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NEW AUTHORS SHOWCASE
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6M P3 |
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Fruit Bats, Geysers and Plato By Leela Dutt |
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This novel is a rich collection of linked stories from around the world, all told by members of a single three-generation family based in Wales. The earliest involves an expatriate family in Nigeria in 1972, but nearly all happen from 1989 to 2000. E-mails continue the plot between chapters. Settings include the USA, Eire, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Australia and India.
There are several on-going love stories. Other themes are lasting trauma from the second world war, ninth century Italian archaeology, post-apartheid South Africa and in the final chapter: how others see us, as characters from earlier in the novel all converge on Cardiff during the fuel crisis of September 2000.
Samples below are the whole of chapter 2, and the start of chapter 12.
Chapter 2
From “Valerie Beynon” <Valerie.Beynon@freesurf.net> To “Barbara Jenkins” <BFJ1982@hotmail.com> Subject: Tibet and your Golden Wedding! Date: Friday 31st March 2000 6:23:45 GMT
Dear Barbara, Ian found your email when we popped into the cyber café in Kathmandu. I’m so pleased you want to have a family get-together for your Golden. Don’t worry about Norman - surely you can talk him round after all these years! Well if YOU can’t, I don’t know who can… Ian and I will certainly be there. Don’t know how many of our grandchildren will make it but fingers crossed. Ian says he remembers your wedding well: your Uncle Alwyn gave him three glasses of substitute champagne and he was sick in the back garden. Poor kid, he was only eleven… The high point of our trip into Tibet was seeing Mount Everest. We camped at Ronbuk monastery, which is below Everest’s base camp. It was dull and misty when we arrived, but suddenly in the evening Everest appeared high above us out of the clouds. Magic! Saw it again next morning when having breakfast in the open air. We have seen a lot of other monasteries - largely reconstructed after being destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Most of the towns we’ve seen have a modern Chinese part and an older - and poorer - Tibetan part. We saw an “anti-British” exhibition in one town - a hill fort where Tibetan heroes nobly resisted the better armed British in 1904: not sure how the Indian half of me responds to this… Ian said (as he so often does!) that I’ve got to work out who I think I am. You’d imagine that I’d know by now, wouldn’t you? We met two sturdy Scottish women camping with us - about your age, been here twice before - who told me the first night that Tibet has two bad features in particular: the roads and the state of the loos. Assured me solemnly that many Tibetans simply do not have loos. Ian says that the tell-tale red spot was beginning to appear on my nose, but - you’ll be proud of me, Barbara! I kept a straight face and asked about the Land Cruiser we were to be travelling on. Our visit to the family in Calcutta went well - good to be back after so long. They are all growing up and having babies: just like us, I suppose… Young Kit is fine - at least he was when we left - but have you seen Owen? I’m a bit worried about this latest pregnancy, I must admit: but Ian says I’m just fussing. Could you ring them for me? Will phone you when we get back - week after Easter - you must come down and see our photos. Greetings to Norman. Love, Val PS Have you really still got all my letters from Nigeria?!!! You must let me read them… PPS And what’s all this about Alec giving a talk in Athens??? For heavens sake, Barbara - of COURSE you must go!
Opening of Chapter 12: Lesotho, 1998: Matthew Beynon “The tanks rolled into Maseru at dawn on Tuesday.” That was how I meant to begin my piece. I guess that’s what tanks do, they come at dawn. “The tanks arrived half an hour before lunch” wouldn’t have the same ring to it. So dawn it was. Five a.m. Six hundred crack South African troops, who should have been backed up with two hundred Botswanans, only Botswana was two days late because the two armies couldn’t get their act together. Operation Boleas, they called it. Almost at once it got reported on Radio Four’s Today Programme. London’s summer time is only an hour behind South African time. My Auntie Barbara heard it up at the cottage and phoned my Mum in Cardiff at nine o’clock that morning. “What on earth is South Africa up to?” Barbara demanded. “Why are they invading Lesotho, of all places? I thought you said, Valerie Beynon, that it was a peaceful little kingdom the size of Wales that never gets into the news?” She paused. “And what’s happening to Matt? Have you heard from him? Is he OK? Eleanor says he was planning a holiday in Lesotho.” Indeed I was supposed to be on holiday that week. I’d been based at Cape Town for some weeks, and since my old friend Femi had just flown down from Nigeria to see me, we thought we’d go up to Lesotho and visit Seretse. Seretse and Femi: my two best mates at school when we lived in Nigeria, all three together again for the first time in years. Seretse was now a doctor, and had returned home to South Africa after apartheid ended. He now had a post at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital. “Come and see the mountains!” Seretse had urged us. We had great plans for exploring the place. Femi had heard we could go canoeing and camping. I planned to drive up to a place called Malealea where you can ride horseback through marvellous scenery and live in little round huts. It’s a wild country, completely unenclosed and very high up; even the lowest part, around the capital, starts higher than many other countries finish. The Basotho are traditionally skilled horsemen, a proud, independent people who have never been conquered and colonised. They haven’t filled the country with motorways, either. It promised to be an idyllic break from our hectic lives for the three of us. Staying with my old friends in Seretse’s house on the road from the border, it struck me that neither of them had really changed much since we’d all been together in Nigeria. I hadn’t seen Femi for eight years. He’d filled out considerably and become an established young businessman with a wife and some kids he carried photographs of, but all the same when we sat late at night with a few beers and started swapping stories, he made us both laugh just as he always had. We had the house to ourselves because Seretse’s wife had taken the children to visit their grandparents in Sweden. I was sorry to miss them but I was looking forward to a drive into the hills with the boys. Tuesday morning we woke early to the sound of gunfire. “What the hell’s going on?” I stuck my head out of the window. “Seretse, why’s there a column of what looks suspiciously like army tanks driving up the road?” Getting Seretse into his hospital that morning had its difficulties. He decided against reversing his car out into the road in between the tanks, and instead the three of us set off on foot round the back streets. We could hear the odd gunshot in the distance... The streets were not as bustling as usual for this time of day, but there were a few Basotho about, dressed for the cold in their colourful traditional blankets pinned at the neck. There were no expats about at all, as far as I could tell. “That guy’s carrying a rifle,” Femi exclaimed in surprise as we turned a corner. “Is it loaded?” “I would imagine so,” Seretse told him dryly. “Don’t hang around, Femi.” I glanced up at the parched brown hills which encircled the town, and caught sight of a burst of gunfire. |