Her cosmetically butchered face harboured nothing but fear and received ideas.

Heliopolis, by James Scudamore

In selecting quotes for this review I noticed an interesting thing. I noticed that I’d only picked descriptive passages. It’s not that James Scudamore can’t write good dialogue, he does, but he writes great descriptions.

Isn’t that just the most tremendous cover? It also perfectly fits the book. Vintage often have good covers, but they outdid themselves here. Anyway, back to the book.

Heliopolis tells the story of Ludo, plucked from the slums of Sao Paolo as a baby and adopted into one of the city’s richest families. His adoptive father is Zé Carnicelli, known to all as Zé Generoso. Zé’s English wife (“Whenever she was in the room it was as if an angel had descended, to look willowy and concerned, and empathise, professionally.”) discovered Ludo and his mother in the Heliopolis favela (slum) while engaged in one of her many, many, charitable activities. Ludo’s mother shared some beans and rice, all the food that was available. A connection was formed, which led to Ludo’s mother being taken on as cook in Zé’s weekend country retreat, to Ludo escaping the world he was born into and years later to Ludo becoming part of the family his mother cooked for.

That’s a big debt of gratitude, and that’s Ludo’s problem in a nutshell. He grew up a servant’s child but closer to the family than any other servant, because of the miracle of their intervention and his rescue from absolute poverty. Now aged 27 he works for an advertising company owned by one of Zé’s friends, he has an apartment in Sao Paolo and a life that couldn’t be much further from Heliopolis if he lived it on Mars. His whole life is defined by an act of charity. He belongs nowhere: too rich to fit in with the poor he’s left behind, but without the unquestioned certainties of those born to the helicopter-driven classes.

Fitting in isn’t Ludo’s only problem. There’s also the fact that he’s sleeping with his married adoptive sister, does nothing at work except turn up late and hung over, and has recently started receiving mysterious phone messages from a stalker who wants to destroy his life. Ludo’s contradictory worlds are all about to crash into each other.

Heliopolis then is a novel with a story, and (allowing for one fairly massive coincidence around the middle of the book) it’s a solidly constructed story which zips along and has enough twists and turns that the book became a positive pageturner. The chapters alternate, between what’s happening to Ludo now and hs memories of his childhood on the Carnicelli’s weekend retreat, and for me at least both narrative strands were equally interesting which also helped pull me through the book – curious to see where it was going next.

Where Heliopolis shines best though is not its story, entertaining as that is. It’s in the descriptions, from shantytowns to exclusive gated communities with private guards. Here’s an example:

Town planning never happened: there wasn’t time. The city ambushed its inhabitants, exploding in consecutive booms of coffee, sugar and rubber, so quickly that nobody could draw breath to say what should go where. It has been expanding ever since, sustained by all that ferocious energy. And here, just as in the universe, anything could happen.

And here’s another, from later on the same page:

… turn a corner and you might find lush foliage, pristine pavements, smoked-glass security gatehouses, and deep, glinting swimming pools. For every wrecked no-go area there is an optimistic new condominium, for every rotting ruin a daring new spire. The city is being reclaimed all the time, either by the forces of development or those of deterioration: the only constant is its power to change. Mobility is celebrated to the point that whole highways are named in honour of Workers and Immigrants. That is why for every desparate hopeful arriving today from the northeast, and every Japanese, Italian, or Lebanese who pitched up in previous years, the city is a stronghold to be stormed; a glaring citadel of opportunity, with swarms coming from all sides to hurl themselves at its ramparts, prepared to end up dead on the wals if they fail. But they must not fail.

Brazil, Sao Paolo, pulses with life in this novel. Scudamore has a journalist’s eye and a neat turn of phrase and the two combine to make his vision of the city both evocative and persuasive. Whether it’s also accurate I have no idea (I’ve been to Rio, but not Sao Paolo), but it feels accurate and given it’s a novel and not reportage that’s good enough for me.

Scudamore is also excellent at swift portraits of the Paulistanas themselves. Here he is on the guests at Zé’s weekend retreat:

Guests would arrive in armoured 4x4s or mud-spattered jeeps: tanned men with bellies and moustaches, who chatted by the pool all weekend gripping beers and caipirinhas; stunning wives on sunloungers with tinted hair and manicured nails and cosmetically enhanced bodies, rotating in the heat like rotisserie chickens.

