for John Key
I have always believed
we should enhance
the literary skills of our young people
and while our literary heroes
may never challenge the glory
and respect given to our
All Blacks,
we still need role models
to inspire us.
From The Listener
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Back on Earth we gauged the pressure, decided it was not strong enough to turn carbon into diamond rain but enough to incite change. We took on new tasks, approached old jobs with renewed determination. After all, we’d made it around the sun again: a revolution to spark a revolution. When we heard all the known matter in the universe could fit into a grain of sand, we took it in our stride; strode across sandy shores anyway, trying not to do the maths. We had been to Titan – a smog-covered moon – we knew what we were getting ourselves into. We laughed too loudly and cried out: If the distance from the sun to Pluto is a ten cent piece then the Milky Way is France!
This is an impressive book. Somehow, Ann Patchett manages to create vivid characters with plausible relationships in the most limited of settings.
The novel begins dramatically with terrorists swarming an international gathering, looking for the president of the small Latin American country. But it turns out he stayed home from the party to watch his favourite soap opera and, with no plan B, the terrorists let all but one of the women leave and keep the rest of the group hostage while they figure out what to do. The exception is the famous opera singer Roxane Cox, who proves to be a valuable bargaining tool.
The operatic theme is clever, tying Roxane’s morning singing routine into the relationships that form within the captive group. Convincingly, we lose track of time after a while and the characters quickly lose any desire to escape, accepting the house they originally entered for a birthday party as their new home.
It would be tempting with such a confined setting (both time and space are restricted here) to go into long detailed descriptions of the characters’ lives, as a way to broaden the scope and escape the four walls. But this is never indulged and we begin to care about the characters knowing little about them other than their thoughts and feelings in the immediate situation. Patchett has an amazing skill in using perspective, whereby she effortlessly shifts from one character to another at times within the same paragraph, as if gliding freely among their thoughts.
As in opera so too does this novel end tragically. However, like the captors we have become so swept up in the new life they have created, the inevitable ending comes as quite a shock.
The other thing I particularly loved about this book was the importance of the polyglot, Gen. As this is an international gathering, he becomes invaluable translating firstly the demands of the terrorists, but increasingly as a tool for characters to confess their feelings for each other; declaring love from Russian into English and Japanese to Spanish. But he’s not always required and as Roxane knows, language is not the only way to express oneself.
Mass movements form landslide dams
water-logged debris from days of downpour
soil slumps, slides, trees fall to rolling logs.
Mud and earth backed-up to bursting
silty avalanche betrays stacked sand-bags
a saturated story of shifting dirt.
Deluge persists after deluges cease
no need to read the residue
of forests strewn like tealeaves on lawn.
Priorities rise to higher ground
drained and piled the softened land
moulded by unearthly hands.
© Saradha Koirala 2012
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Saradha Koirala 