Review of The Cutting Room by Mary Watson

Title: The Cutting Room
Author: Mary Watson
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: April 2013
Genre: psychological thriller
Source: Penguin Books SA
Rating: 8/10

Writing a plot summary for The Cutting Room is difficult – the novel doesn’t follow the chronology of its events. Putting them in chronological order for a plot summary feels disingenuous, because that’s not a proper reflection of how the novel feels to me. But all summaries and reviews are inaccurate in some way; keeping that in mind I might as well go ahead.

Lucinda is a cutter. She doesn’t cut herself with blades – she cuts and edits film – but the sense of menace and the hint at harm and self-harm are not to be ignored. For the second time in their marriage, Lucinda’s husband Amir has disappeared. The first time he went to do ‘research’, and left without saying a word to her, only sending an sms to say that he was ok. This time, Lucinda suspects that Amir has actually left her for good, although she has no way of knowing for sure because he hasn’t communicated with her at all. Their marriage had become strained, and Lucinda finds Amir too inscrutable to understand what exactly has gone wrong. Is it her fault, or is it something else?

Lonely and frustrated, she fills her days with work, dinner parties, and nights with trendy, pretty boys at bars in Long Street, Cape Town. Her nosy, paranoid neighbour keeps worrying about how vulnerable she and Lucinda are, as two women living alone in the crime-ridden Cape. Lucinda finds this annoying, but one night she is attacked with a knife in her bedroom.

Trying to get on with her life, Lucinda joins an old friend on his latest project – a documentary about a supposedly haunted house in the small town of Heuwelhoek. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet the house draws parallels with the figurative ghosts in her own life, and the problems that continue to haunt her.

As I mentioned, the actual story isn’t as linear as this plot summary. To read it is not so much to read a story in the traditional sense but to view a collage of characters, relationships and themes. The narrative jumps back and forth between pasts and presents, Cape Town and Heuwelhoek. In the present, Lucinda tries to live a life where Amir – like her own safety – is an uncertainty. When it segues to the past, we see the before and during of their marriage. At times the narrative goes back even further, to Lucinda’s childhood. The haunted house in Heuwelhoek has its own narrative arc, with stories told about the various people who lived there.

In this way, this novel has multiple facets. It’s an intimate psychological study of Lucinda. It’s depicts her understanding of her relationship with Amir. It’s a supernatural mystery with a touch of horror. It’s a tapestry of life in Cape Town, a mixing pot of cultures and histories but also a “Janus-faced city” (17) with its combination of wealth and poverty. It’s a story about intruders, whether they’re criminals breaking and entering in the city of Cape Town, or ghosts disrupting homes and lives.

We never learn when the first scene of the novel takes place, but it sets the tone for what follows. In it, Lucinda sees a burglar on the wall between her house and her neighbour’s. He’s holding a DVD player and a brick. She calls out to him; he makes as if to throw the brick at her, but it’s just an act of mockery and he runs away laughing. In real time this scene would last about thirty seconds, but it takes up several pages as we’re plunged into Lucinda’s interior world. Some of her thoughts are random and a bit silly – she’s impressed that this man jumped onto this high, narrow wall and wonders how criminals train to master their craft; she compares her stereotypically sinister image of criminals with the ordinary person before her; she thinks of how he looks like the Oros man with his big belly and orange T-shirt; she thinks about how much she hates the Oros man “with that bloated rubber dominatrix suit. That sinister smile. His round dead eyes” (3). When her mind focuses on the reality of the situation, she is scared but also annoyed – this man intruded on her Sunday morning and now she’s a witness to his crime. She has been infected by someone else’s problem. It reminds her of a similar, haunting experience as a child. She is, to an extent, in danger, but the burglar uses her vulnerability to humiliate her.

What comes across here are the themes of crime and intrusion, the psychological narrative style in which the story is related, and a brief but illuminating idea of who Lucinda is as a person. The way you can be shamed by what other people’s sins. This kind of detailed interiority makes The Cutting Room a relatively dense, demanding read, but also a rewarding one. Watson’s writing is impeccable: her combination of choppy and run-on sentences mimics the nature of Lucinda’s thoughts, and the details with which she weaves her stories and characters are captivating.

