Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 Reviews

Molly Fox's Birthday is a definite slow-burner and had I not been reviewing this book I may not have made it past page thirty. There is no doubt that this is a carefully-crafted novel. Madden moves between past and present with ease and perfection and her attention to detail is to be commended. Molly Fox is an actress, 'one of the finest of her generation,' we are told. She is absent from the novel but her presence is everywhere ? the story being told by the narrator who is staying in Molly's Dublin home whilst Molly is in New York. Very quickly the reader is aware of the relationship that exists between the narrator, Molly and Andrew, the art historian-come-TV-presenter. Molly has had a troubled childhood. She refuses to celebrate her birthday for reasons that become clear and her brother lives out the effects their childhood has had. The narrator and Andrew met at Trinity College Dublin, becoming friends (and one occasion something more) until Andrew takes himself off to Cambridge and in doing so becomes a new person.

This novel tries to deal with friendships and identity. Molly's past informs the present. Andrew's past (his poor relationship with his family and his brother's death) similarly shape him. However, we learn all this through the narrator. We see Molly's house through the narrator. The characters of the novel unravel through the narrator. It is this that lets the novel down. Where are the clues to Molly and Andrew? Where are the hints and allusions to their thoughts, fears and wants? Madden hands it all to us on a plate. We are told everything. She provides very little dialogue which would have provided a gentle break from the sometimes over-descriptive text.

The theatre provides a significant motif within this novel. Molly's home packed to the rafters with treasures and trinkets is theatrical; her life is theatrical; she is theatrically superstitious and she is immersed in the theatre of her life in as much a way as the narrator becomes immersed in Molly's life and almost becomes an intruder, a member of the audience, voyeuristic perhaps.

Where this novel fails, is in its over-descriptive desire to bring Molly to life and her life to us. The reader enters a middle-class world where, despite the obvious insecurities of the characters, everything is where it should be - even down to the food that is eaten and the milk jug that accompanies the narrator's cup of coffee. This formulaic approach left me cold and uncaring. Molly's house full of objects collected from her travels did not reveal to me her character. It merely became nothing more than a way to overload the narrative with the fact that this is an actor's home and therefore full of show. While Molly only peeks through the narrative, when she does, it is with such cliched force, she becomes unreal and quite clearly an author's construct.

Submitted by Lu Rahman, MA Student, Manchester University

Samantha Harvey's debut falls somewhere in between Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled" and Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time". For, like the former, we are plunged headlong into a nightmarish surreal mindscape in which nothing is as it seems and nothing can be trusted. Also, like the latter, we are at the same time presented with a stark and honest portrayal of a mental illness. Put simply, this book could do for Alzheimer's what Haddon's novel did for autism.

Each chapter is divided in two. First, "the present". We meet Jake, an elderly, retired architect. We witness, from his perspective, the impact his condition is having upon his everyday life. The second portion of each chapter delves into Jake's memories. Not his past, his memories. Everything is opaque to the point that our narrator is far from reliable - the reader is never entirely sure as to when an event took place, nor indeed if it ever took place at all. It's not even safe to conclude that certain characters ever existed. And if you think you have it bad, Harvey seems to be saying, then imagine how bad Jake feels. To lose grip on ones own memory is presented as a long and terrifying nightmare. As one character puts it, "you don't need a memory to feel trapped".

As the narrative progresses Jake's deterioration becomes more and more serious to the point that the language itself is affected. The names of everyday objects are no longer clear. Jake becomes convinced that long deceased characters have recently visited him (though, tragically, he is never visited by his wife's ghost) and eventually cannot even recall the names of his own children, nor the woman with whom he is now mysteriously living. The order of events and the details of the events themselves are confused, much to the frustration of the reader. But then, one wonders, have we ever been sure of what actually happened?

Though at times Harvey invokes the use of metaphor and allegory to a wearying degree, overall The Wilderness is a most affecting read. The portrayal of mental deterioration is handled with meticulous care to the point that Jake's downfall is shared by the reader. This marks the novel's greatest asset - I have never come across anything that so effectively highlights just how terrible a disease is Alzheimers. Even if simply for its ability to raise awareness, this book must be praised. Apart from that, though, we have a sustained tone of murky melancholy to which, unfortunately, we can all relate. We all lose sight of people, of places, of our dreams. We think we can rely on our memories for life, though, and some of us take comfort in this. However, as Harvey's novel demonstrates so devastatingly, not only can our memories never really be trusted, but they may not even stick around for as long as we do. The thought of losing ones memory suddenly becomes terrifying, and I, for one, was instilled with a sudden urgent desire to make the absolute most of my life and everybody in it.

Elliot Davies, MA Student, Manchester University

Samarasan's debut novel in its ambition and depth is certainly commendable: Evening is the Whole Day interrogates the tensions between public and private life for the predominantly Tamil Indian diaspora who have settled in Malaysia. The novel centres around a dysfunctional Tamil family living in the city of Ipoh, and the "oldest-eldest" sister's desire for escape from this dysfunction to a New York University. This is then underpinned by the political and ethnic issues facing the Malaysian nation, which constitutes a strong central chapter of the novel. This premise should attract interest from many Western readers, eager to learn more of the political upheaval faced by the country so evocatively described in the novel's opening sentences.

