“The eye sockets were sunken; the eyes protruded, a vivid blue; his flesh was a morbid gray. Long blond hair—almost white, albino-looking—hung over his eyes. Once he was forced to break from his labor to cough—and Andrew recognized the noise that had drawn him. The cough combined the bark of a sick animal with a wet, slapping sound. The skeletal man drew his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. He locked eyes with Andrew.”

Book Review:

Review by Katherine Petersen  (OCT 1, 2011)

Kicked out of his last American boarding school for drugs, Andrew Taylor’s father has sent him to England’s Harrow Academy to redo his senior year. It’s his last chance, and Andrew tries hard to follow the rules and not bring attention to himself. But author Justin Evans has other plans for Andrew in The White Devil, his latest thriller/horror novel that sheds light on the bullying and other nastiness that can go on at boarding schools past and present.

Andrew witnesses the murder of his friend, Theo, on a path near the school’s graveyard, but he can’t give all the details to the police. No one would ever believe that a ghost, for that is all Andrew can come up with for an explanation of the albino-type figure that killed his friend and then vanished.

Rumors abound of the Lot Ghost, a ghost that haunts the house-turned-dorm in which Andrew lives. But there’s much more to this mystery that’s gradually revealed. Andrew bears a strong resemblance to Byron and is cast as the lead in the school play about the Harrow alumnus, written and directed by Piers Fawkes, a poet and master at Lot. Andrew’s other confidante and love interest is Persephone, the only girl at Harrow, the daughter of the school’s headmaster. What Andrew can piece together is that his friends’ lives are in danger, and if he can’t find out the mystery with Lord Byron at its center, he may die as well.

Life at Harrow lies at the center of Evans’s tale. He combines the bullying and torrid relationships of the past with the goings-on in the present, moving easily between the two. Our hero, Andrew, with his resemblance to Byron, links the two eras together. There’s a chance he can solve the mystery of who the ghost is and why people are dying with the help of Fawkes, Persephone and a library researcher, but time may run out on him.

My only pet peeve with this book is that the author tries to do too much. Add in Fawkes problem with alcohol, a speech Andrew has planned for speech day and some of the story threads get dropped without becoming fully developed. That said, Evans does a nice job of pulling the reader into the story and maintaining enough tension and hints to keep one’s focus.

I have a penchant for books with boarding schools at their center as well as those with historical settings in part or in whole, so I enjoyed the story immensely. Part horror and part thriller, there are enough creepy, very realistic moments in the story to give out shivers. Evans has a talent for vivid descriptions too, and some weren’t so pretty. While I don’t think the novel has any profound messages to pass along, fans of historical settings, Lord Byron or boarding schools should give it a whirl. Just don’t turn out the lights if it’s late.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Katherine Petersen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Justin Evans
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse The Twelfth Enchantment by David Liss

Bibliography:

• A Good and Happy Child (2007)
• The White Devil (May 2011)

“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do.

But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

Part school story, part existentialism primer, You Deserve Nothing, is a deftly told and absorbing debut. Ostensibly, the story of a troubled teacher who goes too far, You Deserve Nothing is also a thoughtful examination of moral education, of the ways in which we learn to navigate the minefield between duty and freedom, courage and cowardice, the self and the persona. The story, predominately concerned with a scandal that is as shocking as it is mundane, is told from three perspectives some five or so years later: Will Silver’s, a young and charismatic English teacher; Marie de Cléry’s, the beautiful, but insecure daughter of a cruelly elegant mother and a workaholic father; Gilad Fischer’s, an intelligent but lonely boy, the son of an American diplomat and Israeli mother, who idolizes Will.

International School of France is an expensive private school in Paris, and while the majority of students at ISF are “kids who’d been plucked from an Air Force base in Virginia and deposited in Paris, who resented the move, refused to adapt,” the informal style of Will Silver’s Senior Seminar resonates with the privileged offspring of upper-echelon executives and foreign diplomats, kids “who were fluent in several languages and cultures, who were so relaxed, so natural in exquisite apartments at elaborate parties, who moved from country to country, from adult to adolescent with a professional ease.” A dynamic and charismatic teacher, Will pushes his students to think through ideas of duty and freedom, courage and responsibility as they appear in the Bible and the works of Sartre, Camus, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. Although a true believer in the power and importance of literature, Will can’t help but wonder if much of the pleasure of teaching “lies exclusively in the performing, in being adored.” Will enjoys celebrity among the student body, and undoubtedly, his exhortation to pursue your dreams “in spite of fear . . . No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself” will remind many of Robin Williams’ character (carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary) in Dead Poet’s Society, and as I read the classroom scenes, I half-expected everyone to jump up on chairs and quote Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain).

