"Reservoir 13" by Jon McGregor

This is an extraordinary novel and it has been enthusiastically praised by well-known critics, in particular by James Wood in The New Yorker. It is a portrait of life in an English village, probably somewhere in the Derbyshire Peak District and on the edge of 'the moors'--we hear a lot about the moors, the walkers on the moors who pass through the village, the sheep that get caught in the snow.
The novel starts with a girl who goes missing on the moors and the search and police investigation that follows. And over the course of the novel there are echoes of that disappearance, although no solution to the mystery is provided, and gradually it fades from the collective village memory.
The novel covers thirteen years in thirteen chapters, each starting on New Year's Eve with mention of the fireworks and usually ending with the amateur Christmas pantomime. We follow a fairly limited cast of characters over the thirteen years, the dairy farmer and his sons, the butcher whose shop has to close, the editor-writer-producer of a local weekly newspaper and his wife who works for the BBC and has twin sons, and others whose lives are intertwined in village life--teenagers who grow up and go to universities, a couple of semi-criminals living in a caravan, the vicar of the village church...and others. There is nothing sensational about their lives, 
relationships come and go, and in some ways this is, I feel, the intention--to show the ordinariness of life as it flows along from year to year. 
And the background is the annual cycle of nature, described in beautifully written detail. The fox cubs being born and raised. The coming of the swallows in Spring and their departure in the Autumn, and the reverse for the fieldfares. The blossoming of the primroses. The annual routines of planting and harvesting in the allotments (U.S. Victory Gardens). The weather, the rising and falling of the water in the river, the need for the bridge to be repaired. The heron in the river.
All extraordinarily well-written. And I am sure the critics are right about the book...but, dare I whisper, it can get a little tedious and even (again, dare I say it?) a little boring....

"Shame and the Captives," by Thomas Keneally

      Well, you can expect--and you get--a well-crafted novel by Keneally. As with Schindler's List, or a number of his many other books, he obviously does a lot of research. In this novel, his research has focussed on the Japanese martial spirit and the shame felt by Japanese prisoners of war in Australia. And the background--though he says this is not a roman-a-clef--is the breakout of Japanese prisoners from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1944. There were 1,100 odd Japanese prisoners in a camp in a rural area, and there were also a large number of Italians in separate camp.

     The Japanese prisoners stormed the wire fences, throwing blankets over them to protect themselves (to a minor extent) from the barbs on the wire. Many who did not climb the fence with the others committed suicide. The Australian guards opened fire with a machine gun and before the situation had been brought under control and the last escapees captured, 231 Japanese and four Australian soldiers were dead. A total of 359 escaped. Many of the escapees committed suicide, often asking others to kill them.Within 10 days all escapees left alive had been recaptured: none had committed any acts of violence against Australian civilians.

    A machine gunner was overwhelmed and killed by escaping prisoners, but he managed to throw away a crucial piece of the gun's mechanism and thus rendered the gun useless for the escaping prisoners: he was awarded a posthumous medal for bravery. This incident forms part of the novel.

    While the pricipal focus is on the mentality and the motivations of the Japanese prisoners--focussing on three or four in particular--there are also sub-plots, one dealing with the marital problems of the camp commander, and the other with an Australian girl's affair with an Italian prisoner of war who is working on her father-in-law's farm: her husband is a POW in Austria.

    An interesting novel, although I found the sub-plots rather tedious, especially the marital problems of the camp commander. I liked Keneally's disclaimer that he is writing about real characters: "Fiction has always tried to tell the truth by telling lies."

     

"Crimes of the Father," by Thomas Keneally

      This is a fascinating novel by the old master Keneally, who has authored heaven knows how many books, including Schindler's list. As a seminarian and a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood who backed out near his planned ordination, he is particularly knowledgeable about the Church, the faith, and the feelings of those men who give their lives to celibacy and the practice of their religion.
       The protagonist, Frank Docherty, is a priest who has been exiled from Sydney to Canada for his liberal views and public opposition to the Vietnam war (for which Australia supplied troops). In Canada he becomes an academic psychologist, specializing in the psyches of abusive priests. He also continues to function as a priest, celebrating masses in a local church. He returns to Sydney to give a lecture on the subject of abuse, and to petition the Cardinal for his restoration to Sydney, where his aging mother lives. During this visit, he gets caught up in a series of events involving past abuse by the Monsignor brother of a woman with whom he briefly fell in love before his exile to Canada. He also meets up with a woman who drives a taxi who was abused as a young girl by the same man. And then the plot thickens with the suicide of the son of a friend, who leaves a suicide note accusing the same priest and mentioning the name of another boy who was abused. The POV is usually Frank, but other characters have their first person say in a number of chapters. And in the background, though linked to the main theme, is a legal sub-plot about whether the Diocese of Sydney could be sued.
       I thought it was a very good read: TK he certainly knows how to structure a novel: and the writing is of a consistently high standard.