Peter Cunningham
Bettany's Book. By Thomas Keneally. Sceptre. 599pp, £16.99 in UK
Like Australia, the country in which it is mostly set, this novel is rich, vast, embraces several time zones, takes some days to get through and leaves one at the end with a pleasant sense of having shared in an achievement. Prim Bettany quits Sydney after a love affair and goes to the Sudan as an aid worker, where she falls in love with a Sudanese doctor. Here, where local populations teeter on the brink of famine and Islamic fundamentalists wait to seize power, Prim struggles with human values very different to those she has known. Yet the arid setting is not unlike parts of Australia. Prim becomes aware of an active trade in child slaves, but her Australian superiors urge her to ignore it.
Back in Sydney Prim's sister, Dimp, a film-maker, comes across the journal of their great-grandfather, John Bettany, a pioneer settler who came to New South Wales in the 1840s. Dimp sends transcripts of the journal to Prim. Also contained in the cache are letters written by Sarah Bernard, a convict, when she was an inmate of the notorious Female Factory in Parramatta, near Sydney.
John describes his arrival in NSW, how he takes over the care - and in a way, the ownership - of Felix, the son of a murdered native ("sable") woman, how he establishes his farm, buys his flocks, sells his wool and establishes a foothold in this virtually untouched wilderness. Sarah's letters describe the horrors and cruelties of her prison.
Keneally's research is prodigious, from the politics of modern Sudan, to the wool trade in the 19th century, to the conditions in which female transportees to Australia lived. Central is the concept of personal freedom, seen from many different perspectives. In Sudan, Prim can "reduce Australia to size". The rough "justice" of modern Africa is little different to how things were in NSW 150 years ago; one man's child slave is another's conscripted soldier or adopted infant. A bizarre Austrian baroness who flies around Africa "buying" slaves in order to liberate them, examines her purchases as if they were stock and she were "the very model of an assessor of slaves".
The Michener-esque scope of this novel is absorbing, enriched by passages of illuminating description. A dead child is sunk in his cot, "deep as an ingot". Sarah's letters resonate with "the anguish of a slave". In Sudan the past is not yet something to be aghast at, as in Australia, merely "a prelude to an even more astonishing present".
Bettany's Book is a rich feast served up with great skill and passion by a master storyteller.
Peter Cunningham's new novel, Love in One Edition, will be published in February by Harvill
Mary Moloney
How It Ended. By Jay McInerney. Bloomsbury, 196pp, £12.99 in UK
Jaded, slightly dated and even bordering on the trite is Jay McInerney's short story collection. Drifting back to the preoccupations of Bright Lights, Big City, it's a showcase for the avarice of the 1980s - the quick buck, pursuit of the glamour puss, success gone awry, the pain of excess. Complacency wreaks havoc with youthful vanities: but it's not all bad news.
McInerney's characters are cannily observed, pulped to the bare bones, shorn of all but the shoddiest of emotions. He writes with a superb economy of style, hoovering up the clutter of needless narrative and his world is effortlessly seductive, with satire coolly lurking just beneath the surface of designer heaven.
But don't start at the beginning. "Third Party" is a disappointing saunter through night-time in Paris, with Alex hedging his bets and never getting anywhere. Characters throughout the stories are moved mostly by narcotics, sex or nicotine. "Smoke" is a keenly told tale about a couple whose marriage vows crumble as they struggle to kick the habit. "My Public Service" details the concerns of a young intern obliged to provide women for a US senator, who is in turn finally tripped up for possibly all the wrong reasons.
Almost all the stories have been published elsewhere. Clearly they made it into print again thanks to a gap in McInerney's literary CV. The high-profile break-up of his marriage means he has been spending more time in gossip columns than between hard covers. While the collection is easily digestible, it doesn't provide much sustenance - a bit like a knickerbocker glory.
Mary Moloney is an Irish Times journalist
Eamon Delaney
Maya. By Jostein Gaarder. Phoenix House. 309 pp, £16.99 in UK
`Inadvertently I overheard a bit of your talk about the `meaning' or `purpose' of things," says a character in this novel, after hearing some people talk about nature and Big Bang. "Well, fine, fine. However, I believe it's important to realise that such questions have to be judged retrospectively as a rule." Another character, Ana, utters the immortal "we aren't capable of understanding who we are. We are the riddle no one guesses". Or "man can embody truth but he cannot know it", as Willie Yeats once put it - except he didn't take 300 pages to labour the point.
This is the sort of book which makes one marvel at the phenomenon of publishing. Flat in character and tension, and devoid of any meaningful realism, it is obviously no more than a creaky structure on which to hang the most fatuous speculation about the origin of the universe. A sequel to the best-selling Sophie's World, which at least had the merit of offering a crash-course in various Western philosophies, Maya basically takes the form of a letter by an English writer to his dead wife describing how he and a group of tourists interact on a South Pacific island; their "interaction" mostly being their respective theories on evolutionary progress. Until, that is, some of them embark on an out-oftime experience which I wouldn't, for a moment, want to spoil for you. "Wasn't it a bit strange that almost all the guests at the Maravu went around talking about the same thing," thinks Frank, the Englishman. Not really when you've got to cobble together a "where have we come from" talk-fest which will probably fly off the airport shelves.
Eamon Delaney is an author and journalist