"The Behaviour of Moths" by Poppy Adams

I've been reading a lot this year. In fact, this has been the year I've managed to read the most since passing out of b-school. I decided I'm going to try and put down my thoughts on some of the stuff I've been reading, sort of as a practice run for some book review programs I am interested in.

"The Behaviour of Moths" is the story of two sisters - what I thought would be a family drama (and it's one of my favourite genres) slowly reveals itself to be a delicious Gothic suspense. The story is told through the voice of Ginny, the painfully shy and socially inept older sibling who become a lepidopterist (a moth specialist!).

Ginny, who's now in her seventies, has lived in the family Gothic mansion all her life. The return of her vivacious younger sister Vivi to the family home after 47 years brings back many memories of their childhood and younger years. And through these memories, we realise it's not the happy family we think they were - jealousies, alcoholism, surrogacies, rifts emerge in the family - but all this is hinted, not clearly laid out, building up the suspense.

Adams is very successful in creating a very atmospheric novel. The large, rambling mansion they live in and the surrounding countryside form an almost perfect backdrop to this story. Adams gets off to a great start; the sisters’ childhood is depicted with care - their wildly different personalities, their closeness, and their feelings towards their parents. And the young women these little girls grow into are also very believable. And through Ginny’s reminiscences, we realise all is not well, and the happenings in the house and within the family, though they have happened long ago, take on a new meaning when Vivi returns home and it emerges that both the sisters have very different views on their childhood and their parents.

We gear up for the big reveal - whose version is the truth? Why did some of the characters behave the way they did? Why did some events happen? Does Vivi know something that Ginny doesn't? We gear up for the big reveal - but Adam subverts this with an ending that has you completely taken aback.

Unfortunately, I think this is also the books biggest weakness. While it totally works for it's shock value, it also means that a lot of the events and incidents are left unexplained. See...it's great to leave something to the readers imagination, it's good to have an open ending where the reader is left wondering about various interpretations; but in this case, Adams doesnt quite manage to achieve that and leaves the reader a little annoyed because of all the loose ends.

That said, it was still a very well written book, and I couldn't stop reading it. I finished it in one sitting on the overnight train journey from Kasargod to Bangalore. And despite my annoyance at the loose ends, it made for an enjoyable read.

Of This and That

My sister-in-law is expecting a baby girl (they live in the UK) and everyone is very excited because this is the first baby in the in-laws family. A couple of days ago, the mother-in-law was discussing what would be an appropriate gift for us to give the baby, and unsurprisingly, she suggested gold, only to be scoffed at by Nike. She then suggested we could take out a policy in the baby’s name.

“For what?” asked Nike, sounding rather horrified at the suggestion of so much money being spent on a little baby (since baby = vague concept in his mind)

“It will come in useful when the baby grows up and gets married” replied the MIL

Now, if my mum or any of my aunts had said that, I’d have bitten their heads off. But I don’t share that kind of a relationship with my MIL (yet?). So I had to deal with this with tact. I began doubtfully “Marriage? Really...”

My MIL immediately interrupted “Well, okay, not for marriage. But atleast it will come in useful for her higher education”.

I think I may yet make a feminist of my mother-in-law.

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Yesterday, while talking to Dad over the phone, I asked him what Amma and Samee were doing. “They are eating munjulu” says he.

“Ack! Munjulu!” For most people, the best part of the summer is mangoes. For me, it is munjulu. In my head, munjulu are tied up with memories of countless languid, carefree childhood summers spent at my grandparents’ farm.

“Yes. Samee buys two dozen everyday and they polish off the entire two dozen between the two of them. Every day!” he replies, oblivious to the fact that I’m turning green with envy over the phone.

“Nanna, I’m coming to Vizag next weekend” I announce.

Dad is taken aback. “Don’t be silly. Nobody travels 700 kilometres to eat munjulu.”

