‘Tell them stories’ is the refrain of award-winner children’s author Philip Pullman’s book The Amber Spyglass. It’s also a pithy summation of Pullman’s philosophy about writing in general, and children’s writing in particular.

The five books reviewed here are very different, but each demonstrates the challenge contained in this seemingly simple injunction. Children’s and young adults’ literature is always a delicate balancing act between plot and themes, story and didactic purpose, and the authors who succeed in creating an engaging book are those who manage to get the balance right.

Folklorist Kathleen Ragan is an American writer who earns her living by collecting and reproducing stories in their purest form. Her previous collection of folktales, Fearless Girls, was an attempt to rectify the imbalance, as she saw it, betwen the massed ranks of heroes in children’s stories (in both fairytales and more modern works) and the sparse offerings in the way of positive female role models. She also hoped to broaden the definition of heroism. Her most recent book, Outfoxing Fear, is similarly wide-ranging and ambitious: she has collected stories from around the world which take as their theme the banishment of fear. Ragan is a woman who utterly believes in the power of the story to stave off disaster, to ward off terror. And as Fearless Girls created a new concept of heroism, Outfoxing Fear develops a broader definition of bravery. Some of the stories in the collection are about the traditionally brave warriors fighting the supernatural, but most are about small acts of bravery — the quick wit of an old lady defeating a demon, the devotion of a sister riding out into a wild and stormy night to seek aid — and so are all the more inspiring.

The Book of Everything, the latest award-winning book by Dutch author Guus Kuijer, is a deceptively simple story, almost like the folktales Ragan has collected. It is the tale of a sweet-natured boy, Thomas, whose imagination and love of reading give him the power to resist his puritanican father and miserable home life. It is also an examintion of the evils caused by the misuse of religious faith. Kuijer, like Roald Dahl, is able to capture perfectly the outrage felt by young children whose trust has been betrayed. But while Dahl’s protagonists, with supernatural aid, usually escape the adults who treat them so badly, Kuijer’s Thomas relies on magic of a more domestic kind: the ability of one courageous person to inspire others. His reply to his father’s assertions that the Bible is the only real book in the world is to organise a poetry reading in his house, to expose his family to other, secular writing. The Book of Everything is a heartwarming story told with great sweetness. Kuijer does tend to lay on the moral messages with a heavy hand, though, and this detracts from the simple beauty of a narrative which would have benefited from a little more subtlety.

Ursula Dubosarsky is an Australian author who understands the value of subtlety. While her books are always carried by the fantastic stories they tell, they are enriched by the themes, concerns and questions which are allowed to whisper softly in the margins. The Red Shoe, her newest offering, is no different in this respect. Her narrative, like Kuijer’s, is revealed through the eyes of a child, in this case six-year-old Matlida, who lives in Sydney’s Palm Beach in the 1950s. Dubosarsky juxtaposes the story of Matilda’s family — her father, who is suffering from his experiences during World War II, her older sister, who has dropped out of school and is depressed, and many more skeltons in the closet — with the Petrov Affair. The Red Shoe, like all of Dubosarsky’s novels, captures the essence of Australian life. It appeals to the reader’s senses, so that he or she can feel the heat rising from tin roofs and asphalt, smell the eucalypts, and taste the lamb, peas and potatoes served up for dinner. This, along with the extracts from newspapers, makes the 1950s setting come to life, and it adds to the realism of the story. This realism is what makes The Red Shoe such a subtly power novel: like many of Dubosarsky’s works, it revels in the interior life of ordinary people and, as a result, possesses a luminous authenticity. Her characters seethe with life and vitality, inviting the reader into a world which makes the familiar seem marvellous. They are more than the cardboard cut-outs so often used in young adult literature, merely mouthpieces for moral messages.

Looking for Alaska, the deubt novel of American author John Green, is a poorer novel than Dubosarsky’s for this reason. A coming-of-age story, suitable for older teenagers, it begins well but is weakened by its strong desire to shock at the same time as moralise. Its hero and narrator, Miles Halter, is a teenage boy sent to boarding school in Alabama. There he discovers love, makes the first real friends of his life, and matures as a person. The first half of the novel is fantastic — a whirlwind of drinking, experimentation, and pranks — but unfortunately Green can’t resist indulging in the kind of bleak moralising popular among so many writers of books for young adults. He seems to believe that to be relevant to potential readers, books must pander to popular ideas about some common, comprehensively joyless adolescent world. This is a narrow and limiting view. A book does not to be a catalogue of stereotypical teenage problems (drug addiction, suicide, bereavement and the like) to be engaging for young adults. Coming of age does not necessarily mean becoming immersed in the darker side of life and if Green understood this he would have written a much more powerful book.

