Books 2014 - The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay
I'm getting behind again - there'll be more books today, I suspect, now that I have my (unfixed) laptop back from the uselessness of PC World's repair shop (by the end of the week... we'll call you to let you know where it's up to in a couple of days if you like... - it hadn't been touched when I finally followed up the two phone calls I made by going in to reclaim it yesterday). Anyway...
I found this in a secondhand bookshop in Carlton, and even though I knew I didn't have the spare weight to bring it home, I bought it anyway. I suppose it also falls into the "magic realism" category, perhaps, but mostly I just liked the sound of it - and I must admit to rather liking the cover, too... *g*
What if you looked up at just the right moment and saw - out of the corner of your eye - something unexpected? What if it was something so marvellous, so breathtaking, that it transformed time and space forever?
The something was a man falling from the sky, from the heights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built, and surviving. We see this through the eyes of three men standing on the same piece of land - William Dawes, astronomer in the 1700s, someone working on the bridge in the 1930s, and a 21st century ex-pat returning home. The blurb says All are searching for the same thing: how to understand what it means to call a place home, and how to be able to tell when you get there. Which of course I also found rather interesting, as I'd gone "home" for three months... *g*
Bonus - I'd been to Dawes Point, under Sydney Harbour Bridge, with kiwisue, just a few weeks earlier!
It's right under the bridge, with a very different view to Dawes', which is described gorgeously in the book ("All around the cove trees jostled for space, some with subdued green leaves hanging straight against the colours of their bark, others with wide shiny leaves spreading from wide, dark branches to make canopies of damp-looking shade. Below these the different greens of ferns, grasses, heaths, low brush mixed among themselves, offset here and there by the bright feathers - scarlet, green, blue - of some quick bird surveying the British arrival... It must have been so quiet here this morning...")
I kept wanting to read more about each of the characters - I could have done with a book for each of them (*g*) - but it was also rather wonderful to read about them together, and I did like the concept, all of them in the same place, but different times, at the same time. Dawes of course was thousands of miles from home, and not sure he'd ever see it again, and yet somewhat in love with his new, albeit somewhat enforced, home. Ted dreamed of working on Sydney Harbour Bridge, and was finally old enough to leave home and try to make his dream come true, and of course to start building his new home in Sydney. Dan finally goes home when his grandfather, the man who fell from the bridge, is taken into hospital, someone who's going back home from a place that he's been making home for the last ten years. The theme isn't forced, but it's there, and the writing took you with the characters on their journeys, so that you could see, and feel the journeys too. And it's all bound together by the idea of stories - something else I'm rather fond of (*g*) - and what stories mean... which I'm not going to tell you, because that would spoil the book if you're going to read it.
Oddly, people on goodreads don't seem to have liked it, which leaves me a bit gobsmacked, but on the other hand it was apparently nominated for various awards, which I can well believe. I've no idea whether you can get hold of it over here in the UK (or anywhere else) but if you see it and read it, I'd love to know what you think! I wonder if the fact that I had just been to the place it was set made a difference to the way that I enjoyed it? I tend to rather like personal connections in books - but then they have to be wonderful books to start with... *g*
I found this in a secondhand bookshop in Carlton, and even though I knew I didn't have the spare weight to bring it home, I bought it anyway. I suppose it also falls into the "magic realism" category, perhaps, but mostly I just liked the sound of it - and I must admit to rather liking the cover, too... *g*
What if you looked up at just the right moment and saw - out of the corner of your eye - something unexpected? What if it was something so marvellous, so breathtaking, that it transformed time and space forever?
The something was a man falling from the sky, from the heights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built, and surviving. We see this through the eyes of three men standing on the same piece of land - William Dawes, astronomer in the 1700s, someone working on the bridge in the 1930s, and a 21st century ex-pat returning home. The blurb says All are searching for the same thing: how to understand what it means to call a place home, and how to be able to tell when you get there. Which of course I also found rather interesting, as I'd gone "home" for three months... *g*
Bonus - I'd been to Dawes Point, under Sydney Harbour Bridge, with kiwisue, just a few weeks earlier!
It's right under the bridge, with a very different view to Dawes', which is described gorgeously in the book ("All around the cove trees jostled for space, some with subdued green leaves hanging straight against the colours of their bark, others with wide shiny leaves spreading from wide, dark branches to make canopies of damp-looking shade. Below these the different greens of ferns, grasses, heaths, low brush mixed among themselves, offset here and there by the bright feathers - scarlet, green, blue - of some quick bird surveying the British arrival... It must have been so quiet here this morning...")
I kept wanting to read more about each of the characters - I could have done with a book for each of them (*g*) - but it was also rather wonderful to read about them together, and I did like the concept, all of them in the same place, but different times, at the same time. Dawes of course was thousands of miles from home, and not sure he'd ever see it again, and yet somewhat in love with his new, albeit somewhat enforced, home. Ted dreamed of working on Sydney Harbour Bridge, and was finally old enough to leave home and try to make his dream come true, and of course to start building his new home in Sydney. Dan finally goes home when his grandfather, the man who fell from the bridge, is taken into hospital, someone who's going back home from a place that he's been making home for the last ten years. The theme isn't forced, but it's there, and the writing took you with the characters on their journeys, so that you could see, and feel the journeys too. And it's all bound together by the idea of stories - something else I'm rather fond of (*g*) - and what stories mean... which I'm not going to tell you, because that would spoil the book if you're going to read it.
Oddly, people on goodreads don't seem to have liked it, which leaves me a bit gobsmacked, but on the other hand it was apparently nominated for various awards, which I can well believe. I've no idea whether you can get hold of it over here in the UK (or anywhere else) but if you see it and read it, I'd love to know what you think! I wonder if the fact that I had just been to the place it was set made a difference to the way that I enjoyed it? I tend to rather like personal connections in books - but then they have to be wonderful books to start with... *g*