’s Tampa is right up there with the best of them. (The title refers to the Florida suburb in which it is set, but it could also be a play on words, because the main character does “tamper” with people she shouldn’t.)

It’s confronting, disturbing and, well, icky, but there’s something about this novel which had me reading it at break-neck pace — I raced through it in just a day or two — and then wished I’d not galloped to the ending so quickly.

Taboo content

To be perfectly frank, this novel isn’t for everyone. Many will be put off by the subject matter and the explicit sex (page one opens with a masturbation scene, just to set the mood for the rest of the book). And that’s understandable — not everyone wants to read about a female teacher grooming young male students for her sexual pleasure.

But what makes this novel such a riveting read despite the unpalatable concept at its heart is the voice of the narrator, which is wondrous in its sheer bravado, wickedness, narcissism and wit. This is the voice of a 26-year-old woman who knows that what she is doing is illegal but doesn’t give two hoots about anything other than feeding her own insatiable appetite for 14-year-old boys.

I’ve not read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita but I rather suspect Celeste Price, eighth grade English teacher, with her blond hair, red corvette, ultra-handsome husband and unusual sexual obsessions, might give Humbert Humbert a run for his money.

Indeed, it’s hard to fathom a more loathsome character in fiction, but I was completely drawn in by Celeste in a disturbing I-don’t-wish-to-be-complicit-but-can’t-help-it kind of way. I found myself hanging on to every word she said, and even though I became more and more shocked by her outrageous behaviour — and the sheer kinkiness of her relationship with student Jack Patrick — I was kind of willing her on and hoping she’d get away with it — which is an unusual position to be in as a reader, particularly when you know that the narrator is not only abhorrent and immoral, her actions could have long-lasting and damaging psychological impacts on her victims.

Unanswered questions

Perhaps the greatest strength of Nutting’s titillating, often perverse, novel is the questions it throws up. If Celeste is every teenage boy’s fantasy, what’s so wrong about her hitting on them? Where are the lines drawn between teacher and pupil? If Celeste was not beautiful, would she get away with this kind of behaviour? Is her marriage to Ford, a policeman who works night shift, to blame?

Of course the storyline is preposterous — or is it?  We certainly know from news stories and the like that there are plenty of men out there who prey on teenage girls, but are there women, in the real world, preying on young teenage boys?

Tampa brings to mind Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb, which features an equally perverse and deviant character — a man who develops an unhealthy relationship with a young girl — but is far more explicit and confronting, perhaps because it places us firmly in the head of the perpetrator.

While I would not describe this as a comfortable read, it’s certainly attention grabbing, fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, the literary equivalent of a car crash, and yet it’s one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read all year.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, John Banville, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Viking

‘Ancient Light’ by John Banville

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Ancient-light

Fiction – hardcover; Viking; 256 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Love, grief and memory are common themes in John Banville’s work, and his latest novel, Ancient Light, is no exception.

The story has two narrative threads spooling from the one narrator: a current storyline in which ageing stage actor Alexander Cleave is given a rare movie role starring opposite a bright young thing, and a second storyline in which he remembers his first unlikely love affair as a teenage boy in 1950s Ireland.

Both narratives twist and turn around one another, allowing the past to inform the present, but also reminding Alexander of two tragic losses in his life: that of his first lover and that of his adult daughter’s suicide 10 years before.

A killer first sentence

The book opens with a rather striking first line:

Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.

Alexander was 15 and Mrs Gray was 35. Their illicit — and illegal — affair commenced on a metal-framed camp bed — “or it might have been a horsehair mattress thrown on the floor” — set up in the laundry room and then proceeded in all manner of uncomfortable places: the back seat of Mrs Gray’s car, a derelict house in the woods and the floor of the laundry room after the bed mysteriously disappears.

This tantalising storyline recalled in snippets and moments of self-doubt — “Images from the past crowd my head and I cannot tell if they are memories or inventions” — explores how the young Alexander was besotted with his older lover. And it shows, in painstaking detail, how the pair risked condemnation, ruination and, worst of all in Roman Catholic Ireland, damnation for their sordid behaviour.

Lots of questions to think about

A book of this nature throws up all kinds of questions for the reader — particularly when you consider recent news stories in which grown men have gone on the run with teenage lovers and then been thrown in prison for their actions.

This story might be about an older woman and her teenage lover, but does this make it any less of a crime? What was Mrs Gray doing sleeping with a schoolboy? And because Alex was, quite frankly, a randy young male, does this make their sexual liaisons more acceptable?

Of course, Ancient Light only ever tells Alexander’s side of the story — and even then we are never quite sure how much of it is reliable, a point that he labours constantly. The reader, however, will come to their own conclusions.

