All Over Creation (2003) Ruth Ozeki

My parents gave me this book for Christmas having added it to my Amazon wish list after reading Ozeki's Booker Prize shortlisted 'A Tale for the Time Being.' I had also added her other book, 'My Year of Meats,' but that remains on the Amazon which I put down to my mother thinking that vegetarianism is akin to witchcraft and I might be converted. 

Yumi Fuller is a Japanese-American lady who was born into a family of potato farmers in Idaho. At the age of fourteen she has an affair with her history teacher, which leads to her having an abortion and leaving home. Twenty-five years later, she receives a call from her friend and next door neighbour Cass telling her that her parents can no longer cope with their age-related illnesses, so she returns to look after them. Throw some activists protesting against genetically-modified food and a hell of a lot of seeds into the mix and there's your story.

The novel is unquestionably an ambitious one. The multiple narrative; the array of characters of all different ages; the themes of life and death, family, friendship; the idea to write a novel about potato farming and make it interesting are all central to the success of 'All Over Creation.' Ozeki's personal life is also mirrored in the novel with the main protagonist's father being American and mother being Japanese and an Alzheimer's sufferer. I preferred this nod to the writer's personal life to her naming a character after herself in 'A Tale for the Time Being,' which I just found rather odd.

Through Yumi and Cass, the novel's two most central characters, Ozeki is most successful. Both characters are flawed but both evoke very strong emotions from the reader: the harrowing accounts of Yumi's trip to have an illegal abortion and Cass having yet another miscarriage - something that she is so used to that the description of it happening is reduced to a short paragraph, before she returns to bed without telling her husband of the pregnancy or the latest trauma, are painful to read. At other times I was left shaking my head at Yumi's absent approach to parenting or Cass's slight disappointment that her best friend wasn't dead.

Something that slightly bothers me about Ozeki's (and anybody who falls into this trap) writing is being rather contrived in the first place, and then explaining it to the author in the second. She has a big thing about character names: Yumi/yummy/You Me; a character in 'A Tale for the Time Being' called Nao... The novel had me groaning slightly with her rapist teacher and potato-botherer being called Elliot Rhodes and then one of the Seeds explaining that it is the same as erodes. I think most readers may have worked that out on their own.

The novel is about life and death. The author makes reference to the Buddhist belief that only two things are certain in life: You know that you will die and you don't know when it will be. Life, despite its difficulties, is celebrated in this novel and the continual reference to seeds are not accidental. Yumi's parents sell seeds from Asia in Idaho, Elliot Rhodes works as a PR officer for a GM seed company, the activists call themselves 'The Seeds of Resistance.' and so on. 

After struggling through 'H is for Hawk,' this was quite an easy read and an enjoyable one. Ozeki is by no means the perfect author, but she is an incredibly adept one of whom I'd happily read more from. Before starting this novel, I picked up Mark Haddon's 'A Spot of Bother' to read after 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime' came to Birmingham and left without me getting to see it. After a couple of pages, I gave up as I need to be in the right frame of mind for a novel. I'm glad I grabbed this one off the shelf.

Quotations

“As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.”  Hmmm.

"Secondly we believe anti-exoticisim to be explicitly racist, and having fought for Freedom and Democracy against Hitler, I do not intend to promote Third Reich eugenics in our family garden."

"It starts with the earth. How can it not?"

Other thoughts

• At first I thought the way that Ozeki presented the hippie community was a bit...naff. I stand corrected though as they turned out to be excellent smaller roles in the novel leading to the catastrophic climax.
• I don't think Yumi will be winning mother of the year.
• Ozeki said that Yumi was named after 'You...Me.' I got that part, but she also said it's a tribute to one of the best songs of the seventies. Which song is that? Answers on a postcard please.
• I got three books in the post yesterday: 'The Yellow Birds' by Kevin Powers, 'The Leopard' by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and 'Axeman's Jazz' by Ray Celestin. What next?