PICK OF THE WEEK
EMERGENCE
John Birmingham, Pan Macmillan, $29.95
In the past John Birmingham's genre fiction has struck me as a bit too whimsical and overwritten, and not original enough, to really deliver the juice. Emergence, though, is a ripper – a riveting blend of comedy, action, fantasy and horror that reads like a mashup of Carl Hiaasen, Lee Child and H.P. Lovecraft. An oil-rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico sees Dave Hooper – a dissolute and overweight safety manager – develop superhuman strength after a confrontation with monsters from the deep. These lurid, chthonian baddies are a cross between Douglas Adams' Vogons and orcs from Lord of the Rings, and they've got a boner for devouring human flesh. Their attack on the rig proves just the beginning, as a new improved Dave teams up with Navy SEALS to fight them. It's gloriously addictive – a funny, gory and absorbing romp that'd make a great videogame or action movie.
PEACE AND CONFLICT
Irene Sabatini, Corsair, $19.99
Irene Sabatini won the Orange Prize for new writers with The Boy Next Door, an interracial romance set in her native Zimbabwe, just as it became independent under Robert Mugabe. Peace and Conflict has a contemporary setting. The novel opens up the lives of middle-class Zimbabwean expats living in Geneva, and is told from the perspective of the precocious and imaginative 10-year-old Robert. His father works for the Red Cross, his mother is a novelist, and his teenage brother George sports a massive afro and teases his younger sibling constantly. Robert is obsessed by the shady secrets of their next door neighbour, and becomes a bit of a one-boy Famous Five about uncovering them. He's a charming narrator, and the novel generates a complex lens from the childlike proximity of small, mundane things and the distant horrors of Mugabe's dictatorship, which do not leave the family untouched.
VOLCANO STREET
David Rain, Atlantic Books, $27.99
When their mother is sectioned, 16-year-old Marlo Wells and her younger sister Skip are forced to move in with their Auntie Noreen in the provincial city of Craters Lakes. They both hate it there and daydream about escape. Marlo has discovered Germaine Greer and clings to The Female Eunuch like a bible, and Skip causes friction by declaring her opposition to the Vietnam War, in which their cousin is fighting. Unfortunately, Volcano Street is a prime example of good politics making bad art. The dialogue sounds try-hard and there's something forced about the way various historical edifices – notably the '70s feminist and antiwar movements – are slapped on to a plot that superficially exposes the less savoury aspects of Australian conservatism and parochialism, while insisting on a spot of false uplift. Not enough imaginative effort has been expended to make the reader believe in and care about these girls and their world.
THE NERUDA CASE
Roberto Ampuero, Souvenir Press, $32.99
The Neruda Case, from Chilean author Roberto Ampuero, finally introduces his sleuth Cayetano Brulé to an English-language audience. His detective fiction is steeped in the literary tradition of Latin America. The reader is immediately put in mind of Borges' Chinese-German spy in The Garden of the Forking Paths, for this globetrotting labyrinth of a case takes Brulé to Mexico and East Germany, Bolivia and his native Cuba, and in its enigmatic way offers more clues than answers. But it is another literary figure, Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, who commands Brulé to become a detective, offering him a collection of Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels to compensate for his inexperience. He's to seek out a doctor, a cancer specialist, and the journey takes him around the world and back to the troubled political landscape of '70s Chile. It's beguiling, despite the occasional gaffe in translation.