Lucinda is a complex character who I empathised with, admired and disliked all at once. In some ways she’s similar to me – a coloured woman from Cape Town with her fair share of insecurities. Coming from a historically impoverished background and a troubled childhood, she is now sophisticated and financially comfortable, but deeply conscious of keeping up her desired appearances. If she seems cold at times, it could be because she prides herself on being able to be “aloof and unemotional”. When people ask about Amir’s absence, she tries to be nonchalant, never admitting how shamed and lonely she is. I particularly like this anecdote about her cravings for KFC and what it says about her character:

 Lucinda, then approaching thirty, wanted to be stylishly grown-up; she wanted to be sophisticatedly disaffected. The only thing was that every now and then she craved Kentucky Fried with the same intensity that Rapunzel’s mother wanted those radishes in the witch’s garden. She needed the deep grease and she wanted to lick the small bones clean. But she hated going down into the KFC wearing her little boutique dresses – the smell of refried oil absorbed into the expensive fabric and her hair. She felt stared at. Sturvy. So she would slip into an old tracksuit and head down to the Main Road as if in disguise. It became a secret; it just didn’t fit in with the deli and boutique culture she was working so hard at. (41)

“Sturvy”, by the way, is coloured Cape Town slang for “snooty” and its one of the scatterings of slang that Watson has woven into her depiction of the city. She doesn’t explain it, which might be a bit confusing for international readers, but which I thought was great, as explanations tend to distance you from the culture.

Anyway. Lucinda struggles with being alone, not only because Amir has disappeared but because she simply doesn’t know what to do with her time at home. Her work has made her hopelessly impatient:

Lucinda was getting used to manipulating time. She was becoming adept at making it lengthen and contract at will, at the click of a mouse. But it meant that she no longer knew how to wait. That she who had once waited and waited (for Cat to come home from school, for the princess, for her mother to get out of bed, her father to call) had lost the art of sitting something out. Lucinda’s sense of time no longer followed the wise circle of the clock. Instead, it had become a timeline that could be revisited. She could jump from the beginning to the end; she could sever anything that lingered unnecessarily. Except she couldn’t really. And later she realised that she, like software she knew so well, could also play a loop: have one small moment repeat endlessly. To see it relentlessly without reprieve. To know the details, each frame, but to be unable to change even a fraction of a second. (42)

She repeats those small moments by reliving happy memories of her relationship with Amir, to the point where those “comforting memories were worn thin from being taken out and lingered over on too many evenings in with a glass of wine” (14).

It’s quietly tragic, but this isn’t actually a particularly sad book. Lucinda’s narratives – and the book as a whole, in fact – are laced with a sense of menace that elevates the novel from dreary domestic drama to psychological thriller. There are countless details and stories that involve or suggest violence and cruelty or carry the threat of the supernatural – ghosts, witches, the tragedies of the past claiming victims in the present. It’s not something I can properly articulate in the space of a review – the effect is subtle and cumulative, so a few quotes won’t really convey the unsettling tone of the whole.

It’s interesting to note though, that crime isn’t the primary source of menace. Yes, the novel tackles the issue of crime in South Africa, but it doesn’t resort to the relatively simplistic depiction of fearful citizens preyed upon by vile criminals. Rather, crime is one aspect of a more complex consideration of fear in general.

One depressingly memorable moment is when, as a child, Lucinda is walking home with her sister Cat and they hear a woman screaming:

Lucinda thought, rape. Because that was the scariest thing. That’s what they were always warned about. Be careful when you walk home because you might get raped. Don’t go to the caravan park because you might get raped. (44)

Almost as scary as rape itself is the idea that a child would immediately think of rape when she hears a woman screaming. That says a lot about the kind of society that Lucinda and Cat grew up in. But the incident quickly becomes very different: when the woman emerges it’s revealed that she’s screaming for hep for her drowning brother. Lucinda and Cat only stare at the woman in shock, until she runs off looking for someone more capable. Then the two girls just walk on, and Cat immediately starts talking about their library books. Lucinda is more disturbed – was there really a drowning man? Has it got anything to do with the legend of a dead Princess who drowns children in the vlei? She never finds out what really happened and the incident haunts her for years. The unknown is just as threatening as regular crime, at least for Lucinda: ” While she minded gangsters very much, she was more frightened by things she couldn’t see, things that touched a nerve” (54).