Catherine Webb’s The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle is the antithesis of Looking for Alaska, a joyful and exhuberant book reminiscent of Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series. Webb, who wrote her first novel at the age of 14, has presented readers with a rich, feast of a book, a detective story set in Victorian London which moves along as quickly and with as many sparks as electricity. Its hero is an unwilling detective, Horatio Lyle, who would rather potter around at home doing scientific experiments. Aided by a cheeky pickpocket and a bored an lonely aristocrat, Horatio must track down a missing Tibetan plate which may or may not possess supernatural powers. Webb tells her story with great wit and flair, glorying in the Victorian world she has recreated and the characters with which she has people it it. it is heartening to see a young writer valuing the story over a simplistic moral message, understanding that children are engaged more by a richly imagined fictional world than by a misplaced obsession with ‘relevance’ and realism.

This review originally appeared in the 6th May, 2006 issue of The Canberra Times.

Readers have Canberra’s Turner Primary School to thank for Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series. The phenomenally successful and internationally acclaimed fantasy author reveals how an enforced cross-country run led to the memorable opening sequence of the first book in the series, Mister Monday.

‘I had asthma and bronchitis and I was on this run and I just thought I’d keep running. We were running around the oval at school and I had difficulty breathing … and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground looking at the sky. And so I based the beginning of Mister Monday on this real-life experience.’

Now based in Sydney, Nix lived in Canberra until he was 19, and is full of praise for his childhood home.

‘Canberra’s a very good place for a writer to grow up in. You’ve got good education. The Canberra public library service is very important too. Particularly the specialist children’s library they used to have at O’Connor shops, on my way to school. I would get new books almost every day from that little library. The librarians there were enormously helpful at getting books for me, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. It’s a good example of how libraries often sow the seeds for the work that people do later. They’re great sources of inspiration.’

Nix is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. His books, which have been translated into 30 languages, have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. Interestingly, he did not become a full-time writer until quite recently, and spent a lot of his adult life working in the publishing industry, as a literary agent, public-relations consultant and editor. He argues that while this experience was helpful to him as an author, it alone cannot explain his success.

‘Having a background in the business has helped me understand how to get the best for my books and to know when something’s going right or not and if somebody’s not doing the boest for the books or they are, but you can’t make things happen … A lot of it’s luck of the draw … You can market books, push them, but ultimately it comes down to the readers’ word of mouth.

‘I’ve been lucky as well, because I’ve always written the kinds of books that I wanted to read, and when I first wrote that was not a very popular area. You know, I’ve got rejection letters for Sabriel which basically say, “Fantasy? Forget it.” This is pre-Harry Potter, pre-Philip Pullman [the Whitbread Award-winning author of the His Dark Materials trilogy], and so I was always just paddling my little canoe, and then this giant tidal wave of Harry Potter just swept past and caught me up in its wake. I’ve been lucky that conditions for selling the stuff that I did changed. It may well change again, but I’ll just keep doing the stuff I want to write.’

At the moment, what Nix wants to write is a seven-part series called The Keys to the Kingdom. These books are set partly in a slightly futuristic indeterminate Western country, and mainly in the fantastical world of the House, an anarchic realm thrown into the chaos by the withdrawal of the Architect (a shadowy figure who created all the ‘Secondary Realms,’ including our own universe) and the division of her Will among seven villainous, Key-wielding Trustees. Into this bizarre world steps Arthur Penhaligon, a twelve-year-old boy who stands out as a particularly unsuitable hero in a genre famous for its ‘unlikely heroes.’ Nix explains that Arthur was perfect for the story he wanted to tell.

‘I like my characters to feel like real people, and sometimes that means that they are more frail than heroes. To be human you have to have weaknesses as well as strengths. But the characters emerge out of the stories, I often know very little about them at the beginning of the story. I don’t sit down and work out their whole lives as some writers do. I’m totally driven by the story. He has asthma because I had asthma as a child, I suppose, and funnily enough, it went away when I was about twelve or thirteen, and I didn’t have asthma again until I started working on The Keys to the Kingdom.

Nix is keen to reinforce the ordinariness of his protagonist, giving him one of the craziest, most blended of blended families, so that, in his world, he doesn’t stand out. ‘Because Arthur was adopted, I didn’t want him to be part of a typical nuclear family where he would be the odd one out.’ Even Arthur’s meaningful-sounding name, with its hint at a link with the medieval Arthurian legend, is for Nix a literary joke.

