cyphomandra

My torn calf muscle is improving but I did that thing where it started to improve so I overdid it (possibly a ninety minute murder mystery outdoor adventure game walking the streets to find and interview suspects/witnesses a week after the injury might have been a mistake) and then had to go a lot more slowly. The physio let me try single leg calf raises from last week, but they're still pretty difficult and I can't run.

The Sun in the Morning, MM Kaye. First volume of three in her memoir/autobiography, covering her childhood in India - she was born in 1908, in the British Raj - and her return “Home” to a dirty and unwelcoming England and boarding school at age 10. There is a lot of fascinating stuff here but, unlike her novels, it’s filtered through an obvious authorial presence that is grumpy about modern life and much less prepared to admit that people who criticise the British in Indian might possibly have a point. I think this is partly that she’s older when writing this, and partly that as an author she’s very good at being true to her characters, who are reflecting different experiences now.

But I’m on the second book now, and her history is shading more definitively into propaganda. She mentions how the Indian government have blocked off an alleyway after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919, British fired without warning on a gathering of ~15 000 people as it was in defiance of a proclamation issued that morning banning meetings of 4 or more people, death estimates range from ~380 to >1000) to make it seem a more deadly killing ground - she presents this as a discussion with an unnamed Indian writer and fellow cynic - and says that Dyer, the officer who gave the order, was haunted by “the terrified bloodstained little ghosts” of the British women and children killed in the Cawnpore Massacre roughly 60 years earlier. Maybe. The attack on a female doctor, Marcella Sherwood, is given by multiple sources as a provocative factor in Dyer’s decision. But Kaye doesn’t mention that Dyer, for a week after the massacre, ordered that any Indian going down the street where Sherwood was attacked was forced to crawl the length of it or be flogged; and while she does mention (and condemn) the murderous retribution of the British troops after the Cawnpore Massacre, again the malicious and chilling details are reserved for the British victims, not the Indian. She has also casually mentioned her belief that Gandhi may have been personally responsible for more deaths than Stalin - which is, as they say, certainly a take.

What I do like about Kaye’s writing is the country itself, the flora and fauna, the buildings and landscapes. And it made me realise how much has changed; Kaye and her sisters used to play a game from the train where they would count miles between seeing any people (often ten or more), and she spent much of her childhood in Old Delhi, where she felt she knew most of its several thousand inhabitants, and watched the construction of what was to be New Delhi.

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, Rachel Manija Brown (re-read). A counterpoint! I picked this up when Kaye got on my nerves but I wanted to read more about more recent India. It’s great to read but deeply disturbing as an example of parenting.

No Man’s Land, AJ Fitzwater. This has an absolutely fabulous cover. The book, alas, didn’t work so well for me, though I did enjoy it. In WWII in Central Otago, Dorothea (Tea) joins the Land Girls, and goes to work on a farm where her brother Robbie was placed before being sent to the Front. She meets Izzy and Grant, who can shapeshift into a dog and donkey, respectively, and learns her own whaiwhaiā, enabling her to shapeshift into an eel and then make her way through the hidden connections of water to her injured brother on the battlefront. There’s a lot going on - Grant is Robbie’s lover, and Robbie’s own shapeshifting is between sexes, not species - but the actual story feels thin and lacking in tension. And the other issue for me - and this is definitely a reader/writer incompatibility thing, I’ve had it before with other authors - is that I found it hard to see where I was in the story. There’s a lot of descriptive language, but things pile on top of each other in a rush of murky sensation, and I can’t tell who’s there or how things are physically related. Intermittently there are sections told entirely in dialogue, which doesn’t help, and the voices are not distinct enough to carry it.

Risk, Dick Francis. Accountant and amateur jockey Roland Britten is kidnapped and held prisoner in a vividly described sail storage locker on a yacht at sea; he manages to escape, helped by the sort of character you’d only find in a Francis book, a girls’ headmistress in her 40s who is a virgin and propositions the hero solely to gain experience that can then inform her interactions with her pupils and peers without unnecessary emotional entanglements (Roland also has a rather undeveloped love interest). Having completed this and his escape, Roland is then kidnapped again while trying to work out why he was taken in the first place. Solid story, good characters; I’m not entirely convinced by the final confrontation in which the villains tie him up to a table and spit on him before leaving, but it does have a nice thematic resonance when the headmistress (and the love interest) rescue him again.

Conventionally Yours, Annabeth Albert. I should really stop reading her books because although she has interesting set-ups the narrative always peters out as the romance swells, and it all becomes super syrupy. I had her Arctic Sun out at the same time and ended up bailing on it (ex-military wildlife guide clinging to sobriety reluctantly agrees to take a tour that includes a supermodel with an eating disorder). This one has two college students who are both invited to compete at a high level collectible card game tournament (Odyssey, made up for the book) who go on a road trip to get there; initial antagonism blossoms into understanding and make-out sessions. I can buy the emotions and maturity level better from this age group than from Albert’s adults, but it’s still just okay.

WA, novel for critique. Finished second readthrough and did crit.

In progress:

I have actually finished another nine books (travelling) but am going to post these first. I am listening in audiobook to Yumiko Kadota’s Emotional Female, her memoir about being a female Asian doctor grappling with the inhumane Australian surgical training system, I am still on the MM Kaye memoir volume 2, and I am enjoying Joanna Bourne’s The Forbidden Rose, French revolution double identities and het romance. I have also started Lisa Henry and M Caspian’s Fall Out, an m/m romance which I thought was hikers menaced by motorcycle gang but on page 48 volcanic ash started falling from the sky and now one of the couple who is recuperating (badly) from a motor vehicle accident has been left on the trail while the other seeks help - and, after he breaks into a pharmacy for batteries and water, is arrested by the local police, who have no idea what is going on but are happy to assume the worst of a Black man taking stuff even if he did leave cash on the counter. Intriguing.

Up next:

I have a bunch of research books due back to the library soon, so those.

I was convinced I picked this first book up off the memoir/biography table at the bookshop, and despite the author and the first-person protagonist having completely different names read it as such until I’d practically finished, and then felt let down by the discovery that it was fiction. This is completely unjustified, but hard to separate out from my actual impression of the book

( Marc Acito, How I paid for college. )

Rachel Manija Brown, All the fishes come home to roost. Definitely a memoir. Starts in a very promising fashion, with the eleven year-old narrator reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword while her parents argue over how to get from a deserted railway station in India to the place they are supposed to be staying, a holiday break in the hills as opposed to the hot, obscure, town in India where they are living on their guru's ashram (Baba is, inconveniently, dead, but his presence lingers). Rachel is the only child on the ashram for much of her childhood – she's there from age 7 to 12 – and the only Western white child at the archaic Holy Wounds convent school she attends. Books, and reading, thread throughout the memoir, as the only consistent and reliable form of escape/comfort in a very arbitrary world where everything Rachel thinks or experiences tends to be denied by adults with significantly more power.

It's dark and funny, and very good at getting across character in a short space, particularly in dialogue (her paternal grandfather's introductory comment: "The American Communists were very misunderstood."). It's also about trauma, and the powerlessness of childhood, and the stories people tell themselves, as well as the ones they don't ask. I liked it a lot.