This 1952 book by Nevil Shute (author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach) contrasts the bleakness of post-war London and Great Britain, especially This 1952 book by Nevil Shute (author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach) contrasts the bleakness of post-war London and Great Britain, especially the ongoing food rationing and general lack of prosperity, with the bright, roomy country of Australia, where massive meals are the order of the day, everyone (almost) has financial security, and the landscape is awe-inspiring.
[image] Merrijig, Australia
Against that backdrop, we have the adventures and romance between Jennifer Morton, a British young woman visiting her relatives in Australia and deciding whether to make her life there, and Carl Zlinter, a Czech doctor who's working as a lumberman in Australia and loves the country ... even though he's not (because of laws) allowed to practice medicine there. But in the lumber camps there's often a need for first aid, and people turn a blind eye when he performs minor surgeries. And then one day there's a major accident ...
The story begins with some scenes from the life of Jack and Jane Dorman, a couple in their 50s who moved to Australia many years ago. Jane, a British woman from an upper class family, married Jack years ago against her parents' wishes.
She was too young, too immature to be able to stand up and state her conviction that there was solid stuff in this young man, the substance for a happy and enduring marriage; she felt that very strongly, but she could never get it out in words.
Jane's Aunt Ethel was her sole supporter. Now, after many years of financial struggles on their Australian sheep ranch, Jack and Jane finally are making a lot of money. Jane, reading between the lines of Ethel's latest letters, gets worried and decides to send Aunt Ethel a gift of ₤500. Meanwhile, back in Great Britain, Ethel's granddaughter Jennifer gets an emergency call about Ethel, and rushes to her home.
Carl is an unusual character for the love interest, with a thick accent and a somewhat timid manner with Jennifer. He's a good guy and a talented surgeon, though, and I ended up really liking him. Ethel was a distinctive character as well, a relic of a bygone era with pride and a deep wish not to be a burden or charity case. Compared to these two, Jennifer is somewhat less memorable, though appealing; a plucky British young woman.
Nevil Shute has a lot to say about the relative merits of post-war England vs. Australia, and it's clear on which side of the fence he stands. I don't know how accurate his portrayal of these countries in the early fifties is, but he does draw Australia as kind of the Promised Land, a place of great opportunity for people both rich and poor. There were a lot of European refugees who emigrated to Australia in the aftermath of WWII, called the "New Australians," and this book talks quite a bit about the Australian immigration program and the work requirements for immigrants. Interesting stuff. Shute's views on colonialism are dated, though that's understandable for a book that's nearly 70 years old.
The Far Country isn't as memorable as A Town Like Alice, one of my favorite comfort reads, and the ending left too many loose threads for my taste. I really wanted an epilogue or a few more chapters! But I enjoyed it and downed the whole thing in one evening.
June 2019 buddy read with the Retro Reads group....more
The Shadow of the Lynx is one of the four Victoria Holt novels that I picked up in an omnibus volume the other day. I stayed up way too late the otherThe Shadow of the Lynx is one of the four Victoria Holt novels that I picked up in an omnibus volume the other day. I stayed up way too late the other night paging through this one. It's kind of interesting but repelling. Published in 1971, this was later days for Victoria Holt, when I imagine she was tired of writing governess-marries-the-lord-of-the-manor stories. But this is not a romance so much as it is a story of obsession and revenge.
Set in Victorian England and Australia, this tells the story of 17 year old Nora Tamasin, a strong-willed young British woman who travels to Australia when her father dies, accepting the protection of her father's partner, Charles Herrick. She's escorted by Herrick's son Stirling, and falls in love with Stirling on the trip. But when she gets to Australia, Stirling's father, known as "the Lynx," wants her too, and Stirling defers to his father in this as in almost everything else. Nora, disappointed with Stirling and weirdly fascinated with the Lynx, marries him.
Nora gradually comes to realize that the Lynx, who was wrongly charged with a crime and shipped off to Australia as punishment, is obsessed with revenge against the English family that accused him. He wants them broken and he wants to live in their mansion, Whiteladies. Everyone around him, including his son and, to some extent, Nora, gets caught up in his Master Plan for Revenge. Since this is Victoria Holt, there's also a murder subplot that gets wedged into our story. There's also a very odd shift in perspective later in the story, as the first person point of view shifts to another woman for a number of chapters, but to say more about that would get us into spoiler territory.
