★★★★★ Big Novels

The Potato Factory

Bryce Courtenay

I listened to The Potato Factory in late 2006 or early 2007. The date I know for sure is 13-Dec-2006, when I purchased it from Audible. I bought books two and three in the series a few months later: Tommo and Hawk on 10-Mar-2007 and Solomon's Song on 21-Mar-2007. (I'm guessing I bought The Potato Factory in December 2006 to use up my expiring audible credits, got around to listening to it in March, and immediately snapped up the next two.) I then went on to buy several other audiobooks by Bryce Courtenay, all of which I greatly enjoyed. I mention all that because it is the strongest recommendation I can give for an author. I read one book, then I spent my money and time on more and more of his books.

And it was a lot of time! Courtenay writes big novels, in the tradition of War and Peace or War and Remembrance. The Potato Factory series is a multigenerational saga that portrays Australian history through the fortune of the Solomon Family. (Indeed, I vaguely remember that I may have happened on The Potato Factory after reading Colleen McCullough's Australian historical saga The Thorn Birds.)

In this first novel we meet Ikey Solomon, his wife Hannah, and his business partner (that's a euphemism) Mary Abacus. The story begins in London, where Ikey and Mary lead lives of crime. They are transported to Australia, and the story begins. I remember very little of the plot of this novel -- the subsequent ones are clearer in my mind. But I remember it was utterly gripping.

Indeed, I now see that besides the six novels I have read, Courtenay has written a bunch of others. And I am wondering why I never got around to seeking those out. Perhaps...

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★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

A Woman of No Importance Sonia Purnell Fiction writers operate under certain constraints. Their characters and plots have to be believable. Pile the implausible too high, and critics and readers will complain. ( Mea culpa .) Reality is not thus constrained. Thus, Virginia Hall, an American spy, a tall striking redhead who speaks French with an American accent, and has a wooden leg that she calls Cuthbert, who organizes Resistance forces in occupied France during the Second World War, and who assembles and leads a force of about 1000 Maquis (rural guerillas) that defeat the Germans and drive them out of Le Puy before the Allied invasion reaches it. (Cuthbert seems so gratuitous. I would shout to the heavens about a fictional spy with a wooden leg. But Virginia was real, and she really had a wooden leg, and she really called it Cuthbert.) And this is only one of Hall's exploits. Before that she was the Limping Lady of Lyon and the Abwehr and Gestapo were obsessed with her, but never

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