The ghosts, whether real, imagined or figurative, cut deeper than any incidents of crime. They are born of intimate, unsettling secrets, they bring personal insecurities into sharp relief, they kindle obsessions. I particularly enjoyed the ghost stories of the house in Heuwelhoek. They raise more questions than they answer, but they get under your skin. As a genre fan I was hoping Watson would make the supernatural horror story a bigger part of the novel. I wasn’t unhappy with what she did, I just wanted more of it, with a more satisfying resolution.

But the book is primarily and Lucinda’s relationship with Amir and the mystery of his disappearance. This is probably not a good choice if you’re looking for sheer story – the book is packed with stories within stories, but the main arc of narrative moves quite slowly and isn’t especially exciting. The appeal lies in everything around the core narrative – the characters, their histories, the writing.

I was captivated, but if I have an any complaints, it’s that yes, the novel does drag in parts. As Watson mentioned in a Q&A with Penguin, The Cutting Room is a very reflective book rather than a typically fast-paced thriller. The challenge was to balance reflection and action. For the most part, I think Watson balanced it very well, not with guns-and-chases sort of action but with gripping stories and intriguing encounters. Nevertheless, Lucinda’s problems start to become tedious in the last third or so and I really wanted to hear more about the Heuwelhoek house instead.

Niggling aside – The Cutting Room is good. Very good. It’s one of the most sophisticated South African novels I’ve read and a classily macabre work in its own right. Recommended.

Review of Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

Title: Wolfhound Century
Author: Peter Higgins
Published: 21 March 2013
Publisher: Gollancz
Genre: science fiction, alternative history fantasy, thriller
Source: I received a review copy from Gollancz Geeks, but had to use an eBook for reviewing purposes, hence the absence of page numbers for quotes.
Rating: 7/10

I judged this book by its cover. I took one look and assumed it was a political or military thriller within the sf genre. A perfunctory glance at the blurb -  “SF thriller… alternative Russia” – and I moved on. Only when Gollancz Geeks sent out an email about the book and possible review copies did I take a closer look and realise that Wolfhound Century is actually the kind of weird, hard-to-categorise genre fiction that I like. It’s still, in part, a political thriller but it’s far more bizarre and surprising than I’d expected. 

It’s set in an alternative Soviet Russia known as the Vlast, where for over three centuries angels have fallen from the sky, supposedly killed in a heavenly war. Their massive stone bodies have been used for buildings, machines, and biological modifications that serve the totalitarian state of the Vlast.

Investigator Vissarion Lom has a sliver of angelflesh embedded in his forehead. Among other things, “it encourages loyalty. The sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the whole. It’s a way of binding you to the Vlast.” And Lom is a dedicated, loyal policeman, willing to take down his own corrupt peers even if it means that he’s despised and his career remains stagnant. It’s because of this work ethic that Krogh, Head of the Secret Police, summons Lom to the capital Mirgorod to capture a terrorist. Joseph Kantor is “a one-man war zone”, a man who spreads chaos, fear and distrust”, but who is protected by unknown allies within the Secret Police. He uses his guise as a rebel to uphold tyranny. Because Lom is unknown in Mirgorod, Krogh hopes he can track down Kantor and “stop him. By any means possible. Any at all”.

What Krogh and Lom don’t know is that Kantor is also being influenced by an angel – the last fallen angel, known as Archangel, although it has no real name. Unlike its predecessors, Archangel fell to earth alive. It is slowly poisoning the forest around it as if “shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing”. Dying, but fused deep within the earth, the Archangel reached out with its mind and found Kantor. It promised him dominion over this world and others, if only he would perform one task – destroy the Pollandore.

The Pollandore is the stuff of folklore, described once as a ‘”forest god” although that doesn’t really capture its role in the narrative. Rather, the Pollandore is potential personified – it embodies the possibility of another world, specifically a world without the influence of the angels. And this last angel – Archangel – wants to destroy all possibility of a world free from its dominion.

Most people assume the Pollandore is a myth. The Vlast captured and caged it a long time ago, but couldn’t kill it. Now the wounded forest itself sends an emissary to the city to find a way of opening the Pollandore and saving the forest – and presumably the world – from the cruelty and destruction of the Archangel. The forest’s only hope is Maroussia, Jopseph Kantor’s stepdaughter, who holds the key to opening the Pollandore. Her path collides with Lom’s, and although she fears and hates him as a policeman, he becomes her ally when she finds herself hunted by the Secret Police. Lom himself gradually begins to rethink his loyalties as he wonders, for the first time, what the sliver of angelflesh in his forehead has really done to him.

