419 by Will Ferguson ✔✔✔

This novel won the Giller prize last fall, so late last spring I downloaded it and had begun reading it when it was selected for our Book Club this year, so I put it aside till this fall to finish.

I had some trouble reading it.  The beginning - with Laura's father found dead by apparent suicide and the discovery that he'd gotten into a scam from Nigeria- was interesting enough.  Then all of a sudden there's a mysterious woman travelling across Nigeria, hiding a lot of the time, begging enough food to feed herself and her unborn child.  We never do find out why she was wandering, except that her face was scarred, so maybe she'd been attacked back home. Nor does she appear to know where she's wandering to until she meets Nnamdi, another character who is just inserted into the novel, who seems to be there just to show us how the discovery of oil and the takeover by the multi-national companies has affected the poor.  There are occasional interjections back to Laura, but nothing substantial enough to give us any idea why- or how- these characters will finally intersect.

They finally do, but I was so uninterested in Nnamdi's story, simply because the novel seemed to shift so suddenly to him away from Laura and the wandering woman.  His story is actually the longest in the entire novel.  Anyway, I skimmed my way through all this - and got myself a major headache for doing it- but I decided I should read the final part of the novel more closely, so I read the last 1/3 of it, and found it interesting - even though I still don't know why Amina was wandering!  Now, in preparation for Book Club I'm reading Nnamdi's story, so I've actually read the complete novel, only not in order. Laura, who seems at the beginning to be this mousy little copy-editor, becomes Wonder Woman when she gets to Nigeria, chasing down the bad guys and putting herself in danger - I figured at this point that these characters were just driving the story and the author's message. I really do get a bit disgusted when the author has no respect for the reader, and I think that's what happened here.

I really don't think the novel is all that well-written.  It probably didn't help that I was re-reading some Alice Munro stories at the same time in honour of her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I mean really - no one compares to her.

What attracted me to the novel was the 419 schemes, because we've all received these e-mails, and it was interesting to find out what could possibly happen when you respond to them.  But it was just too choppy and disconnected for me.  Should be an interesting discussion on Saturday, because I'm sure there'll be people who just loved it!

And you can be sure I'll be expressing my opinions!

The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray ✔✔✔✔

I'm a real fan of Gray's books - she writes what I guess could be called narrative histories, since the stories are true, but she writes them so well they read like a novel.  She also is able to meld her research with a narrative touch so everything holds together well.

This book is about a young housemaid in Toronto in 1914 who shoots and kills her employer as he returns home from his work day. The subtitle of the book : A Maid, Her Master and the Trial That Shocked a Country pretty well tells it all- Carrie Davies  is the 18-year-old maid who has recently come from England to better herself and help her family financially back home, John Massey is the master whose wife is away visiting family in the US when he decides to make moves on Carrie, and the trial is shocking because of the differing levels of society that are represented here, as well as the lawyers, judge, etc and their presentation of this case, plus the ramifications for the jury's final verdict.

Gray also fits all of this into the framework of a country at war, a newspaper war, emerging rights for women and a fast growing Toronto.  I found it fascinating.