Reviews of Graham's novels
Five Oranges
Squeezing oot a braw wee caper
If a series is good, it doesn't really matter where you enter it. You
can read most Wodehouse, Pratchett, Trollope or Montgomery without having
to start at the first instalment. If the created world of a book is internally
coherent and vital, you can enter it pretty much like catching the bus
at a stop in the middle of its run: it's been somewhere and is heading
somewhere else, but this time with you on it.
Five Oranges is like that. It
is a sequel to the first book, Saigon Tea (which I now very much look
forward to reading). From the first chapter the reader is swept up into
an earthy, comic and dangerous universe: the story encompasses a range
of experience that is unusually wide for the comedy-thriller genre. Glasgow,
Melbourne and Saigon are the backdrops and the scenarios are of love, mortality,
crime, family, sex, politics and class war, all seen with a mordant,
pitying eye.
The story opens with Eileen Canyon finding an orange on the
doormat of her tenement flat when she returns after a morning's shopping.
Why she feels worried by this is gradually revealed; everyone who gets
one is under threat from some very bad people. Her husband, Frankie,
is a resourceful type who has done something useful for his brother Danny
a while back when Danny owned a bar in Saigon and had trouble with the
local crime boss.
Now in Melbourne with his Vietnamese wife, he has invited Frankie and
Eileen to visit, along with their friends Jimmy and Stella Stewart. It
all seems normal and jolly. Graham Reilly, who is a journalist with The
Age, manages to keep a sure grip on the common goodnesses of life even
as the plot stratifies and becomes unpredictable. The plot is neat and
suspenseful, for he is not a writer who leaves loose ends.
But it's not denigrating the plot to say that it's not the most important
thing about the novel. It's a damn good story, full of incident, but his
characters are the best thing about it: they just jump off the page at
you. You care very much what happens, because these people feel very real,
right down to their accents. It's risky to try writing in dialect, but
Reilly succeeds because he knows what he's doing. Jimmy's lament about
feeling past it at 45 is comedy with a bedrock of authenticity that artfully
reveals a culture placed firmly in a time: ". . . As ye get older
ye have tae prepare yerself tae be naebody, nuthin'. Ye know, when I was
younger I could walk down the street tae the shops . . . and I'd stroll
past the young lassies standing outside the shop having a blether and that,
and they'd check me out, so they would. They smile and nudge each other
in the ribs and rock their prams back and forth a wee bit faster, ye know.
And they'd smooth down the front of their dresses or undo the top button
of their cardigans. Christ, some of them would even take their fags oot
of their mouths!"
Jimmy, Frankie, Stella and Eileen talk about the important things in life
even as they play their parts in a story that, were it a movie, would be
called a caper. When Stella and Eileen visit a small museum in their neighbourhood
and contemplate a display of the Cock Robin story, the social history of
Glasgow is laid out in a few words: the coal dust that was the scourge
of the past is gone - replaced by the white powder that has undermined
the economic progress that has been made.
That particular incident is one of many examples of a fine paradox in
Reilly's prose: he seems at first to be a bawdy, wordy Scot who loves to
rant, but within a page or two you will have considered sex, death, ageing,
addiction, the clash of cultures, the decline of the natural world, the
pathos of animal suffering, the love of children, nostalgia and the curious
significance of the Discovery Channel.
And it's all done while teetering splendiferously between humour and catastrophe.
Such compression of insight and experience, all while we're having great
fun reading, is a rarity.
Five Oranges made me laugh many times, and I will read it again with pleasure
because, unlike many capers, thrillers or suspense novels, Reilly's writing
is so vivid, rich and generous that it isn't played out in a first reading.
Juliette Hughes - The Age