This isn’t what I expected with this novel, and it should serve to remind me to be a bit more open-minded when judging books by their covers. Well, some books anyway. Wolfhound Century frequently surprised me with its world. When I started reading I’d forgotten what was outlined in the blurb; I recalled only that it was supposed to be a genre-leaping book that was hard to categorise, and it had been praised for being dark and inventive. As far as worldbuilding is concerned, the novel certainly lives up to the hype.

At first there are only a few minor fantastical elements – giants, stone golems called mudjhiks, Archangel, the angelflesh that seems to be more than just dead stone. Then some of the characters are revealed to be more than simply human. Maroussia, who has “an open, outdoor scent. Rain on cool earth” clearly has some kind of intrinsic link to the forest; a power which terrifies Kantor. Lom reveals a weak ability to manipulate the air, which he feebly uses when suddenly attacked by sentient rain. Raku Vishnik, a mutual friend of Lom and Maroussia’s, works as the official City Photographer, and has discovered an otherworldly city existing in the same space as Mirgorod. He has photographed the moments when the otherworld breaks through into their world and the laws of physics go awry. And like the alternate reality bursting through into the current one, the novel seemed to flourish with the bizarre as I read. Even as I neared the end it continued to unveil its wonders.

It wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular if not presented in Higgins’s vivid writing, and I spent a lot of time taking down quotes. What I also love is the way Higgins uses the world to emphasis the central conflict between the cold brutality of Mirgorod and the Vlast, and the mythical world of the forest, teeming with life and uncanny beauty. Consider, for example, these descriptions of the Lodka, the colossal building housing the Secret Police HQ:

Six hundred yards long, a hundred and twenty yards high, it enclosed ten million cubic yards of air and a thousand miles of intricately interlocking offices, corridors and stairways, the cerebral cortex of a stone brain. It was said the Lodka had been built so huge and so hastily that when it was finished, many of the rooms could not be reached at all. Passageways ran from nowhere to nowhere. Stairwells without stairs. Exitless labyrinths. From high windows you could look down on entrance-less vacant courtyards, the innermost secrets of the Vlast. Amber lights burned in a thousand windows. Behind each window, minsters and civil servants, clerks and archivists, and secret policemen were working late.

The Lodka cruised on the surface of the city like an immense ship, and like a ship it had no relationship with the depths over which it sailed, except to trawl for what lived there.

It sounds frighteningly Kafkaesque (I also assumed that Joseph Kantor is a reference to Joseph K, although I’m not sure why). Compare it to the sense of life in these passages about the forest:

The tree was eating light and breathing clouds of perfume.

The perfumed tree-breath was its voice, its chemical tongue. It was speaking to the insect population in its bark and branches, warning and soothing them. It as speaking to its neighbour trees, who answered: tree spoke to tree, out across the endless forest. And it was speaking to him. Psychoactive pheromones drifted through the alveolar forests of his human lungs and the whorled synaptical pathways of his cerebral cortex.

Maroussia was walking among them. She placed her hand on the silent living bark and felt her skin, her very flesh, become transparent. She became aware of the articulation of her bones, sheathed in their muscle and tendon. Eyes, heart and lungs, liver and brain, nested like birds in a walking tree of bone. A weave of veins and arteries and streaming nerves that flickered with gentle electricity.

I think science and fantasy are beautifully entwined here, and the descriptions draw distinct parallels between the life of the forest and the functioning of the human body, bringing to light the ways in which life is connected. It’s a stark contrast to the pointlessness within the Lodka’s structure, and the impersonal nature of the work that is done there, ignoring or stamping out life rather than nourishing it. To the Vlast, people are only useful as parts of a vast machine. If it considers it individuals to be connected, it is only so that they may serve the demands of the state, which in turn serves only itself.

While the forest and other mythical beings seek to stop destruction, the Vlast only seeks more power and has been engaged in a years-long war with the vaguely defined Archipelago. No reason is given for the war, but I think it’s safe to assume that the Vlast wants to expand. Although the Novozhod (the Vlast’s version of Joseph Stalin) is set to begin negotiations, Krogh warns that

“There are those who say there should be no end to the war at all. Ever. Warfare waged for unlimited ends! A battle waged not again people like ourselves but against the contrary principles. The great enemy.”

