In Short Debra Adelaide

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 27, 2002

Debra Adelaide

BLUE DIARY By Alice Hoffman Vintage, 303pp, $21.95 (pb)

How you write with such acute clarity and sweet lyrical power about a man in jail for a particularly brutal and grubby crime is possibly a mystery to all except authors like Alice Hoffman. This story of a life seemingly perfect, yet lived in complete deceit, suddenly undone and lost forever, explores the past's haunting ability to inhabit the present, inescapably. Rapist and murderer Ethan Ford is not the only one in this novel trapped by his past: even 12-year-old Kat, friend to Ethan's son, witness to and sometimes unwitting accomplice of the weaknesses of others, is trying to accept the fact that her father's suicide will affect her all her life. In a novel full of sensory details as well as tremulous emotions, Hoffman at times overdoes the exquisite imagery. But it is forgivable in the context of her penetrating insight into both the minuscule and enormous anguish in the lives of seemingly ordinary folk.

ZOO TAILS By Oliver Graham-Jones Bantam, 207pp, $19.95 (pb)

Hard to imagine how someone could spoil such a good opportunity to write about animals, but with a combination of brisk superficiality and fustian prose, Graham-Jones manages it. Being the first vet appointed to the London Zoo in 1951 after a few years of rural work, you'd think the raw material perfect, yet his ``tails" of animal antics aren't a patch on Durrell, Herriot et al; in fact, some subjects of his anecdotes like that of Cholmondeley, the stout-drinking, packet-a-day smoking chimp have a second-hand ring to them. The chapter on snakes fails to exploit the potential of this unique genre (snake-lit, that is) while stories about ravens fitted with wooden legs, caesareans performed on unco-operative lionesses and docile leopards sitting on prime ministers' desks are only tepidly amusing. The seduction of snakes and penguins on the cover notwithstanding, this one remains decidedly lightweight.

KILLERS IN EDEN By Danielle Clode Allen & Unwin, 190 pp, $24.95 (pb)

Killer whales have not been seen in Twofold Bay since 1930, but when they visited in numbers it was amazing: every winter during their annual migration they not only hunted and trapped baleen whales into the bay for slaughter, but helped first Aboriginal, then European, whalers catch their own in a partnership that seemed so unlikely it was considered myth for years. Savage and ruthless when it came to killing their own prey, the whales were gentle as lambs with the whalers, guarding damaged boats, towing stricken men to safety, even rescuing them from drowning. The lack of any record of killer whales ever attacking humans suggests they desire only fishy-tasting meat. Or is it a bond more like the traditional one between dolphins and humans? Clode's natural curiosity and unaffected approach draws the reader into this stranger-than-truth, genuinely fascinating story.

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR By Amulya Malladi Bantam, 214pp, $21.95 (pb)

The Bhopal gas explosion provides a background to this first novel that examines marriage relations in India. Anjali is damaged in several ways on the night the disaster occurs when her health and marriage come undone, but worse awaits. Having resisted scandal and ostracism by her own family, obtained a divorce and remarried, contentment proves temporary when Anjali's young son's ill health drags her back to the disaster; it's a situation almost too fragile to survive her ex-husband's sudden reappearance, and unbearable when he wants to make amends. A portrait of the lot of contemporary Indian women amid compromise, illusory choice and apparently inescapable catastrophe, the narrative voices are not differentiated enough for all the characters to come alive; but the story is compelling, with a climax both surprising and inevitable and inescapably sad.