Fiction

There are a number of strands at play in this curiously titled novel set in postwar London in the Coronation year, 1953. The well-to-do Mrs Harriet Wallis, convicted of the murder of her husband, Cecil, becomes the second-last woman in England to be hanged. The last woman to be executed for murder in England was Ruth Ellis, about whom Mike Newell made the film Dance with a Stranger (1985), with Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

The sticker on the cover assured me that if I had enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society I would ‘love’ Stillwater Creek. Had I been browsing the bookshop shelves, this would have been fair warning not to part with my money. Myriad readers obviously did love Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s international bestseller. Alexander McCall Smith certainly did: he chaired the committee that recently voted it The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year. TGLAPPPS bored me so much that I failed to finish it, but I can see why McCall Smith, who writes novels in a similar vein and with similarly whimsical titles, championed it.

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.

Set in Sydney, Wendy James’s third novel, Where Have You Been?, an intriguing story of family, loss, memory and identity, is just as compelling as her previous ones, Out of the Silence (2005) and The Steele Diaries (2008).