It’s a surreal combination of science fiction, fantasy, folklore and political thriller, but surprisingly undemanding. Wolfhound Century feels like a light combination of China Mieville and 1984. It’s much quicker and easier to read, but still contains social critique and a wonderfully inventive alternate history. Sadly, it fails to be as good as 1984 or a Mieville novel.

The problem is that Wolfhound Century is the first in a series, and the author seems to be saving too much content for the sequels. The first half is brilliant; then it gradually peters out as you realise this isn’t quite the novel you were promised. At first it looked like the climax would involve opening the Pollandore. Instead, the heroes never get anywhere near the Pollandore. There’s a prolonged fight that I thought would be just be the final showdown before the climax, but as I got closer to the end I realised that this fight was the climax. It would have been ok if only the preceding events hadn’t led you to expect so much more.

Yes, it’s just the first book in a series, so no, it won’t resolve all conflicts. But even when novels are written with sequels in mind, they still have self-contained plots – one set of conflicts is set up and then resolved in a way that leaves a new set of conflicts to be tackled in sequel. You get a full story, but with the understanding that it’s part of something bigger. Wolfhound Century seems to give you half of the first story, resolving nothing except for a fight that seemed secondary until I realised it would be the last major event of the book. Despite being quite impressed with most of the novel, I somehow finished thinking “Is that it?”

There are unfortunate gaps elsewhere too. The characters of Lom and Maroussia feel quite flat even though they drive the story, and most of the secondary characters are much more interesting than them. Lom is little more than the standard dedicated cop, wandering through the standard plot where he’s forced to question what he believes in after realising that system has betrayed him. It’s hard to see Maroussia as more than a desperate, gasping victim. They’re both cardboard cutouts in a phantasmagorical world, shuffling between people who seem more real than they do. Kantor, luckily, was fleshed out a bit more. Although his history is a tad vague in parts, we learn a lot about his ruthless philosophy of life:

Kantor’s life had been shaped by the dialectic of fear and killing: if you feared something, you studied it, learned all you could from it, and then you killed it. And when you encountered a stronger thing to fear, you did it again. And again. And so you grew stronger, until the fear you caused was greater than the fear you felt. It was his secret satisfaction that he had begun to learn this great lesson even before he was born. He was an aphex twin: a shrivelled, dead little brother had flushed out after him with the placenta and spilled across his mother’s childbed sheet. Before he even saw the light of day, he had killed and consumed his rival.

I hope Kantor will be as interesting an antagonist as his philosophy promises.  He has a strong start in Wolfhound Century, but falls to the wayside in the last third or so.

There are also some issues with the world, although these are less noticeable because that aspect of the novel is generally done very well. Still, I was left wondering about the world outside the Vlast – does anyone else know about the fallen angels? Have they fallen anywhere else? We don’t know exactly where the angels came from, and that makes sense, but the general belief is that they’re aliens, so why does everyone subscribe to the angel mythos? It’s possible that it was put in place by the authorities, who claim that the Vlast’s ongoing war with the vaguely defined Archipelago is an extension of the heavenly in which the angels died. But as far as I can tell there’s no institutionalised religion in the Vlast, so why employ Christian mythology here?

I hope there are answers and a more satisfying story arc in the sequel. I would really like to read it because this was still a mostly good and pretty exciting book. It’s flaws lie not so much in quality, as in the fact that it feels so damn incomplete! So if you’re thinking about reading this, I suggest you do. But put it on hold until the sequel comes out. According to Goodreads, it’s called Truth and Fear and is due to be published in March 2014.

Up for Review: Strange Bodies

The cover’s shit, but the plot summary made me curious. And hey, it’s written by Louis Theroux’s brother! I know that doesn’t mean the book will be good, but it made me read a bit more about Marcel Theroux. He has an interesting and varied biography, which is always promising for fiction.

Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux (Faber and Faber)

NetGalley Blurb:

Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive.Yet nothing can make him change his story. From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth – a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.

Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.

Strange Bodies will be published on 2 May 2013 by Faber and Faber.

Links:
Goodreads
Faber and Faber
Buy a copy: The Book Depository | Amazon | Amazon.uk

About the Author
Marcel Theroux is a screenwriter, a broadcaster, and an award-winning novelist.

He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He grew up in England, was awarded a first-class degree in English Literature at Cambridge University and then won a fellowship to Yale where he took an MA in International Relations with a specialization in Soviet and East European Studies.

