The Sooterkin
Tom Gilling
Viking £9.99, pp211
Buy it at BOL
Music for the Third Ear
Susan Schwartz Senstad
Doubleday £12.99, pp208
Honeymoon
Amy Jenkins
Flame £10, pp361
Buy it at BOL
'We are a colony beset with monstrosity,' claims the Rev Mr Kidney in Tom Gilling's debut novel The Sooterkin, 'as much in the commission of sin as in the punishing of it.' It is 1821, and in Kidney's reluctant and sometimes indifferent parish in Hobart, Tasmania, two freakish births have taken place - a foal with a single horn and no front legs, and a strange creature like a seal pup, with fur, flippers and whiskers, born to a young woman.
The foal dies, but the pup thrives, and news of its existence spreads like a stain. Tasmania is at this time Van Diemen's Land, a distant country where the conquering West rids itself of its undesirables. Hobart is made up of a fractured collection of convicts, itinerant whalers, colonialist speculators and oppressed indigenous people. No one, however, is impervious to a kind of repelled fascination for this mysterious animal.
Realising this, and discovering the pup's musicality, his convict parents turn their strange offspring into profit, putting on a circus show for their impoverished neighbours. But it's not long before churchmen, medical men and tall, well-dressed impresarios from America come knocking at the door.
Gilling's writing is both lush and sparse. He sketches the nascent social structure of Hobart with a few precise strokes: a dead gum tree that serves as the town noticeboard, a meeting of the scientific society, an economically frustrated newspaper. He is also good with people. Every individual is described in brief yet deft detail: 'Banes is always pleased with himself. If men were obliged to bid for the privilege of being Dr Benjamin Banes, Banes would immediately put up his hand for ten thousand dollars and consider it a bargain.' Such skill is satisfying and addictive to read. This is a startling, original novel.
When I picked up Music for the Third Ear I was struck by the odd vagueness of the title. What did it mean? I am still none the wiser. No matter, because Music... is a tightly woven, unusually perceptive account of the repercussions of war on individual lives.
Mette is a Jew living in Norway. Conceived in a Holocaust liberation camp, she has grown up in the shadow cast by her parents' experiences in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. After the Balkan crisis, mindful of the charity her parents received in Norway, she agrees to house two refugees, a Bosnian Muslim man, Mesud, and his Croatian Catholic wife Zheljka, because 'she wanted to think of herself as a good person'.
As with the nature of good intentions, nothing goes as planned. To Mette and her husband, the refugees lack the 'humility' of Mette's parents. Instead of being grateful, they are scarred, traumatised - and angry. Zheljka reveals, in language plain with fury, her experiences in a rape camp and the child she conceived as a result. She and the boy had been living together in an awkward complicity, but then Mesud returned and forced her to give him up for adoption.
Mette becomes fixated with this child, partly because she is childless and partly because she knows that the terrible effects of war are inherited. She conspires behind Zheljka's back to get the child to Norway, and so begins a struggle which involves the press, the immigration authorities and a national debate on human rights.
Music... is artful and compassionate, taking on difficult subjects without crassness or predictability. Senstad pits two wars and two generations against each other in a way that manages to be understanding and unjudgmental.
Amy Jenkins's name is never mentioned without being followed by the words 'This Life' and '£600,000'. I wonder if her publishers enquired about the semantically elastic label 'creator of This Life' before shelling out, because Honeymoon leaves me perplexed.
The plot gives more than a nod to Noël Coward: on her wedding night Honey Holt comes face to face with the long-lost 'Love of Her Life' on a hotel balcony. He is also on his honeymoon, and Honey is thrown into confusion over which man she wants: dependable Ed or exciting Alex?
I would love someone to write a rom-com where the heroine decides that the men on offer are such ridiculous opposed stereotypes she'd rather stay single. Or have a ménage à trois. Or become a lesbian with her feisty best friend (they always have feisty best friends). The problem here is that the romantic conundrum meant to keep you reading is so blindingly solvable from page one that you can't believe there are 360 more to go.
The other problem is that our heroine is unpalatable. We're supposed to find her exasperatingly charming, cutely tiresome, be beguiled and amused by her emotional U-turns and various screw-ups: she misses the plane, she eats too much at her reception, she opens the door in pyjamas, etc The idea that anyone thinks this is an accurate reflection of modern woman is deeply depressing.
Tears fall 'wetly'; people in a lounge look 'loungey'. Jenkins has a penchant for one-word sentences which make the text. Rather. Clunky. This book has all the depth of a paddling pool with a leak: 'I miss you,' Ed said. 'Arrrrrrrgh! I screamed, but not out loud. Inside. Pain. Ohmygod - it hurt so much.' Noël would have choked on his martini.
