Room for a Stranger - Melanie Cheng
I really do try to read my Kindle downloads mindfully and slowly but sometimes the book is so excellent that my self-imposed control is challenged. Melanie Cheng is a GP in Melbourne with a husband and three children. And she still has time to write such a control-shattering novel! This book is the story of Meg, a seventy something living alone in her childhood home. She has nursed her parents until their deaths and then her sister who was crippled by a childhood accident for which Meg (and her mother) blamed herself. Her social life is made up of Atticus, an African grey parrot and two school friends; she is content with her garden and her neighbourhood. However, a violent stranger breaks into her house and, although he quickly leaves, she begins to feel unsafe. She contacts an organisation which oversees accommodation for overseas university students and the elderly. This means the elderly can stay in their own homes with company and support, and the students experience domesticity in Australia at a bargain price.
Andy from Hong Kong is in the second year of a pre-medicine degree. He feels the pressure from home to repay his parents’ sacrifice, especially as he is well aware that he is finding his course too difficult. He and Meg try their best to communicate and in this cultural miscommunication, Cheng finds lots of gentle humour as well as educating us about how easy it is to misinterpret a different culture. No doubt Cheng’s own experience of being born in Adelaide, growing up in Hong Kong and now living in Melbourne has given her plenty of examples of such misunderstanding. Both Andy and Meg endure crises that change their lives. Cheng is too wise a writer to give us a neat, cliched ending but there are partial resolutions. Room for a Stranger is far more than a story with a sophisticated structure. It is wonderfully written with such perception and compassion that the characters live on in our minds after we have reluctantly finished the final page. This is the kind of excellent book that can be read by all ages: Like all quality writing, it is beyond specific labels. I would recommend it for thoughtful readers in their adolescence as well as rather older people.
PLUNDERING THE BOOKSHELVES OF OTHERS
With five days of disconnection from email, I became an even more shameless plunderer of the bookshelves of friends and acquaintances. If I had any enemies with bookshelves, those would have been plundered as well. One of the few disagreeable aspects of life in Timor Leste is the complete absence of any bookshops for readers of English, although in some of the dodgier accommodation choices in Dili, there are informal lending libraries. Sadly, most of these books have embossed writing on their covers. It is a truth universally acknowledged that embossed titles are a sign of pulp fiction. Despite the embossed title, Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield is more “Dickens lite" than pure rubbish. The river in question is the Thames and the time is the later part of the nineteenth century. The focus is the Swan Inn, efficiently run by Margot and her sickly husband, Joe. One bleak midwinter night, the door bursts open, interrupting the regulars in the accustomed story telling. A badly injured stranger staggers in, holding what seems to be the corpse of a little girl. So begins a story that meanders just like the river: There are digressions and smaller creeks feeding into the river. All these have to be investigated before the identity of the miraculous child can be confirmed. Perhaps. The author has combined the leisurely narrative style of a typical nineteenth century novel, with references to superstition, legend, a tale of a benevolent ghost, suspense, tales of love lost and won, with references to the future such as Daunt the photographer and fleeting discussions of Charles Darwin’s book about his theory of evolution. None of the characters can be aware of the stupendous changes these last two factors will impose on their culture. How could they? Although Bess with her Seeing Eye might have had an inkling if she had chosen to use her insight irresponsibly.
Another appealing aspect of this novel is the important part played by pigs. Until living in Timor Leste, I had never appreciated the beauty and wisdom of pigs. I found the interactions of mother and daughter sows with their carer, the heroic Robert Armstrong, to be charming and completely authentic. Talking matters over with pigs is a very rewarding activity. Being very intelligent, pigs seem to be at least bi-lingual in English and Tetun, with a smattering of Bahasa and Portuguese. As the river approaches the ocean, it becomes more swift, and just like the river, as this book nears its climax and end, the suspense becomes more pronounced, reaching a satisfactory as well as an ambiguous conclusion. Almost all loose ties are neatly knotted. Living in Timor Leste is experiencing new learning almost daily and I now understand I have to put aside my prejudice against the embossed front cover of a paperback book.
AN INTERESTING MIXTURE
I used to be puzzled by people who could read two books at a time but when one is reading one book from the bookshelf of a Living Legend and a different one on Kindle, not assisted by the dodgy internet, one adjusts. The Living Legend aka The Landlady came to Timor Leste for six months seventeen years ago as a volunteer and has stayed, working at the Marist Brothers’ Teachers’ College and helping less long-term volunteers adapt to the challenges. Like me, she is also besotted with India as well as various other obsessions, so I was delighted but not surprised to find Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki.