He has published four novels to critical acclaim. His second novel,The Paperchase, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His most recent novel, Far North (2009) was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2011.

He has written and presented more than a dozen documentaries on subjects ranging from climate change to the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi. - from the author’s website
Website
Goodreads
Twitter
Wikipedia

The SA Fiction Collection

It is time, I’ve decided, to build a collection of South African fiction, particularly South African genre fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime fiction and anything else that takes my fancy – I want it in print and, if possible, I want it signed. I’ve picked up a few here and there, beginning with the dire social and political fiction bought for university courses, depressing enough to make your eyes bleed and heart wither (actually, I think I gave those away; I won’t miss them). Then, like a flash, a copy of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, bought with my staff discount when I worked at Exclusive Books. Suddenly reading local fiction could be a pleasure, could be fun, even when it was serious. Slowly, I sought out more. I went to the occasional book launch or panel discussion and got signatures. I became familiar with the names and spotted them at sales and second-hand stores. And recently I’ve received a few review copies.

Maia, and part of my SA fiction collection. The rest of the books are in Cape Town

One day, they will have their own shelf, but for now they will be a new feature on my blog. I’ll share pictures, information, thoughts on any launches I was able to attend, and the occasional review or flash review. I’ll add to the excitement about the latest titles, but hopefully turn some attention towards the obscure ones as well. Readers outside SA probably won’t be able to get many of the titles at the moment, but I’ll do my best to find out what’s available internationally. Feel free to let me know about other genre titles that you think I should check out, or let me know about local stores with good selections (new or second-hand), sales, and signing opportunities. Regardless of whether or not I can take advantage of those myself, I can always put up an announcement.

I hope you all enjoy the new feature Happy reading!

Up for Review: Helen of Troy

I don’t get around to reading nearly as much non-fiction as my nobler self would like to, but I’m quite excited about this study of the paradoxical nature of female beauty embodied in the myth of Helen of Troy.

Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation by Ruby Blondell (Oxford University Press)

NetGalley Blurb:

The story of Helen of Troy has its origins in ancient Greek epic and didactic poetry, more than 2500 years ago, but it remains one of the world’s most galvanizing myths about the destructive power of beauty. Much like the ancient Greeks, our own relationship to female beauty is deeply ambivalent, fraught with both desire and danger. We worship and fear it, advertise it everywhere yet try desperately to control and contain it. No other myth evocatively captures this ambivalence better than that of Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, and wife of the Spartan leader Menelaus. Her elopement with (or abduction by) the Trojan prince Paris “launched a thousand ships” and started the most famous war in antiquity.

For ancient Greek poets and philosophers, the Helen myth provided a means to explore the paradoxical nature of female beauty, which is at once an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man’s name through reproduction, yet also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. Many ancients simply vilified Helen for her role in the Trojan War but there is much more to her story than that: the kidnapping of Helen by the Athenian hero Theseus, her sibling-like relationship with Achilles, the religious cult in which she was worshipped by maidens and newlyweds, and the variant tradition which claims she never went to Troy at all but was whisked away to Egypt and replaced with a phantom.

In this book, author Ruby Blondell offers a fresh look at the paradoxes and ambiguities that Helen embodies. Moving from Homer and Hesiod to Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides, and others, Helen of Troy shows how this powerful myth was continuously reshaped and revisited by the Greeks. By focusing on this key figure from ancient Greece, the book both extends our understanding of that culture and provides a fascinating perspective on our own.

Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation will be published on 2 May 2013 by Oxford University Press.

Links:
Goodreads
Buy a copy: The Book Depository | Amazon | Amazon UK
On the publisher’s website

About the Author
Ruby Blondell is Professor of Classics at the University of Washington, co-editor/translator of Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, and editor/translator of Sophocles: The Theban Plays. - From OUP
University of Washington profile page
List of works on Goodreads

Review of Stolen Lives by Jassy Mackenzie

Title: Stolen Lives
Series: Jade de Jong #2
Author: Jassy Mackenzie
Published: 2010
Publisher: Umuzi
Genre: crime thriller
Source: own copy
Rating: 6/10

I hadn’t planned to review this novel, and had’t heard of it until I stumbled across a second-hand copy during my recent holiday in Cape Town. I’d been taking the opportunity to build my collection of SA genre fiction, so I was quick to grab this crime thriller. Jassy Mackenzie is one of the better-known names in SA fiction and is currently in the spotlight with her latest release, Folly, about a woman who falls on hard times and sets up a domination dungeon in her garden, offering her services as a dominatrix to make some much-needed cash. Stolen Lives, published in 2010, also has a sexual theme, but it tackles sex crime and is (presumably) much darker and more violent. It’s the second in a series featuring PI Jade de Jong. I haven’t read the first book, Random Violence, but I thought this one stood perfectly well on its own.