‘With Arthur Penhaligon, I guess I’m doing a sort of red herring on the reader, because you’re meant to think “Hang on, that sounds significant,” but in actual fact, it’s not. Arthur is chosen at random because he’s about to die, he’s not the Chosen One, so it’s a little ironic joke. He’s not the secret heir who’s been hidden away, he’s just a boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

One of the characteristics of Nix’s work is the number of clever ideas he manages to pack into a couple of hundred pages. The most brilliant conceit in The Keys to the Kingdom is that, rather like the television series 24, the action takes place over a relatively short period — one week, with each book devoted to one day. Nix explains that ideas like this come relatively easily to him. He gives an example from another of his books, Sabriel, the first in his Old Kingdom trilogy.

‘One of the central ideas is of two countries separated by a wall where one is magical and the other is technological, and it came from a photo of Hadrian’s Wall. On the southern side of the wall there was a green lawn and on the northern side there were these snow-covered hills and it actually looked as if one side was summer and the other side was winter. There are lots of stories in fairytales and fables with barriers between the fairy world and our world and demarcation points like hedges or walls or doorways, so it’s not a new idea, it’s just what you do with it.’

Nix is a voracious reader, and says that many of his ideas come from other books. Glancing around his bookshelves, he points out children’s stories, classic fantasy novels, short stories, biographies, history books and graphic novels. But one of the richest seams he mines is an old edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

‘It has so much old, weird stuff in it. You can open Brewer’s at any page and find an idea for a story. It’s quite astonishing how you can just open this book and discover amazing things.’

An element of myth Nix has transformed in The Keys to the Kingdom is the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Seven Trustees of the Will, whom Arthur must defeat, are thoroughly refreshing villains, each embodying a particular kind of modern evil. Thus, the slothful Mister Monday represents bureaucratic ineptitude, while avaricious Grim Tuesday becomes a symbol of corporate greed. In Sir Thursday, Nix is able to place the action in a setting of which he has some experience, the military. (Nix spent some time serving in the Army Reserve.)

‘Certainly I drew upon my Army Reserve experience, but I’ve always been a military history buff — a history buff in fact — and I read a lot of biographies, so I’ve read a lot of personal stories of soldiers, and it draws on that as well.’

And is it also good to correct some common mistakes made in films and books about the military?

‘Annoying things happen in movies sometimes. Some of them are incredibly basic, like little differences between the American and British armies, when Americans make films that have British soldiers in them, they have them saluting without their hats on, which they do in America and they don’t do in Britain. There are tiny details like that which most people couldn’t give a stuff about, but there’s always some who do, and it’s nice to get it right for them. And I do like it when I get emails from serving members of the military who just appreciate some of the military characters in my books.’

But while correcting misconceptions about the military is satisfying, Nix’s primary aim has always been to tell a good story. He views this as the natural purpose of children’s and young-adult fiction.

‘I think good children’s books, and good young-adult books nearly always work on multiple levels, and one of those levels is always a very strong strand of story. [A good children’s book will always have a] strong story, rich characters, usually told in a fairly straightforward prose, so it’s an easy read in the sense that it’s easy to immerse yourself into and be carried along by it, not lots of interruptions in the style which throw you back out of the story … But often the good children’s books have other levels as well, where more sophisticated readers, as well as being immersed in that story, can also pick up on the thematic level where the author is having a lot to say about the nature of the world, or the nature of humanity, or human relations or any of those deeper things, and perhaps because of that very strong weave of story, you often will pick up that subsidiary weave of thematic content without realising you’ve done so or having to pause and think about them, or stop.’

Philip Pullman has often spoken out against the trend in children’s literature to make a good story subsidiary to a moral message. It’s a view Nix shares. ‘I think with children’s books, if you set out to make your “top level” a message, or some sort of didactic theme, it doesn’t work, because there’s nothing to carry it along. A story can carry a theme, but a theme can’t carry a story. A good story can be deep and poignant and so on, but it must be the primary carrier of everything else.

‘Adult books don’t have to be like that, but the best adult books also have a very strong layer of story which carries everything else along, and that’s probably what Pullman was talking about in that he was able to convey a greater depth of meaning on the back of a great story, ostensibly for children, but the best children’s books are for everyone and you can reread them. You can read them at ten and just get the story, and again at 20 or 30 or 50 and get all that other stuff, and you can reread them again and again and again and get more out of them. That’s the characteristic of great books in general, not just children’s books.’

This interview originally appeared in the 25 March, 2006 edition of The Canberra Times.

Fantasy novels are wish-fulfilment for teenage girls. A typical fantasy heroine always combines shy unworldliness with resourceful courage. She is breathtakingly beautiful but too modest to realise it, a teenager standing uncertainly on the brink of adulthood, being pushed into maturity by an adventure which is almost always a journey of discovery. And despite her shyness, she never seems to have much trouble making friends, falling into friendships (especially, it seems, with usefully supernatural beings), seemingly without effort.

