Book Review: The River Wife

Title: The River Wife
Author: Heather Rose
Year Published: 2009
Genre: Fantasy, Magic Realism, Romance

The river wife is a woman by day and a fish by night. She has a duty to tend the river. When she falls in love a man named Wilson James, the balance of nature is upset and she must do what she can to save the one she loves.

The title, cover and blurb lured me in with promises of gentle magic. But then I read the first sentence...

“As the sun crests the dark line of the land, I wake and step from the river, and that in itself is what is called magic.”

...and had to put the book down. It was a bit too intense for me, though I can see the same sentence inducing others to fall instantly in love.

Knowing that I was prejudiced, I tried to keep an open mind and almost succeeded in imagining myself charmed by the very lyric, very poetic and very pretty writing. The book is full of passages like

“My father's face softened into the kindness of moss that grows in the furrows of trees and asks for nothing but dappled light and the touch of rain.”

and 

“He held me to him and his skin stole warmth from the closeness of our blood. The days of longing for him, the coldness of his skin, the taste of his tongue, the stretch of his legs, the colour of his eyes, the texture of his breath on my skin, the weight of him above me and in me and with me, so sharp and sweet was the relief of it, so deep and urgent and shuddering. And then he held me and said, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'”.

Now, a couple of phrases like that now and then I could have dealt with. However, the entire book is written this way. Personally, I find this sort of prose – when it's constantly like this – to be a bit too much; it's the literary equivalent of drinking a bowl of honey. As I read, I felt my mind closing, resisting the writing, and I hated myself for it. I started noticing things like how the author likes to use lists in descriptions and how sometimes verbs seemed to be missing from sentences. I started mentally screaming “what does that even mean?” when I read about how the river wife wove the stories into the water and listened to songs the river brought her – because that's as far as it goes, there's nothing about why this is done or what it means to weave stories. Furthermore, the words “stories” and “songs” end up being used so often that they lose all meaning.

Despite my dislike of the writing, on a macro scale it suited the story very well. It's a love story at heart and the lyrical writing suits the magical, otherworldly nature of the river wife herself. As you might expect then, the love between the river wife and Wilson James doesn't spring from things like compatible personalities and shared interests – it's more of a mutual admiration of each other's exoticism and being; they just are in love and that's just how it is. The start of the book largely consists of the heroine's musings on her pre-Wilson James life, the middle consists of her Wilson James life, and a relatively action-packed Wilson James-related plot emerges in the last fifth of the book. It's a short and simple story, couched in poetry. However, I feel that the style gives it the illusion of depth, rather than actual depth itself.

I think most people will either love or hate this book. The writing is so stylised that there isn't much room for a middle ground. It's a lovely mood piece; Rose evokes the earthy, magical atmosphere very well. In the end, however, it was simply not for me.

Alex's Rating: 2.5/5

Movie Review: Life of Pi

Title: Life of Pi

Director: Ang Lee

Year Released: 2012

Running Time: 158 minutes

Classification: PG-13 (M)

Genre: Drama, Magic Realism

Life of Pi tells the story of a boy who survives a shipwreck only to find himself sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. A tad unbelievable, perhaps, but that's the whole point. This is meant to be an epic, spiritual journey – one, which we are told, will make us believe in God. Now, I couldn't help but have high hopes for this film, given its celebrated director, prize-winning book, stunning trailer and great reviews, and I was ready to be a sucker and *~believe~*. Unfortunately, I walked away feeling slightly but distinctly unsatisfied.

Things start off well enough. The visuals are stunning from the get-go, with a vivid palette and adorable HD zoo animals. But as I saw more and more of the writer (Rafe Spall) and adult Pi (Irfan Khan), I felt myself deflate. The use of the interview as a framing technique seemed to work well enough in the book, but here it felt limiting and more than a bit contrived – rather than letting the story speak for itself, we are told, on no uncertain terms, that we are about to embark on a ~journey of faith~.

Perhaps it's because I sat in a bad spot in the cinema, but what ensued was not especially captivating. The early discussions on religion are superficial but heavy-handed and the acting somewhat stilted. As such, the retelling of Pi's childhood seems to drag on (get to the tiger already!) and I failed to connect with the character and his beliefs.

Things get better once Pi is played by Suraj Sharma and the ocean voyage begins in earnest. His plight is terrifying yet so absurd that it isn't so much frightening as it is surreal. The vast expanses of ocean and sky only accentuate the dream-like atmosphere. Speaking of, the visuals live up to the hype. They are, simply put, very spectacular; the tiger looks very life-like and the scenery is gorgeous. It's possibly the most beautiful movie I've ever seen and is worth watching for the graphics alone. Pi's strange adventures on the ocean are easily the best part of the film – in survival mode, Pi becomes easier to relate to and you get a sense of his joy, his awe and his despair. As a bonus, everything looks magnificent, but I think I may have mentioned that already.