For now, he has dissuaded me. But one weekend before the summer is over, I am going home, and I am going to gorge on munjulu till I am sick. Ha!

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I have a long commute to work – 90 minutes one way. Which means I spend 3 hours in a day sitting in a car. Sigh! While going to work, I can’t talk to anyone over the phone because all my friends and family would be busy getting ready for work. It’s not so bad on the way back home, because I either talk on the phone or take a nap. But the commute has become so much more bearable ever since I hit upon the solution of listening to audio books. I was sceptical about whether I would enjoy listening to books, but it has been a surprisingly positive experience: I close my eyes and focus on the recording, and then I can imagine what is happening in the book in even more vivid detail, I can pause the recording at interesting moments to reflect upon it.

Unfortunately, the first audiobook I had downloaded was Anne Bronte’s ‘Agnes Grey’. It is a slow, dull, dreary book; and the heroine is so full of overwhelming and needless self-pity, so bloody self-righteous, such a Ms. Goody Two Shoes, so judgemental while pretending not to judge, and generally so boring that I felt like whacking her hard many times through the book. It was rather a test of patience finishing ‘Agnes Grey’. But now I am listening to ‘Anna Karenina’ (been many years since I first read it) and so far, I’ve been enjoying it.

Of course, the voice of the person reading the book also adds to the overall experience. ‘Agnes Grey’ was read by four or five different women, and while I really enjoyed listening to some of them, some voices were just unsuited for the book, and made the listening tedious. For ‘Agnes Grey’, the voices I felt were best suited for the books were soft, young voices with a British accent. By that logic, Anna Karenina should ideally be read by someone with a Russian accent (!) but so far a young lady with an American accent and an expressive manner of reading has made the Anna Karenina experience very enjoyable.

Go to www.librivox.org to listen to and download audiobooks. It’s free and its legal. You can also volunteer to be a reader there. I’m thinking of volunteering too – it sounds interesting and fun!

The Girl Who Kicked Ass

Not me. I’m talking about Lisbeth Salander.

Read the Millennium Trilogy last week. Excellent, thrilling, intelligent crime fiction that had me turning the pages feverishly. Actually, the feverishly part is rather literal too – I was down with fever, cough and cold all of last week, so all I did was lie in bed and read. I’m actually glad I read it when I was unwell and in bed, because otherwise I’d have just left all my work unattended till I had finished off the series.

The Millennium Trilogy is a three book crime fiction series set in Sweden. The protagonists are Lisbeth Salander, a highly intelligent but anti-social a 25 year old and Mikael Blomkovist, an intrepid reporter with the magazine Millennium. The books were written by Stieg Larsson and published initially in Swedish, where they became quite a rage, and were translated into English by Reg Keeland.

Sweden isn’t a common setting for books in English, so this series provides a fascinating insight into Swedish society. Larsson focuses especially on how the media, the police and certain government authorities in Sweden work. There are also occasional references to Swedish politics, which I found particularly interesting.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael is on a forced career break and is hired by a wealthy ex-businessman to uncover the truth behind a murder which took place in the family 30 years ago. He is initially sceptical about his ability to solve the mystery but gradually realises that there is much more than meets the eye. He then discovers that Lisbeth has some skills that could be especially useful to the assignment, and hires her to help him on the case. What they uncover goes beyond just one murder in the family, and leads to a whole lot of horrific crimes.

This book starts off in a ‘locked island mystery format’ but the scope of the mystery gets bigger as the book progresses. So as one goes reading, a number of other elements start coming in, but Larsson handles these smoothly, and it never gets unwieldy. Though there are a number of threads which are introduced but not followed up (these are for the later books), this book reads very well even as a stand – alone piece.

At different points of the book, the story is told from the perspective of different actors. Larsson uses this not so much as a narrative device as a way of letting us know the thoughts of the protagonists – and this works well for the book because at many points we are left pondering over the motives behind the actions of the people in the book (this is especially true in the case of Lisbeth).