But most importantly, the men in these novels behave in the way teenage girls wish the boys they know would act.

Cecila Dart-Thornton understands this. If the catfights over him on internet fansites are anything to go by, Thorn, the hero in her first trilogy, The Bitterbynde, is nothing short of perfect. He has magical powers which often come in handy, but are eclipsed by the abilities of the female protagonist. So he respects her as his superior. He is a chivalrous mind-reader he keeps his love for the heroine secret until she is ready to love him back. He also looks good in a cloak, wielding a sword. What more could a girl want?

In The Bitterbynde, Dart-Thornton captures perfectly the way the object of first love can seem unblemished, dazzling and immortal. In The Crowthistle Chronicles, her second fantasy series, she revisits this theme, but combines it with a focus on how patterns of behaviour can be passed down through the generations in families.

Her latest book, The Well of Tears, is the second in this series, and it tells the story of Jewel, a 12-year-old girl who carries a strange legacy in her blood. Her parents are descendants of two families, one of which cursed the other. Her father Jarred is descended from a vindictive wizard who was so terrified of the mortality of human memory that he made his descendants invulnerable to all save old age — and mistletoe.

On Jewel’s mother Lilith’s side of the family, a terrible curse — the result of an ancestor refusing to marry this same wizard — affects the lives of all. Lilith’s ancestors — and she herself — are condemned to bring an early death to their lovers, and go mad themselves. Although madness and death do come to Lilith and Jarred, the curse does not affect Jewel, since she has inherited her father’s invulnerability. However, she must leave her childhood home to escape foes searching for descendants of the wizard, and wishing to learn his secrets. Jewel flees north, ending up under the protection of the weathermasters, a group of poeple who possess a supernatural power, the bri, which allows them to control the winds and rains.

Jewel grows up protected and hidden, finding it difficult to love and trust as a result of her parents’ deaths. At 16, she decides to journey, accompanied by a young weathermaster, to reclaim her heritage. She unseals her sorcerer-ancestor’s home, the Dome of Strang, and discovers his secret: he was searching for three wells, whose water, once drunk, would allow immortality. Jewel and her companion (who is nursing a not-so-secret love for her) become determined to find these wells. Unfortunately, their enemies are searching for them too. The novel finishes with a spectacular denouement in which a scruffy band of mercenaries do battle with a quartet of weathermasters on a frozen lake, leaving the reader questioning the ethics of immortality and pondering the finality of death.

The Well of Tears is in many ways a weaker story than The Bitterbynde series. The latter, although obviously inspired by Tolkien and other canonical fantasy authors, had much in it that was refreshingly original. The same cannot be said for The Well of Tears — the theme of the ehtics of immortality is so overused that it has become a cliché. How many fantasy villains, from Tolkien’s Sauron to J.K. Rowling’s Voldemort, have been seeking to artificially prolong their lives, how many fantasy novels leave their readers with the message that life is short and should be enjoyed while it lasts.

Unfortunately the review breaks off here — I don’t seem to have saved the second page of newspaper onto which it continued, and the original files no longer exist. I’m amused by basically everything said here, especially the notion of the Bitterbynde series being ‘refreshingly original’!

This review originally appeared in the 3 December, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Isobelle Carmody’s Legendsong trilogy imagines a world sung into being. Alyzon Whitestarr, her most recent book, extends this philosophical metaphor, even though it is not part of this series. Her new book is a song for humanity, in the broadest sense of the word: a plea for compassion, creativity, emotion and imagination, and a celebration of these qualities. At the same time, it is a repudiation of brutality, hatred, rage and apathy.

Her heroine, the whimsically named Alyzon Whitestarr, is the middle child in a dream family. Our introduction to the Whitestarr family prepares us for Carmody’s fantastical story, which will centre on them. Our first glimpse is of four siblings on a beach at sunset, with their father, watching their mother give birth in the water. There is beautiful Mirandah, musically gifted, with a penchant for dyeing her hair odd colours, gregarious Jesse, the deeply scarred Serenity, who has transformed herself into a gothic prophet named Sybl, and Luke, the baby. Their mother is a flame-tressed artist, who tends to waft in and out of the narrative dreamily. The focal point of the clan is Macoll, the larger-than-life father: an idealistic musician blessed with eternal optimism, and a belief that despite the depraved acts human beings sometimes commit, there is a possibility that things might become better some day. Smack in the middle of this family of artists, musicians, dreamers and sibyls is Alyzon, the narrator, who, in the style of many of Carmody’s heroines, feels like a boring changeling out of place in her exotic tribe. All this changes with a bump on the head. Alyzon falls into a coma, and when she awakens, finds herself with enhanced senses, which enable her to smell people’s essences. This allows her to see through the masks that people where, and she discovers that there is a disease spreading among humanity, a disease of cruelty, sadism and despair.