If you spot it online or in store, I suggest you avoid reading the blurb unless you don’t mind learning about two thirds of the major plot developments. I’ve written a plot summary that’s less exciting, but less revealing. The story opens in the London, where Detective Constable Edmonds, newly promoted to the Human Trafficking Division of Scotland Yard, goes on her first raid at a brothel that’s been using trafficked women. They fail to capture the owner or the mysterious woman who injures two cops and escapes with an accomplice, but they at least manage to rescue the girls, most of whom have been trafficked from South Africa.

In Jo’burg, the very wealthy and impeccably groomed Pamela Jordaan hires Jade de Jong to be her personal bodyguard. Pamela’s husband Terence recently went missing, and because he owns a stripclub – the kind of business that attracts dangerous people – Pamela fears for her own safety. Jade thinks she’ll just be babysitting some paranoid housewife, until she and Pamela are nearly shot in broad daylight, and Pamela’s daughter Tamsin goes missing as well. Further investigation draws Jade into the sordid world of sex work and human trafficking, and instead of simply watching Pamela shop, she finds herself dealing with cases of torture, murder and rape that are all linked to the trafficking case in London.

At least Jade has the help of police Superintendent David Patel, her ex-lover who recently ended their brief relationship on a cold and awkward note after a moral disagreement. David is dedicated and ambitious, but horribly overworked. He still cares about Jade though, so he does his best to help her, especially when her case begins to involve serious criminal activity and intersects with his own investigations. Although neither of them harbour any illusions about the dangers of the situation they’re involved in, they still find themselves unprepared for the extent of the violence and brutality that follows.

Not surprisingly, Stolen Lives offers bleak picture of crime in South Africa, and Jo’burg in particular. I learned quite a bit about the human trafficking in my home country, assuming Mackenzie’s novel is as accurate as it seems. Apparently it’s the third most lucrative crime in the world, after drug trafficking and arms dealing. South Africa is, depressingly, both the source and destination of trafficked women, and the laws related to these crimes are so inadequate that they tend to work against the victims rather helping them. Any such case is a “right bloody pain in the arse” for the cops, and the USA has actually put SA on a watch list for “an inability to exhibit efforts to meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” (36)

I don’t know SA was a human trafficking hub, but the inefficiency of governmental and legal systems wouldn’t be a surprise to any citizen, and the novel makes this an integral part of the plot. Home Affairs is portrayed as an inefficient institution, rotten and reeking with corruption. Officials take a year or more to process passports and ID books, or expect bribes before they will do anything. On the other hand, passports can easily be bought as long as you have the money and the right contacts. One of the villains goes to violent lengths to procure a set of forged passports, and other countries are said to complain about the number of fake passports from South Africa (leading, for example, to South Africans requiring a visa to enter the UK). One character describes the country as “beautiful but lawless”, which is a tad melodramatic, but I understand where that feeling comes from.

Still, Stolen Lives is hardly the bleakest novel I’ve read about SA. It’s subject matter is disturbing, but it’s not written from the perspective of those who suffer the most – the trafficked women or the women who move to Jo’burg from small towns, desperate for jobs promised by the allure of the big city but finding themselves resorting to sex work. We see things either from the POV of law enforcement agents (Jade, David and Edmonds), or the criminals they’re trying to stop. This is still a crime novel intended to entertain, so the victims are seen only through the eyes of cops or criminals, their voices heard in interviews or pleas. Pamela could be considered a victim of sorts, but she is so snotty and spoilt that it’s hard to feel much sympathy for her, especially since her family’s troubles are a consequence of their sordid business dealings.

That said, this isn’t what I’d call an easy read. It may take a more privileged perspective on sex trafficking, but this is not a book for sensitive readers. It includes torture, rape, and a great deal of other violence. Not all of it happens on the page, but a young woman describing how she was kidnapped, locked up and repeatedly raped is horrifying enough.

