Fiction

The Age

Saturday August 13, 2005

CAMERON WOODHEAD

BOOK REVIEWS: Little Scarlet; White; The Bitch Goddess Notebook; An Acre of Barren Ground

Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley, Phoenix, $19.95

It's 1965 and Los Angeles is burning. Race riots have swept the city of angels, and the police turn to Easy Rawlins to help solve a sensitive case. A white man, pulled from his car and beaten in a black neighbourhood, escapes into a nearby apartment complex. Soon after, a black woman is found dead and mutilated in the building he fled into. The suspect has vanished and the cops fear that if they descend en masse into a black precinct to investigate, it may spark another wave of violence. Easy and his crime-prone friend Mouse tackle the mystery and soon they're on the trail of a killer whose rage has been fired to infernal pitch by racial prejudice. Walter Mosley tells a mean story. Little Scarlet is fine-honed, knife-edge noir. Detective fiction written about as well as it can be done.

White, Marie Darrieusecq, Faber, $29.95

There's an eeriness to Marie Darrieusecq's latest novel, White, a part-thriller, part-romance situated on a remote ice-bound station near the South Pole. It's 2015 and Pete and Edmee are running from separate tragedies. Pete takes comfort in the practical rituals of life; Edmee strives to maintain communications with the outside world. A thwarted romance blossoms between them, but the ghosts of the station haunt their daily rounds. When a power failure strikes the Antarctic base, the spirits rise to claim their own. The desolation of the novel's setting is echoed in Darrieusecq's bleak, unstructured style. It would be tempting to dismiss parts of this novel as simply bad writing, and though parts of it are bad, they're not simply so. The incantatory phrasing, hanging parentheses, the looseness (almost contingency) of the prose, all build to produce a wild and unsettling effect.

The Bitch Goddess Notebook, Martha O'Connor, Orion, $29.95

Rennie, Amy and Cherry are three high-school friends who combine to form the Bitch Posse, which like most school cliques forms both a refuge from and a vehicle for the adolescent anomie that propelled them together. Rennie, to mitigate the rigours of being a straight-A student, is sleeping with her dishy drama teacher. Amy has alcoholic parents, a severely handicapped sister, and shreds her cheerleader's uniform to run with the posse. Cherry, whose mother is a coke-fiend, has a Princess Diana fetish and a disturbingly violent relationship with her Marxist boyfriend. But it's not all about listening to Sisters of Mercy and the Smiths and going at your wrist with a butter-knife, as the three troubled teens discover one night when something happens that will shatter their friendship forever. The Bitch Goddess Notebook is a surprisingly realistic story about growing up gothic in the '80s that contains the kernel of a decent teen movie.

PICK OF THE WEEK

An Acre of Barren Ground, Jeremy Gavron, Scribner, $39.95

It has been a long time since an attempt to keep the novel novel has really grabbed my attention, but An Acre of Barren Ground did that and more. Jeremy Gavron's book is a magnificent achievement, and those who relish fiction that gives a vivid sense of place will adore it. This is the story of Brick Lane, London's longest alley. Each building along its length has a tale to tell. There are migrants and revolutionaries; a monk and his lover; a detective who thinks he's caught Jack the Ripper, James Boswell; a gangster's sister; a mammoth's thigh; a dotcom on the brink; and a woman who scavenges her living from the sewers that run beneath the lane's fetid cobbles. Gavron weaves magic from successive waves of history, and his characters' stories begin to resonate through time. In terms of formal innovation, Gavron includes some bizarre novelties: a chapter composed entirely from quotations, another in comic form, yet another in photographs. But it is the skill with which these components are layered that takes the breath away. I think it does for the East End what W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn did for East Anglia.

© 2005 The Age

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