Outback Noir

"You wouldn't want to be lost out there for too long.  It's the panic that gets you.  Everything starts to look the same After a few days, makes it hard to trust what you are seeing."  He glanced outside.  "Drives 'em wild."

I actually prefer Jane Harper's second novel Force of Nature to her highly acclaimed debut The Dry.  I just love the concept of five ill-matched female colleagues forced to spend a long weekend on a team-building hike in the remote Giralang Ranges in East Australia.  Brilliant opening chapter with the corresponding male team completing the hike and making it back to camp in plenty of time, drinking coffee, checking their phones and making jokes about the tardiness of the women's team.  As time moves on they become concerned.  The search team come in, confident of swiftly locating the women and bringing them out.  They return stone-faced as the light begins to fade.

Jane Harper's low-key, likeable detective Aaron Falk receives a disturbing voice mail from one of the women on the hike and also heads out to the Giralang Ranges recalling that the area was the scene of a notorious serial killer in his youth.  The five women are ill-equipped for hiking in the outback with hiking boots that don't fit and rucksacks with straps that chafe the skin. Not enough water, not enough food.  Courtesy and camaraderie breaks down under adversity and the five colleagues - all at different levels of seniority within their organisation - are reduced to scuffling over their only phone with a faint signal.

Jane Harper is good at the slow-burn plot and setting up red herrings among her characters.  What does the guy at the petrol station know? Who exactly is the man running the corporate events?  Is the woman known to have a drink and drugs problem too obvious a suspect?  As in The Dry the landscape itself adds a sense of foreboding -  a 'green sprawling mass of bushland' where you only have to walk a little way in any direction and it all starts to look the same.

While we're on the subject of outback noir let's not forget that other great novel by Colleen McCullough who was writing a love story set on a remote sheep shearing station in Drogheda, New South Wales back in 1977.   I've just reread The Thorn Birds and for me the most interesting part of the story is not the affair between Meggie and the priest but the gradual unfolding of the character of Fee, Meggie's strange silent mother.

Amidst the ghost gums, wilga trees, cockatoos and the silver grass of Drogheda, McCullogh brilliantly portrays how the climate controls life and work.

Any recommendations for further reading would be welcome!

Let's Get Physical

 All right ladies. Are you ready? Let's go!

I enjoyed Danielle Friedman's account of the rise of women's exercise classes Let's Get Physical. It's organised into chapters with titles like Stretch, Bounce and Burn, etc each denoting a different exercise. The book covers women's ballet barre, Jazzercise, yoga, aerobics, running and weightlifting and I found some chapters more interesting than others.

My favourite was Burn which of course was Jane Fonda's 'go for the burn' phrase during the 1980s dance aerobics craze.  Incidentally this phrase was gradually dropped from the workout as doctors questioned the safety of it.  I used to think that the Jane Fonda workout was very glamorous but now it is available on YouTube it seems utterly insane!

Of course it's easy to laugh now at the leg warmers and hyper extended leg stretches but Friedman raises deeper questions. What was it that women found - and still do find - when they can get away from home, work and family for a couple of hours to exercise together?  The form of exercise may change but the joy, peace, well- being and strength to be found in communal exercise remains.

I didn't know that the Jane Fonda Workout Video was the first of its kind and sold 17 million copies.  Or that all the money went to fund her then husband's political campaign.  But she comes across as likeable and self-aware in this book.

As Friedman explains, the rise of women's exercise classes in the 1950s pioneered by Bonnie Prudden and Lottie Berk were routed in ballet.  Jane Fonda, too, was ballet trained but the popularity of the dance- based exercise class began to decline in the late 1980s.  Women were nursing injuries from overdoing it and were looking for a gentler and more spiritual form of exercise.

'Like a lotus flower rising from the mud' yoga began to peak in popularity in the 1990s.  Of course this ancient practice had always been around but was popularised in America by Indra Devi and the charismatic Lilias Folan who had a yoga television show Yoga and You in the 1970s beginning each episode with a reassuring voice.  Friedman describes feeling stressed with deadlines, work and family when interviewing Lilias Folan who is now 87 for the book and becomes tearful when Lilian reminds her to exhale. Suddenly I got it. So this is why women like yoga.  

 If I have any criticism of this book I would say that it is very US based.  As someone who has spent many years taking classes - aerobics, zumba, yoga - in chilly village halls and overcrowded dance studios a corresponding UK history of the women's exercise class would be interesting.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

I enjoyed Jenny Jackson's PIneapple Street and its 'old money' Brooklyn setting.  I was also intrigued by its epitaph - a quote from Truman Capote.  'I live in Brooklyn. By choice.'

I'd never actually read his famous novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and it's difficult to read without an image of Audrey Hepburn shimmering before you.  The Holly Golightly of the book is a rather less progressive young lady and at times is almost unlikeable.  I suppose when you consider her background, orphaned as a child and married at 14 before running away to become, let's say, an escort, her choices were limited.  The unnamed narrator is a much kinder character who brings out Holly's better self.

Of course, it's the quality of Truman Capote's beautifully descriptive prose that makes this book so good.  From the opening lines reminiscent of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you know that you are in the hands of a great writer.

She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing and the ragbag colours of her boy's hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino blonde and yellow, caught the hall light.  It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker.  For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.

A lot of the famous lines and images in the  1961 film come directly from the book; Holly sitting on the fire escape drying her hair in the sun and playing her guitar, her love of Tiffany's 'Nothing very bad could happen there'.  And of course her famous line about it being tacky to wear diamonds before you're 40!

Although written in 1958 it is actually set in 1943 during the war.  When Holly receives a telegram to say that her beloved brother has been killed the 'mean reds' (her words for depression) threaten to overwhelm her.

Certainly there are phrases and sentiments in the book which are unacceptable now but the story of a young writer's first Brooklyn apartment and his infatuation with a young women who lives in the apartment below and owns a ginger cat with a 'pirate's cut-throat face'  is utterly charming.

Outside, the rain had stopped, there was only a mist of it in the air, so I turned the corner and walked along the street where the brownstone stands.  It is a street with trees that in the summer make cool patterns on the pavement; but now the leaves were yellowed and mostly down.