The Drop

Author Jane Harper introduced readers to Aaron Falk, fraud and financial crimes investigator with the Australian Federal Police, in her 2016 best selling novel, The Dry. Falk's second outing was the following year in Force of Nature (2017).  Falk disappeared for a while while Harper developed other characters, but he has returned in her latest novel, Exiles (2022). 

Falk is in Marralee, South Australia to attend the baptism of his godson Henry, child of his friend Detective Greg Raco. The christening was due to take place a year prior but it was cancelled abruptly when a local woman, Kim Gillespie, went missing on the opening night of a wine and food festival leaving behind her infant daughter in a pram. One year on, there are still no leads on what happened to Kim that night. Many locals seem to think she may have wandered off and either fallen or deliberately jumped into the deep reservoir. Kim has never been found, but her family, especially her teenage daughter Zara, is not convinced that she would have left on her own accord. 

Falk and Raco subtly begin to investigate. At the same time, as he builds relationships within the community, Falk reflects on his own upbringing in a small town and contemplates whether he is in the need of a tree-change from his bachelor life in Melbourne.  

Harper is an excellent writer with an ability to create a strong sense of place. Here she perfectly crafts a regional town, and the rhythm of the novel slows to the pace of this country life. Harper has infused this community with interesting characters, showcasing the tight-knit relationships of those who grew up in the town, with Falk as the outsider allowing him the means to observe from a distance,

I had hoped that Falk would become a character not dissimilar to Rebus or Cormoran Strike - a smart but not showy detective. While we learn more about Falk in this novel, he comes across as rather vanilla. He is so reserved that he lacks the rough edges that endear scruffy, flawed detectives to readers. Harper has said that this would be Falk's last outing (although she does leave an open door), and that may be for the best as her non-Falk novels have shown she doesn't need him to write a compelling mystery.

The novel was told from Falk's perspective, however, at the end of the book, Harper switches narrative lens and the last two chapters are told from the viewpoints of other characters. While this may have been a neat way to propel the story to its conclusion, I found it jarring to be pulled from Falk's narrative. But other than that minor quibble, I really enjoyed Exiles and would recommend it.

My reviews of Harper's previous novels are available on this blog:

• The Dry (2016) - featuring Aaron Falk
• Force of Nature (2017) - featuring Aaron Falk
• The Lost Man (2018)
• The Survivors (2020)

The Dry was made into a 2021 film starting Eric Bana as Falk. Bana will reprise his role in an upcoming film of Force of Nature, starring alongside Anna Torv, Deborra-Lee Furness and Jacqueline McKenzie.

Booker Prize Winner 2022

The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction was announced today, with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka receiving the £50,000 prize for his novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. 

Set in 1989, in Colombo, Maali Almeida is a war photographer, gambler and closet queen. He wakes in the afterlife to find that he has been killed but has no idea by whom. He has seven moons to contact his loved ones and alert them to some important photographs. 

The judges said of this novel: 'Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic'.

Karunatulka is the second Sri Lankan author to win the Booker Prize (the first was Canadian/Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient in 1992). 

His previous works include Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010) and Chats with the Dead (2020). He has also written features for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Guardian and other publications.

Chair of the Judging panel, Neil MacGegor, said of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida:

'Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative technique. This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not juts of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west...'

Here is the moment that the winner was announced and the award was presented to Shehan Karunatilaka by the Queen Consort.

I have not yet read this novel but I havre heard great things about it from readers I admire, so will have to find a copy and check it out. 

Nobel Prize for Literature 2022

The Nobel Prize for Literature was announced this week, recognising French author Annie Ernaux 'for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.'

I have several books by Ernaux sitting on my to-be-read shelf, but have not yet explored her work. I had hoped to read her work in French, but fear my abilities in that language have faded from disuse, so I may need to resort to an English translation or a bilingual tandem read. 

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux was initially a teacher. She is known for writing in plain language about life from different perspectives. Many of her novels are brief and autobiographical. Ernaux has also published memoir, non-fiction, and diaries. 

Let's take a look at a few of her best known works.

