The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village by Joanna Nell — New Review

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She’d somehow fallen between the genres. Everywhere she looked, people were defined, conformed to the conventions of their particular genre. Brian the educated, handsome widower; Jim the ageing Lothario; Celia the capable tomboy. Even Angie had never wavered from her man-eating temptress persona. It made them who they were: individual. Real people. Peggy did have her own identity, even if she didn’t like it. Overweight, self-doubting. She was a nondescript person, an elasticated waistband of a human being.

The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village, Joanna Nell

As a title, The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village gave the impression that this would be an ensemble of stories, featuring different women who were single for different reasons. And in a way, it was many stories in one, but they were all happening to the same main character. Peggy Smart is living, simultaneously, in a romance novel, a Bildungsroman, a family drama, a story about the importance of friendship and one of those novels where a secret from the past dominates events of the present. Joanna Nell is trying to cram an awful lot into one book, and it doesn’t entirely work.

For a start, some of those stories directly contradict each other: is The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village a romance, or a story about how friendship is more important than bagging a second love interest in later life? Trying to resolve both those plot lines leaves the ending feeling half-hearted and unsatisfying. Similarly, does Peggy Smart deserve independence from her family or does she want to reconcile with them? Again, Joanna Nell tries to let her protagonist have her (homemade) cake and eat it.

The three of them sat in silence, lost in their own memories of love and loss, oblivious to the impatience of modern life as it played out around them.

The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village, Joanna Nell

There are hints in the first half of the novel at a secret from the past that’s going to dramatically explode all Peggy’s ideas about her life. Except… it doesn’t. She half-discovers the secret, half-forgets it and then, when all is finally revealed, she’s already over it. The drama of the moment comes from another source entirely, and even that is papered over to get to the end of the story.

If you want a later-in-life bildungsroman about romance and community among people in their retirement years, read Mr Doubler Begins Again, it’s heaps better.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie — Revisit Review

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Like most Agatha Christie novels, I’ve listened to And Then There Were None a dozen times and know the solution of the mystery by heart. It was interesting to slow down and read it on paper, because different things jumped out at me.

Enveloped in an aura of righteousness and unyielding principles, Miss Brent sat in her crowded third-class carriage and triumphed over its discomfort and its heat.

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s prose is clear and to-the-point, summing up all ten of her main characters in only a few words. The descriptions of Emily Brent and Anthony Marston were particularly effective, while on the other hand it’s easy to get ex-Inspector Blore and Philip Lombard mixed up in the early stages. Even knowing the ending, it’s interesting to watch the atmosphere of increasing dread play havoc on everyone’s anxieties.

“My point is that there can be no exceptions allowed on the score of character, position or probability. What we must now examine is the possibility of eliminating one or more persons on the facts. To put it simply, is there among us one or more persons who could not possibly have administered cyanide to [the first victim], or an overdose of sleeping draughts to [the second victim], and who had no opportunity of striking the blow that killed [the third victim]?”

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

One of the things which makes And Then There Were None a really clever mystery is the total lack of trustworthy sources. Every character is equally open to suspicion, and that means the reader can’t trust anything, not even murder mystery staples like time of death or who last saw the victim alive. And by the time solid alibis are established, the characters are all too psychologically wound up to recognise and act on it.

While And Then There Were None is widely recognised as one of Agatha Christie’s most unique offerings, it’s surprising to me that it’s so often recommended to people who haven’t read any others. The very fact that it’s not a detective story makes it a slightly odd place to begin. I’d advise new Christie readers to start with something a bit more traditional and work their way up to And Then There Were None once they’re familiar with the format!

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett — New Review

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It’s always exciting to make another inroad into the vast universe of Discworld, especially one which falls into a new subcategory, as Going Postal did for me. The name Moist von Lipwig was familiar, but everything else about the character and his history came as a delightful surprise. As goals go, ‘rejuvenate the postal system’ doesn’t sound as though it will be all that absorbing and yet, as Moist applies his skills as a conman to the business of civil service, the story sweeps you along nicely. Had Going Postalbeen nothing but a series of escalating problems successfully solved, it would have been enjoyable. 

He felt the tingle he always felt when the game was afoot. Life should be made up of moments like this, he decided.

Going Postal, Terry Pratchett

Of course, things can’t be that simple: the conflict is well-paced, reminding me a little of The Once and Future Witches, though with a less dramatic emotional punch. Everything that Terry Pratchett sets up pays off, or else seems like fertile ground for future novels to explore. Going Postal’s prose is of the clear, unassuming kind that doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the plot. The only rough part was a portion of dramatic irony, which I have an incredibly low tolerance for.

But what was happening now… this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They’d cursed and, worse; used logarithms. They’d waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. They hadn’t dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they’d imagined a different world, and bent metal round it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this… thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight.

Going Postal, Terry Pratchett

While it seems necessary to mention social commentary in any Discworld review, it’s not something which jumps out to me as a reviewer. This may be why I find Terry Pratchett’s novels enjoyable but not sparklingly magical. For any readers in a similar position: Going Postal is perfectly enjoyable without engaging with the deeper meaning! 

While I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to reading every Discworld novel, I do hope to eventually make the acquaintance of Samuel Vimes and Granny Weatherwax, so this won’t be the last time I read Terry Pratchett.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough — Reread Review

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I picked up The Thorn Birds four years ago because it was mentioned in The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club. I devoured it over the course of a week in a holiday cottage, and it packed an enormous emotional punch. I’ve been looking forward to rereading it ever since, which might seem odd because almost nothing nice happens in the entire 54-year span of the novel’s plot.

She knew her son well enough to be convinced that one word from her would bring him back, so she must not utter that word, ever. If the days were long and bitter with a sense of failure, she must bear it in silence.

The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough

The Thorn Birds appeals to the part of me that signed up to take a module on Settler Identity: Fictions of Oz/Nz at university; it starts out as a story about coming to a new place and trying to make a life there. All the characters’ lives are limited in some way – by class, by money, by gender. It’s not even as if the characters band together to overcome these problems, because most of the relationships in the book are strained to some degree.

Away from Fee, her brothers, Luke, the unsparing, unthinking domination of her whole life, Meggie discovered pure leisure; a whole kaleidoscope of thought patterns wove and unwove novel designs in her mind. For the first time in her life she wasn’t keeping her conscious self absorbed in work thoughts of one description or another. Surprised, she realised that keeping physically busy is the most effective blockade against totally mental activity human beings can erect.

The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough makes these tragedies cathartic, rather than depressing. The characters and their emotions feel incredibly well-observed and realistic. The prose has just the right balance between descriptions, interior thoughts, action and dialogue. Specific scenes linger in the memory so that, on rereading, I found myself recalling them just before they happened and was able to see the foreshadowing which I missed when I didn’t know what was coming. Even though these events no longer came as a surprise, they were still able to bring on a storm of tears.

Reading this so close after Brideshead Revisited, it struck me that Colleen McCullough does a better job at making Catholicism understandable to someone who wasn’t brought up with it than Evelyn Waugh does, as well as offering a more sympathetic portrayal.

Though I’m not a reader who loves or goes looking for tragedy, The Thorn Birds is such an incredibly satisfying novel that I know I’ll return to it again and again.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.