The Novel in the Viola

By Natasha Solomons

Sceptre, $39.99

Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

While I enjoyed Natasha Solomon’s debut novel Mr Rosenbaum’s List there was a little too much whimsy for me its gently humorous tone. Her second offering covers a similar era and themes but this time the feel is less cutsey and more Daphne Du Maurier. She even references the author in the very first line “When I close my eyes I see Tyneford house” which echoes the beginning of Rebecca.

Again Solomons is writing of a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Elise Landau is the cosseted child of Viennese intellectuals who is sent by her family to safety in England. With only a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management to guide her she must go into domestic service. Frightened and alone she finds herself in a large country house on the Dorset coast where she is to clean out fireplaces and polish silver. The great house Tyneford is rather Downton Abbey with a butler and housekeeper that rule the roost and a handsome young master Kit, the golden boy everyone adores.

Kit and Elise invite scandal by falling madly in love. But this story is more than a maid-and-master wartime romance. Great change is coming to Tyneford and tragedy too, and to survive Elise must become a very different person.

The Novel In The Viola is an addictive read, capturing the period and its emotions beautifully. There’s something fascinating about the whole stately home milieu – the awful haughty aristocrats wedded to convention, the stern servants below stairs that prop up their lives and the ill-fated romance of the era’s final days. But it’s the character of Elise that’s the real strength of this novel. She is a heroine whose company you’ll enjoy: spirited, witty and daring. She wears her mother’s pearls beneath her maid’s uniform and refuses to know her place.

This is a lovely story, bittersweet and moving rather than whimsical, and while its ending might not surprise it ought to satisfy.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Life was published in April, 2010, while her latest The Villa Girls, was published three weeks ago and is riding high on the NZ bestseller list.


She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 15 May, 2011 as were the Book Watch and Booklover columns below.

Book Watch

Children’s book specialist Crissi Blair reveals some of her favourites from the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards finalists.

With the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards ceremony coming up on 18 May, I’ve been looking through the finalists and lingering over some of my favourites.

In the non-fiction realm I go back again and again to Sandra Morris’ Sensational Survivors (Walker Books). There’s a wealth of information within the covers but it’s the watercolour illustrations that hold me. Sandra teaches illustration, particularly nature journaling, and has spent many hours out on the beaches, mountains, ocean and in the bush, sketching wildlife and the landscape, and this wealth of experience and love for the environment shines from every page of her book.

For newly confident young readers try Hollie Chips by Anna Gowan (Scholastic). It provides quality entertainment with humour and clever tricks as Hollie craftily helps her grumpy neighbours find what makes them happy, transforming the neighbourhood in the process. Then she has to find a way to thwart the villain’s plans to build a dog-food factory on their land. This novel won the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award and although the main character is female, it contains plenty to entertain boys and girls alike.

I have several favourites in the picture book category, but Hill and Hole (Penguin) is different from the others, being quite abstract in concept and illustration. Author Kyle Mewburn first appeared on the shelves in 2006 with Kiss! Kiss! Yuck! Yuck! (Scholastic) and has been going strong every since, with more than a dozen new titles since then (including last year’s NZ Post winner Old Hu-Hu). The current contender Hill and Hole, is about two best friends who decide they’d like to see the world from each other’s point of view – to see the sun rise, and feel the earth breathe. With some help from Mole, Hill becomes a hole and Hole becomes a hill. Soon they’re ready for a change again; Wind will help but it’s not an easy task. Vasanti Unka has done a superb job of bringing depth and personality to these unlikely characters, filling the landscape with texture and colour. A thoughtful, philosophical read about being happy with what we are, but also seeing the other’s point of view.

These are just three of the 20 terrific NZ Post Awards finalists, they’re a great place to start if you’re looking for something new for the kids (and you) to read, and decide for yourselves who you think the winners should be.

*Crissi Blair publishes the guide New Zealand Children’s Books in Print each year. To order the 2010-11 edition ($20) email books@silvertone.co.nz



Booklover

Lindsey Dawson is the host of Let’s Talk, a weekly women’s issues show on Stratos TV, was the founding editor of Next magazine and has authored seven books.

The book I love most is.......… Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Who’d ever think of writing a novel about a boy called Pi and a Bengal tiger adrift for 227 days in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean? But Martel’s belief in his implausible plot was so complete that he managed to pull it off with great aplomb. And it surprised me by making me think seriously about whether big animals are better off in zoos than in the wild.

The book I'm reading right now is.........Paul Auster’s Sunset Park. Auster’s one of those old-school writers who makes his craft seem effortless. This book is about a teenager who runs away because he can’t bear to confess the part he played in his brother’s death. Halfway through I’m realising there’s hardly any dialogue on the page, and yet I’m never bored by it as he details the messed up lives of a family.

The book I want to read next is................... The Book of Rachael, by Leslie Cannold. It’s her first novel but she’s known as a brainy intellectual in Australia. Her Rachael is the high-spirited fictional sister of Jesus (yes, that Jesus). I’ve read one scathing review of this book by a man and a laudatory one by a woman, and so am curious to try it for myself. I hear it’s not unlike Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, which I loved, so I’m hopeful.

The book that changed me is…......... The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. It’s the 1963 polemic that set off feminism. I can remember feverishly reading it in bed one night in my twenties, riveted by her arguments about how constricted women’s lives were in the post-war period, and thinking, “My God, this is how my mother felt! This is why she was so frustrated. This book is true!”

My favourite bookshop is…..... The Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby, Auckland.

The book I wish I'd never read is.... .........The Celestine Prophecy by James Redman. It was huge in the 90s but has sunk out of sight. On a trip to Peru I heard how the locals despised him because his mythical spiritual tale set in their landscape didn’t even get the geography right. Redman sold 20 million copies of his book, one of them to me. Okay, call me a sucker.