Book Review: The Positively Last Performance (2013) by Geraldine McCaughrean

If the writing game was anything like kung fu films, Geraldine McCraughrean would be the serene, peaceful-looking elder with long white hair who mops the floor with legions of cocky writers who think that no one who uses YA-style kung fu could possibly defeat their literary fiction-style kung fu. McCaughrean, as I've said in every review I've done of her other novels, is a masterful writer; it would be very hard to think of a contemporary writer from any genre who has her skill with metaphors and similes. Reading one of her novels is a reminder that there are always new ways to describe the world and human emotions.

Having said all these wonderful things I have to admit that this novel is a tiny bit of a letdown. McCaughrean's writing is up to par, but there's a sentimental streak that's been absent from her other books. The novel's main character is Gracie, an eleven-year-old girl who come to the English coastal town of Seashaw with her parents, who want to take over the shuttered and decaying Royal theatre. The old theatre is in terrible shape and comes complete with a motley collection of ghosts that only Gracie can see. The ghosts come from all walks of life and from different eras, and seem to have ended up in the theatre the way floating debris is caught in an eddy. The ghosts are shocked that Gracie can see them, and thanks to her prodding they reveal something of their lives and how they died. The ghosts also have to deal with a plot by a property developer to burn the theatre down.

As is usually the case with McCaughrean's novels the character-building and descriptive writing are top-notch. She has a Dickens-like ability to churn out sharply-defined, cliche-free characters, and her eye for the telling detail is unmatched. She even adds an interesting wrinkle to the ghost genre with her explanation of why the spirits of the dead linger on. All that's to the good, but unlike her previous novels there's a tweeness and softness around the edges here that's a bit unfortunate. McCaughrean is light years away from being hard-boiled in any way, but her writing normally has a bit of an edge, enough to throw the profound humanity of her writing into greater relief. With one exception all the characters are lovely people with lovely life (and death) stories to tell, and that sameness is a bit disappointing. And the threat posed to the theatre, which is the backbone of the story, is a tired plot device and McCaughrean doesn't find any way to freshen it up.

Even though this novel isn't up to McCaughrean's usual standards, it's still head and shoulders above what other people are doing in the field, and if you've never read one of her books, read this one and bask in the knowledge that you've discovered one of contemporary fiction's great prose stylists, and then rush out and get your hands on The Death Defying Pepper Roux or Not the End of the World or Lovesong. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Book Review: Lovesong (1996) by Geraldine McCaughrean

I've read four of McCaughrean's novels so far this year and at this point I'm just going to declare that she's the best living writer I can think of. Her writerly talents are, well, obscene. She can toss off more brilliant metaphors and similes on a single page than most writers can muster in an entire novel, and her storytelling imagination is fully the equal of her other skills. She's so good I actually find it a bit odd that she hasn't attracted more critical attention. One possible reason is that most of her output has been for the kids' lit and young adult market, and I think big time reviewers and critics are probably loath to take heed of someone who doesn't write for the grownups. Jealousy may also be part of the equation. I barely count as a writer, but I'm jealous that one individual should be so supremely gifted, so I can only imagine what the average professional writer thinks of a person who can apparently toss off sublime prose every time she puts her fingers on a keyboard.

Lovesong is one of a handful of adult novels McCaughrean has written. It's set in France and the Middle East during the last half of the 12th century and is described as a novel of "courtly love," which is rather like calling The Iliad a story about a package tour to Turkey. The French nobility in the 12th century was in the throes of an obsession with knight-troubadours and the formalities and demands of courtly love. As McCaughrean makes clear, it was a highly ritualized game or cult that was neither courtly nor loving. Her main characters are Amaury and Foulque, knight-troubadours; Oriole, a jongleur (a poet) in the employ of Amaury; and Ouallada, Oriole's daughter who eventually becomes a jongleuse. The story covers everything from the Crusades to tragic love affairs to mad nobles to the slaughter of the Cathars, and there are healthy helpings of violence, intrigue, sex, exotic locales, and lots of stomach-churning detail about the grimness of life in the Middle Ages.