Nora's father-son romances, if you can call it that, were just too off-putting for me, as was the fact that the father (who she marries at age 19(view spoiler)[, though he conveniently dies not too long after (hide spoiler)]) is in, as far as I can tell, his early 50s. Ewww! I skimmed most of this book. But if you're into an obsessive revenge type of historic fiction tale with a side of weird romance, you might enjoy this. As I mention in one of my comments in the thread below, the obsession and revenge-based plot was an interesting idea, but an author has to be a much more talented writer than Victoria Holt (sorry, Eleanor) to make reading about anti-heroes enjoyable for me. Someone like Daphne du Maurier, as in Rebecca, is much better bet for that kind of tale.
An odd one all the way around. Almost everyone in it needed a good solid smack upside the head. Though there is, kind of, a HEA, it's an unusual one, not what a typical romance reader might have expected or hoped for in this story....more
4.5 stars. In the course of my ongoing search for good old-fashioned romantic suspense novels in the vein of Mary Stewart, I've been down the path of 4.5 stars. In the course of my ongoing search for good old-fashioned romantic suspense novels in the vein of Mary Stewart, I've been down the path of gothic mysteries with Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt (which didn't work out particularly well for me), and tried some of the more modern ones by Susanna Kearsley (a bit hit and miss, but there are definitely some good ones there). A while back one of my Goodreads friends recommended that I give Madeleine Brent's books a shot. I’ve read several Brent novels now, and this one is my favorite.
Our story begins in the late 1800's in Australia, where a 14 year old girl called Mitji lives with her aboriginal tribe, far from white civilization. She has white skin and fiery red hair, which the other tribe members (who picked her up as a lost child, but are otherwise unfamiliar with white people) view with huge distrust, and Mitji believes she is a freak. So she goes walkabout, and comes across a handsome Englishman, Luke Bowman, who was dying of thirst in the outback. She saves his life (this girl has mad desert survival skills) and ends up living with Luke and his wife Rosemary for the next few years. They teach Mitji, now called Meg, how to be a (semi) civilized Victorian young lady.
Rosemary eventually dies of a long-term illness, and Meg's relationship with Luke is uneasy for reasons she doesn't really understand. When someone tries to kill Meg for unknown reasons, Luke (now wealthy from a gold mine find) ships her off to a finishing school in Switzerland, where Meg spends the next year gaining polish. But the mysterious danger to her life threatens again ...
Golden Urchin is an unusually adventurous suspense novel with just a little romance. It takes Mitji/Meg all over, from Australia to Switzerland to England to Africa, as she tries to understand her past and come to terms with her present. I got a kick out of the way a lot of the aborigine attitudes and talents still stayed within Meg, even when covered with a veneer of social polish. Good thing too! It's pretty handy when your sense of smell is so good that you can sniff out both hidden springs of water and murderous villains.
I'm not at all sure how realistic it all was, but it was great fun. Recommended for those who like light romantic suspense novels. This book was published in the 1980's but there are lots of fairly cheap used copies floating around....more
The Forgotten Garden is a multi-generational mystery that reveals itself bit by haunting bit, featuring three women:
- Eliza, born in the late 1800s, The Forgotten Garden is a multi-generational mystery that reveals itself bit by haunting bit, featuring three women:
- Eliza, born in the late 1800s, who is born into poverty in London. Eliza's mother was a young woman who had run away from her upper crust home, for reasons that become clear later in the story, but she is found and pulled back into her wealthy family's embrace (or maybe it's their tentacles).
- Nell, born in 1909, who is found sitting on her suitcase on an Australian ship dock in 1913, adamantly refusing to say where she came from or even what her name is. Eventually she begins searching for her roots in England.
- Cassandra, Nell's Australian granddaughter, who takes up the search in England after Nell dies.
The storyline skips back and forth in time and from person to person (and also tosses in a few other characters' POVs here and there for good measure, which might irk you if you prefer a more linear plotline with a single POV). But the concerns of these characters and the themes of this book - like identity, finding oneself, family connections, desires - are so closely tied together that I didn't feel confused once I got to know the characters.
