​Is there any point in writing a review for a book that’s been (metaphorically) sitting in my TBR pile for over twenty-five years? What has made me decide I must finally get around to reading it? Perhaps it’s a form of nostalgia for a lost way of life, or just in order to round out a trilogy of sorts of “missionary novels” that were popular in the 1980s/1990s and set in the backyard of my own African childhood. The two other novels are A Man Cannot Cry by Gloria Keverne and the more famous The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. *
 
The solemn opening to this novel is the funeral in the mid-1970s of Kate Carrington’s missionary parents who have been brutally murdered. Kate is determined to put her childhood and the notorious events in Tanganyika (Tanzania) behind her, cut all ties. She returns to the family home in Australia, even changing her name so that no-one might know her history. In 1990, she comes into contact with the strange woman, Annah, who lives next door and who also seems to have an African background. Their connection is revealed and the doors to the past are thrown open. Annah’s story takes up most of the book and tells of her experiences, firstly as a devoted missionary nurse, later as a renegade and outcast white woman healer who makes spontaneous or scandalous choices and for which she, and some of those who are associated with her, must pay a high price.
 
There is much here that resonates for me personally, having grown up in an adjacent region and in that time of great change when the old traditions and tribal systems came into conflict with a new Africa emerging from its colonial past. My father often travelled in this territory on business, visiting various centres and meeting many individuals as he did so, so I have a few quibbles about some of the details as to how far from civilization these missionary places really were by the 1960s as Annah’s difficulties with supplies and communications makes it seem more like what life would have been like thirty years earlier.
 
Perhaps there were lone white nurses operating clinics in remote places during what was an extremely volatile and dangerous era throughout much of this part of Africa, but without any indication in the author’s notes to say it inspired by a true story, it is presumed to be complete fiction. It's a novel that some readers will find inspiring while others may not be as moved by some of Annah's actions. The narrative hasn't dated too much although it is slow going in places.
 
Three-and-a-half stars
 
Second-hand copies available from:
 
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Abebooks
 
* My own African novel, Land of the Long Grass, features some missionaries but it is set in an earlier era and is based on truth with a broader adventurous and saga-style focus. It’s also now out of print but copies are available through second-hand dealers. 
 

I’d had this much-lauded epistolary novel on reserve for many months with my library before becoming available. As its plot (or lack of) is well covered elsewhere with nearly 85,000 starred reviews and well over half-a-million ratings on Goodreads alone, my opinion hardly matters, although I notice there are more than 50,000 people there who feel somewhat the same as I do.
 
Everyone is aware of the decline in the art of letter-writing so there’s a note of nostalgia about this book, and thus the need to make Sybil, the protagonist, a woman in her seventies. We learn some of the reasons why she’s become a letter writer rather than a face-to-face communicator and one can understand this to some extent. However, it still doesn’t make her a particularly likeable character.
 
Sybil is opinionated, kinder towards strangers than her own family. Her overwrought and righteous letters and those that she receives all seem to have a similar tone, with younger individuals often as precise in their grammar and style which isn’t close to modern reality. A transcription of SMS texts would make the other correspondents seem much more authentic for the 21st Century.
 
Another irritation is how every piece of correspondence begins with the address blocked to the left which is how business communications are created on a keyboard and you wouldn’t address handwritten letters to your nearest and dearest in that style. Presumably this is an editing device to assist the reader, but once you are familiar with the cast of characters, is superfluous. (And why does nearly every missive suffer from having a PS, i.e. postscript?)
 
Elitism and politically correct inclusivity dominate this novel, with far too many themes packed into Sybil’s existence. Perhaps this is a deliberate decision to try and appeal to the widest range of readers who can all find some aspect with which to identify. There’s the obligatory gay son, a teenager with ADHD or similar, adoption and a DNA mystery, family dysfunction, racism, anti-immigration, feminist discrimination and sexual harassment in academia, the Holocaust, overwhelming grief and various deaths (including that of a cat), encroaching blindness, other disabilities and dementia, IVF problems, infidelity, divorce, stalking and threats, even the election of Trump. The icing on the cake is the far-fetched scenario of an irascible, decrepit and not particularly loveable woman having to decide between two men who bizarrely seem to find her attractive. All this without that other dubious pretentiousness involving book reading and letters to, and occasionally from, famous authors that hints at influential friends in the world of literature. Perhaps therein lies a clue as to how this managed to get voted the best book in this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

An underwhelming experience.
 
