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: 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.

Book Review: The Death Defying Pepper Roux (2009) by Geraldine McCaughrean

Finding this book shelved in the teen section is a bit like having Anna Karenina stuck in with the Harlequin romances, or Metamorphosis kept in sci-fi/fantasy. This isn't just a great teen novel, it's a great novel. In fact, I'd guess that the publisher probably hurt sales by not marketing it as another Life of Pi. It should have been sold as an adult novel with a teen protagonist rather than as a young adult novel.

Pepper Roux is a 14 year-old boy living in a French coastal town. The time period is the early 1900s, but that's only a guess, and the era isn't too terribly important to the story. Pepper's family consists of a mother, father and aunt. Aunt Mireille is a religious fanatic who, on the day of Pepper's birth, claimed that St. Constance appeared to her in a vision and said that Pepper would die on his fourteenth birthday. Pepper's parents are under Mireille's thumb, or at least believe totally in her prophecy. Pepper has grown up certain in the knowledge that he will die on his fourteenth birthday. His whole life has been a preparation for his terminal day. The terrible day arrives and Pepper decides to run away from his fate. What follows is a novel with a structure that's part odyssey, part picaresque, but unlike most picaresque novels the main character is neither a rogue or a rascal, although Pepper does, in all innocence, commit some rascalish acts. It's hard to outline the plot without making the story sound overly whimsical, but Pepper becomes, by turn, a sea captain, a reporter, a meat cutter, a French Legionnaire, a horse wrangler, a telegraph boy, and a husband, all in an effort to disguise himself and thus hide from St. Constance's wrath. Along the way, as is the case with a picaresque novel, Pepper learns much about the human character, both it's nobility and its cruelty.

The general tone of Roux is light and humorous, but there are darker elements, particularly the anguish Pepper goes through as he tries to live with the constant fear of God coming down to snatch him up. The quality of the writing, McCaughrean's ability to craft striking sentences, metaphors and similies is what's most astonishing about this novel. I can't think of another recent novel I've read that shows more agility and  joie de vivre with the English language. Equally good is her skill at alternating dark and whimsical elements. Not getting the balance right can really ruin a novel, but McCaughrean manages it flawlessly. The best example is her handling of Yvette, an abused woman who  Pepper becomes a "husband" to. Yvette is nearly mute but the author makes her very real, and her pain is truly affecting but not so much so that it makes the novel uncomfortably serious.

I actually wouldn't recommend this book to teens unless they're up for a highly unconventional plot structure and an equally odd main character. This novel doesn't fit easily into most teen fiction genres. It has aburd, surreal moments but it's not a fantasy, nor is it about garden variety teen problems. Really, the novel it most closely resembles is Candide or perhaps The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So far, it's the best novel I've read this year.