Amazon.com Review
Gert Hardcastle and her twin, Frank, can read each other's minds. She knows when he is plotting fiery ordeals for her dolls, and he knows when she is being attacked by river swans. When Frank returns from his sadistic boys school and moves into the ghost-infested attic bedroom that Gert has just fled, she is the sole family member to see the aura of madness collecting around him. But there are limits to their empathy. In adulthood, only she receives begging letters from their indigent mother, and only she is wracked by hopeless love for Eva, the coffee girl at the museum where she works as a curator. Frank remains strangely removed from human concerns, despite his telepathic link to his sister.
Well received by English critics, Crocodile Soup will call to mind Jeanette Winterson's early work, especially Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, yet this fragmented but appealing comic novel is entirely fresh. Julia Darling has the gift of writing from a child's perspective: an ability to see at close range, and without context, making plain the strangeness and wonder of the world. The best chapter in the book is a brief description of the twins' first day of nursery school. Surveying the chubby boys racing wild-eyed around the room, Gert promptly wets her pants, while Frank begins to count maniacally. For the rest of the morning, she is ostracized, and sits in humiliation near the fuzzy felt while her brother, "still counting, drew a picture of an abattoir, upsetting some of the other children."
He had reached two thousand and eighty-three when Miss Lute rang a heavy brass bell, and we were instructed to eat rusks, which tasted of recently ironed tablecloths. We were told to chew them thoroughly. Then we had weak juice, that must have been drugged, because afterwards we all lay down on straw mats and fell asleep, while Miss Lute sang "The Farmer Wants a Wife" in a low monotone.
None of Darling's other characters come to life in the way that Gert and Frank do, not even Gert as an adult, with her inexplicable passion for Eva. Narrative, too, isn't the driving force behind
Crocodile Soup, which ambles along with an internal logic that may frustrate a plot-loving reader. Nevertheless, the childhood scenes and Darling's comic talents make this a more-than-worthy debut from a quirky new voice in British fiction.
--Regina Marler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
British novelist Darling showcases a lively, engaging voice in her debut, bringing abundant humor to the unique cynicism of her protagonist and the heartfelt pathos in her plot. Gertrude Hardcastle works in the basement of an archeological museum in England cataloguing potsherds. Isolated, she feels safe: "I was not used to emotion. The institute was not generally an emotive place. It was good for shelving and filing, and that's why I liked it." But Gert's placid existence is disrupted by a pleading letter from her estranged mother and an "inappropriate obsession" with Eva, the young woman who serves coffee to the museum's staff. The intrusion of emotion into Gert's comfortable seclusion prompts her to revisit key moments in her childhood, to which the reader is treated in short, amusing chapters that develop the cumulative drama. Why Gert prefers her lonely life soon becomes clear: as a child growing up in a rambling house haunted by a dead poet, Gert was misunderstood and neglected by her mother (her father was often absent tending the family crocodile farm), and relegated to a dreary life in the attic (while her twin brother, Frank, lived downstairs). Slowly and with many missteps, Gert ventures out of the museum and into the world, unearthing an unorthodox community of people to care for her. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age novel, but one with such charmingly messed-up characters that it seems refreshingly new. Some aspects of the plot are fairy tale-like in their absurdity (Gert's telepathic relationship with her twin, for instance), but with the character of Gert providing its spiritual heart, the novel is entertaining, moving and emotionally real. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
