The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 30 Sep 2012 02:28 AM PDT Does James Patterson live up to his 'world's bestselling thriller writer' label with this latest book? Guilty Wives I MUST confess that I (along with a whole bunch of fans, I'm sure) was beginning to think that James Patterson had lost his mojo – his recent books have been pretty whack, to be honest. But I'm happy to announce to my fellow followers of the thriller writer that he's found it again, and that it is pretty evident in Guilty Wives. The book, cowritten with David Ellis, offers almost everything that a fan looks for in a Patterson novel: drama, suspense, a slight hint of comedy – and the best part is that it is super concise. Unlike some authors who love to tease their readers and force them to endure entire chapters of unnecessary words (well, I'm sure they're necessary for the storyline, but seriously, it's really annoying when you just want to find out the who, what, where and why), this book, like most of Patterson's previous works, just gets to the darn point. Guilty Wives tells the tale of four married gal pals in desperate need of a vacation that doesn't involve pleasing their husbands or picking up after their noisy and boisterous kids. All these ladies want is a nice trip to somewhere far away from their families so they can spend a few days full of massages, pool time and lots of alcohol. And that is exactly what they get when 30-somethings Abbie Elliot, Bryah Gordon, Winnie Brooks go on an all-expenses-paid trip to Monte Carlo courtesy of another of their clique, Serena Schofield, who married into a rich family. The story is told from Abbie's point of view, and according to her take on her friends, Bryah is in an abusive relationship, Winnie is an exotic British diva, and Serena is one heck of a lucky woman. Thanks to Serena sharing that luck, Abbie and gang get to arrive in style in Monte Carlo in a private helicopter, and they are then ushered into the luxurious presidential suite in a lavish hotel that overlooks the scenic millionaire's playground. The girls are more than ready to surrender themselves to a weekend during which they will be free to live someone else's life, and bask in the sun and attention from the gorgeous men surrounding them. But their magical vacation turns into a nightmare when, after an alcohol-charged night in the company of some new men friends, the women are arrested for a world-shaking act of terrorism. Unable to prove their innocence, or even give a coherent account of their crazy night of passion with men other than their husbands, the women are thrown into a maximum security facility in France after a quickie, lip-service trial. Of the group, Abbie is the only one who is absolutely sure of their innocence and is determined to fight the French judiciary system that seems hell bent on seeing the women suffer for the act they supposedly committed. Isolated from her friends, unable to see her family, Abbie endures physical and sexual abuse from the prison guards and is even threatened with death during her struggle. And as she gets closer to uncovering the truth, those threats become full blown assassination attempts. Patterson and Ellis do an awesome job in setting up the scenes in the book but they do make a few mistakes here and there. The big revelation on why Abbie and her girlfriends get into this situation, for instance, falls kind of flat and asks for a little too much suspension of belief, in my opinion. Patterson seems to have slipped back into a bad habit here and underestimated the intelligence of his readers, assuming that we won't be able to catch on to the clues and solve the mystery before he does in the end. But it is fun solving that mystery, and Guilty Wives does have almost everything we have come to love in a Patterson novel. While it's not an Alex Cross winner (like Cat And Mouse or Pop Goes The Weasel), it is a definite return to form for a writer who has been called the world's bestselling thriller writer. This will do until he gets even more of his mojo back. |
| Posted: 30 Sep 2012 02:23 AM PDT Mrs Ali's Road To Happiness THE road to happiness is never straight, less so in Vizag, a small town in India where Muslims, Christians, and Hindus live intertwined lives. In this sweet little book that continues Farahad Zama's series featuring his birthplace, we follow Mrs Ali who finds her quiet retired life under threat during the holy month of Ramadan. The Alis are torn between religious convention and freedom and troubled by a myriad of other problems unique in their own Indian way but not uncommon in many parts of the world: corruption, political skulduggery, and social disparity. A young and enthusiastic new imam blows into town, bringing along a strict piousness that poises to cause an upheaval in the close-knit community and within Mrs Ali's extended family (introduced in Zama's debut in 2009, The Marriage Bureau For Rich People). "The entire community has a responsibility towards individuals who stray," the fiery imam gazes at Mrs Ali and her niece Pari who is determined to raise her adopted Hindu son in a Hindu manner. "You son will be brought up as a Muslim or you and your family will be thrown out of the mosque." Which gets the Hindu temple involved when the priests decide to take up Pari's case – in rather cowboy style. But the religious conflict, thankfully, is not overblown. Farahad Zama is an author who prefers comedy to violence, and chooses to highlight, instead of terrorism, the absurdities of fundamentalism. The whole conflict becomes a whimsical satire, and in the end, as someone asks in the book, "How can anyone imply that someone is somehow unworthy just because of their religion? People are good or bad by their thoughts and deeds, not by their faiths." Tough, though at times a worrywart, Mrs Ali wants nothing more than contentment and peace for her family. Faced with quotidian problems, she remains composed even as she struggles internally. Who wouldn't faced with all this: A road-widening has threatened the loss of her much-loved garden, the sudden termination of the electricity supply to her home has disrupted her family business, and a well that is slowly drying up distresses her, as access to clean water is, as the world knows, notoriously inconvenient and sometimes downright implausible in many parts of India. As Mrs Ali watches her worries bubble to the surface and settle seemingly permanently around her, we observe an Indian matriarch keeping a family intact and preventing its values from leaching away. There is brilliance to be found in the book, amidst the seemingly daily pettiness. "Hindu, Muslims – what's the difference, sir?" a villager asks the head of the Hindu temple. Unfortunately, as is often times true in real life, those playing political games are the ones exploiting history and