Customer Reviews

Summerland (Reading Group Guides)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Malcolm Knox's first novel is an emotional X-Ray of four young Sydney 'movers and shakers', Hugh, Richard, Pup and Helen. Richard is the narrator of this real-life story of passion without love, and family without connection, through the years of early adulthood around Sydney's northern beaches. So much of Knox's style reminds me of Milan Kundera, the Czech author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", with a hint of Tim Winton's freakish ability for character-assassination. The lead actor in this tragedy, Hugh, embodies privilege, vanity, and ego in search of a larger universe. Pup ("Philippa") is the struggling artist of the group, writing novels of rejection from a viewpoint of lovelessness. Richard is the 'innocent' of the four, who loves the group more than himself or his marriage to Pup. Helen is the 'martyr', an other-worldly princess who carries Hugh's secrets as well as her own family shame. The portrayals of lifestyle and moral decision-making are shocking and vivid - the author takes us from a vision of stunted love almost to one of blossoming evil. I look forward to the ABC-TV (or will it be Channel 10?) dramatic representation of this biting tale of emotional blindness and mutation (I've already cast David Wenham, Jeremy Sims, Essie Davis and Georgie Parker in my mind). A revelation of the high-powered 'summer world' to which many, perhaps tragically, devote their life's work. A great first novel.

This book is set in Australia and could turn out to be beautiful movie material actually.

I was captured from the word go. Meticiously narrated by Richard one of the characters, I would be delighted to see this fine piece of work on the big screen some day with these wondefully rich (in every sense of the word) characters. These were societies golden ones with the prvilleges of beauty, youth and wealth.

Richard, now suffering from insomnia plays back the details of the lives of his friends Hugh, Helen and he Richard and his wife Pup from the ages of seventeen to the present age; thirty seven.

He has lost his wife Pup and his best friend Hugh, and on his thirty seventh birthday and with a bit of help from a a ew bottles of whisky as his aid he uncovers their long ago charmed existence.

From prefects at schools they come into adulthood as partners in the firms they work with. This quartet travels to Palm Beach every year after Christmas and live their lives to the hilt as social butterflies, oblivious of the danger around each corner, and the still waters which run a touch too deep.

Mr Knox writes with such elucidation, I could see the scenes played out before me in this well crafted and fine work of art.

Thanks to the first review from England's Guardian Newspaper and thanks to my sister Jan who ordered it for me from Amazon pronto.

If you haven't read a book that touches your heart in a long while, this book Summerland is highly reccommended. See for yourself the wonderful art of this first novelist Mr. Knox, and order from Amazon today. I hope I will see Summerland on the big screen soon. I really do.

"Summerland" has a strong premise, four interesting characters, and an author with a lot of guts - it takes some nerve for a first-timer to deliberately court comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford. Unfortunately, the gamble doesn't entirely pay off. For me, the enterprise is ultimately undone by the narrator's journalistic tone of detached amusement. It's as if he never really knew these people, never really had these experiences, and is only pretending to care. I sense no real pain in Richard's telling, no real regret, so as the story of a man whose life has been obliterated by treachery it just didn't ring true. The voice fights with itself, wandering into anecdotes and tangential ramblings in a tone suggesting Knox might have been happier writing an essay entitled "Reflections on the Ruling Class". I think I might have been happier reading it, too: Knox clearly has a good mind and a sharp appreciation for the cant and hypocrisy of Sydney's idle rich. He's an excellent writer, but I think his talent could have made more of this material as an extended sociological essay - much like Lewis Lapham's "Money & Class In America". No one has exposed the rotten core of Sydney High Society in quite that way, and I reckon Knox is just the man for the job. It's still an enjoyable read. But perhaps asking for comparisons with Fitzgerald sets the wrong expectations up front.

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 heard": "Our story is only as sad as others allow it to be . . ." He closes with Pup's "final fragment", an opaque, suggestive passage that becomes clear only when read against the last page of The Good Soldier , leaving us with the strange phenomenon of a novel that demands an entire other novel to unlock it.

The hidden text mirrors the hidden story that the others have kept from Richard; while they age into a battle of attrition between loathing and desire, his innocence remains "the sheltered repository of lost time . . . the perfect, fragile, tensile bubble where their memories resided". But as the bottles pile up and dawn approaches, he must revisit his gilded memories in the harsh light not only of enormous betrayal but of his own complicity in it - recognising, for instance, that what he called the grand project of his life, comforting Pup's thwarted ambitions, was in fact a vampiric feeding off her failure. Knox offers us four stories, each shocking, epic, heartbreaking and familiar - of Hugh's boundless, self-devouring greed, Pup's bitter infatuation, Helen's blind, determined love and Richard's determined blindness - while insisting on the final unfathomability of desire. His clear-eyed wisdom and startling, depth-charged prose constitute a novel that should become as much of a classic as the one he has remoulded.

This fantastic narrative of the very privilaged life of a cluelessly happy man, his conniving wife, and their life long friends tells you from the begining that disaster has already struck. The narrator then draggs you back to the begining of their story and takes you through their life, ever moving slowly forward to that inevitable end. I could not put down the book in suspense as to how their lives would play out. It was really really great - teasing and suspenseful without being overly so.

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.

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 don't know if the other reviewers read the same book I did, but this book slogged through random descriptions that seemed to go nowhere, tried to make a point about these people's lives that never really came to anything for me. It messed around in terms of timeline, jumping all over the place with no real effect except confusion. I got to the end and still didn't really get the point. All the characters seemed either clueless, or cruel, or otherwise extremely hurtful to everyone in their lives. In his twisted way the narrator tries to get us to forgive them for this, but in my case fails. I would not recommend that anyone take the time with this book getting to the end, and hoping, like I did, that somehow it would come together. You'll get to the last page and be disappointed.

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!

I enjoyed this book very much even though it was difficult to get through at times. The end was also a little disappointing. If you liked "The Great Gatsby", you will love "Summerland".