That last image there, of the wives rotating like roasting chickens, brings me to the book’s other great love beyond the city itself. Food. Each chapter of Heliopolis is named after a dish which features in that chapter (Feijoada, Jacaranda Honey, Sea Urchin) reflecting the centrality of food to Ludo’s own salvation. His mother’s cooking brought him from the gutter. As a child she showed her love in the treats she gave him while she cooked for the Carnicelli’s. As an adult he is a talented home cook himself with a love of fine restaurants. I said already that Scudamore has a talent for description. This is not a book to read when hungry.

Then there were the accompaniments: heaps of finely shredded green kale fried in garlic and oil, roasted cassava flour, pork rinds, plantains, rice, glistening slices of orange. And endless ice-cold jugs of passionfruit, cajú, or lime batida to help it all on its way.

So, any reservations? On one level not particularly. The plot rattles along and comes to a neat and satisfying conclusion. Everything hangs together. I found it a fun read and will likely buy more of Scudamore’s books in future. That’s not a bad result. On another level though this is a novel which was longlisted for the 2009 Booker and which comes festooned with critical praise from the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman, Literary Review, the Financial Times, the Glasgow Herald (and the Daily Mail, but that’s not Scudamore’s fault). There are quotes on the rear and inside front covers from all these highly regarded newspapers and magazines using phrases like “brilliantly inventive”, “beautifully clear prose”, talking of “writing [which] is exemplary” and throwing around words like “superb”, “extraordinary” and “triumph” (full marks to the FT though for the phrase “A kinetic novel” which is absolutely spot on).

That’s a lot of praise, and it leaves me in the odd position of knocking down a novel which I really enjoyed. It is good, it is fun, it’s a very easy read, but the story doesn’t do anything hugely surprising, it doesn’t contain any great insights (unless you were unaware of Brazil’s huge wealth disparities) and it doesn’t do anything with form or structure. It’s well written, but it’s not a prose driven novel. It’s not seeking to push literature forward. It’s seeking to be a well written and tightly plotted book which says something about contemporary Brazil, and it succeeds at precisely that. It just doesn’t succeed at more than that.

I now feel rather like I’ve punched a baby, because this isn’t remotely a bad book and it doesn’t deserve to be criticised for not being what it doesn’t ever set out to be (what book does?). The problem with hyperbole though is it leaves nowhere for an author to go. Scudamore has talent, but his characters aren’t as interesting as his locations and there’s a sense near the end of the plot taking over when for me it was the least exciting part of the book (it’s the engine that keeps the book moving, sure, but engine’s aren’t always at their best when they’re showing). Put simply, I think Scudamore has the potential in him for better books than this one.

Kevin of kevinfromcanada first put Heliopolis on my radar with his review here (and draws an excellent parallel with Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger which I wish I’d thought of). Guy Savage also reviewed it here. It hardly needs saying that both of course are well worth reading and they picked different quotes to me (though the one they have in common was on my list for consideration). Their quotes were descriptive passages too.

I don’t know my husband.

The New Perspective by K Arnold Price

There is a sense in which committing to another human being is among the bravest things any of us do. What if we make a life with someone, spend irrevocable decades with them, and then discover it was a mistake? What if come middle age they suddenly have a change of heart, decide to trade us in for a younger or more successful model, or we discover that for years theyve been having an affair or had hidden some deep part of themselves?

I have a fondness for horror movies, but zombies and predatory aliens aren’t real. The true terrors of our lives are much closer to home.

The New Perspective is an 84 page novella, mostly told in the first person though occasionally in third. That first person is Pattie, married to Cormac and after 26 years together in the same house they’ve finally just seen their second son married. After decades, their home is just theirs again, their children are embarked on their own lives and Pattie and Cormac are free to just enjoy each other’s company.

Their marriage has been a strong one. They have few arguments, they are still physically attracted to each other (though sex is never directly described in the novel Pattie’s sheer desire for Cormac, undimmed over the years and children, is powerfully evoked), they don’t talk much but then they hardly seem to need to because they agree so easily.

Returning home, after the wedding of their son (“a dull boy” who “has married a dull girl” reflects Pattie, somewhat against her will) Pattie is suddenly shocked to see the home they had made for themselves over all those years. How little it now fits her:

What checks and chills me is that I come home unexpectingly, and suddenly it is not home, it is an unlikeable house stamped with mediocrity and choked with trivia.

