A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

Does a novel about a Dutchman in medieval Japan interest you? No? Well, it should. This is a love story, and its consequences, set against the backdrop of large commercial enterprise gone wrong on a big scale. Sounds like today, doesn't it? Except this is a secret world, where Japanese Shoguns add their own layer of power to that wielded by the Emperor in far off Edo (modern Tokyo) in order to keep Japan cut off from the rest of the world.

Jacob is an innocent abroad, trying to make his fortune whilst maintaining his dignity and honesty in the corrupt world of the failing Dutch East India Company. He makes enemies everywhere, some of whom use his deepening, but forbidden and dangerous, attraction for a local girl against him to bring about his fall. The girl, Orito, is consigned to a closed community of women where she discovers slavery and infanticide.

Jacob and Orito meet again in later life, when destiny has built very different lives for them, and there is no going back. The gentle sadness of their loss is beautifully described as is everything else in this excellent story.
  
This novel is so full of poetry and the poetic that it glows with soft light and subtle hints that captured my imagination in a way I haven't experienced since I read The Waterbabies as a child. It's a page turner because of its scholarship, poetry, the cleverness of the plotting and the layers of humanity in its characters. Highly recommended.

       

Salem Falls by Jody Picoult

I've been off-line since before Christmas - sorry to any readers out there. A pretty awful virus caught up with me and, although I've done quite a bit of reading in the interim, I haven't felt motivation enough to blog about any of them. Whether this is a reflection of me, or of the books I chose to read, is debatable. Still, I'm back now.

Jody Picoult has millions of fans, and I'm one of them. In each of her several books, she deals with a moral issue of our time and Salem Falls is no exception. Jack St Bride is accused of raping one of his students. He pleads guilty to a lesser charge, and accepts an 'easier' punishment, in order to avoid the very real risk that his protestations of innocence will not be believed. At the 11th hour his 'victim' tries to save him, only to be disbelieved and her motives suspected.

The reader is asked to consider the morality of a harsh justice system in which a process supposedly designed to protect the innocent and punish the guilty can, all too easily, confuse which is which and damage both, irreparably. There is also the issue of courage and cowardice, where we are asked to recognise that the line between them can be paper thin; the supposed coward can still be a hero and bigotry masquerades as righteous courage.  

A good read, with satisfying twists and turns.