An obvious association, I know, but I couldn’t help but feel at times that that’s the point, that Will is aping that role – the role of risk-taking, life-changing teacher. This is a book about courage and responsibility, about the ways in which we shirk our freedom and opt out of creating ourselves; moving half-way across the world for a job you love might seem like a brave choice, but for Will it’s an act of cowardice, an abrupt flight from a wife he loves when the pain of his parents’ deaths becomes too much.

Numbing himself with a sort of Sartrean bad faith, Will’s dazzling persona protects him from having to emotionally engage with the world. Even when he flouts conventional morality and starts a sexual relationship with Marie, both a minor and a student at ISF, it is less a principled embrace of desire than a retreat from his despair, having witnessed a murder, and his shame at having done nothing to apprehend the murderer. Even the young and inexperienced Marie starts “to have the impression that [she] was making love to a ghost or something.” However, there are no easy villains here, and Alexander Maksik wisely avoids moralizing their relationship. Although Marie, masking her inexperience and insecurity, plays at being the seductress, Maksik allows her a honest sexuality, and Will, unable to doff his role as the instructor, gently teaches her how to enjoy her sexual nature. This is not to excuse Will, of course. Mickey Gold, ISF’s bumbling biology teacher, hits it on the head when he advises Will that trading in the complicated (and reciprocated) love of a real woman for the empty pleasure of “those adoring eyes” is “a coward’s game.”

Just as Marie’s disappointment with Will is inevitable, Gilad’s hero-worship can only mature through disillusionment. Gilad, in the way of the young, conflates the thrilling ideas being taught with the character of his teacher and when, after a heartbreaking scene with his parents, he sits in a café, reading Camus, it pleases him to think that Will would approve of him “there alone, so early in the morning, paying such attention to simple, beautiful things” and when Gilad admits that his infatuation was so complete he “wanted to go to war for him,”,I was reminded of one of the best instances of hero-worship and disillusionment in literature: Nicholas Rostov’s infatuation with Tsar Alexander in War and Peace (in case there’s any doubt: I mean this as a compliment). In fact, it’s partly  Maksik’s astute understanding of adolescent psychology and mannerism that makes this book so good and his characters so real, as captured here in this bantering dialogue between Will and a former student, Mazin:

“ . . . I miss our talks.”
“But we’re having one now.”
“Yeah, on my free period. Lame.”
“I’m flattered you’d waste your free period with me, Maz.”
“Yeah, well don’t get too excited. Anyway Silver, school’s a waste of my time.”
“Carrot?”
“No man, I don’t want a carrot, I want to know why I shouldn’t just move to LA and start a band.”
“Who says you shouldn’t?”
“Please. Everyone.”
“You realize, right, that this is a tired conversation? You know everything I’m going to tell you. It’s the height of boring.”
“No, I don’t. You’re the height of boring. What are you going to tell me?”

However difficult Marie and Gilad’s loss of innocence is, narrated from a place of relative wisdom many years later, that past pain is softened. In comparison, Will is frustratingly opaque, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the place he was narrating from: had he found the courage to dismantle his armor or was he “teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation” or “living cheap in Thailand,” still a ghost?

You Deserve Nothing is an auspicious debut, both for Alexander Maksik who shows himself here to be an unfairly talented writer and for the new Europa Editions’ imprint, edited by Alice Sebold (of The Lovely Bones fame), Tonga Books. I look forward to seeing more from both.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alexander Maksik
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Bibliography:

• You Deserve Nothing (August 2011)
• A Marker to Measure Drift (July 2013)

“Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. (…) We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide by.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (DEC 13, 2010)

I’d seen Fall described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.

The two main narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking, not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be good-natured.

