In Short - Fiction

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 27, 2008

Reviews by Kerryn Goldsworthy

THE GRIFT

By Debra Ginsberg

Allen & Unwin, 360pp, $23.95

A "grift" is defined at the beginning of this charming, clever novel as "a group of methods used for obtaining money falsely through the use of swindles, frauds etc". There's also a definition of "gift", in its particular sense of "a special ability or capacity".

This book is about a gifted grifter called Marina Marks, whose career in "intuitive counselling" began when she was forced in childhood to make money for her junkie mother by pretending to tell people's fortunes.

As any good fortune teller knows, the real gift is the capacity to observe, and in this Marina is very like Sherlock Holmes; her deductions and predictions do indeed seem magically accurate.

But then she moves across the continent and falls in love and, as several clients' lives become interwoven and she realises that her past has caught up with her, she also realises that she really does have the gift of prescience and that creates new problems of its own. It's an engaging story, written with a wry, light touch and an open mind.

WE KNOW

By Gregg Hurwitz

Sphere, 320pp, $32.99

What saves this novel from being the kind of thriller that makes the eyes of female readers glaze over is the intelligent characterisation and the way that family relationships drive the story. Nick Horrigan has been on the run since he was 17, suspected of murdering his much-loved stepfather and forced by nameless and mysterious figures into running away from California to Alaska - a destination that has the kind of resonance Hurwitz could scarcely have foreseen, or he might have chosen somewhere even more remote.

Another 17 years later, back in Los Angeles, Horrigan is woken by police sirens and the next thing he knows there are Secret Service personnel abseiling off his roof. This novel equates to an action movie in its plot and in its proliferation of exciting toys in the James Bond tradition: Black Hawk helicopters, digital transmitters, exploding mobile phones.

It's also tightly plotted and well written, its hero the opposite of the usual hard-bitten loner and its values more those of the gentler genres than of thriller fare.

LUUURVE IS A MANY TROUSERED THING

By Louise Rennison

HarperCollins, 272pp, $14.99

This book, subtitled Fab New Confessions Of Georgia Nicolson, is the eighth in a series that is a huge hit in Britain. Sales are high, HarperCollins keeps publishing more sequels and someone is making a movie out of it.

The question that's hard to answer is why this might be. Aimed at teenage girls and clearly inspired, if that is the correct word, by Bridget Jones's Diary but with little of the latter's irony or charm, Luuurve Is A Many Trousered Thing follows the fortunes of a British teenager Georgia Nicolson, member of the Ace Gang and speaker of a strange dialect that reads like a combination of standard contemporary British and middle-to-upper-class British private school slang from some time before World War II.

The entire plot is that Georgia has acquired two boyfriends by mistake: "I am going to have to be on high beauty and glamorosity alert at all times." It's hard to understand how this particular fictional world could possibly be popular in the country that brought you Harry Potter.

PICK OF THE WEEK

LATE CONNECTIONS

By Aileen la Tourette

Ilura Press, 312pp, $26.95

This novel takes fictional liberties with the lives of European figures from the turn of the 20th century, including Sigmund Freud, Coco Chanel and the novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. These and other historical characters are brought together in a tale of revenge and redemption; at its centre lies another real person, Rose Kamper, who had been a patient of neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette. In 1893, for reasons that remain unclear, Kamper shot de la Tourette through the head but somehow managed not to kill him.

De la Tourette was the neurologist after whom the condition of Tourette's syndrome is named; whether the author of this novel is any relation remains unclear, not that it matters. In 1893, a bad year for him, his son, Jean, died of meningitis, his teacher and mentor Charcot also died and it was shortly after these deaths that Kamper shot him, claiming he had hypnotised her against her will.

Aileen la Tourette turns this series of events into a novel with great success and flair, plus a fairly clear agenda. The early studies in neurology, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis that produced so many giants in the field - Charcot, de la Tourette, William James and Freud - rested largely on case studies of women, particularly the patients at the Salpetriere Hopital, of whom Kamper was one. Charcot used the patients to illustrate his weekly lectures, "displaying these poor women like animals in a circus".

The story is retold from the point of view of several of the women involved in it: mainly Kamper herself, but also de la Tourette's wife, Marie, and daughter, Genevieve. Chanel and her real-life friend Colette are also roped into the plot when Rose convinces Chanel to take her on as an apprentice seamstress. These two singular women and the towering figure of Freud are depicted with great insight and authority but all of the characters are vividly drawn and la Tourette does a wonderful job of assembling real lives into a coherent and shapely plot.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home