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The team at Millennium is working with a couple who are doing an expose on the criminal elements in the sex trade industry in Sweden. Lisbeth comes back to Sweden after a long holiday and is getting her life together in order. The next thing we know, the couple is murdered, and Lisbeth is charged with their murder, and has a nationwide manhunt going on for her.

The rest of the book is about how Lisbeth avoids the police, and tracks down the people responsible for getting her into this mess, and extracts her revenge. Simultaneously, Mikael works towards finding out who the true murderers are, while also trying to clear Lisbeth’s name. In the course of this investigation, he finds out about Lisbeth’s shocking past, and has to figure out how her past is connected with these murders.

This is a crime mystery on a vast canvas, and has the reader wondering right from the start about the who, what, why and how. As in the first book, this starts with two murders, but expands to a whole lot of murders, criminal activity and drug dealing, and a major cover up by the Swedish secret police and maybe even the government. What makes this book work is how all these elements are connected to one another, and how they all come together brilliantly by the dénouement. There is also a lot of physical action in this book, and it sometimes reads and feels like a movie.

The one major issue I had with this book is that there is a lot of unnecessary stuff that could have been edited out. There is already a lot happening within the main plot itself, so it was a little annoying when Larsson introduces little side tracks (for example, the strange couple Lisbeth meets on her holiday, the Blomkovist – Vanger angle, or all the details about Erika). The main plot itself is rather convoluted, and all these other tracks become tedious and unnecessary and rather distract one from getting fully involved.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

This takes off from where ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ ended. This book was by far my favourite in the series. By this time, it’s more of a howdunit than a whodunit. In ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’, the whodunit gets solved – we find out the entire back story about Lisbeth’s past, the murders, the police cover ups, who did it and why. This book is about whether the truth will come out and bring down the bad guys or whether the truth will stay hidden and thus bring down the good guys. This is popular crime fiction so we already know the answer to that one, but the book deals with how the good guys get together and try to get the truth out while the very powerful bad guys try to stop the good guys.

This was a great read – you know the good guys will eventually triumph in the end – but you’re so desperate to figure out how they are going to do it that you just can’t bring yourself to put down the book. Secret police, secret units within the secret police, politics, murders, suicides, hacking, spies, counter spies, espionage – this book makes for very exciting reading, and has you rooting for the good guys right till the end in a very ‘That’s the way to do it! Serves those bastards right’ sort of a way. I think this was the most dramatic of the three books.

Lisbeth Salander makes for a fascinating protagonist. I think it was a rather daring choice to make someone who is so inscrutable and difficult to like as your main protagonist. And through most of the first book, one has no idea why Lisbeth is so difficult, making it even more difficult for the reader to root for her. Apart from her, almost all of the female characters in the book are very strong characters – Erika Berger, Miriam Wu, Sonja Modig, the Vanger women, and the other relatively minor characters.

There is a lot of physical action in the books, and sometimes it feels like it was made with a future movie in mind. Surprisingly, I didn’t mind that at all – in fact, I think I quite liked it, and am looking forward to the movie (I am assuming they will be making one – they can’t pass up a script like this!). I had major problems with the fact that when the lead characters are in some sort of trouble, they find extremely simplistic solutions to get out of it. Also, by the end of the series, there were a couple of loose threads left hanging (Camilla for example), that didn’t leave me completely satisfied.

However, these don’t really take away much from the overall awesomeness of the series, so I will end this very long post by saying ‘GO READ IT RIGHT NOW!’.

Oh Philippa, where have you been?

Oh Philippa, where have you been all my life? How could I have not come across your delicious books for so many years? Well, now that you have been discovered, the loss will be shortly rectified.