Interestingly for Carmody, who usually prefers this pet philosophical belief to be played out in a wholly imagined world, these metaphysical concerns are painted on a backdrop of contemporary Australia, with the government’s policy of mandatory detention and deportation of asylum-seekers becoming the spark which ignites the action. It becomes clear that the Whitestarr family’s closeness to a refugee woman, Aya, and their inability to prevent her deportation, is the cause of Serenity-Sybl’s emotional wounding. Serenity pours scorn over her father for writing a song about Aya, seeing his actions as those of a coward, capitulating in the face of evil. Alyzon’s fears for her sister begin to converge with her more general fears about the sickness of society. The novel culminates in a spectacular event, a charity concert that seems to symbolise Carmody’s attitudes about everything that is wrong with the world: bitter musicians singing of rage and despair while apathetic socialites drink and drug themselves into emotionally deadened insensibility. Carmody portrays the rage and the drugging as cowardly escapes from the cruelties of the modern world. The true heroes, in Carmody’s book, are those like Macoll, who never coerce, never give in to bitterness, but use their talents to give people a bit of hope.

Isobelle Carmody is a rare writer, an adult who has never lost the sense of what it feels like to be a teenager. Her books — from her award-winning Obernewtyn series, to her collection of short stories, Green Monkey Dreams — capture perfectly the idealism, aspiration and yearning of adolescents to change the world, as well as their despair at discovering that the world is a difficult place to change and may not be worth saving. Alyzon Whitestarr is another book in this tradition, a song, full of emotino, love and dreams. In it, Carmody attempts to convey, like Macoll Whitestarr, a little hope to like-minded people.

This review originally appeared in the 5 November 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness is a 21st-century fairytale. Just as stories such as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White are underpinned by the complexities of family relationships, Magic or Madness explores the lives of three generations of women whose relationships are mediated through their attitudes to magic. And Larbalestier’s novel, the first in a trilogy, treats magic in their lives as a straightforward, matter-of-fact way, reminiscent of the acceptance of the supernatural found in folk and fairytales.

While most fantasy novels require a pre-industrial setting, presupposing that technology and magic cannot exist in the one world, Larbalestier embraces modernity, which she uses to enhance her brand of magic.

Magic or Madness has a simple message: reason and wonder can coexist, and are very much alike. She uses the coming-of-age story of her protagonist, the aptly-named Reason, to demonstrate this.

Before the story begins, Reason has already grown up on the run in the outback with her mother, Sarafina. The pair were in hiding from Sarafina’s mother, Esmeralda, who is, Reason has been told, an evil witch. Sarafina tries to instill in her daughter a love of science, mathematics, and all things ration. But all this problem-solving cannot address Sarafina’s own problems — when Reason is 15, her mother has a mental breakdown and is hospitalised. Reason is sent to live in Newtown in Sydney, with her dreaded grandmother.

Reason’s misery is alleviated slightly by meeting Tom, a neighbour, who shows her around the city. Larbalestier indulges in her own love of Sydney’s inner west — she writes in lyrical terms of the Moreton Bay fig trees, heat rising from asphalt roads, and Camperdown Cemetery. But all this is just a prelude to the great adventure awaiting Reason, literally right outside her grandmother’s back door. One day she opens it and finds herself in wintry New York.

This event forces Reason to accept the existence of magic, and to reexamine her attitudes towards her grandmother. Has her mother been lying to her for her entire life? Against a backdrop of snow and diners, pizza and pierogi, Reason grows up fast, learning some family secrets, as well as how to use her own amazing powers.

Magic or Madness is a simple book, one which combines fantasy and teenage realism with a dash of travel narrative.

Larbalestier’s treatment of the supernatural is impressively original, making magic almost ordinary and innate. She owes little to either J.K. Rowling, who emphasises the controllable, technical nature of magic, or the writers of New Age, Celtic-inspired fantasy who revere magic as something natural and wild. This is, most literally, the magic of Reason, and can be found in anything from the perfection of Fibonacci sequences to the uncanny ability to know who is on the other end of the phone before it is answered. Larbalestier manages to make the real world luminous and full of wonder. For readers in the 21st century, it’s good to know someone still believes that’s possible.

This review first appeared in the 22 October issue of The Canberra Times.

Australian writer Sophie Masson, in The Curse of Zohreh, leaves her familiar territory of dark, mysterious Breton forests for the fiery world of the Arabian Nights. Masson’s talents as a writer have always been based on her ability to blend several genres of story, and combine the qualities of myth, legend and fairytale with modern sensibilities. She certainly doesn’t disappoint in The Curse of Zohreh, which mixes medieval Arab storytelling with modern fantasy, throwing in a dash of Romeo and Juliet love story and feminism for good measure.

