Natural Elements

January 26, 2009
Mason’s ambitious second novel (after Drowning People
) takes a contemporary aging parent story and weaves in elements of a corporate thriller and a bit of historical fiction flecked with fantasy. Eloise McAllister is facing the problem of how best to care for her mother, Joan, an amateur pianist whose family’s nasty experiences during the Boer Wars have begun to color her vivid dream life. While juggling hundreds of millions of dollars as a London hedge fund manager, Eloise settles Joan into a nursing home, but before she does, the two take a trip to South Africa to visit Joan’s childhood home. While there, Eloise’s risky (and large) investment in a new metal alloy tanks, and Joan’s hallucinations—brought about via hallucinated piano pedals—fail to improve. These two story lines drive the narrative and eventually compel Eloise to commit a supreme act of filial compassion. An array of strange characters play pivotal roles, such as an eccentric 16-year-old, a lover who happens to be a scientific genius, and an evil nursing home worker. Though Mason tends to spell everything out, the South African passages are sublime and the mother-daughter relationship well done.

January 15, 2009
Life is hazardous for a newly institutionalized mother and her risk-taking financier daughter in this contrived novel by Mason (Us, 2004, etc.).

Eloise McAllister loves her elderly mother Joan, up to a point. That point is reached when Joan becomes too frail to live alone. Rather than having her mother move in with her, Eloise installs Joan in the Albany, an expensive South London nursing home. As a sweetener she pays for a vacation to South Africa, the place Joan left years before to study music in London. Joan wants to investigate her Boer heritage and is thrilled to find the diary of her grandmother, a survivor of a British concentration camp set up during the Anglo-Boer War. Back in London, she hates the Albany and Sister Karen, the smarmy disciplinarian who runs it. Eloise has problems of her own. She makes a good living as a hedge-fund broker in metallurgical commodities and has bet heavily on osmium, based on encouraging predictions by her former lover, the brilliant French physicist Claude Pasquier. But a scientific article has cast doubt on osmium 's industrial applications, and the price is tanking. Eloise 's job is on the line. What if she can 't pay the Albany 's bills? Joan is not helping. Her innocent hallucinations of piano pedals have progressed to full-scale delusions involving a sadistic concentration-camp doctor. Also in the mix are Joan 's dead husband and mother-in-law (she hated them both); Eloise 's black-sheep brother, fresh from Australia; and Pasquier, Eloise 's lover again after his marriage to an American collapses. Mason 's lack of control over his material is compounded by his ambivalence toward Eloise, one moment the hard businesswoman, the next the fundamentally decent daughter.

A family drama made unmanageable by disparate plot threads.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 1, 2009
Eighty-year-old Joan McAllister faces the difficulty of moving to a London retirement home run by an officious and insensitive nurse manager. To make that dire prospect sweeter, her daughter, Eloise, takes Joan on a trip to South Africa, where Joan's Dutch family lived through the Boer War. Joan makes delightful ancestral discoveries in the town's archives, but Eloise's discoverythat the metal in which she invested millions of her hedge-fund company's money is not performing wellsends her flying back home early to face her furious, pen-eating boss. She reconnects with her French ex-lover, whose promising research into the metal osmium generated Eloise's financial risk in the first place. Meanwhile, Joan struggles through her days at the retirement home, taking comfort in the hallucinated brass piano pedals she sees everywhere and relishing her new friend, Paul, a shy, pimply 15-year-old whom she meets in the basement archives of the local library. Mason ("The Drowning People") has written a suspenseful tale that is unusual in its dealing expertly with myriad subjects: old age, the Anglo-Boer War, high finance, metallurgy, and classical music. This extremely absorbing novel is highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/1/08.]Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2009
Rich in historical background and indelible characters, Masons third novel explores the issue of the responsibility of one generation of a family to another, whether motivated by duty or by love. Risk-taking London hedge-fund-manager Eloise McAllister puts her reputation and her funds future on the line with a buy based on a remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, at the same time that she is working to relocate her 80-year-old mother, Joan, to a retirement home. Before Joan moves to the Albany, she travels with Eloise to her childhood home in South Africa. Here, in a museums archives, Joan finds her grandmothers journal of the Anglo-Boer War about her year in a concentration camp where four of her children died. As Eloise seeks desperately to reverse the effect of a drop in her fund, Joan increasingly slides into dementia-induced hallucinations of her past and of the lives of nineteenth-century residents of the Albany. Published in England in 2008 as Lighted Rooms, this is an ambitious and brutally honest view of love, family, and aging.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)