The heart of the novel is the long and tortured relationship between Foulque and Ouallada. The sub-plots that spin off from their relationship are multitudinous, but to keep things simple just imagine Foulque as Mr Rochester and Ouallada as Jane Eyre. But don't let that comparison make you think that this novel is basically a historical romance. McCaughrean tackles some weighty themes in Lovesong, chiefly the idea that love and faith are blind. She doesn't, however, take a sentimental view of this kind of faith . Blind love and faith in this world leads to harrowing examples of violence and betrayal. McCaughrean would explore the idea of blind faith even more thoroughly in Not the End of the World (2004), a young adult book that takes a hyper-realistic look at the Noah's Ark myth. In Lovesong, religion and the informal institution of courtly love are used as pretexts for astonishing crimes; for furthering the interests of the ruling classes; and for asserting the dominance of men over women.

As excellent as Lovesong is, it does go on just a tad too long. Ouallada and Foulque get kicked in the shins by Fate and History so many times it's a wonder they can walk, and the fact that it takes Foulque forever to notice that Ouallada is in love with him defies logic. Similarly, Foulque's infatuation with Aude, a shallow but beautiful noble, really only makes sense as a plot device. Even with these minor deficiencies Lovesong is still one of the very best historical novels you'll ever find.

Related posts:

Book Review: Not the End of the World
Book Review: Pull Out All the Stops!
Book Review: The Death Defying Pepper Roux 

Book Review: Not the End of the World (2004) by Geraldine McCaughrean

So, if you were interested in taking a poke at theism and religiosity how would you do it? Most writers would choose an essay, but not many would choose a young adult novel to do the job. That's what Geraldine McCaughrean has done in Not the End of the World, a retelling of the Old Testament story of Noah and the Flood. McCaughrean makes the brilliant decision to look at this myth through the prism of realism (it's caused by a natural catastrophe), to imagine that it really happened and that life on board the ark followed the laws of nature and basic human psychology.  She asks the questions: what kind of man would build an ark and gather together all kinds of animals? What would life be like on board such a ship? How would Noah's family react to his belief and their predicament? The answers are, in order, a religious nutjob, hideous, and with mounting terror and fear.

McCaughrean presents Noah as a delusional mystic; the kind of man who's continually at odds with his peers because of his zealotry, and a man who bullies his family into following his mad dream of building an ark. Once the waters rise, life on the ark becomes virtually unbearable. The multitude of animals create an epic amount of pungent filth; food supplies for the humans are meagre and nasty; and the various critters are either eating each other or multiplying to plague-like numbers. Noah's extended family have a range of reactions to their circumstances. Some simply retreat into a shell, saying and doing nothing and just hoping that this trip from hell will come to an end. Shem, Noah's oldest son, begins to go insane, becoming filled with even more religious fervour than Noah, if that's possible. Towards the end of the voyage Shem actually becomes murderous. The youngest members of the family, Timna and her brother Japheth, are the most humane and the most questioning on the ark. They give shelter to a trio of stowaways rescued from the flood, and the novel becomes a kind of thriller as the two try and keep the stowaways from being discovered. It's certain that Noah and Shem will kill them.

What McCaughrean manages to do with her novel is show that any kind of religious belief, if taken to its logical extreme (and nothing's more extreme than building an ark), must rest on a bedrock of superstition, unthinking devotion to ritual, fear of authority, and a wilful disregard for logical thinking. It would be easy for an author to attempt this and come across as preachy or condescending or both, but McCaughrean does neither. She lets reality and logic speak for themselves by crafting what amounts to a novel version of a disaster movie. She takes a disparate group of characters, throws them into a hellish situation, adds some religion to the mix, and records what happens. The story is tense, exciting, horrifying, but at the same time McCaughrean keeps the plot lean, and proves, yet again, that's she's one of the best prose stylists operating in any genre.

This book came out in 2004, and it's pleasing to think that perhaps it was McCaughrean's reaction to the rising tide of religious intolerance and zealotry at loose in the world at that time. Bush and Blair, both loud and proud Christians, were busily violating the sixth commandment in Iraq and elsewhere, and across the Muslim world Koranic excuses were found for acts of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and vicious attacks on women under the banner of sharia law. It's interesting that a Google search for U.S. newspaper reviews of this book turned up nothing. It's probably a measure of just how effective her novel is that it has received so little notice in god-fearing America. Anti-religious content aside, Not the End of the World succeeds marvellously as a thriller and a character study, and don't let the young adult classification hold you back from reading it. This novel, like McCaughrean's The Death Defying Pepper Roux (my review here), stands comparison with anything being written for the adult market.