Readers, however, should be warned that this is by no means a political novel; and it is perhaps the over-emphasis on this single and seemingly idiosyncratic family that lies at the roots of the novel's many shortcomings. These become apparent in the opening chapter, where Samarasan's prose becomes increasingly strained in attempts to capture every nuance of a particular moment in time. This over-detailing patronises the reader's imagination, allowing the narration to stagnate in its persistence to linger over every subtlety of every character's consciousness. Further into the novel, glaring and unimaginative allegories are drawn in the synchrony between public and private life in the case of 'the Big House' being signed from the old British coloniser McDougall over to 'Tata', then head of the Rajasekharan family.

Most of all, the novel cannot seem to make up its mind as to whether it is most in debt to the Western literary tradition, in its scrutiny of the family dramas in 'the Big House'; or to the inevitable 'anxieties of influence' in the form of Rushdie and Roy. These comparisons, made my many of Samarasan's critics so far, are certainly justified, but not necessarily for the best reasons. The influence of Arundhati Roy in particular is painfully discernible in Aasha's characterisation as the child who truly sees the 'reality' of the family's respective traumas; yet in Evening the awarding of the child with supernatural, visionary qualities is an ungainly device which jars with the dense realism of most of the novel.

However, there are large parts of the novel which do display Samarasan's strength as a writer, most notably the chapters which reflect on the courtship and past of Appa and Amma. They constitute some of the more evocative passages of the novel, allowing the older characters to become fully realised and more sympathetic to our readership. Amma's background gives a particularly sensitive insight into life away from the privileges of life in 'The Big House'; yet this is sorely under-developed elsewhere, merely glimpsed through Chellam's disgrace and the brief insights into subaltern life elsewhere in Ipoh.

Unfortunately, readers hoping for a sustained evocative depiction of Malaysia will be disappointed: besides the cursory chapter on the 1969 riots, the novel overall lacks a distinct sense of national place, replaced instead by the stifling presence of the domestic. This, alongside a clear anxiety of influence and the painful density of the prose, are the hallmarks of this unfortunately faltering debut.

Jenny Treble, MA Student, Manchester University

The Invention of Everything Else fails to get to grip with its subject, staying firmly on the fairy side of tale. Fair enough, if that's what you like but sadly, this reader, at least, was not entranced. The fairy tale element comes across pretty heavily when the narrator says things, in relation to Louisa, the chambermaid heroine, like 'What an odd day she is having?. When Tesla, the inventor residing in the Hotel New Yorker where Louisa works, says, to excuse a completely unnecessary coincidental meeting with Edison and another scientist, I was no longer surprised at the coincidences that racked this city, we know that we'll just have to go along.
The voice is designed, presumably, to give a feel for the East European immigrant background but descriptions, for example, of two men being 'wrenched in bitter disagreement', or of the eyes of an attractive man as having 'been burned into the very back of Louisa's brain' end up being so irritatingly quirky as to get in the way of a clear reading.

There are also problems of perspective. For example, as characters sit up talking all night the vines crisscrossing the house's exterior seem to grow?. That they are clearly inside the house leaves us unsure who is seeing this strange, seeming growth.

The explanations of Tesla's inventions never come off. To be fair it clearly isn't where the narrator's interest lies but even the most basic attempt to put a description of an alternator into the mouth of its inventor is poorly handled. The narrator has Tesla condescending to tell us not only that copper is a good electrical conductor but feeling it necessary to explain what the word conductor means too whilst failing to explain the term DC so that the crucial distinction of this from his own alternating current is underplayed. Botching Tesla's descriptions in this way turns the distinctive scientific genius he was able to communicate and to pitch ideas, however wild into a rather stock, mad-scientist figure. The introduction of a time-machine caps the tale off quite nicely and with a good romantic interest to boot we can all have a jolly good read and sleep soundly tonight after lights-off. Thank goodness for those crazy scientists who invented all this stuff, where would we girls be without them?

Peter Garland, MA Student, Manchester University

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

This rich, arresting debut depicts the fortunes and failures of a merchant family in post (and briefly, pre) colonial Malaysia. Whilst echoes of similar works abound reviews have frequently invoked Rushdie and Roy Samarasan deftly avoids clich and the liberal hand-wringing often present in exotic, colonial narratives. Yet, whilst any analysis of the novel will inevitably turn to the politics inherent to its setting, this is a fundamentally human tale in which contrasting lives and experiences become, nonetheless, emblematic of wider cultures. The Rajasekharan family and their rambling house on Kingfisher Lane might be a metaphor for Malaysia itself, yet Samarasan never uses this to hammer a message home. Instead, the pleasures to be drawn from the novel lie within finely drawn characters and the deeply buried secrets they conceal.

