Review: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

During a party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is dreaming of the future. Before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy.
Now, fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to the family farm for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by questions she has not thought about for decades. From pre-WWII England through the Blitz, to the fifties and beyond, discover the secret history of three strangers from vastly different worlds — Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy — who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined.

I've heard a lot of good things about Kate Morton's books so when I was putting together my reading list for this year I was excited to include The Secret Keeper. I did not regret my choice when I finished reading the book, particularly because Morton is so very good at bringing her characters to life.
Everybody we meet in the course of the novel is flawed or broken in some way: Laurel is wed to her work and a secret that's older than she is, Dorothy's desire for something more and better rules her life, Vivien is a prisoner of her past, Jimmy sacrifices his beliefs for the sake of love... There is a story there for each of these characters and through them Morton weaves a tale of love, family, growing up, hard choices and decisions with far-reaching consequences.
It's fortunate that the characters are strong because the biggest mystery in the book wasn't all that mysterious for me. I guessed what would be the shocker about half way through and kept reading mainly to see whether I was right and to watch the characters get to the end of the story. Morton worked very hard on making the shocker plausible and on keeping the reader in the dark throughout the book, and yet it wasn't seamless (Gillian Flynn managed to keep me guessing much better in Gone Girl). There were key character traits that just didn't work with the ending, and remembering how highlighted they were made the dissonance only more obvious for me.
Despite this shortcoming reading The Secret Keeper was particularly enjoyable because of the writing. The book is full of lines that I wanted to write down and commit to memory, but for the fear of breaking the spell I didn't, and now that the book is back at the library I wish I had. Fortunately there is the Internet, so here are a couple of quotes that I liked so much I went back to reread them once I was done with the chapters where they appear:

"... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances."

and this paragraph I thought was just beautifully written, with a sprinkling of foreshadowing and a generous doze of significance:

"And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen."

I did enjoy this book and if you are a fan of lyrical prose and a character-driven story I think you will as well. For my part, I'll be keeping an eye on Morton's new books. She's liable to produce another beautiful novel (hopefully one with a more graceful surprise of an ending).

Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany this is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

I wasn't planning on reading this book this year despite its reputation as a very good novel and all the positive reviews. WW2 and its horrors seemed just too close, too terrible to read about when my grandmother, who was a girl of about Liesel's age when it tore through her childhood, still sometimes talks about it. However a friend invited me to her book club and The Book Thief was next up so I picked it up from the library. The first few chapters were a bit difficult to get through (Zusak's writing style is somewhat unusual) but the more I read the more I understood what all the fuss is about. Very soon I felt invested in Liesel's story and wanted to know more about her and the other characters. They've gradually come alive and I found a certain sensitivity and wisdom in the way the author was depicting them and telling the story. I particularly liked Rosa, Liesel's foster mother. She was the one who surprised me on more than one occasion with all the layers to her personality and I applaud the author for creating her just the way she is.
The more I think about this book the more I appreciate its prose where a few spare words hold more meaning than whole paragraphs elsewhere and descriptions are so strange that they make perfect sense and stay with you for days ("frightened pajamas and torn faces" did).
Having Death as the narrator allowed for both the more intimate first person storytelling combined with the omniscient third person point of view that is much less limiting and I feel that this combination served the novel very well. It was startling sometimes how human Death seems, with his fatigue, regret, sarcasm, insights into humanity and the occasional bitterness over the things he's seen. Another device I have grown to enjoy were the regular interruptions to provide explanations, translations (much needed with a book so full of German words), and other such asides, it kept things moving and was a little bit of a distraction in an otherwise very serious novel.
The subject of WW2 isn't an easy one, despite being widely covered. Lives were destroyed, whole countries were devastated and something like that isn't easy to get over. There's a lot of books and TV and radio programs that talk about the genocide, about Hitler and his party, but I haven't seen or heard any that would talk about the regular German citizens who were in the middle of it all, their allegiances, their problems, their relationships with the people in their communities who found themselves ostracized for their heritage. Admittedly, I didn't look, but this book was my first window into the lives of ordinary families who lived during those tumultuous years and had to choose which side they were on. The more I read the more the realization that Nazi Germany and Socialist USSR were very similar despite all their differences. The propaganda, the need to be a member of the Party to be able to lead a life that wasn't artificially complicated for you, the poverty and the division of society were present on both sides of the divide, and as much as the leaders of both countries preached from their podiums that the others were evil incarnate now I think that they were just different sides of the same coin. I'm glad that I read this book, for this if for nothing else.

P.S. There is now a beautiful movie out that's based on this wonderful book, I haven't seen it yet, but judging by the trailer the film-makers have stayed close to the story