Saturday Review: Paperbacks: Fiction
ISOBEL MONTGOMERY AND DAVID JAYS

The Guardian – United Kingdom
Jun 05, 2004

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray (Penguin, pounds
7.99)

A writer of short stories who has a medical background at once
suggests comparisons to Chekhov, but in the case of John Murray
they are worth drawing. The viewpoints in this collection are richer
than one would expect in a debut and the stories have an austerity,
almost a severity, born, one suspects, of Murray’s experiences as a
doctor in the developing world. Second-generation immigrants to the
US, often of Indian parentage, crisis-raddled or simply confused,
his characters struggle with what it means to be human. Murray grants
them epiphanies in Indian cholera treatment centres or refugee camps
on the Rwandan border; his stories are old-fashioned, yet refreshingly
bold when so many writing-school graduates do not venture beyond the
insular discontents of consumer culture. “What difference can any
of us make?” is a question worth raising, and one that Murray forces
his characters to face head on.

Isobel Montgomery

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury, pounds 6.99)

It is easy to see why Sam Mendes wants to film this wonderfully
vivid debut, which sets a coming-of-age story against Afghanistan’s
recent history. Amir and Hassan are motherless boys growing up in
Kabul just before the coup that deposed the last Afghan king. Amir
is Pashtun, a Sunni and privileged, while Hassan is the son of the
family servant, Shia and a member of the Hazara minority – making
theirs a friendship that cannot survive childhood. Its climax is
Kabul’s yearly kite-fighting festival in which the pair’s victory
culminates in Amir’s betrayal of Hassan. Amir is haunted by his
cowardice throughout invasion, escape and exile in America, and it
is only the fall of the Taliban that offers him an opportunity to
redress the wrong he has done his best friend. Hosseini brilliantly
personalises a place and a history for a western audience, but his
eagerness to match political upheaval with emotional crisis makes
the narrative over-determined. Isobel Montgomery

Buddha Da, by Anne Donovan (Canongate, pounds 7.99)

You can get used to anything . . . almost. But a dad who would “dae
anythin for a laugh so he wid; went doon the shops wi a perra knickers
on his heid” is much easier to cope with than one who announces “Ah’m
gaun doon the Buddhist Centre for a couple of hours”. Next thing he is
chasing round Glasgow with a trio of monks trying to track down the
reincarnation of a lama; then, before his family realises that this
is more than one of his fads, he has swapped drink for meditation and
is telling his wife he wants to practise celibacy. Told in a rich
Glaswegian through the alternating voices of Jimmy, his wife and
their 12-year-old daughter, Anne Donovan’s portrayal of a Damascene
conversion in an ordinary household is warm, if not always funny. She
not only makes the practical problems of religious fervour central
to the story, but within pages the dialect writing becomes something
to savour rather than stumble over. Isobel Montgomery

Gilgamesh, by Joan London (Atlantic Books, pounds 7.99)

Nunderup only just makes it on to the map of Australia; there’s nothing
there but hard work and hard faces. When Edith’s plump British cousin
and his handsome Armenian friend visit, imaginative horizons open –
and she gets pregnant. Armenia nags at her like a necessary dream,
until she slips away, baby in one arm, suitcase in the other. Edith
makes it to a dispiriting England and on to the Orient Express,
defying the approaching war until she attains her fabled Armenia. She
finds a disconcertingly real place, its hazy air laden with petrol
and protest. The ancient epic Gilgamesh , about friends who travel
the world and dare death together, haunts this book, even though
Edith feels it’s a Boys’ Own legend. Nothing happens to women, she
protests: “It’s not their story . . . women get stuck.” Her quest
is none the less achingly brave, and in this beautiful first novel,
the deceptively calm pages contain a turbulent, heroic longing.

David Jays

The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, by Paul Theroux (Penguin, pounds
7.99)

In the title tale of Theroux’s collection, American artist Gil Mariner
returns to a snooty hotel in Taormina. He remembers a Sicilian summer
40 years earlier, when as a young traveller he was uncomfortably
coopted by a wealthy German countess. Softened up by luxury and
teased by the Countess’s breast with its “lovely smooth snout”, Gil
became a bedroom flunkey, playing self-hating sexual games. Theroux is
known for travel writing and fiction set abroad – other stories here
visit South Africa, Vegas and Hawaii – but this novella is stained by
grubby braggadocio. Better are the bewildering intimations of sexual
knowledge in “A Judas Memoir”. In four linked episodes, a Catholic boy
stumbles towards queasy adult knowledge in small-town America. Guilt,
disgust and betrayal snag his imagination, prompted by vicious nuns,
stagnant holy water and a priest pawing his scout troop with scaly
hands. David Jays

Living Nowhere, by John Burnside (Vintage, pounds 7.99)

Don’t believe the death certificates, says Burnside – everyone
in Corby dies of disappointment. The Northamptonshire town was
hollowed out when its steel plant closed in the 80s, but this novel
opens 20 years earlier, with the families who sought a new life
there. Everyone comes from somewhere else, no one considers it home –
not the Scottish Camerons nor the Latvian Ruckerts, each a family at
sea, especially after the friendship between teenage Francis and Jan
ends violently. The plant steeps the community in “a miasma of steel
and carbon and ore”, the smuts and stink staining even the snow. The
characters maintain a conviction that home is somewhere in the past
or future, but Burnside writes so forcefully about the pitiless town
that you miss it when Francis does a bunk, wandering from Scotland
to California. Writing with a poet’s electric apprehension of the
material world, Burnside puts the ghosts back into a town without
history. David Jays