Me? I figured Mrs Gray was lonely, bored and looking for a frisson of excitement in her dull 1950s small-town life as a homemaker and mother (this does not make it right), and Alexander, initially thrilled by the sex, was clearly not mature enough to handle the complexity of an adult relationship. He struggled with his emotions, often rowing with Mrs Gray or sulking because she behaved in ways he didn’t expect. She fulfilled a need — and not just a sexual one.

Lovely writing, perfect voice

As ever with a John Banville novel, the writing is rather lovely, ripe with meaning and exquisite sentences. The voice of Alexander — a heady mix of pomposity, runaway ego and heartfelt regret and sadness — is captured so expertly that I did not know whether I loved or loathed him.

Occasionally alarming, often tender and moving, this is a novel of remarkable insight. And as a multi-layered confessional, looking back on a life marked by an aching sense of loss, it is a pretty damn fine one.

Ancient Light won the 2012 Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It is the final novel in the trilogy formed by Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), neither of which I have read, an oversight I plan to rectify soon.

Author, Bonnie Nadzam, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Other Press, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Lamb’ by Bonnie Nadzam

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Lamb

Fiction – Kindle edition; Other Press; 289 pages; 2011.

Who says newspaper reviews no longer sell books? Last week I read a review of Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb in The Telegraph and promptly ordered it in ebook format. And like the Telegraph reviewer, I, too, raced through this book, barely stopping to eat or even breath. It’s compulsive and urgent and compelling,  but it is also disconcerting and creepy. I suspect it is going to be one of those stories that stays with me for a long time to come.

One man’s personal crisis

The story is told by a a rather detached omnipresent narrator  — “We’ll say this began just outside of Chicago” — but we only ever get to witness David Lamb’s version of events. David is 54 and is going through some kind of personal crisis: Cathy, his wife, has left him but he has not told anyone, including Linnie, the younger woman at work, with whom he’s been having an affair. Then his aged father dies, leaving him pretty much alone in the world.

It is on the day of his father’s funeral that he meets Tommie, an 11-year-old girl, who tries to bum a cigarette from him while he is standing in a car park. She has been put up to it by her bitchy school friends, who are watching events unfold from a short distance away. David thinks she looks like a “pale little freckled pig with eyelashes” and wonders if the trio might not be playing a joke on him.

He took the girl’s bare arm just above the elbow and she jerked back, as if suddenly awake. Everything quickened. The sky seemed brighter, traffic faster. “Let’s pretend,” he said low, talking fast, already pulling her toward his Ford, “that I’m kidnapping you. I’m going to pull you, just like this—” She dropped the cigarette and tripped over the long ends of the sandals. “And I’m going to walk you to my car,” he said, pulling her along. “You’re not going to scream, but you’re going to look back at them. Okay? So they know you’re afraid.” Inadvertently, the girl did exactly as he said. “Now don’t freak out,” he said. “We’re just scaring your friends. They deserve it, right? I’m not going to hurt you.”

What follows is a deeply troubling narrative in which David and Tommie go on the run to his cabin in the woods. Much of the novel is about their road trip, including overnight stays in hotels, in which David goes to exceptional lengths not to touch his young companion.  But as much as he respects Tommie’s privacy — he steps outside and “counts to sixty twice, very slowly” whenever Tommie has to change her clothing — it’s clear that he is grooming her, by building trust and making her feel special at every opportunity.

Once in the Rockies, holed up in a run-down cabin, they pretend to be uncle and niece in order to thwart an elderly neighbour from discovering the truth.

For much of the story, Tommie seems happy to be in David’s company. But the longer she is away from home, the more her toughened exterior begins to show signs of cracking. The dilemma for the reader is trying to figure out to what extent Tommie comprehends what is going on — how mature is she for her age and does she genuinely feel love for the man who is essentially keeping her captive?

The reader feels complicit

Reading this book is a fascinating exercise in trying to understand David’s motives and actions. He knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he rationalises everything, so that it is difficult not to feel complicit. Most of the story is told in dialogue, and it is his conversations with Tommie that are the most illuminating. While his voice is so needy and wheedling, it’s hard not to pity him.

Strangely for a novel that is about one man’s warped relationship with a young girl, there is no sex here. Nadzam is not interested in writing gratuitous scenes, although it appears that something of a sexual nature does occur between them towards the end of the novel. For the most part David seems intent in simply rescuing Tommie from a life which he believes — rightly or wrongly — is impoverished and poor; it appears he only wants to do good — but that doesn’t necessarily get him off the hook.

In fact, a lot of what happens in this novel is open to interpretation (it would make a terrific book club novel for that reason). This is helped by Nadzam’s restrained narrative, which lends the story a lean quality in which the reader must fill in the gaps.

Ultimately, Lamb — which won the Centre for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2011 — is about exploring truth, trust, innocence, thwarted dreams and coming to terms with growing old. It is perversely sad, deeply unsettling, lovely and grotesque all at the same time.