As if to reflect the chaos of the refugee camp in the fictional municipality of Stegnova where it’s
Posted in General on 08. Oct, 2010
As if to reflect the chaos of the refugee camp in the fictional municipality of Stegnova where it’s set, for the first half of her book May introduces a new character every few pages. Even if some of them are archetypal or thinly characterised – the cynical hack, the jaded aid worker, the corrupt mayor, the downtrodden refugee – it’s worth trying to keep up, because the novel evolves into an interesting study of what happens when international goodwill collides with the politics, bureaucracy, and market forces of a small Eastern European country, and the situation is confused by everyday human greed, desires and rivalries. This is a part reportage, part satirical page-turner, and it is cynical about the motives of almost everyone involved, not just the Albanian mayor fronting for his gun-running brother or the President doing deals with McDonald’s. The urge to do good is “a widespread malady”, one journalist comments.Peyton Amberg By Tama Janowitz (BLOOMSBURY £9.99)Peyton Amberg is nearly 50 years old, a slim-hipped and Botoxed travel agent married to a rich but nebbish dentist. Having just had sex with a small-time gangster in Hong Kong, she has at last discovered inside herself “a gnawing animal, the sexual beast” and embarks on a last-gasp spree of sexual encounters in Milan and Antwerp, while recounting her unrewarding youthful sexploits in her home town of Boston, in Rio, and with Barry the dreary dentist.
It’s unfair, she remarks, that having finally learnt to take pleasure from sex, “soon no man would ever want to sleep with her… Meanwhile all the men her age would continue to be as desirable as ever.” But Tamowitz seems to have little sympathy for her, heaping upon her ridicule and countless indignities, presumably as punishment for having drifted so aimlessly through life. The trouble is, there’s so little to Peyton apart from her sex life, she makes a tiresome narrator. With its thin characters and repetitive narrative of sexual discovery in a series of exotic locations, Peyton Amberg resembles an instalment of Emmanuelle, albeit a slightly more sordid, and much more explicit one.. Falmouth’s most plausible literary connection is its oldest. The town is supposed to have been founded in Elizabethan times at the suggestion of Sir Walter Raleigh, that roguish sea-canine adventurer some of whose claims to fame may have been dubious but who wrote one of the greatest of all poetic intimations of mortality. Much of this is still standing opposite a hideous 18th-century obelisk dedicated to Sir Peter Killigrew, not far from the magnificent new multi-million-pound National Maritime Museum Cornwall.The Killigrews dominated the town for centuries and developed it to such an extent that it became, in 1688, headquarters of Royal Mail Packets, and one of the most important ports in Britain.
It remained so until the Mail Packet trade went to Southampton in 1852 when it went into a prolonged period of relative decline.From a literary point of view no one in Falmouth’s history quite lived up to Raleigh. The most famous Falmouth writer since Sir Walter was probably Howard Spring who lived at the White Cottage and set several novels in the town and its surroundings. John Betjeman, who knew a thing or two about Cornwall, said, “More than any town in Britain it resembles Sydney, Australia, with its sudden flashes of water seen through tropic trees.”From a literary point of view, however, Falmouth remained a bit of a backwater, eclipsed by its eastern neighbour, Fowey, which claimed an impressive double whammy with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”) and Daphne du Maurier and which for some years has staged an impressive literary festival in a tented village near the hotel which is supposed to have served as the model for Toad Hall in Wind in the Willows. (Kenneth Grahame was married in Fowey church and Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, was his best man.)Now, however, Falmouth is staging a literary comeback. Not only has the Falmouth Bookseller won last year’s award, jointly with Foyle’s, as best independent bookshop in Britain but also on 12 October the town is putting on its first literary festival in the grounds of Henry VIII’s Pendennis Castle overlooking the famous anchorages of the Carrick Roads. George Alagiah, Kate Adie, Beryl Bainbridge, Melvyn Bragg, Louis de Berni?s .. and that’s only the first two letters of the alphabet.