The story concerns two families, the wealth al-Farouks of Ameerat, and the impoverished Parsarian descendants of a successful trader, Zohreh, who laid a curse on the al-Farouk family for destroying her business empire and stealing a family treasure. One hundred years after Zohreh’s death, 15-year-old Khaled al-Farouk is keen to break the curse. Just as determined to visit retribution on the al-Farouks is Soheila, Zohreh’s descendant, who has disguised herself as a boy and infiltrated the al-Farouk household.

What follows is an adventure in the best fairytale tradition. It involves werewolf carpet-sellers, ghouls, jinn, dusty libraries and terrifying car journeys through deserts. While it is Masson’s imaginative brilliance that makes the story engrossing, it is the emotional richness and moral complexity that gives The Curse of Zohreh its depth.

As the story progresses, the reader wonders with Soheila whether it is right to punish children for the sins of their ancestors. At the same time, we come to understand, with Khaled, that it is important for families to remember past wrongdoings and to learn from mistakes. However, Masson has never been an author to use her characters as mouthpieces for moralising, and so these emotional issues are hinted at rather than broadcast loudly from every page. Readers have to discover this moral dimension for themselves.

Although the book is a welcome addtion to good-quality Australian fiction for young teens, the more worldly reader may question Masson’s fantasy world. This is partly because it is so obviously based on the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East that readers might wonder why she bothered to reinvent it. Parsari is Persia, or Iran, while Mesomia is Iraq, which is even ruled by a bloodthirsty, Saddam Hussein-type figure called The Vampire. Soheila’s family follow a religion which has the characteristics of Zoroastrianism, and Khaled’s is recognisable as Islam.

It is also partly because of the anachronism of having mobile phones and jinn, cars and flying carpets, in the same story. Genre convention either has modern characters experiencing the weirdness of the otherworld or the story is contained in one internally logical universe. Here contemporary characters with mobile phones travel on flying carpet without comment. Some readers may have to work hard to accept this.

Ultimately, the most important theme of Masson’s book is one that is woven like a thread through all her books. This is her deep belief that magic, wonder and fantasy are essential to the human spirit, and that life is impoverished without this other world into which people can travel. For Masson, this other world resides between the pages of books. Despite the slightly uneasy stretching of the parameters of fantasy conventions, this nourishing richness lies there to be discovered in The Curse of Zohreh.

This review first appeared in the 9 July, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

The 60th anniversary of the end of World War II has provoked a rush of books. At the same time, the anniversary reminds us that those who lived through the terrible war years are dying: this will be the last generation to have direct contact with Holocaust survivors, for example. This sense of urgency, that the stories of survivors must be passed on, drives the new books of two Australian authors, Nicole Plüss and Ursula Dubosarsky.

Plüss’s novel, Hope Bay, explicitly uses this theme, jumping back and forth between occupied Holland and a modern-day Australian coastal town. The link is Olga, an elderly Dutch woman, who in her youth was heavily involved in the Dutch resistance during the German occupation of her country. After the war years she moved to Australia, with her younger sister, and terrible memories, and many secrets.

In the present time, Olga strikes up an unlikely friendship with Possum, an Australian teenager. They are united by their shared love of nature and their sense of outrage at humanity’s denial of responsibility in its destruction.

However, Plüss’s passionate belief in the fact that one big horror is made up of millions of little acts of complicity, and turns too large a part of the story into a soapbox-style rant. The Dutch-resistance half of the story is much more interesting, and if Plüss had reined in her anger, the novel could have been a more thoroughly satisfying exploration of the importance of memory and a reminder of the wisdom gained through experience. As it is, this theme does shine through, but it is dwarfed by the impassioned outbursts of Possum, the author’s mouthpiece.

Theodora’s Gift, Dubosarsky’s offering, is a quieter and more powerful book altogether. It carrries on the story which she began in The First Book of Samuel, the CBC Honour Book in 1996, in which Dubosarsky wove together the stories of sensitive, emotional Samuel, his Holocaust-survivor grandfather Elias, and their unconventional but loving family.

Theodora’s Gift takes up the action one year on, continuing the story about the complicated, creative Cass family. Theodora and her younger half-brother Samuel watch uneasily as their family begins to fall apart. Their father, the opera singer Elkanah, has visions which leave him terrified, and he impulsively moves to the country with his first wife Pearl. Meanwhile, his second wife, Samuel’s mother Hannah, takes to her bed in despair, and Elias, Samuel’s grandfather, is dying. The quiet decay of the family is mirrored by events of the present and memories of the past: it is September 2001 and the children are bewildered by the hatred which seems to them to have come from nowhere and to have taken over the world.

