Summerland

This was a great book! I find myself reading it over and over again. Its a mix between the Great Gatsby and The Good Soldier. The unreliable narrator lyrically tells his story of class and dishonesty through a tale that you cannot put down. I have also linked scenes to the movie, Closer. Give it a read, you will be pleased! And intrigued, and you will pass it on so you can discuss it with someone.

I just finished reading "SUMMERLAND" by Malcolm Knox this morning and I must say that after struggling through the beginning of this book that in the end I really did enjoy it. Summerland is not an action packed novel of lies and deceit, rather it is a story that is slowly unwound by a man who missed the entire thing. Richard is telling the story of the affair of his wife and his best friend.Richard and Pup, Hugh and Helen were best friends since their teenage years, which is when Hugh and Pup actually began their affair that lasted well over a decade. The four of them had a yearly tradition of summering at Palm Beach a tradition that unbeknownst to Richard, was built on lies from the very beginning. Even Helen the beautiful wife of Hugh knew of the affair and in many ways had a hand in controlling it. Now years later after the whole story has been revealed to him by Helen, Richard attempts to recant the stories of his friendship with Hugh, his marriage to Pup, the marriage of Hugh and Helen and the affair that ultimately ruined all of them.As I said, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I struggled through the first few chapters of this book. I thought it was over written and a bit slow but as I read on I became more engrossed in these four lives and very interested to see how, in the end, everything played out. I can honestly say that I am glad that I did not give up on this book in the beginning because I would have missed out on a really entertaining novel.

Two couples, blessed by life's good fortune,smiled on by all, childhood sweethearts, begin life's journey into adulthood with all the good things they need. But, despite having it all, despite the charmed upbringings, something goes horribly wrong. Richard, one of the four, tells the story of their lives from his perspective. He brings us into their lives as children, when life gave them everything and "want" was an unknown word. Then like separating the straight-edged jigsaw pieces from the inside pieces, we are left helping Richard put the story together, piece by piece. He makes it easy with his insight and perceptions of his three friends, and I loved the way this protagonist becomes real by speaking directly to the reader. The writing style is pure and forthright, the two couples as real as the pages you hold. The heavily underlined emotions of Richard as he deals with his best friend Hugh's insidious nature, his own wife's increasing distance, and the shattering of a dream that could have been, this story will leave you emotionally shell-shocked. Read it today!

For Richard, the narrator of Malcolm Knox's astoundingly accomplished first novel, life has been "a long sleepwalk"; now, with the death of his wife and best friend and the discovery that his charmed existence was a carefully maintained facade of surfaces, he has lost the art of falling asleep. Through one insomniac night, with the aid of three bottles of whisky, he juggles the retrospective bliss of his ignorance with the shifting perspectives of the endlessly qualifiable truth. The quartet that constituted Richard's emotional world - himself and his wife, Pup; Hugh, his friend since childhood, and his wife, Helen - seemed to live in "the brochure-light of Summerland, perfect people". For those at the peak of Australia's class system, who preserve that system by calmly denying its existence, it takes more effort to fail than to succeed; Hugh, who describes his profession as "heir", dabbles in gleefully immoral venture capitalism, while the others are made partners in their firms as surely as they were made prefects at school. And every Christmas they escape Sydney for a "designated summer" together at Palm Beach, scene of childhood holidays, where they sip their Vermouth like ghosts of the jazz age, even booking restaurant tables in the name of "Gatsby and party". Richard goes back to his boyhood days with Hugh to begin his investigation into the causes of their tragedy, tracing childhood's "necklace of non sequitur passions", the garden swing shrinking year by year, with a luminous immediacy. When girls come on the scene, Richard is a "dowdy pilot fish" to Hugh's shark, netting the volatile, would-be writer Pup after Hugh's choice settles on beautiful, remote Helen. But his first love, a love grappling with hatred, is always for Hugh, a character as doomed, unfathomable and compromised as Jay Gatsby; like Gatsby, a pathological liar, in thrall to his own dream of himself. As Richard, a man without ambi tion or lust, follows Hugh's crooked business deals and brothel adventures, he is both his stooge and his double: "What difference is there, in the end, between wanting everything and wanting nothing? The same faculty is absent." But the novel hovering beneath Summerland is not The Great Gatsby , though Knox's sentences share Fitzgerald's lush precision. Pup, desperate to be published, conceives a plan of creative plagiarism: choose a classic and keep on copying it out, each time changing the names, places, adjectives, until you have a book of your own. The novel she decides to "remould" is Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier . "I don't know why she chose that one," says Richard. "Perhaps I should read it." Indeed he should, for Knox's Summerland is, substantively, Pup's remoulding of Madox Ford's elegantly digressive tale of two couples, their yearly holidays, and the eddy of destructive passions that swirls between them. Knox opens with a class-conscious, qualified paraphrase of Madox Ford's first line, "This is the saddest story I have ever hea