Two stars
 
 
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Booktopia

​
The late Princess Margaret was perhaps one of the sadder members of the royal family, if only for the fact that she seems to have been a chain-smoker and whisky-drinking cougar who never did very much at all apart from waltzing about being an entitled princess, in all its connotations. This memoir is written by the lady-in-waiting who was closest to her, Anne, Lady Glenconner, now in her nineties, a blue blood connected either by family or friendship to nearly everyone in aristocratic circles in the UK.
 
Anne knew she was a disappointment right from birth, when she should have been a boy destined to become the next Earl of Leicester. In her era, upper-class girls had little value other than finding a suitable husband before she was out of her teens, preferably one with money and high status, and to produce more heirs, while putting up with husbands that any self-respecting modern woman would kick out. She didn’t receive any form of higher education and was expected to tolerate all her husband’s foibles, including abuse, gas-lighting and adultery, and keep her mouth shut.
 
This upbringing explains to some extent why Anne married the ghastly and mentally unstable Colin Tennant and stuck with him through behaviour that would break anyone else. The honeymoon “education” in France should have been enough for her to bolt and demand an annulment. It is interesting to speculate if she’d married her first love, Johnnie Spencer (who ditched her because of perceived insanity in her genes) how modern royal history might have been different. Johnnie married another woman instead and became the father of the late Princess Diana. (One can see echoes of Anne’s experiences in Diana’s own story.)
 
Much of the book covers the tedious development by Colin of the island of Mustique in the Caribbean, which became Princess Margaret’s famous bolt-hole after her marriage failed, and the haunt of many other celebrities. The locals who had once independently grown cotton for export were deemed capable of simply turning into menials serving the rich and royal tourists.
 
Whether she wrote this autobiography herself, or was helped by a ghost writer, is debatable. Whoever did the historical copy editing didn’t bother to closely check facts and there are a number of anachronisms that have slipped through, e.g. Anne reminisces about Sir Thomas Cook, “… the founder of the package holiday incidentally …”, coming to her school. This must have been time-travel given he died in 1851. There are also confused references to mad King Ludwig of Bavaria’s numerous castles and one of his mistresses, Anne’s ancestor, Jane Digby. It was the gay and mad King Ludwig II who was famous for dabbling in castles, but not women. Jane Digby’s lover was his grandfather, King Ludwig I, who may have been only slightly mad and was definitely not gay. And quite a few more that perhaps only fussy history fiends like me would spot!
 
Some behind-closed-door stories also feel apocryphal but, given the general nuttiness and eccentricity endemic in this family, others are so outrageous or improbable that they are probably true. These stories found their way into the media, with one particularly appalling episode featuring Colin who was so incensed at his wife and Princess Margaret being put into first class on a plane while he was relegated elsewhere, that he lay down in the aisle and had a full-on tantrum worthy of any three-year-old, resulting in him being forcibly removed, after which British Airways banned him for life. It wasn’t the first time Colin had behaved in such a manner, he had another tantrum during an opera which was so bad Anne had to put a rug over his head to shut him up and the conductor had to repeat the scene. These antics by any normal person would result in them being certified and cared for in some mental institution. Apparently, all the royal family were aware of his tendency to tantrums and somehow blithely ignored them.
 
The coup de grace came when the insufferable Colin left everything in a two-line Will to a male friend that could have left Anne and her children destitute. She fortunately had some assets in her own name and, of course, good connections to rally round and support her.
 
One has to admire Anne’s psychological strength. How she coped without coming apart from the seams herself with the tragedies involving her three sons in particular is more than the average person could dare to imagine. Perhaps she had become so used to denial or those proverbial English traits of pulling up socks and gritting teeth as defences, they helped through these events in her life.
 
