PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleNotes on a Scandal is Barbara's retelling of what happened, detailing scenes she couldn't have possibly witnessed but claims to have been retold so many times that she may as well have been there ... Heller is, of course, an expert at depicting the cool, smooth, oh-so-proper veneer of the English upper- and not- so-upper classes: the veiled confessions, the insincere concerns, the very passive aggressions of it all ...drops plenty of hints early on that Barbara isn't the most reliable narrator around, particularly when documenting her own obsessive behavior ... Heller never dares lose control, and neither, in spite of everything, do her characters. The story holds the promise of an emotionally catastrophic denouement, but lacks the punch of Muriel Sparks' The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Sheila Kohler's South African variation, Cracks.
Peter Carey
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleWho is more trustworthy in telling a history: a murderer and thief (likely to burn in hell anyway) writing to the daughter he will never know, or the historians and novelists profiting from his life and death decades later? Such questions rise out of the text even as Carey succeeds in creating an account that not only feels authentic but also passes as a serious novel and solid, old-fashioned ‘entertainment’ … What keeps True History of the Kelly Gang moving along is the wonderfully poetic, kinetic voice that Carey has fashioned for his illiterate hero … This is ultimately not so much a portrait of its own narrator as it is a gallery of the people and circumstances who made him. True History of the Kelly Gang is a big, meaty novel, blending equal parts Dickens and Cormac McCarthy with a distinctly Australian strain of melancholy.