Samarasan manages her sprawling cast list effectively, and moves smoothly between three generations and several time periods, the older of which feel thoroughly researched and powerfully immersive. The country's turbulent past is explored with focus and the tone skips appropriately, from tragic to comic, with only the rarest of jarring.

While the author weaves several dialects in and out of the text, the narrative voice is chiefly an evocative, playful presence drenched with the South East Asian flavour. Elsewhere, a vein of excursion into the supernatural avoids the insultingly nave; post colonial narratives have tended to invoke local mythologies with a straight face, but here the ghosts haunting the novel's pages are of refreshingly diverse backgrounds, reflecting the many owners of Malaysia. Their behaviour is, refreshingly, often less than appropriate.
The author's biographical material tells us that she is a true internationalist, having lived in several disparate territories around the globe. With this first effort she shows great skill and future promise and we can only hope she treats her next locale with a similar depth of feeling and due respect. Wonderful stuff.

Nick Garrad, MA Student, Manchester University

Science and literature are both ways of describing the world. This makes the idea of Samantha Hunt's novel about the scientist Nikola Tesla seem very natural. Or it should do. At its best, The Invention of Everything Else describes the world in such beautiful detail that it makes you want all fiction to contain an element of science. There are passages here that make you feel as though the world is almost unbearably wonderful. It is these that the book is worth reading for.

However, this is a novel shackled by reality. Hunt is only on her second book. And as such, she is still a little caught up in the novice writer's justification that things should be believed because they actually happened that way?. She even goes as far as to work recorded quotes from the real-life people featured in her book into the dialogue of their fictional counterparts.

Historically real statements and events are allowed to shape this story, rather than Hunt doing so herself. This makes it difficult to see Hunt's objectives. Most modern readers have now become used to a postmodern, ever-questioning lack of dialectic. However, Hunt does not even do this. She highlights no specific problems regarding the possibility of knowing historical or scientific truth. She simply lays her interesting findings about Nikola Tesla on the page.

The format of this book suggests that it wants to be a historical novel. It claims authority from history with multiple layers of intertextuality and historical source-notes at its end. However, it fails to confront this, and makes no attempt to engage with history in any way. Rather, it seems to accept a very traditional view of history, and any questions regarding truth in the novel are aimed at the senile fabulations of old men. Both free electricity and time travel are tentatively posited as possible within the realm of this fictional world. The narrator doubts these old men who claim these scientific innovations to be true, and they are portrayed as unreliable characters. Therefore, the truth, and potential for knowledge, of science as well as history, is never really confronted.

The problem with this book is that it has just too many ideas. Each of them being quite interesting in its own right. Yet there is not a single strand that has enough focus to form the main thrust of the novel. There are too many stories that are merely hinted at here, and though they are intriguing, they only serve to distract the reader in the complicated context of the novel.

Hunt's descriptions of the world are truly original and inspiring. That she succumbs to the pressure to wedge in a romance-plot and to draw the book out to 352 pages does not detract from that. Any problems the book has will surely be ironed out in Hunt's future offerings. It can only be hoped that she will keep writing about science, keep forcing a cynical world to see how beautiful its surroundings are, and keep looking at the people and ideas that literature usually leaves untouched.

Willow Hewitt, MA Student, Manchester University

This review was submitted by Deborah Ward at Oldham Sixth Form College.

This book was about a day in the life of a playwright who stays in her friend Molly Fox’s house, and reflects on her past relationships, which coincidently, are all represented by visitors to the house that day.

My favourite character in this book was the lady who came to visit at the end, the neighbour, who called with some plants from her garden,her simplicity apealed to me , it was the only realistic event of that day.

I didn’t like this book because it had no real purpose, the tag line of why Molly Fox didn’t celebrate her birthday was answered early on with no real suspense.

I give this book two stars.

This review was submitted by Kirsty Robinson at Woodrush Community High School.

I read The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey. This book was about
a man called Jake who has developed Alzheimer's and is trying to recover lost or fragmented memories. It follows his struggles as the disease takes a stronger hold of him and describes how he tries to piece together what little of his past life he can remember.

My favourite character in this book was Jake, the central character, as you get so wrapped up in his story that you almost begin to think of him as a real person because he is described so well by Harvey. His character is totally believable, just like an everyday person you might meet walking down the street.

I liked this book because it was very gripping and emotional, and had me wanting to read more as i found myself wanting to know if the character managed to pull together any of the loose threads in his memory.

You should read this book because…

It will open your eyes to the plight of those suffering a debilitating illness. Through the emotive descriptions of Harvey's writing, the story has strong emotion with the power to be heart-rending or to leave you with a warm and positive glow.

I have learnt something new. This book has made me think more about the hardships many people face every day with Alzheimer's and how they are forced to deal with the prospect of never regaining such personal, significant moments in their lives. Also, how this could one day happen to me, as i have never really thought about or encountered anyone with this condition.