Hovering at the edges of the narrative is the Holocaust and traumatic legacy it left Elias. There is a sense of urgency in the book, a fear that Elias (who symbolises all who survived through the terrible years of Nazism) will die before his memories can be entrusted to the next generation. But the book’s message is not that simple. At its heart is the story of one family, whose tensions reflect the pains of the past and the chaos of the present.

These are two very different novels on very similar themes. Dubosarsky’s succeeds while Plüss’s fails because she does not shout her message loudly, but allows it to whisper in the margins, waiting for the reader to notice it. Theodora’s Gift is a beautiful book for its quietness, for the elegiac stillness which harmonises perfectly with its emotional clarity. Hope Bay is a good book. But, with more thematic subtlety, it could have been a great one.

This review first appeared in the 14 May, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Allan Baillie’s book of short stories for young adults, A Taste of Cockroach, demonstrates the truth of Plato’s maxim that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ It’s also a plea for tolerance of difference. Its cover tag is ‘stories from the wild side,’ and most of the stories are inspired by Baillie’s own experiences on ‘the wild side’ as a freelance journalist in South-East Asia, and later as an author who kept his eyes open for the unusual and bizarre.

The stories are loosely tied together by their theme of cultural differences — the experiences of the foreign and strange, the challenge of prejudices. In ‘The Domestic,’ a 19th-century Anglo-Australian girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with her Aboriginal servant, the pair united against the injustices of a society which denies women the right to a decent education and Aboriginal people the right to a dignified existence. In ‘Only Ten,’ Hussain, a refugee boy, has difficulty coping with normal life in Australia, as his classmates struggle to relate to someone whose life experiences are so alien to their own.

It is in the stories based on real events that Baillie demonstrates his talent for observation, however, and that his power as a writer really shines. Nothing escapes his notice, and no event is too banal or insignificant to inspire a story. In ‘The Bull,’ the reader can soak in the atmosphere of 1950s Portarlington, sharing in a childhood world where camaraderie can be found jumping off a pier into the ocean, or swinging on a tree in a paddock. In ‘Snatch,’ an unlucky encounter with thieves while on a family holiday in Naples leads to musings on the lifes of such Neapolitan petty criminals — a surprisingly charitable response considering it was a bag containing souvenirs and photos of the trip that was stolen. And characters met on Baillie’s journeys — in Laos, Vietnam, Nepal and Burma — inspire eloquent and evocative depictions of their lives and countries. That most of these encounters took place more than 30 years ago says much about Baillie’s phenomenal memory.

In A Taste of Cockroach, the reader is confronted with life in all its complexity, conveyed with warmth and affection by a writer who appears to have made it his mission to absorb and chronicle the breadth of human experience. At a time when it’s perhaps hard to feel happy about what’s happening in the world, Allan Baillie’s book reminds you that it’s good to be alive.

This review first appeared in the 7 May, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Although many popular ideas about the Vikings are no more than 19th-century inventions, we can be sure that they were fierce warriors and masters of the sea.

Even their sketchy history, then, can provide fertile soil for Jackie French, one of Australia’s most prolific children’s authors.

Inspired by reading the Icelandic sagas, French has written They Came on Viking Ships, a novel about Viking settlement of Greenland and ‘discovery’ of America during the time of Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson. However, French being French, the story has a twist, and so the focus of the book is not on these two relatively well-known historical figures, but rather on two unlikely friends: a feisty Viking feminist and her captured Scottish slave.

This is a story of adventure and exploration, and so it is a stroke of brilliance that French has chosen for her protagonist Hekja, a bewildered 12-year-old who has never left the boundaries of her tiny village in northern Scotland. She is captured by Viking raiders and becomes a thrall — a slave — to the sword-wielding, free-spirited Freydis Eriksdottir.

With Freydis (and her faithful and intelligent dog, Snarf), Hekja travels north to Greenland — Freydis’s father, Erik the Red, was an outlaw banished from Iceland who founded this new community — and later to America. Hekja’s distress at her new status is not quite so great as her amazement at the wonders of the wider world which she is now experiencing.

Hekja has never seen goats or sheep, never seen a weaving loom; even the very words are unfamiliar to her. Her ignorance of the wider world is used to suggest the wonder of her experiences, and, as a young adolescent, her physical journey beyond the rim of the known world parallels the metaphorical journey into adulthood which she is just beginning.

Interestingly, French does not give in to the temptation of moralising. The book is remarkably free of judgement, which leaves its readers to make up their own minds. Ultimately, Hekja has little resentment at her treatment, even though her mother was killed, as were most of the people in her village, by the raiders. Instead, she almost seems grateful that her capture made adventure and exploration possible. At the same time, although French revels in the strength of her heroines, Freydis and Hekja are not the focus of a feminist tract.

