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Imagine if you will a novel that combines the fashion savvy of "Sex and The City" with the brassy British sense of humor in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY. Now, just for fun, throw in an Agatha Christie mystery, a Rough Guide travel book, and a steamy romantic passage or two from a Barbara Cartland novel. The result? BACKPACK by Emily Barr.
Tansy, Barr's first person narrator, is a pretentious over-indulger in drugs and alcohol, who seems to care very little about anyone other than herself and her select group of equally snobbish and self-absorbed friends. In the hands of another author, she could very easily develop into a highly unlikable character, but in Barr's hands, just the opposite is true. There's something very appealing about Tansy that draws in the reader. Maybe it's an underlying, albeit puzzling, sense of potential that is so engaging.
When her mother, an alcoholic, dies, leaving Tansy with a small inheritance and a half brother she hadn't known existed, Tansy plans an escape, a holiday. She and her fat --- but very attractive, she assures us --- on again, off again boyfriend decide to visit Vietnam, "a chic destination," where she expects to "assume languid attitudes and (meet) intriguing strangers." Shortly before their scheduled departure, he backs out, and she braves the trip on her own, dressed in "Asia-wear." (One senses Tansy hasn't packed light for her trip to enlightenment.)
In an exotic continent away from home, Tansy adheres for a period to her past habits --- primarily looking down her coke-seeking nose at all she encounters. Barr transitions Tansy very subtly into the backpacker that she so despises. It's a slow process, and one that even while witnessing it Tansy can't entirely accept. Ditching her London attire for the loose cotton apparel of her fellow travelers, she stubbornly notes, "Wearing the clothes doesn't make me a backpacker. Of course it doesn't." She slips later when she says, "Everyone hates backpackers because of their image, but some of us are all right. I correct myself. Some of them." But the transformation does occur, much to her delight and to the reader's as well.
Despite missing her snooty friends, Tansy becomes chummy with several Aussies and other Europeans. Thrown in the mix is Max, an unexpected affair, who helps to prove that Tansy can indeed love more than just cocaine and herself. In what is our first glimpse of the insights Tansy is capable of, she says of her ever-present-in-spirit mum, "Perhaps this is what it means to be haunted. Perhaps ghosts aren't troubled souls in themselves, but souls whose memory troubles the people who are left behind. Ghosts don't exist, they're in the mind."
Barr cleverly reveals a murder mystery not through the telling of the events, but as "gossip" in newsy e-mails exchanged by Tansy with friends and family back in England. Someone is on the rampage in Asia, a doing-in Tansy doppelganger. The outcome may be a bit predictable to some, as more about the murders unfolds and Tansy exposes facts about her mother's death. Still, the mystery is deftly woven into the rest of the story and does not overwhelm. Barr is never heavy-handed.
In fact, Barr is a master of balance --- appropriately Taoist in settings both seedy and breathtakingly beautiful. She straddles several genres well, and never disappoints in any.
Barr's debut novel is like the proverbial combination platter at your favorite Chinese restaurant…a little of this, a little of that, just enough of everything. However, unlike the meal that leaves you hungry an hour a later, BACKPACK is very filling.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
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