By contrast Noel’s prose is highly structured – more so than would be possible for the age group. This is excused by the account being written retrospectively from an adult standpoint. Within the novel, it’s only Noel that is examined in detail and whose changes are viewed. Most of the other characters are almost static emotionally. There’s also a nominal contribution from William, Julius’s father’s driver.

The “Fall” of the title is the name of one of the few girls in the predominantly male school, and is short for “Fallon.” Fall is dating Julius: they’re the ideal couple, both popular and attractive. Noel is obsessed with Fall as well, though he never declares it to her, but instead continues to state in the narrative that his turn with her will come later. The plot (such as it is) revolves around the disappearance of Fallon from the campus grounds, with both Julius and Noel being questioned about it.

What the novel is concerned with is the development of Noel from a weedy sixteen year old who won’t retaliate if pushed down in a corridor, to a seemingly self-confident, possibly self-knowing sociopath, prone to explosive violence at rare moments. When he visits his family in Sydney near the outset of the book, he describes himself:

“One day I came out of the pool and saw myself reflected in our sliding door. I was a pale and skinny sixteen-year-old who had forgotten to put sunblock on one of his shoulders. My lazy eye was swollen shut, my face was ugly and drained, my shoulder was livid, and I was still unformed.”

It’s the “unformed” that McAdam is concerned with. The environment the teenagers are put into is portrayed as artificial, unhealthy. Despite being highly supervised, there are effectively no adults in the children’s lives. It’s noticeable that Julius’s mother is dead (she committed suicide), Fallon’s father is absent (her parents are divorced) and Noel’s family is supposedly intact but they’re as far away as they can be, in Australia.

The implication is that growing up in this unnatural environment, the children inevitably miss out on vital components of life. Like plants deprived of isolated nutrients, they’re prone to becoming emotionally stunted – lop-sided, etiolated.  In Sydney, as Noel prepares to leave his parents’ house for school at the end of the holidays, his mother says to him:

“I don’t like seeing how much you’re changing. … I’m missing all your changes.”

When adults don’t keep a watch on the changes children go through, undesirable developments multiply unnoticed. There are key incidents that serve as markers along the road to Noel’s increasingly antisocial tendencies. The first is an incident in 9th grade, mainly described by Chuck, a close associate of Julius and Noel’s. The incident involves Noel (still in his “unformed” state) being bullied by a larger boy, and after a fair period of non-retaliation suddenly turning and biting his tormentor’s arm. Chuck says it wasn’t even the fact that he physically bit a piece out of a fellow student’s arm, but that afterwards Noel was absolutely unaffected by it. “…like it was all normal for him. Like he just forgot about it.” It’s not the incident itself that the stolid Chuck finds disturbing, but the separation from a workaday mentality.

Nuances and hints are brushed in lightly but deliberately. In the corridor of a quiet Friday afternoon when not many other people are about, Noel passes Mr Staples:

“who taught Algebra and Functions, nodded at me and said, ‘Mr Reece.’ His lips were tight and there was a look in his eyes that had developed a few years earlier whenever he saw me. Distrust or caution or just that squint of a half-formed opinion. I never liked him.”

Here Noel is narrating, but he doesn’t refer to the biting incident specifically, but simply as “a few years earlier.” In the lop-sided world of the semi-abandoned school, even the teacher’s opinion is possibly “half-formed.”

There’s also an ambiguous encounter with a girl at the gym in Sydney, where Noel first starts working out. Meg is a no-nonsense girl and is pointedly stronger than Noel at the time, but after an encounter at a midnight beach suddenly stops turning up at the gym. Noel writes her a letter of apology for “frightening” her, but as far as Noel’s own account relates, there has been nothing to justify this apology. One is left to wonder what happened after Noel’s pen stopped writing.

This is the case throughout Noel’s account. How self-aware is he? Although it’s deliberately left unanswered, the fact that he’s writing after (what is obviously) extensive discussion and analysis, as well as brief pointers, suggest that Noel is quite aware of his own nature. When he’s sitting in a café with Fallon, he narrates:

“I’ve often tried to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her than it did to me.”