This isn’t a home fit for their new life. It’s born of a more timid Pattie, furnished when she was young and uncertain. Now she’s a mature woman with years ahead of her. It won’t do.

They move (the novel is structured into three sections, around three homes they live in). They agree to buy their new home without even needing really to discuss it – they visit it and inspect the rooms and consider what they would do to it and without need of direct discussion know that they will buy it. Once there they begin to transform it, and it them.

Internal walls are knocked down, rooms are decorated sparingly yet tastefully, the garden is planned and planted. Pattie comes to it all with colour charts for the rooms and images of heather atop stone garden walls but the reality is frustratingly obdurate – there are too many choices of colour and each changes its appearance as the day progresses, heather won’t grow where she wills it to – but in the end it is done and it is beautiful.

This quote is, I think, quite heartbreaking:

At the beginning of the summer Pattie decided that they would eat Sunday morning breakfast in the courtyard when the weather was suitable. She gloats over her garden furniture. The young trees she has bought are still very young but the tubs they stand in are freshly painted and look very nice. One bright Sunday morning when the sun is dazzling on the white walls and the white table, Pattie puts some of her dark crockery on the table and a bowl of fruit. She brings from the kitchen a tray containing brown bread, butter, honey and tea. Then she stands under the window of the landing and calls to Cormac. After an interval Cormac puts a tousled head out the window, smells the sharp morning air and disappears.

Pattie sits at the table and begins to eat brown bread and honey. After some minutes she hears movements in the kitchen and then domestic noises – a mile clatter of utensils and crockery. She finishes her light breakfast and walks into the kitchen. Cormac is seated at the table in his dressing-gown with a plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of him.

It’s not a flawless piece of prose (the young trees are still very young, not sure the first “young” is needed there) but it’s immensely powerful. The scene is beautifully painted – the light, the freshness, the bread and honey. Then the noise from the kitchen and the keen disappointment. Indifference is much worse than arguments.

Pattie thought she and Cormac didn’t need to speak because they knew what each other were thinking, but what if he simply never cared that much what she was thinking? She thought they reached the same decisions without need of discussion, but what if Cormac just didn’t care about the things she decided on? She thought they were in love because they still regularly have sex, but does that necessarily follow?

Once in the new house, Cormac buys a violin and reveals that he played as a youth but had to give up due to a family crisis. He had never mentioned any of this, in all their long years together. If that, if Cormac plays the violin, what else is there in Cormac’s past that was never shared? Pattie thought their life without children would be about each other, but Cormac wants to rediscover his long-delayed love of music. Where does Pattie fit into that? She talks of wanting to learn Italian to read Dante, but nothing comes of it (really I think it’s there because of the extraordinary appositeness of the opening lines, about being in the middle of life and finding oneself lost in a dark forest with the straight path lost).

That’s a lot for 84 pages, and it’s absolutely to this novella’s credit that it packs so much in. It’s a devastating book in its way. A discovery that the heart of a marriage may be missing, may never have been there. Fiction by female authors on this sort of topic is sometimes categorised as women’s fiction, a category I find actually fairly objectionable because really what about this isn’t universal? It’s fiction which goes to the worst fears we can really face, rather than those fears which comfort us because they will never happen.

The New Perspective isn’t without flaws. Pattie is supposed to be a small town librarian in rural Ireland, and she describes herself and her husband as “ordinary” and “not intellectual”. Despite that she uses words like “parousia” (I don’t know, I’ll google it at some point), references Plato and reads Svevo and Moravia. Those feel to me more the interests of someone who is say a student and occasional scholar of modern literature and a published poet and author, which is what K Arnold Price was.

Worse, Price makes heavy use of italics for emphasis, of exclamation marks and of ellipses and the result of all these is frequently to tell the reader how to read the sentence. I found them intrusive, and given her skill unnecessary. I admit I have a particular dislike of overused exclamation marks, but it did feel like the book wasn’t giving me space to interpret it, but rather insisting on a sole authorial interpretation. A book though which is capable of only one interpretation ultimately struggles to merit rereading.

Despite those criticisms there is still a lot to recommend here and I’m grateful to Will of Just William’s Luck for alerting me to it. His review is here, and it also made his end of year list for that year. Colm Toibin, whom I hold in huge regard, is also a fan and talks about it some way down the page on this Guardian article.