As in much of French’s writing, this and all other themes are secondary to her passinoate belief in the power, beauty and uncontrollability of nature. She is able to convey much of the sheer wildness of the land — its rocks and fjords, ice and snow — through her prose. In They Came on Viking Ships, French links this awe of nature with a strong appreciation of the bravery of the people who live at its mercy.

The reader cannot help admiring the combination of the hardiness and resourcefulness demonstrated by the Greenland colony, and their utter dependence on nature and each other is portrayed as a beautiful and genuine way to live.

Despite the harshness of the weather and the slim pickings to be had from their farms, the people find plenty to celebrate.

French’s storytelling ability is enhanced by her obvious deep historical research. This is demonstrated in far more than the footnotes or the brief note at the end of the book. It is in her ability to create a world into which her reader is happy to tumble for several hours, and in her talent for making history as enjoyable as the best story.

This review first appeared in the 16 April, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.

Does your dog have a passport? What kind of world would you have to live in for a dog to require a passport but you, a human, would be denied one?

Welcome to Ramallah and an account of the daily absurdities that confront Palestinians trying to live there.

This was the farcical situation in which Suad Amiry found herself after taking her dog, Nura, to a Jewish vet for vaccinations. As Dr Tamar, the serious Israeli vet says, ‘the Jerusalem municipality vaccines are only for Jerusalem dogs.’ Amiry (and Nura) lived in Ramallah, but the vet was willing to give the dog a Jerusalem passport to get around this inconvient fact of life. Amiry asks, half-joking, if she can replace the dog’s photo with one of herself.

This incident is a typical exchange to be found within the pages of Amiry’s memoir, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Amiry is a Palestinian academic and was involved in the peace negotiations in Washington between 1991 and 1993. Having studied architecture in Beirut, Michigan and Edinburgh, she settled in Ramallah and founded the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation, which she now heads. The book is in two parts, the first covering the first intifada and the Gulf War, the second dealing with the recent Palestinian uprising.

While there have been many books written about this subject which transform the political into the personal to illuminate the effect of the conflict on individuals, this book stands out in its emphasis on the absurdity of the situation.

Amiry herself recognises that in order to convey the ridiculousness of her life and the lives of other Palestinians, she had to ‘step out of the frame,’ and simply observe. Dripping with irony, her accounts of her experiences force you to understand that she laughs simply to survive. There is the time she tells the Israeli customs official at Tel Aviv airport that she went to London to go dancing, and then, in mock naivete, pretends to be outraged that they will not let her through. There is the ongoing saga of the family living next door to her in Ramallah — bored mother having affairs, the father collaborating with the Israelis and the son set to follow in his father’s footsteps. And there is the mother-in-law of the title, 91 at the time of the second intifada, and living right next door to Arafat’s besieged compound. Amiry finally manages to get her out, dodgin Israeli tanks, but is not repaid with gratitude. Instead, the formidable matriarch becomes the houseguest from hell, complaining about the crockery and demanding her meals at 8am, 1pm and 7pm SHARP! Amiry locks herself in her room with Teach-yourself-Italian tapes.

Amiry’s approach is more effective than other writers about the Middle East conflict, who’ve perhaps chosen a closely reasoned historical account, an angry polemic, or a moving personal memoir. She convinces you that people cannot go on living like this. However, for all Amiry’s attempts to take ‘one step to the side of life,’ she does not completely manage to rein in her outrage.

Most of the episodes she describes begin humorously but finish with a vitriolic denunciation of the Israeli occupation. When she hopes to show her visiting niece, Diala from Lebanon, that there are some ‘good Israelis,’ it feels half-hearted, insincere, as if she’s trying to keep non-Palestinian readers on side. Her anger is unfortunate, because it’s her humour that reaches out to people. We’ve heard the anger before. But perhaps if I lived in a country where it took seven years to get an identity card which allowed you to live in the same town as your husband (this happened to Amiry), and where a holiday in Egypt, requiring seven different types of documentation for seven different people, became a bureaucratic nightmare, I’d be angry too.

Ultimately, Amiry succeeds in giving her readers a sense of both the tragic-comedic futility, and dangerous intensity, of the lives of Palestinians. The impression given is one of anger but not despair, of a people able to maintain a sense of humour amid chaos and violence. In one of the final chapters, a little boy whom Amiry had berated earlier for banging on a cooking pot is confused by the neighbourhood women banging their own pots during a protest march. As long as he can see the surreal humour in the situation, the boy will probably be alright.

This article first appeared in the 5 March, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.