This brings us to the issue of lack of empathy. Critics of the book have pointed out that characters are not rounded, they’re cut-outs. Particularly Fall, the prime object of desire. We’re not at all clear  what she looks like, or anything about her other than she’s a reasonably attractive, decent girl with a slightly troubled family background. The point about Fall is, however, not why she is desirable, but that she is. In the two-dimensional mind of an underdeveloped human with an insufficient intake of adult stability, the fact that she is desirable is much more important than what she actually is. As readers, we need know no more. In a world reduced to symbols and arbitrary black-and-white areas, protagonists are unable to function when they collide with real life or emotion – the “grey” areas, within themselves and in the external world.

The premature separation from parents caused by boarding school is juxtaposed with the infantilisation of physically mature boys. The school imposes rules, often ineffectual and seemingly arbitrary. Julius says:

“Chuck’s bed is here and Ant’s bed is there and I’m wondering why I’m eighteen years old and sleeping in a bunk bed.”

These two aspects of the evils inflicted by the school seem to combine to create a small vortex strong enough to suck susceptible minds into an emotional limbo. McAdam himself went to a similar boarding school, and there is without doubt a great deal of catharsis and self-healing within the volume. This does not make it less worthwhile a read.

Once again, on hearing the novel was a “literary whodunit” with the title of Fall, I expected perhaps a detective’s journey into the abyss of a killer’s mind, which drags the detective into a biblical “Fall” in the process. In the first analysis, one might be disappointed going in with these expectations. However, in retrospect, this is precisely what it is – except that the detective is the reader, and McAdam tries his best to share the “fall” in a manner that will be participated in, also by the reader. Here, though, the state before the fall is not some prelapsarian innocence. It’s more mere ignorance, unformedness. The protagonists lurch from being unformed to being malformed, no pause inbetween. It’s perhaps more chilling for this, as for all their two-dimensionality, they are in their own way entirely believable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; 1 Reprint edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page for Colin McAdam
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Some Great Thing

Bibliography:

• Some Great Thing (2004)
• Fall (2009)
• A Beautiful Truth (September 2013)

“Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different from them.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 13, 2010)

This is a magnificent achievement, one that I personally rate above all other Ishiguro novels, because it adds an unexpected and quietly devastating emotional dimension to his already-powerful armory. Although this book has something of the alternative-reality feel of  The Unconsoled, it is by no means as difficult to read. It probably beats even The Remains of the Day in the surface lucidity of its narration, and emotions that had been denied or repressed in that earlier novel are here allowed to flower, albeit briefly. Indeed, one strand of this most unusual Bildungsroman is a love story, simple, true, and almost traditional, though denied the traditional happy-ever-after ending.

It opens at Hailsham, a secluded co-ed boarding-school in the English countryside. I am sorry that many reviewers, professional and otherwise, have given away the secret of what the book is about, since the pace at which Ishiguro reveals information is masterly. First, he gives hints that Hailsham is not a normal school and that its pupils are somehow special. Then he lets drop pieces of information, though never the complete picture. Even when the book is over, there are still larger mysteries out there that are never explained. Indeed it is not only the readers who must accept the mystery; the characters themselves are hesitant to demand explanations for what they have not been told; it is part of what sets them apart as a sub-class, living apparently full lives within a cage of which they are only dimly aware.

There is a scene about three-quarters of the way through the book, after the heroine Kathy has graduated and travels widely around Britain in her own car. She takes a couple of her friends on a trip to see an old boat, beached on the edge of the Eastern fens. It’s just “this old fishing boat, with a little cabin for a couple of fishermen to squeeze into when it’s stormy.” A common enough sight along the shoreline, one would think. But for the people in this story, it acquires almost mythic significance. Kathy first hears about it as far away as Wales, and those who have been to see the boat are given the respect due to returning pilgrims. But for people who are effectively institutionalized, such outings can seem very special indeed; I remember feeling the same about some day-trips from boarding school, or later from a long-stay hospital. It is a brilliant device of Ishiguro’s to demonstrate the smallness of his characters’ world by showing the intensity of their enthusiasm for something so apparently trivial. It is one of his dominant techniques in The Remains of the Day, and it recurs in each of the four books of his that I have read.