nationalism and disregarding harmony. The Partition, when India and Pakistan was created, is a prime example of this, of course. It is a wound that has long been poked and prodded by many Indian writers but Zama attempts to heal it with tactful digression. It is indeed about time India moves on and pays attention to the more immediate and urgent needs of ordinary folk: better housing, a clean water supply, adequate sanitation, access to education and, most importantly, a way to ameliorate the often deadly disputes that arise due to religious intolerance and that bane of modern life, the caste system. Mrs Ali has always been the central figure of Zama's novels; apart from his debut mentioned above, these include The Many Conditions Of Love (2009), and The Wedding Wallah (2011), all set in Vizag. In her world, love rules; it is a world filled with a cast of recurring characters whose flamboyance is offset by their sensibility and generosity. In each character, Zama nimbly paints contrasting colours, rendering each of them distinctive and unique. In this latest book of his, neither ornate in style nor prolix in dialogue as most Indian novels tend to be, Zama tells a tale he envisions still taking place in his hometown or many parts of India. That simplicity humbles him and that humility in turn makes the book's lack of climax excusable. "Stand up for the prayers," the imam summons for the last time before leaving Vizag. We stand up instead to applaud Zama for having written a charming and affectionate reflection of India with its race to modernity and its cut-throat economic prosperity largely sidelined. |
| Posted: 30 Sep 2012 02:21 AM PDT This is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. Bring Up The Bodies WHEN Hilary Mantel started out on her project to write a book about the Tudor-era British statesman Thomas Cromwell, she little thought that it would develop into a trilogy. Speaking at the Hay Festival in June in Britain (an annual literary and arts event), she explained, "When I got a little over half way through Wolf Hall, I saw – not gradually, but in a flash of insight – that one book would not tell this story. The battle for England's soul was underway." And then when writing Bring Up the Bodies, "I made another sudden and alarming discovery ... I had in fact written a second book and with the arrest of Anne (Boleyn) it was almost complete". And so a single novel became a trilogy, the first part of which, Wolf Hall, won the Booker Prize in 2009 and the second, Bring Up The Bodies is tipped by some to achieve an unprecedented double this year. You could say that the British are obsessed with the Tudors and those turbulent years between 1509 and 1547 when Henry VIII married six times and divorced England from Rome and papal authority, declaring himself head of the Church of England. This is one of those periods of British history that has been endlessly taught in schools and continues to be picked over by historians. But the fascination clearly does not end with Britain's shores, as the recent and very successful American, Golden Globe-nominated TV series The Tudors clearly shows. The fascination is understandable: there is nothing that the history of the Tudors does not have – politics, sex, violence, bloodshed, intrigue, high drama and political in-fighting – so it's a heaven-made script. Mantel's take on all this is distinctly different from the very unsubtle (but, I must confess, gripping and highly entertaining) TV series. Her focus is on Thomas Cromwell, a man to whom history has not been kind yet one of the clearest examples of a self-made man we have from this period. Born into poverty and violence, he became, first under the guidance of Cardinal Wolsey and then on his own merits, the most powerful man in England, charged with the break from Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the downfall of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife. If, as I say, history has been unkind to Cromwell it is in part because the famous portrait of him by the German painter Holbein makes him look "like a murderer". But then he was. In a sense. It is this "in a sense" that makes him, and Mantel's depiction of him, fascinating. The truth, of course, is complex and largely unknowable. Her Cromwell is by turns brutal, devious, loyal and tender. His purpose in life is to serve the king and what the king wants is neither pleasant nor often wise. But Cromwell is his servant and if he is not to meet the same fate as his much loved master, Cardinal Wolsey (who was, historically, accused of treason just before he died), he will deliver what the king wants whether he is inclined that way or not. Man of conviction or of expedience? Both. We are similarly confused about Anne Boleyn. Accused of high treason, adultery and incest, she was beheaded with a single stroke of a sword in the French manner. Was she guilty as charged? In an author's note, Mantel warns us: "The evidence is complex and sometimes contradictory; the sources are often dubious, tainted and after-the-fact. There is no official transcript of her trial and we can reconstruct her last days only in fragments, with the help of contemporaries who may be inaccurate, biased, forgetful, elsewhere at the time or hiding under a pseudonym." But whatever the truth, we know she was executed, and with her died five men, none of whom were Cromwell's friends. Bring Up The Bodies is beautifully written. Mantel has long been an admired writer and in this magnum opus of Thomas Cromwell she has clearly found her world. A small example: Thinking of his dead wife and daughter, Mantel has him blur the two in his mind – "This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash." Time and again I was impressed by the precision and the eloquence of Mantel's prose. This is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. There is, of course, a mass of historical material to handle and my only reservation about this fine book is that at times the reader (and perhaps the author?) becomes bogged down in extraneous details. Historians will, of course, quibble with her interpretation, suggesting that Mantel's revisionist view of a national villain defies the facts. But "I am making the reader a proposal, an offer," she writes, an offer about how these events may have looked through Cromwell's eyes. And her own view of her protagonist? "Sometimes people ask me what I think now of Thomas Cromwell. Nothing is the answer. I don't think anything. He is a work in progress. I am not in the habit of writing character references for people I only half know ... I am not claiming that my picture of him has the force of truth. I know it is one line in a line of representations, one more copy of a copy. All I can offer is a suggestion." It is a formidable one. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan