When I started to write this review, I realised that this is the third review about book that has, as a central character, a houseboy – the first was Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the second was Reef by Romesh Gunesekera.
 
On this website, http://www.samsstory.per.sg/main.htm, a synopsis of the story reveals that Sam’s Story is a story set in the year 2001. It is the tale of Sam, ‘raised in a tiny village too remote for maps, brought to work in Colombo as a house-boy, finding momentary happiness in a life muddied by difficult days and countless painful moments. … [He is] a dim-witted, illiterate houseboy, whose lot in life was to tend the gardens and care for dogs in the home of an upper-middle class family in urban Sri Lanka. … His story begins at the River house where he finds employment as a houseboy, and ends in his village to which he returns. In between the two, Sam relates episodes from his life; people that have passed through it, events that changed his world, happy childhood hours he enjoyed, tears he has shed, and days he wished he could forget. In counterpoint to these snapshots of the past are descriptions of his life at the River house; a lifestyle far removed from his own background, with people he comes to love, others he’d love to hate, and the myriad events that dotted the otherwise peaceful days he spent there.’
 
Elmo Jayawardena is a Sri Lankan pilot employed with Singapore Airlines. He writes in his free time and is the founder of a charitable organisation, AFLAC (Association for Lighting a Candle).
 
I first met the author at the LitBlogger event organised by MPH here in Kuala Lumpur. I listened to him speak about the book and his experiences. I remember him saying that there is not a single ‘big’ word in Sam’s Story. After reading the tale, this is true. The language is very simple which lends a charm to this book. Interwoven in this tale is the pain that war brings; for example, Sam practically hates the other workers in the house – Leandro and Janet. And the reason is revealed in the telling in this one sentence: Janet was from the other side that threw bombs. When the author spoke of his houseboy, he said that Sam has no idea what the war is about. Sam is Sinhalese and a Buddhist. He jus knows to hate the ‘others’.
 
My favourite passage in this book is this:
‘I cannot honestly remember a single day that someone laughed in my own house. I mean, really laughed, with a lot of noise and stomachs shaking, like the people who came ot the river house did. We smiled at times. Not too often, but we did smile from time to time. Even when we smiled, they were small smiles. I think the poor can give only small smiles. Since we were poorer than the poor, our smiles were mostly smaller than small similes. Just appeared and disappeared, like a broken moon in a cloud filled sky.’
 
Sam’s Story won the prestigious Graetian Award in 2001 for the best literary work in English in Sri Lanka. It was also long listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003. This is a story that is both poignant and touching. You will certainly have a smile on your face long after you’ve read it.
 
30 January 2009

Right at the very end of my copy of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I read that one of the novels the author liked was Reef by Romesh Gunesekera. I decided I would re-read this book.

Reef is not a difficult book to read for it is small in size. On this website, this is the description given for this book:

Reef is a love story set in a spoiled paradise. It is told by Triton, who at the age of eleven goes to work as houseboy to Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamp, sea movements and the island’s disappearing reef. Triton learns to polish silver; to mix a love cake with ten eggs, creamed butter and fresh cashew nuts; and to steam the exotic parrot fish for his master’s lover. As Triton recounts his story, an extraordinary voice emerges: naive and knowing, fearful and brave, a boy becoming a man in a world on the brink of chaos.

On the same website, it is stated that, ‘Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Sri Lanka where he spent his early years. Before coming to Britain he also lived in the Philippines. He now lives in London as a writer but travels widely. Recently he has been a writer-in-residence in Copenhagen, Singapore, Hong Kong and Southampton.’ I was fortunate enough to listen to him speak when he visited Silverfish Books, in Kuala Lumpur. There are two things I remember most from this meeting:

• When he read from his book, he chose a passage which describes one of Triton’s creations. He spoke so very slowly; every word was pronounced and there was nothing hurried in his manner. It made listening to this author an absolute joy.
• He mentioned that when his agent first saw the manuscript, the agent commented that it was a very short work. I suppose, I found it such a fascinating thing to remember because I often wonder what was implied in that comment. Was it a query as to whether the book was any good since it was so short? I never dared to ask.

The book was certainly very good. From the moment I started, I could not put this book down. The words flowed from start to end. Here are two passages that will show how meticulous the author was in his writing:

Mister Salgado, Ranjan Salgado, was a bachelor. A sweet smell clung to him, heady and unnatural, derived from an ivory bottle shaped like a bell and impossible to open properly. He would shake tiny, powerful drops out of the metal clasp at the top of its narrow neck and rub them on his hands, or his face or body. The scent made me think of cinnamon bushes, but it was the nature of the town to deceive. 

&

After serving the tea, I went out into the garden. With the sun down, the air moved gently as though the plants had begun to breathe again having held their breaths all day. The drone of insects rose like scent. It was the time of the day when flowers would fall from the tress, petals bouncing off the small branches and resting briefly on a lower leaf before being released to touch the earth and die. ….

The backdrop of the story is the civil war in Sri Lanka. It is in the last sentence of this novel – a sentence that is so beautiful and profound – that the horror of war and its lasting repercussions are most evident: A couple of hours later he flew out, after a glimmer of hope in a far-away house of sorrow.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading this book. The story has remained with me to the point where I often wonder what happened to both Mr. Salgado and Triton. Did Mr. Salgado meet his beloved Nili? Did they rekindle their romance? Did Triton find much happiness in the UK? Then, I realise, it’s just fiction. And I feel sad.

30 January 2009

In the middle of last year (2008), I was given this book together with Practising the Power of Now. The author provides an excellent explanation as to why it’s taken me so long to finish reading this book and also write this review; in the Introduction, he writes:

The pause symbol [elongated ‘s’] after certain passages is a suggestion that you may want to stop reading for a moment, become still, and feel and experience the truth of what has just been said. There may be other places in the text where you will do this naturally and spontaneously.
 
As a result of reading this passage, I duly paused when necessary; only, I seem to have paused for months!
 
The Power of Now is a non-fiction piece of work and on the back cover of the book, the blurb reads as follows:

Hugely successful author Echkart Tolle guides us through a challenging but extraordinarily rewarding journey to find The Power of Now. We learn that we can find out way out of psychological pain; authentic human power is found by surrendering to the Now; the silence and space all around us is one of the keys to entering inner peace. In the Now, the present moment, problems do not exist. In the Now, we discover that we are already complete and perfect.

 
There is also a description of who the author is:
Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany, graduated from the University of London and worked at Cambridge University. When he was twenty-nine, a profound spiritual transformation virtually dissolved his old identity and radically changed the course of his life. He is now a counsellor and spiritual teacher.
 
More recently, Eckhart Tolle also gained much notoriety when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show. A series of classes called, A New Earth classes, was organised based on his newest book, A New Earth.  
 
Already aware of the principles of Advita, teachings of Buddha and little bits of Christianity, a lot of what Eckhart Tolle said was not new to me. However, I was very impressed with the way he managed to explain these complicated concepts in very simple terms. He chose to do it in a ‘Question and Answer’ style – a question is posed by the reader and he answers it. Here is an example of the pain-body concept being explained in simple terms:

Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don’t think about it – don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyse. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of “the one who observes,” the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

 
The entire book is presented in a logical sequence from explaining what enlightenment is to identifying pain and moving to other issues like enlightened relationships and finding happiness. The biggest problem with this book is the size of the font used – it is too small and this made reading this book more difficult.
 
Here are some of the things I’ve learned from reading this book:

‘Instead of “watching the thinker,” you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.’
 
‘Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want to the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.’
 
‘When you know you are not at peace, your knowing creates a still space that surrounds your nonpeace in a loving and tender embrace and then transmutes your nonpeace into peace. As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.’

 
It is not an easy book to recommend to people. I would certainly keep my copy of the book and read passages regularly. However, anyone who reads this book needs to be open to what I call ‘alternative theories’ and accept spiritual concepts which might be different from what they’ve believed all along; me giving a blanket recommendation like, “Yes, go and buy it,” will not do. It is a very good book and if read with an open mind, will certainly help to broaden the reader’s spiritual horizons.
 
29 January 2009

On the back cover this work of fiction, the blurb provides the following description of the story:

‘In the 1960s Nigeria, a county blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. The third is Richard, a shy Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. When the shocking horror of the war engulfs them, their loyalties are severely tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways that none of them imagined …’

 
The war mentioned in the passage above is the Nigeria-Biafra War which happened between 1967 and 70. This work of literary fiction gave me an insight into what happened in this land that is so far away from where I live (Malaysia). While it was interesting to learn about this terrible War, I enjoyed, even more, learning about the people: the differences between the Igbo and Yoruba, the food they ate, where they lived, the kind of dress they wore and so on. It was all in the details and it comes as no surprise for the author says, in an interview published at the end of the book:

‘I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, because my mother still cannot speak at length about losing her father in a refugee camp, because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because I don’t even want to forget.’

 
These are very powerful words from the author and go to show her dedication to making this story so real, so alive and such a pleasure to read.
 
What remains after reading the whole novel are some home truths, which would apply even in Malaysia. For example, one of the characters, Madu, asks Richard to write for the Propaganda Directorate. Richard says no and when he is asked if has thought about it, the ensuing exchange between him and Madu is very telling:

[Richard says,] “You would not have asked me if I were not white.”
[Madu replies,] “Of course I asked because you are white. They will take what you write more seriously because you are white. Look, the truth is that this is not your war. This is not your cause. Your government will evacuate you in a minute if you ask them to. … If you really want to contribute, this is the way that you can. … They will believe a white man who lives in Biafra and who is not a professional journalist.”

 
The sequence of events was very well plotted throughout this novel. The joys, the sadness and the very real fear of the characters were all narrated with style and elegance. Perhaps, the most telling part of the tale is that the title (‘Half of a Yellow Sun’) is so beautifully reflected in the way the story ends: one has the sense that the story is only half told since there is still a need for Olanna to find her sister. And, yet, the tale is at an end.
 
Other more memorable passages from this novel are:

 
‘They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Olanna laughed too and felt for a moment that her laughter sounded different, more shrill, than theirs.’
 
‘Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it to a prosaic partnership.’
 
‘She put it down on the bedside table and came over and hugged him, a tremulous tightening of her arms around him. He was so surprised he did not hug her back. She had never embraced him that closely unless they were in bed. She did not seem to know what to make of the hug either because she backed away from him quickly and lit the cigarette. He thought about that hug often, and each time he did he had the sensation of a wall crumbling.’
 
‘The sudden thought that something might be wrong with her body wrapped itself around her, dampened her.’

 
This is one book I shall buy several copies of to give as gifts to people. I have enjoyed reading it and will not hesitate to recommend it to others.
 
27 January 2009

In this novel, Christopher John Francis Boone is fifteen years old. He is autistic and his world is very ordered. As the blurb on the back cover of the book says, ‘he knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,0507. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. He detests the color yellow.’ One day, however, the neighbour’s dog, Wellington, is found dead. Christopher sets out to solve this murder. He is encouraged to do so by one person only and that is his social worker, Siobhan.
 
For me, this novel is a cross between a murder-mystery novel and a literary one. For one, the plot of this story is very much in the style of a whodunit – throughout, the reader is kept guessing about the answer to the question, “Who murdered this dog?” All the clues are placed in the appropriate places in the novel, the characters are defined and dialogue genuine. And yet, the style of writing is so unique: everything happens in the present moment. It is as if this boy, Christopher, is living for the moment; if one were to imitate Echkart Tolle teachings, it can be said that Christopher epitomises the art of living in the now.
 
Sometimes, reading a book for pleasure does not really reveal anything new to the reader – the information shared is old but the joy comes from the manner in which the author shares that information. In this book, the reader is bound to learn things that are new and many times, wise truths are inserted in appropriate places. For instance, on page 69 or so, there is the story about Marilyn vos Savant, the person with the highest IQ in the world, who participates in a game show. She gives her answer to questions asked and is ridiculed. Christopher not only agrees with her answer but gives a very valid explanation of how she would have reached her answer. Then, he adds this: ‘And this shows that intuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is what people use in life to make decisions. But logic can help you work out the right answer.’
 
Many times, in literary novels, the author’s mastery of language is praised in that though the sentences are complex, the messages they convey are clear and the overall impression is one of beauty. In this book, however, it is the exact opposite. The language is simple. This simplicity alone is not what makes this book impressive but that it is maintained throughout the novel; and, therein lies the beauty of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. An excellent read!
 
3 July 2008

How time flies! As I write this review, it appears that it has been some five years now since I self-published The Banana Leaf Men. When I started that project all I knew was this – I had a manuscript, I wanted it published and I wanted the books sold. I remember agonising over what font to use, how many lines to squeeze onto one page, what the cover design of my book should be and so much more. I had to learn (very fast) what words like ‘typesetting’ meant; the accounting concept of ‘sales-on-return’ and ‘taking on consignment’ soon became the norm. When someone pointed out to me that it had not been properly formatted in that there were just too many spaces between the paragraphs in the text, I remember being completely dumbfounded. Now, had I had Write It, Self-Publish It, Sell It in my hand, I would have been able to read, on page 89, as follows:

SPACING OF TEXT FOR A NEW PARAGRAPH. A new paragraph should be indented on the next line down. That is, there should be no line space before the new paragraph begins (as you might otherwise do when writing a report, say). …

 
There are times I’ve listened to people stand up in public and ask questions like, “I have written something; I want someone to publish it.” When it is explained to them that they will have to go through a submission process, they say, “But no. I don’t want to have someone else have all the profits. I want to do it myself. I just need a publisher.” If you’re a person who’s asking, “What’s wrong with that question?” or you need to understand what words like, publisher, literary-agent, print-on-demand, editor, typesetter, printer, distributor mean, you will find this book extremely helpful.
 
The most important section, for me, was the information on page 69 wherein Bill Keeth provides the 25 Specifications for Self-Published Fiction. Again, I wish I had had them before. For instance, he asks, and answers, questions like: Are the pages of this book 90 gsm or better? Are the pages of this book white, or do they have a greyish/yellowish tinge? Does this book have an ISBN number? Does the book show the publisher’s imprint or the author’s? How I wish I had known all this before …  
 
An excerpt of the official description of this book, which appears on the Amazon.com (UK) site, provides a more comprehensive idea of what the book is about:  

Write It Self-Publish It Sell It supplies the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask about self-publishing. Why would anybody want or need to self-publish in the first place? Is your book good enough to self-publish? Isn’t self-publishing just another name for vanity publishing? Are there any famous writers who originally self-published, then went on to be commercially published? Should you self-publish with a print-on-demand company or a local printer? How much will it cost you to self-publish? How many copies of your book should you order for a first print run? How do you go about placing your book with bookshops great and small? Which mere handful of the hundreds of self-help manuals on sale is essential for writers of fiction? How may you sell your book title via Amazon? What is the simplest way of getting your self-published book into every public library in the UK?

 
Make no mistake about it, Write It Self-Publish It Sell It is an absolute must for every writer of fiction – unpublished, self-published and otherwise.
 
As for the necessary qualification needed to write such a book, Mr. Keeth has self-published two novels, Every Street in Manchester and Manchester Kiss. The former was shortlisted for the prestigious Portico Literary Prize and I think that says enough about his expertise in this area.
 
This book is no ‘boring’ manual. Instead, the style of writing is one I have not read or heard spoken in a long time. The manner in which Bill Keeth has written this book is so entertaining; the descriptions are apt, the conversations recorded made the text come alive and indeed, the humour can make you laugh out loud. At times, I was so reminded of Sir John Mortimer’s Rumpole of Bailey.  Here are two of my favourite pieces from the book:

Page 20 STARK TRUTH No. 8: Having duly succeeded in fulfilling all the required submission criteria, and/or avoiding all the pitfalls listed above, there is no way you are guaranteed commercial publication unless you also have: Price Charles’ mother; or Angelina Jolie’s photogenic good looks; or Wayne Rooney’s feet or Jordan’s wobbly bits; and preferably, all six.
 
Page 93 A SPACE OF YOUR OWN “The will to work,” says John Braine, “builds all the seclusion one needs,” But you really should contrive to create a space of your own in which you may do your writing undisturbed – even if it’s only your garden shed, the family car parked up in some quiet spot, or your place of employ when everybody else has gone off home for the day.
 
For instance, I have a room, small in itself, which is invariably commandeered as an when a guest stays overnight or household items no longer enjoyed the approval or regard of She Who Holds the Casting Vote At My Present Address are temporarily side-lined en route to the charity shop or the council tip. The room contains my PC, printer, hi-fi, bookshelves, and a small filing cabinet (aka a bedside cabinet with a deep drawer). It is not a perfect location, partly for the reasons already stated; and certainly, an upstairs room would be marginally better in order to distance myself from household noises and to afford me a more expansive outside view. (From the upstairs window on a good day I can see the Pennine Way above the M62 footbridge at Windy Hill). But the room I have serves its purpose well enough, affording me shelter, privacy, reasonable quietude, and the triple benefits via an opening window of the wall beyond my PC of daylight, ventilation and an exterior vista consisting of a couple of hardy perennials, the door of an outbuilding and beech tree which, luckily for me, is a neighbour’s responsibility.

 
The single complaint I have about the book is the fact that new chapters do not begin on a fresh page. Still, from experience, I would hazard a guess that having to commence each chapter on a new page might have increased the total number of pages and, hence, the overall budget. Having chapters begin on a new page would have been nicer but this is just an aesthetic problem which does not in any way detract from the content.
 
Would I recommend this book to others? Firstly, last weekend, a subscriber to my newsletter asked me a question I’ve been asked many times since the publication of The Banana Leaf Men: how does one go about self-publishing a book? For the first time, my answer was different from the normal, “Well, I cannot explain it all to you now. Why don’t you send me an email and we’ll discuss this further?” My answer was, “I have just the book for you – Write It, Self-Publish It, Sell It!” Secondly, some time ago, a reporter asked me if I would be willing to self-publish again. My answer was a firm, “No.” However, after reading this book, I am so tempted … really tempted. Is this not enough of a recommendation to invest in this book?
 
1 July 2008

This is what is stated on the back cover of this book:

 
IBU MALUKU is the unique story of a resolute woman, Jeanne van Diejen-Roemen, who survives the hardships of remote jungles, the horrors of two world wars (including a 3 ½ year internment by the Japanese), and the life-threatening political upheavals that preceded the birth of the Republic of Indonesia.
 
Her story reminds one of the exploits of Florence Nightingale, for Jeanne is also driven by an overriding sense of duty: to relieve the suffering of her less fortunate fellow-men.
 
During her often extremely difficult life, she distinguished herself as a planter, army nurse, midwife, gardener, and social worker. During the Japanese invasion, the stout-heartedness saved Ternate from total annihilation. After the war, she spearheaded the fight against leprosy, and enabled hundreds of Moluccan lepers to again assume a useful role in the society that had once exiled them. She also implemented plans to bring isolated forest people into the 20th century, and founded a hospital, a school, an orphanage, and home for the elderly. In recognition of her efforts, Indonesia’s first president Sukarno started calling her Ibu Maluku – Mother of the Moluccas – and the name stuck.
 
Though she had a carte blanche with Sukarno, her outspokenness finally brought her into conflict with him. This forced her in 1957 to leave the Moluccas and the people who had given her their trust, and she settled in Sittard, in the Limburg Province of the Netherlands. In 1978 she returned to the Moluccas to celebrate her 82 birthday among her Moluccans. Were it not for other commitments, she would have stayed, for it was there that she truly felt at home.

Many books about the East are centred around the countries where either the British or French were colonial rulers – India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, to name a few. It is rare to read a story that is based in an Asian country where the Dutch were colonial rulers. So, I was intrigued by this book the moment I laid eyes on it. The cover image, The Bay of Ternate by Antoine Payen, gives that visual impression of what it must have been like when Jeanne first arrived in Ternate. However, it is through words and stories narrated that one learns of the true condition of the people and the place that Jeanne van Diejen-Roemen came to know, care for and love.
 
Despite the fact that Malaysia (where I live) is geographically close to Indonesia, I did not know where these islands, Maluku islands, are. I was, therefore, very grateful that the publishers had thought to include maps of the region.
 
The sub-title, on the cover of this book, states ‘An extraordinary life in the vanishing world of the Dutch East Indies’. Throughout reading this tale, it was hard to separate the fact that I was reading an account of someone’s life story; I often felt I was reading fiction. There was romance, tension, murder, betrayal and all set against the backdrop of political upheaval.
 
It is a long story and covers 636 pages – it must have taken sheer tenacity on Ron Heynneman to keep at this book and indeed, it is stated that the project took 25 years! Written in Jeanne Can Diejen-Roemen’s voice, the author managed to infuse Ibu Maluku’s emotions, ideas and thoughts, which all added to the originality of the tale.
 
There are many passages I enjoyed in the book but one which touched me – because it showed just how much courage she had, the genuine love of the people of the islands, her compassion and the acceptance of what was – was this:

… Sukarno kept pressing, and … I finally blurted out: “And what should I tell them in America, Mr. President? Should I tell them the truth – that we lack doctors, hospitals, road, and houses? Should I tell them that our people go hungry because rice is disappearing into the black market, and that your soldiers are throwing my people in jail for making salt from seawater, whereas before we were exporting salt?” … Sukarno’s eyes narrowed, and his face turned into a mask. … Shocked, I realised I had gone too far. I, a Belanda, had offended the President of Indoesia and made him lose face! … Then he brusquely turned around and left … I went over the disastrous conversation sentence by sentence – and then I realised, with a sinking feeling, which words had offended him. “Your soldiers are throwing my people in jail for making salt from seawater, whereas before we [the Dutch] were exporting salt.” … What had happened could not now be undone, but I was at peace with myself. I had remained true to myself, and true to the people of the Moluccas whose case had been entrusted to me.

It is a book I will certainly recommend that people read.
 
2 April 2008

The description of this book on Amazon.com reads as follows:

A Study in Red – The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper by Brian L Porter tells the story of Robert Cavendish, a modern day psychiatrist who is bequeathed a strange set of papers which purport to be the journal of the long-dead infamous Whitechapel Murderer whose crimes gripped the hearts and minds and instilled terror on the streets of Victorian London. As he begins to read the journal, Robert becomes convinced of it’s [sic] authenticity and finds that the words of the Ripper have a strange and compelling effect on him. Unable to cast the pages aside he finds himself being drawn into the dark and sinister world of the killer until he is unable to distinguish what is fact and what is fantasy. In short, Robert Cavendish begins to feel as though he is being taken over in some way by the soul of the long-dead Ripper. …

 
The cover design of this book is arresting and true enough, one does not have to read very far into the book before the fear sets in. However, it is not the kind of fear that will make you put the book away; instead, the author managed to sustain the interest of the reader to the very end.
 
I felt somewhat reprimanded when, some 25 or so pages into the novel, the author wrote:

How easy it would have been to skip straight to the end, to read my great-grandfather’s final notes, to see if the Ripper was identified, either by his own words, if true of by great-grandfather.

Indeed, had this ‘warning’ not been given, I might have been tempted to do exactly that! As it was, I behaved myself and read the book properly.
 
While I’ve heard of Jack the Ripper and seen some movie adaptations of the story, I never really delved into details of the life of this infamous person. So, I was fascinated to learn about him for this book – the period in time, the atmosphere, socio-economic strata of the people of London and the culture were all elements that were beautifully placed and described throughout the novel. What made this book special were these little details : Jack going to watch the stage play by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde’ and, reference to Mr. Bazalgette.
 
I was grateful for the extensive research the author had clearly undertaken. That said, the quality of writing was such that reading the text was not overbearing but there was lightness of to the the arrangements and sentences; this made the tale a gripping read rather than a tedious one.
  
Although the main character, Robert Cavendish, was convincing, the character I liked most was, strangely, Jack the Ripper. While his deeds were vile and horrible, it was, above all, those human aspects of him – the neglected son, the dejected lover, the man who yearns for love – which endeared me to him. In the end, one almost feels sorry for Jack the Ripper. There is also the great grandfather, Dr. Cavendish, whose character was written with compassion in mind: his parental burden which, in the end, he discharged in the only way he knew how (I will not give you details here, as it’ll spoil the story).
 
Though the plot was plausible and the story flowed, I was a little perturbed by the way the tale ended. I would have preferred it had the words ‘Or … is it?’ been deleted. That sentence gave rise to the feeling that the author was merely playing around in telling me this story, almost trivialising the seriousness of what I had read.
 
Still, I would certainly offer this story to someone who has an interest in tales about Jack the Ripper. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s to have a new respect for Jack the Ripper.
 
 
31 March 2008