I’ve always loved historical fiction, both Indian and non - Indian, and whether it is a well - researched piece of work (as in the case of William Dalrymple) or light fluffy reading (a la Georgette Heyer), if I come across any piece of historical fiction, you can bet I am going to read it. Last year, on a cruise on the honeymoon, I came across Philippa Gregory’s ‘The Other Queen’ (yes, yes, I read books on my honeymoon) and I was completely bowled over by how much fun the book was, and in my favourite genre too!

When I discovered that Philippa had written a number of books in the genre, and some of them were very popular, I was blown away. Here was a lady who had written numerous books, largely centered around the English royals, across the ages. Her books were extremely fun to read, you want to race through the pages, even though you know very well how it all ended. And so was born a worshipper! I have now made it my mission, my goal, to read all her books, in chronological order (though she is still working on the Plantagenets, so I will have to start from the Tudor dynasty).

I started off with ‘The Constant Princess’ , which traces the life of Katherine of Aragon, from her childhood, till the early years of her marriage with Henry VIII. If you are really interested in the plot, do take a look at the Wikipedia page on Katherine of Aragon. Philippa takes quite a few liberties in the book - she shows that Katherine and Arthur have indeed consummated their marriage, in fact are deeply in love, and Katherine later lies about the consummation of the marriage because she believes it is her destiny to be the Queen of England - but its an interesting take on the inner workings of a beloved and revered queen, and of how she might have been as a young woman.

Of course, in terms of actual writing, there isn’t much to recommend in her books. The writing is awkward, and she has a tendency to repeat the same expression over and over again, (say at the beginning of a speech, mid way though the speech, and again at the end of the speech). I mean, seriously, Philippa, it isn’t children you are writing for, this isn’t literature, we get the point, so get a move on woman! The inner monologues of her heroines are a bore - just because the woman thinks the same thought everyday doesn’t me you have to write those thoughts in every chapter!

She also has this tendency to ramble for the first quarter of the book, and then suddenly jump to an epilogue, which features an important (and maybe concluding scene) of the heroine’s life. it’s a little annoying because here you are, following this woman’s (the heroine’s, not Philippa’s) trials and tribulations closely, and then, in one turn of the page, you jump ahead by 10, 15 years to some sort of a forced conclusion. It wouldn’t be so irritating if it was well done, but it isn’t a smooth transition at all, and it jars, so that when you close the book, you are a little put out, and feel rather cheated.

But for all the criticism about her writing, her books are such fun! Once you start, you’re on a roll, and you don’t want it to end. And for such a light read, her books are fairly well researched. Sure, she takes a number of liberties with historical facts, and assumptions we have no way of verifying (but dude, that’s the point of writing historical fiction - where you don’t know, you put your own spin on it), but in terms of the actual events that take place, and an idea of life in court, its well researched. Mind, the research wouldn’t stand up for a second if it was serious work, but her books are little more than chick - lit, so any research is good.

I think the best part is that they raise in the reader a great curiosity about the people and the time they have been reading about. I am fairly familiar with the Tudors, atleast from Henry VIII up to Elizabeth, though I’m sketchy once James I steps in, but even I was keen to know more about Katherine of Aragon after reading The Constant Princess and did quite a bit of reading up after that, and may even be reading upon some serious historical accounts of her time.

It also makes me wish we had more historical fiction/ mythology in the Indian context. The amount of material at our disposal is incredible, but modern works based on Indian history/ mythology are very limited in India. I didn’t think much of Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series - actually I disliked it intensely, and had a tough time reading it, which is a pity since my mother bought the entire series in hardback (some sort of collectors edition), since I had been so excited about it.

I remember reading somewhere that there is a lot more historical fiction available in regional literature but translation is of course a problem. It also makes me immensely grateful to Amar Chitra Katha for their books on various Indian mythological and historical figures. They has books on even fairly minor characters (such as Sishupala). I owe them my familiarity with and interest in Indian mythology.

Anyway, I’d love to hear recommendations from you on modern works based on Indian history or mythology. Meanwhile, I’m off to spend some time with ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’.