Eliza is an author of mystical and sometimes dark fairy tales, with lovely sketched illustrations by another character. I really wanted to see these illustrations; I imagine them as something like an Arthur Rackham illustration:
[image]
[image]
Some of Eliza's stories find their way into the text of this book, and their symbolism and autobiographical qualities help to unravel the mystery of Eliza's life and how it connects to Nell's and Cassandra's. Toward the end I was able to guess the main mysteries of the book, but at least they didn't come out of left field.
There are some nasty and disturbed characters in this book and a few really ill-advised decisions made by characters who are otherwise likeable, so it's not all rainbows and unicorns here. In the end it's a bittersweet but hopeful story, and overall I enjoyed the book. [image] ...more
There are books we can't be entirely rational about. For good or bad, they push our personal buttons, and we adore or detest them beyond their own merThere are books we can't be entirely rational about. For good or bad, they push our personal buttons, and we adore or detest them beyond their own merits.
A Town Like Alice is one of those books I love beyond reason. It contains courage, determination when the odds are against you, and taking action to change others' lives and the world around you for the better. It has some bittersweet moments, as well as a little bit of romance.
Nevil Shute based this 1950 novel on a WWII story he had heard about Dutch women and children, who were Japanese prisoners of war, who were marched around Sumatra from place to place because the Japanese had no prison camp to put them in, many of them dying along the way. (As it turns out, he misunderstood the story: they didn't actually have to walk but were transported around the country.) He used this as the basis for this story of Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman who becomes the leader of a group of women and children who are forced to walk from town to town in Japanese-occupied Malaya (now Malaysia), in terrible circumstances. Along the way they meet a kind Australian POW, Joe Harman, a young man who helps them with food and other necessities and quickly becomes a friend to Jean. But Jean and Joe run into trouble when Joe steals some black Leghorn chickens for the underfed group. What happens then, and after, makes for a fascinating story.
[image] Malaysian village
After the war, Jean inherits some money, and becomes friends with Noel Strachan, the elderly English solicitor who is her trustee. Noel is the narrator for most of the novel, and sometimes his voice gets a little dry and tedious in relating tangential details, kind of befitting an aging lawyer (I can say that :D). At the same time, he has a certain old-fashioned charm and wry humor. Noel watches Jean fall in love with a distinct feeling of regret, since her new life will take her away from England, but he continues to help her as she begins to transform the Australian outback town where she has chosen to live.
[image] Queensland, Australia
As he decides to travel to visit Jean to help her with some legal matters, one of his law partners is concerned for his health:
"I only wish you hadn't got to put so much of your energy into this. After all, it's a fairly trivial affair."
"I can't agree with that," I said. "I'm beginning to think that this thing is the most important business that I ever handled in my life."
I've read this book three or four times over the years. I noticed much more this time how Noel's narration sometimes gets repetitive and tedious (I wish I had a dollar for every time a character stared at someone or said "Oh my word"). I don't know if Nevil Shute deliberately wrote it that way or if that's just his style of writing. But then there's a wonderful scene or a lovely turn of phrase, and I fall in love with this book all over again.
In the half light he turned as she came out of the hut, and he was back in the Malay scene of six years ago. She was barefooted, and her hair hung down in a long plait, as it had been in Malaya. She was no longer the strange English girl with money; she was Mrs. Boong again, the Mrs. Boong he had remembered all those years.
It's old-fashioned in many ways, but it still moves and inspires me. And for that reason, despite its occasional weaknesses, it's staying at the full five stars.
February 2015 reread/buddy read with Hana. __________________
Previous review: This is one of my all-time favorite books. It consists of two quite different halves, with the first half relating the travails of Jean Paget and a group of English women in Malaya during WWII, and the second half about Jean's romance with an Australian man she had met briefly during her travels in Malaya and her efforts to turn his Australian town into a decent place for women and families to live.
I may be in the minority of liking the second half better than the first, not just for the romance (which is nice but doesn't take up a lot of space in the book) but more for the way in which the main character takes action to change her town. It's inspiring and enjoyable reading, even if rather deliberately paced at times. Highly recommended....more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
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