The Mission Song

by John Le Carre. Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.
Cover photograph: Tim FLach/Getty Images.

John Le Carre excels at packaging revelations about corporate and political corruption in an entertaining thriller. He researches his subjects more thoroughly than most current affairs reporters.

His latest book, The Mission Song, is about the East Congo, part of The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where elections just took place on October 29. Conservative estimates claim that around 4 million have been killed in wars and massacres in the Congo since 1998. The East Congo is beautiful and mineral rich. One of these mineral is coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, “If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cellphone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris.”

A group calling themselves ‘The Syndicate’, plan a coup, a ‘humanitarian’ coup to deliver democracy from the barrel of a gun. The story is told in the first person by Salvo, son of an Irish missionary and an East Congo woman, who is fluent in major and minor African languages. Called a ‘zebra’ by one of the players, he must decide where his allegiance lies – with his white strip or his black one – when he discovers the Syndicate’s real agenda.

Funnily enough (!) in 2004 Mark Thatcher (yes, son of Margaret) was arrested in South Africa with a cache of weapons and charged with planning an assault on Equatorial Guinea. The idea was to overthrow the ruler-tyrant and install a puppet president, who would then turn over a large slice of the country's considerable oil revenues to what was known as "the Syndicate".
If you want to know more about how The Congo was sabotaged from the beginning of its independence, then borrow the DVD in our collection, Lumumba.

- Ines

Best first lines

I was just reading about this website in a professional library journal – for all of you out there who like those top 100 lists – try this one – it’s a list of the best 100 first lines in novels – just for fun go through it and tick off those books you have actually read.

- Louise

Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell, Sceptre, 2006.

Following the critical acclaim of his last book, Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won several other literary prizes, people were awaiting Black Swan Green with great anticipation. Sure enough, it too has made its way onto prize shortlists. But in keeping with the unpredictability we have come to expect from this author, it was quite a different sort of novel from his others.

The narrator is the almost teenage Jason Taylor, and the setting is Worcestershire at the time of the Falklands War. Jason navigates us through his world, the village of Black Swan Green. The general awfulness of puberty is magnified for Jason by his battle with stammering. We spend a year in his company, in a series of linked stories which bring the 80s flooding back.

This is an engaging work, as much reminiscence as fiction, written with warmth. On the whole, it is a lesser work than Mitchell’s others. But if you liked the Adrian Mole books, or Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, this covers similar territory.

- John

Snow

by Orhan Pamuk. Faber, 2004. (Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006)
Cover design by Two Associates. Cover illustrations Webistan/Corbis & Natalie Forbes/Corbis.

Turkish poet Ka has been living in exile in Germany. He travels to the remote city of Kars under the guise of being a journalist investigating the suicides of the ‘headscarf girls’. His hidden reason for the journey is to find Ipek, a beautiful woman he remembers from the 70s when they were involved in left-wing politics. The city is cut off by snow. He becomes entangled in a complex political web, falls in love with Ipek and wanders in the snow writing poems. Reading the book one has the feeling of falling into a strange dream.

Turkey has a secular government and the separation of government and religion is written into its constitution. The wearing of headscarves is against the law. The left-wing socialist politics of the 70s which had made Ka an exile, is no longer relevant to the youth. Radical Islam is the path they take to challenge the oppressive central government. Turkey sits between Europe and the Middle East. Orhan Pamuk explores the tensions this creates in Turkish culture.

In an interview in 2005 Pamuk stated, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." Pamuk was charged under a newly introduced Turkish law for insulting Turkishness. In January 2006 the charges were dropped.

-Ines

The Lost Luggage Porter

by Andrew Martin. Faber, 2006, ISBN 0571219039.
Cover design by Two Associates. Cover artwork: Hulton Archive/Getty; John Angerson/Alamy; Science and Society Picture Library; National Railway Museum; Mary Evans Picture Library.

Crime fiction fans looking for something a bit different might enjoy Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series. Set in the North of England a hundred years ago, The Lost Luggage Porter , the third in the series, following The Necropolis Railway and Blackpool Highflier, finds the reluctant railway detective, Jim Stringer, out of his depth on his first day operating out of York Railway Station. Two brothers have been shot to death – is there a connection with a pickpocket gang which frequents the station platforms? Andrew Martin writes knowledgeably about the period, and the books are beautifully atmospheric, capturing the rain-soaked, smoky, Yorkshire winter.

Stringer, who’d rather drive trains than solve murders, finds himself dangerously close to an intelligent and deeply disturbed criminal pair. Can he avert the peril he has placed his wife in?

Occasional strong language may deter some readers, but the Yorkshire dialect is not overdone.

- John.

Nobel prize for literature winner announced

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006 is Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. You can read his bio-bibliography at the Nobel Prize site. Some of his titles in English include The white castle, 1991; The black book, 1994; The new life, 1997; My name is Red, 2001; Snow, 2004 and Istanbul: memories and the city, 2005. You can also listen to a telephone interview with Orhan conducted after he won the award.

Man Booker winner announced

The winner of this year's Man Booker prize is Kiran Desai for her novel The inheritance of loss. Kiran is the youngest woman ever to win the prize at 35. From the Man Booker website:

"The Indian-born writer has a strong family tie with the prize as her mother Anita Desai has been shortlisted three times since 1980 but has never won. This year, however, her daughter, Kiran, has won the acclaimed literary prize. Author of the 1998 universally praised Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Desai is the first woman to win the Man Booker since 2000 when Margaret Atwood scooped the prize with The Blind Assassin. Her winning book, The Inheritance of Loss, is a radiant, funny and moving family saga and has been described by reviewers as ‘the best, sweetest, most delightful novel’."

1001 books you must read before you die

Peter Boxall (ed). ABC Books, 2006.
Cover design: Quintet Publishing

It’s the title that’s the problem. Weighing in at a shade under 1000 pages, this thumping tome aims to tell you about all the books (meaning novels) that, let’s face it, nobody ever gets around to. Moby Dick, War and Peace, Finnegans Wake – who has the time? Even if you started now, you’d be committed to reading around 200 million words of fiction. You don’t have enough eyes! The selectors of these 1001 books are academics in the main, and this means there is little room for the oddball, the unconventional, the unliterary and the comic. There aren’t many Australian writers here, either, only four. There are numerous obscure choices: good luck getting hold of Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, or Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico, or Cane by Jean Toomer. There’s also a certain amount of pretentiousness in the more recent selections. Whilst the novels before 1950 have generally earned their place, at times I was reminded of Woody Allen’s reply when asked what he would do differently if he had his time over: “I wouldn’t read Beowulf”. The short summaries of why the books are ‘must-reads’ range from enjoyably enthusiastic to boringly egocentric.
- John

First Tuesday book club

The ABC has started a show called The first Tuesday book club where they talk about a different book once a month, on the first Tuesday of the month. October's show was on this week and they talked about Bill Bryson's memoir The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid. A transcript of the show can be found here.