It is interesting that Ishiguro states the place and time quite baldly on the first page as “England, late 1990s,” five years before its actual publication. Such glimpses of the outside world as we get, increasingly towards the end of the novel, are tied more closely to place and time than is usual with this author. And yet the basic premise of his story would have been impossible in the nineties. Although he is essentially writing science fiction, he needs to set it in the familiar world to prevent his readers from slipping into a special sci-fi gear. The most touching thing about his quite extraordinary characters is precisely their ordinariness, framed towards the end by long car journeys between various decrepit facilities and lonely evenings in bed-sits. The heartbreak of the closing paragraph is conjured out of a description of windblown rubbish, “torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags,” caught in a wire fence.

In each of his novels, Ishiguro seems to take a particular genre of British popular fiction and rework it to his own ends: the Upstairs/Downstairs story in The Remains of the Day, or the Great Detective story in When We Were Oprhans. Here, although the author surely owes much to John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the dominant genre is not science fiction but the boarding-school novel. And once again, he has captured the convention to a tee; it is also clear that he has been through such schools himself. This is all the more remarkable in that this book features a young woman as narrator and a mostly female cast, and thus breaks away from the classics of the genre (for example, Kipling’s Stalky & Co) which all have a boys-school bias. But he has the adolescent female psychology down pat, especially the way that the closest friendships can also harbor intense rivalries.

Ishiguro’s appropriation of classic British tropes is parallel to what I see as his attempts to enter British society. Even today, English society is inherently dominated by class — or rather caste — with great importance placed on being a member of an in-group, and on the numerous ways, subtle and not so subtle, of reminding others that they are merely outsiders and not “one of us.” An immigrant from another culture, however talented and however well-connected, could not help but feel this even more acutely. Ishiguro’s books are peopled with characters who believe themselves to be part of a privileged elite, but are still conscious of a true elite beyond their circle to which they will never belong. The boarding-school setting is a perfect metaphor for this, beginning with shifting in-groups among the students themselves, extending to the distinctions between the older and younger students, and eventually moving into the outside world, where having been to such a school at all is both a mark of privilege and a handicap.

One might even say that it has a metaphysical component, questioning whether a life led in accordance with rules set by an unseen power that can change them at a whim is worth living at all. What, in short, do any of us live for? Ishiguro’s answer in this book seems to be that you simply have to live as best you can. I find it a strangely reassuring one.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 958 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Mti edition (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kazuo Ishiguro
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nocturnes And another of: Never Let Me Go Another kind of “carer:” Confessions of a Death Maiden by Ruth Fransciso

Bibliography:

• A Pale View of Hills (1982)
• An Artist of the Floating World (1986) 
• Remains of the Day (1989)
• The Unconsoled (1995)
• When We Were Orphans (2000)
• Never Let Me Go (2005)
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)
• The Buried Giant (March 2015)

Movies from books:

• Remains of the Day (1993)
• Never Let Me Go (2010)

“I have a corner seat in this train by a mistake which is not entirely my fault. The woman, who is in this seat, asks me if I think she has time to fetch herself a cup of tea. I can see that she badly wants to do this and, in order that she does not have to go without the tea, I agree that, though she will be cutting it fine, there is a chance that she will have time. So she goes and I see her just emerging from the refreshment room with a look on her face which shows how she feels. She has her tea clutched in one hand and I have her reserved seat because it is silly, now that the train has started, to stand in the corridor being crushed by army greatcoats and kitbags and boots, simply looking at the emptiness of this comfortable corner.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JUN 13, 2010)

Although she wrote all her life, Jolley didn’t get her first book published until she was 53. Thereafter she published 15 novels, four story collections and four non-fiction books. The daughter of an Austrian mother and English father and a transplant to Australia from England, she became one of Australia’s most celebrated authors and won at least 16 awards. Yet by the time of her death in 2007, her books were out of print. This new edition of her acclaimed autobiographical trilogy brings these three novels — My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife — together in one volume in the U.S. for the first time. The conclusion, The George’s Wife, was never before published here though it won major awards and accolades in Australia.

Having read My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever years ago, I can tell you it makes a difference having the final volume, but even more – reading the books in one volume changes the experience. There’s a disjointed quality to Vera’s narration and a rhythm to the prose, which creates a deep intimacy when all three books are read together. The format also satisfies the build-up of suspense and relieves certain frustrations with Vera’s sometimes self-destructive passivity.