Unlike other biographers who perhaps never knew Princess Margaret personally, she is kinder towards her, and the Princess comes across as smarter, funnier and a little more likeable than might be expected.
 
If there’s anything to be gleaned from this expose, it’s the familiar trope that a privileged birth and wealth will never guarantee happiness.
 
Three stars.

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Booktopia

This novel opens with the stealing of a valuable Japanese netsuke from an exhibition in Oxford in 1976 by an unknown person, then it splits into two narratives set in the late 1940s and the cusp of the millennium in 1999.
 
Olivia is an intern in with an art dealer in London when she is sent on a journey to the house of an elderly widow, Beatrix, who apparently has the netsuke in her possession and is thinking of putting it up for sale.
 
Cut to 1945 and the war in Burma, where Beatrix is one of a group of women called the “Wasbies” (Women's Auxiliary Service, Burma) who run mobile canteens in difficult and dangerous jungle conditions, catering for Allied troops on the battlefront.
 
Eventually, the two narratives intersect when Olivia accompanies Beatrix to a New Year’s Eve reunion in Ireland with her old war-time friends and the dramas and secrets behind the netsuke and the reasons for its heist are revealed.
 
Inspired by facts, this is an excellent novel for anyone interested in little-known aspects of World War II, especially in the Far East, and the intrepid women who played their part. The background research doesn’t overload the story and the dialogue fits the era and its characters well. Olivia’s role is low-key, and it is the feisty, grumpy, but ultimately likeable, Beatrice who is centre stage. There is a love story and quite a number of inevitably violent and tragic aspects, and the conclusion may seem a bit too contrived in order to reach its feel-good ending, but overall an entertaining and memorable read.
 
Four stars

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This novel was inspired by a true story. [See the author's website for the background.]
 
Roza Meszaros arrives in America from Hungary. Born an aristocrat, she’s also been a celebrated ballerina and is eagerly looking forward to seeing her soldier fiance, Joe, for the first time in two years, and marry him. However, when she arrives at her destination in Minnesota, there is no sign of Joe. Instead she is met by a Hungarian couple, Jakab and Mariska Wykowsi who will have difficult news. Roza is devastated to discover Joe has married an old girlfriend. She’s been jilted.
 
The option is to return to Hungary, but it is now under the Communist iron fist and would expose her to new dangers. Roza is desperate to stay in America. She resorts to a plan to find someone else to marry her before her visa runs out. She approaches a local newspaper and the editor spots a great human interest story. He publishes her appeal and Roza receives well over 1,000 proposals. She narrows them down to just five. Eventually, she chooses stoic and quiet war veteran, Finn Ericksen. It’s a rocky road for both, however, as it is complicated by Finn’s shell shock (now better known as PTSD) and Roza’s difficulty in adjusting to the role of a housewife, not helped by her lingering feelings for Joe and her own psychological war damage.
 
Roza is an interesting, complex woman, someone who was born with a silver spoon but who must learn how to be ordinary, deal with a new culture, improve her strengths and face up to her weaknesses. And it is so refreshing to read a novel with an appealing male character like Finn. He has his own demons and faults, but is determined that the marriage should succeed.
 
What may appear to be a modest, romantic novel, has far more layers than you expect. It also enlightens readers about what life was like for many individuals and refugees who had to flee from oppression in Europe and elsewhere after World War II.
 
With thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.
 
Four stars
 
(As a personal aside - this novel initially caught my attention because of my fascination with marriages of convenience since first becoming aware of at least of two in my parents’ circle of friends in post-war Africa. One was our neighbour’s “mail-order” bride from Greece whom the husband had never even seen, but it seemed the marriage worked and I believe they stayed together for life. The other was of a Polish woman who’d married a South African soldier after the war, also partly in order to escape family persecution by the Communists. It was another marriage that seemed happy and their son was a playmate of mine. Although she wasn’t aristocratic, her traumatic background involving the Nazis was not dissimilar to Roza’s.)


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Booktopia