This is a family saga/migration story beginning with a beautiful and cunning young girl who deliberately lies to the family of her future husband. The truth is only revealed when she is married: She is gorgeous but she is fourteen to the horror of her Anglophile, literary husband. She is illiterate and a complete monster of selfishness disguised by a veneer of charm. This unhappy couple produce one daughter, Shona; the husband is promoted and spends most of his time in London but is able to fly back to Bangladesh each month for the purpose of keeping everything “respectable”. Their daughter falls in love with a completely unsuitable young man and elopes with him to London. They marry, have twin sons and a very happy marriage for twenty years. Shona returns to university for successful graduate studies and becomes an English teacher at a delightful school. She and her father are reconciled and he is willing to give her a large amount of money for a need close to her heart.
The third generation, the twins, provide further secrets to be hidden: One is a student at Oxford and the other falls in love with a girl he must not marry. What is so clever about the plot is the way a series of lies, often told for what seems understandable reasons, cause endless heartache because of their unintended results. You do not have to love India to enjoy this debut novel because the writing is so engaging and the plot so well-crafted. The same description can be given to my Kindle choice, Monsters by Sharon Dogar whose other novels I have loved. This book is based on the story of Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary, who wrote Frankenstein.
Shelley was ravishingly handsome, aristocratic and a rebel as well as a poet. He believed in telling the truth about everything and dreamed of a society of equality for all social classes and genders. In reality, in his personal life, he was a cad. When his wife was pregnant with their second child, he eloped with Mary Godwin and her half-sister, Jane. When Mary was pregnant with their first child, he promptly seduced Jane, all in the name of honest relationships. However, probably the most repellent character of all is Lord Byron, the poet and serial womaniser who believed boasting about his conquests was being honest. As one of the characters points out, this utopian vision does not really work for the women who are carrying the children of all this personal freedom. At least Shelley tried to support his offspring whereas Byron usually refused. The treatment of these unfortunate babies was appalling. Shelly’s first wife killed herself, Jane who called herself Claire had to relinquish one of her babies and her child fathered by Byron was his legally and he promptly neglected her for all of her pitiable, short life.
Both the books challenge us to think about defining what is truth and what happens when truth is hidden by soothing lies. I finished Farooki’s novel misty-eyed at the happy ending and delayed reading the end of Dogar’s excellent historical fiction because I was so FURIOUS at most of the men. It is a mark of an excellent story when you start shouting at the pages - it would have been foolish to throw the Kindle across the room, but I was tempted.
OLDER ADULT FICTION
I think I just made up this category but it fits Meet me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, who at the age of 71 has just published this novel, her first. When Tina and Bella were senior high school students they were given lessons about Tollund Man, the partial remains of a human being thousands of years old whose head in particular had been perfectly preserved in peat and is on display in a museum in Copenhagen. After the professor responsible for discovering and writing about this artifact replied to their “fan” mail, the two girls decide they have to travel from Bury St Edmunds in England to pay their respects to this ancient person. However, life gets in the way of their plans, and then, at twenty, Tina is pregnant to her boyfriend, Edward. She is pressured into marrying him and becomes absorbed by marriage, motherhood and the endless work connected with owning and running a farm. By the time she is sixty, she has acquired wisdom and experience but has never travelled to Denmark. On impulse, she writes a letter to the famous professor care of the museum and receives a reply, not from him because he is long dead but from an expert on Tollund Man who works at the museum. Their correspondence, which makes up the whole book, develops from pleasantries to an intense sharing of their stories and an endless conversation about their philosophy and views on life. These letters become beautifully poetic and compassionate as well as exciting. When Tina’s marriage implodes, she leaves the farm but she does not flee to Denmark because she is too wise. However, the very last letter reassures the sobbing reader. If you have a feisty great-aunt or a cheerful grandmother, such a person will relate to many of the issues raised in this gentle book. It reassures we older adults that life does not stop at sixty, that it is possible to experience moments of joy and continue to pick raspberries. This last phrase being a reference to a lovely metaphor in the book.
CORRECTION AND APOLOGY
In my review of Libby Bleakley’s memoir, On a Mission, I made two mistakes which have been pointed out to me by the author, whose nieces attended St Vincent’s College:
. Paragraph 2 should have mentioned one marriage and one engagement.
. Ms Bleakley served in the NSW Police Force for nineteen, not seventeen, years.
I am grateful for her contacting me and accepting my apology.
Reviews by MS SUZANNE O’CONNOR