Passion simple (1991) / Simple Passion (trans 2003) - The story of a woman's affair with a younger, married man. Set in Paris around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This affair becomes all consuming, an adrenaline-fueled passion which burns fast and hot. She is infatuated, spending her time away from him constantly thinking about him and planning their next encounter.  While her whole life revolves around this man, she doesn't really know him.

L'evenement (2000) / Happening (trans 2001) - Happening tells the story of a young woman who has a secret abortion in 1960s France, when terminations were illegal. At the time, oral contraception was also illegal, so when university student Anne becomes pregnant, she knows she is not equiped to have a child. She seeks out someone who can assist her to terminate the unwanted pregnancy. Happening has recently been adapted into a film directed by Audrey Diwan, which won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021. 

Les Annees (2008) / The Years (trans 2017) - Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, The Years is a personal narrative spanning six decades of the author's lifetime. Starting in the1940s as a child in war-torn and post-war Normandy, to a young adult in the 1968 student uprisings, the changing Europe of the 1980s and 1990s, and the turn of the century.

Memoire de fille (2016) / A Girl's Story (trans 2020) - This is the story of a girl's first sexual encounter and what happens afterwards. At summer camp when she is 18, a naive young woman loses her virginity to a 22 year old camp counsellor. But rather than explore the story from the girl's perspective, the author views this experience from older age, reflecting back on this moment and what it meant then and now. 

While many of Ernaux's works focus on her life, she also writes about her family and their experiences. Ernaux turns her lens on her father, a grocer, in La Place (1983) / A Man's Place (trans 1992) and her mother's battle with dementia in Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1997) / I remain in darkness (trans 1999).

Learning about Annie Ernaux and her work once again encouraged me to reflect on the diversity of my reading and the need to include more writers in translation. I am intrigued by how Ernaux takes her own life experience and writes not as memoir but as inspiration for her fiction, blurring lines. I have Simple Passion, Happening and The Years, so will give Ernaux a whirl. 

Strike Force

I pre-ordered The Ink Black Heart (2022), the sixth novel in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) and began reading it as soon as the book arrived. Nothing beats a gripping crime thriller and I have always loved this series, particularly the relationship between the two lead characters Cormoran Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott.

Strike and Ellacott are hired to investigate the identity of 'Anomie', the co-creator of an online game based on a popular cartoon series, The Ink Black Heart. The creators of the cartoon have been the victims of a crime, and Anomie has been stirring up hatred towards one of the creators on Twitter and on the game. The private detectives have to infiltrate the game and its fandom, and try to determine the real-life identities behind the online aliases of the gamers. One-by-one they have to rule out potential Anomies, which is made harder because resources are stretched at the agency and there is a lot of gaming, stakeouts and undercover work to be done by the team. Plus, the closer they get to cracking the case, the more danger they face.

What I really enjoyed about this novel is the way in which Robin has come into her own. No longer Strike's sidekick, she is taking the lead, growing in confidence, and proving time and again how resourceful she is. The relationship between the two private detectives continues to bloom, simmering away and leaving readers in anticipation. 

I also admired the idea behind the plot - this online world where people hide behind anonymity and behave in ways they never would in real life. Cyberbullying, privacy, hate crimes, and more are covered in this novel. Rowling has created a world within a world which is wonderfully detailed and easy to see how people get sucked in. She is also able to craft a compelling mystery, with enough twists and turns to keep readers guessing whodunit. While reading, I also listened to the audiobook version brilliantly narrated by Robert Glenister who has performed all the novels in this series. 

However, as much as I wanted to love this novel, I was disappointed. At over 1000 pages, this doorstop book is too long, too complicated, and has too many characters. While the chapters depicting online chat threads of moderators within the game were innovative, after a while I found these repetitive and dull. I appreciate that Rowling needs time to explore characters but I honestly felt this book could have been edited down by 20-30% and been a tauter thriller. 

Rowling has said that she expects there will be ten novels in this series, and I look forward to seeing what happens next with these characters. While it will be at least another two years before the next instalment, the BBC has announced that Tom Burke and Holliday Granger will be back in a four-part adaptation of Troubled Blood. This is expected to be televised before Christmas 2022.

My reviews of previous books in the series are available on this blog:

• The Cuckoo's Calling (2013) 
•  The Silkworm (2014) 
• Career of Evil (2016)
• Lethal White (2018)
• Troubled Blood (2020)