As My Father’s Moon opens in post-WWII England, Vera is departing with her illegitimate daughter, Helena, for a teaching position at a progressive boarding school, Fairfields. Her mother is distressed that she is taking the child, but then her mother is distressed at the whole mess Vera has made of her promising life. And thirty pages later, as if to underscore her series of bad choices, Vera is waiting at the end of a train line, having left squalid, abusive Fairfields and thrown herself on the mercy of a nursing colleague she hasn’t communicated with in five years.

Each of the ten sections focuses on an aspect of Vera’s life, which illuminate the story’s center – her wartime nursing (instead of the university her parents had hoped for) and her own naivety, self-absorption and insecurity. From Fairfield her perspective returns to childhood and boarding school, the wartime refugees her mother aided, a lesbian affair, a beloved neighbor whose warnings go unanswered, and pivotal incidents in her war experience. Fractured repetitions offer new depth, details or interpretations of events.

From her poor but bookish home life and the typical child’s impatience with her mother’s foreign accent to the casual cruelty of dormitory girls in a hidebound, lawless environment, which is uneasily echoed in nurses’ housing, Vera is flatly, musingly honest about her own failings and loneliness. At school Vera torments a girl she calls Bulge, for no more reason than physical antipathy. As a new nurse, she’s in thrall to a roommate who she keeps in cigarettes and spending money. Taken up by a doctor and his wife who move in moneyed, bohemian, dissolute circles, she feels herself uplifted, cosseted and loved, only to find herself seduced and abandoned.

As Cabin Fever opens Vera is a doctor in a hotel at a conference. And that’s about all we find out about that. “Memories are not always in sequence, not in chronological sequence.” Structured like My Father’s Moon in interconnected sections, Vera remembers Helena’s birth, her horrible, stultifying experience as a mother’s helper, her removal to the nursing home to have her baby and her extended stay there, all of it intertwined with wartime and childhood memories. Loneliness looms large, but there’s a fair amount of humor too as Vera limits her focus to getting through the day.

In book three, The Georges Wife, Vera makes the same mistakes all over again, longing for love. “I suppose I shall be lonely, Mr. George, I suppose that, one day, I shall have to be alone. I shall be lonely.” Taking a position as a servant to an unmarried brother and sister quite set in their ways, she has a second child. But this time there is no running away and no abandonment though Mr. George (as she still thinks of him) keeps putting off their marriage. She goes to medical school, and takes up with a strange couple not of her class – echoes of her postwar youth. But this time she gets her education and eventually emigrates to Australia with Mr. George.

From her perspective as a psychologist Vera does not spare herself: “I am a shabby person. I understand, if I look back, that I have treated kind people with an unforgivable shabbiness. For my work a ruthless self-examination is needed. Without understanding something of myself, how can I understand anyone else.” Of course, most of us could say the same if we were honest. Jolley says it in a trilogy of beguiling rumination, exploring a half-century of history through one woman’s very personal experience. Though largely tossed about by life, drifting into circumstances and relationships of least resistance, Vera finally gets a grip on herself and her future and perhaps that’s what maturity is all about, even if it’s still a lonely place.

Jolley’s prose is intimate, poetic and unflinching. The disjointed structure builds upon itself with an almost mesmerizing quality. Though less humorous than much of her fiction, the trilogy is a work of emotional depth and beauty, which will be enjoyed by anyone who likes to wrap themselves in compelling, artful fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Persea; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS:	Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	See this one, for a contrast: Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann And more by Elizabeth Jolley: Foxbaby Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

• Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976)
• Palomino (1980)
• The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1983)
• Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983)
• Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
• Milk and Honey (1984)
• Foxbaby (1985; November 2010)
• The Well (1986)
• The Sugar Mother (1988; November 2010)
• My Father’s Moon (1989) *
• Cabin Fever (1990) *
• The Georges’ Wife (1993) *
• The Orchard Thieves (1995)
• Lovesong (1997)
• Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories (1997)
• An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
• An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
• The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife (April 2010) *

Non-fiction:

• Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
• Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
• Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)