At the end we're confronted with the question of what to believe and the answer, supposedly, will affirm our faith. At this point, my good spirits withered away. Especially given the shallow treatment of faith and religion at the start of the film, I found this turn of events to be somewhat of a let-down and a reminder of the things I should have felt but didn't. Where I had previously enjoyed this as a story about a Boy and his Tiger, it all now felt a bit hollow. I can't quite remember feeling this way with Yann Martel's book, so I'm not sure whether the problem lies in the tale or its telling.

Many have found Life of Pi to be marvellously uplifting, but I'm afraid I hold with the less favourable reviews. Certainly it is impressive on a technical level and certainly it is a unique tale to have been brought on screen. Pi's adventures with the tiger are indeed wondrous, but alone, they are incapable of carrying the whole narrative. The film's key flaw is that it fails to give substance to its own spiritual aspirations – but clearly, it seems, many would disagree entirely.

Alex's Rating: 3/5

Book Review: Metro Winds

Title: Metro Winds
Author: Isobelle Carmody
Year Published: 2012
Genre: Literary fiction, Magic realism, Fantasy, Young Adult (?)

I've been a fan of the Obernewtyn Chronicles as well as the Legendsong for quite some time, so I picked up Isobelle Carmody's latest offering with an expectation of dreamy, immersive fantasy. This expectation was only partially met. Though all six stories contain fantastical elements, all are grounded in our world. Further, there is a more literary quality to the writing than I am used to for this author, which also meant I spent some time adjusting. 

The first story, “Metro Winds”, is about a young girl who moves to live with her aunt in the city and becomes drawn to the tunnels of the metro. The writing in this story is simply beautiful; there is a poetic, magical quality to it, almost as if it's for children. I found the ending unsatisfying on a conceptual level, but it's worth reading for the language alone.

Next comes “The Dove Game”, in which an Australian travels to Paris to meet a woman on behalf of a dead man. This is story reads a bit more like general fiction, with the fantasy elements blended into the psychological confusion of the protagonist. While it's a perfectly decent story, the style felt a little generic. I can't help but feel as if it could have been written by any number of literary short story writers and it didn't really grip me as much as the other stories did.

At a little under a hundred pages is “The Girl Who Could See The Wind”. Here a girl is taken to a foreign land by her mother and eventually embarks on a quest to find her lost sister. This was one of my favourite stories in the book, being one of those pleasantly sweet kind of stories with allusions to various fairy tales. The writing style is more similar to the author's other works too, which is to say it's easy to read, dream-like and evocative. As a side note, (impliedly) indigenous Australians are portrayed in this story as spiritual people connected to the land, and I for one cannot decide whether this was respectful or cliched or both or neither.

I found the fourth story, “The Stranger”, to be the book's weakest. It's about a scriptwriter who travels to Greece and meets a strange woman. While the narrator's voice was novel (for example, how he sees reality as if it was shot as a movie), this alone was not enough to sustain my interest the whole way. It's alright, but not much happens for most of the story and I was constantly counting how many pages of it I had left.

“The Wolf Prince” was the other favourite of mine. It's the longest story of the collection and it involves a cursed faerie prince who must hunt a princess in order to save himself. It's told from the point of view of the queen who herself was hunted as a girl. The style is similar to the third story, albeit the fantasy here is front and centre. Again, fairy tales are inventively woven into the story, itself steeped with richness. It's a truly lovely read.

The last story is “The Man Who Lost His Shadow”, and involves the eponymous hero searching for his shadow in an unnamed European country. It's stark and strangely refreshing after the previous story, and the absurd notion of losing a shadow is treated is treated with a kind of frank practicality. The style is vaguely reminiscent of Peter Carey.

All the stories are quite varied – in style, tone and narrative. I personally found this jarring when reading them all one after the other; it might help if you think of the stories as being written by different authors, so you know to expect something different each time.

Still, despite the differences, common threads run through all the stories: the idea of a quest and the sense that a different world sits entwined with our own. Australia or Australians also feature in an express or implied manner, which adds another flavour to the tales.

Basically, if you're looking for a pure fantasy kick, you can just read “The Girl Who Could See The Wind” and “The Wolf Prince”. The others have a more ~literary~ general fiction kind of feel to them. All are well written. That said, while I was fine with reading it, there were also many times that I felt no compulsion to pick the book up again after having put it down. The author sets the bar so high with some stories that others seem lacking by comparison.

I've seen this book shelved in the YA section, but I would only recommend it to older teens or adults.

As a collection, Metro Winds feels a little patchy to me, though I admit this may be because I started the book with certain expectations. It's worth a shot if you're into literary fiction with a dash of magic. However, if you just want something similar to Carmody's fantasy series, then I'd just read the the odd-numbered stories.

Alex's Rating: 3.5/5