On a gentler note, are the personal lives of Jade and David. They broke up because of Jade’s attitude to killing – she shot the man who murdered her father, and feels no remorse. In fact, she believes certain people deserve to be killed – a moral issue the novel raises a few times. David, however, disagrees so strongly with this that he left. They still care about each other, but David has another complication – his wife Naisha and young son Kevin. The couple separated after Naisha had an affair, but again, David still loves her and is doing his utmost to maintain a strong relationship with Kevin despite his demanding job. Over in the UK, Edmonds’s story is more focused on the case itself, but we still get an understanding of her as an awkward woman, trying hard to overcome her insecurities in order to do good work. The novel also gives a glimpse into the culture of Jo’burg, which is much more… intense than the laid-back attitude of Capetonians. There was a bit of comic relief in Jade’s description of the way Pamela “screamed Sandton, from her big, gold-framed sunglasses and the silver Patek Philippe watch on her left wrist to the oversized diamond rings that sparkled on her red-manicured fingers”. Sandton is an affluent suburb in Jo’burg, and although I’ve never spent much time there, I know exactly the kind of person Jade is talking about.

There is, you may have noticed, quite a lot going on here. Too much perhaps. There are four main crimes – Terence’s disappearance, Tamsin’s disappearance, the human trafficking in the UK, and a kidnapping that I omitted from my plot summary – as well as several minor ones. As a reader, you can assume from the start that they’re linked, and certain sections show exactly how they’re linked, although they don’t reveal all. Jade and David, however, aren’t able to figure this out until the last quarter of the novel, when it comes as absolutely no surprise to you. By then, you’re just waiting for them to fill in the blanks. There are also many different viewpoints – the narrative switches frequently between the main characters (Jade, David, Edmonds) as well as minor characters whose brief appearances show us parts of the plot that the protagonists aren’t privy to. Towards the end, there are even sections from the villains’ POVs.  And with the multiple viewpoints come multiple story arcs. It’s not hard to keep track of everyone, but it does make the novel feel very untidy, with stories and characters scattered all over the place. Mackenzie brings everything together, of course, but it’s not all that satisfying. Perhaps one of the reasons is that it’s not the kind of crime thriller that engages you in the mystery by giving you the means to figure things out on your own. Either you know more than the protagonists, or you have to wait for someone to you exactly what happened.

It’s still a good read – it has the action, violence and shock value that you expect from a crime thriller – it’s just not as tightly plotted as I would have liked, and there were some details that didn’t make sense or were left dangling. I also thought it very stupid that Jade goes alone to face the villain in the final confrontation, with David not even considering the possibility that this might be extremely fucking dangerous and suggesting she wait for help. Instead, he just gives a lift home so she can get her car and drive off to her possible death.

One other concern I want to mention is the way that non-white characters are usually described according to their race. If, for example, a woman is described only as being tall with brown hair, you can assume she’s white. Because if she’s black, coloured or Indian, that will be part of her description. Mackenzie is hardly the only author to do this and she doesn’t always do it, but it’s so noticeable because this is a crime thriller about detectives, and providing physical descriptions of characters is a standard means of evoking an investigative tone. One character who is frequently described as the “black accomplice” when other, more important descriptions could be easily be used. It wouldn’t be a problem if the white characters were similarly described. It’s also not necessary, and not all authors do it, opting for more subtle means of describing their characters unless the issue of race is pertinent. Is the word “black” meant to evoke a sense of menace in accordance with stereotypes? Or does this trend, here and elsewhere simply acknowledge the way many readers see white as the norm and wouldn’t imagine a character to have a different skin colour unless it was specified? But that’s another debate.

All in all, Stolen Lives is a decent crime thriller, given weight by the very serious issue at its core. Crime has become a major theme in South African fiction, a dire but welcome change from the (post) Apartheid politics that dominated our novels for so long. Stolen Lives highlights a major issue in the SA crime scene and asks difficult questions. Although I had some issues with the book, I liked the moral ambiguities – the way villains can become victims and vice versa, the way characters sometimes do unpleasant or cruel things to achieve more admirable ends. I’d grit my teeth before venturing into another of Mackenzie’s novels, but don’t take that as a reason to shy away from her. Her works are available locally and abroad, so check them out

Beautiful Redemption Winner!

And the winner of Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is…

Victoria!

Congrats!

I’ve emailed Victoria and will send off her prize as soon as I have the address. Thanks to those who entered, and happy reading everyone!