Review by Jane Rosenthal

Flyleaf is a novel both poignant and hilarious. The plot begins with what Bernard Levin once called "that familiar corpse, the middle-class marriage". Here we find how to meet the love of your life, get married and divorced, be miserable and disillusioned and how to ponder the unfathomables in life - all with wit and style.

The narrator is Violet Birkin. Yes, indeed ... Violet. The amusing shock of this deeply unfashionable name should prepare the reader for what is to come. This is one of the most obvious jokes in a text full of delicate irony. In one police-station scene, for example, she remarks, "The detective looked the way men do when at last you have brought them another man to speak to." The writing has a clean but dense poetic quality, enhanced by the separation of paragraphs that makes them feel like the stanzas of a poem.

So, is it "Violet" as in shrinking, or as in violated? As it turns out, violations of trust and love have occurred. But Violet, though she does retire to the sanctuary of a friend's spare bedroom in Kalk Bay, shows considerable grit and endurance and an almost grim determination to survive. This manifests in working insanely hard to survive on what even teachers at tertiary institutions get paid, in untenured jobs.

Her subject is English and her meditations on language and how we use it are a real feast. She takes the most ordinary of utterances and turns them into food for thought, using that most wonderful instrument, grammar. She also touches on literary theory. She shows both sides of teaching too: the horrors of the back row of gum-chewing, talking, i-pod-connected, manicured girls - but also the love and the passion that goes into it. She has many interesting things to say about this profession and the usefulness of the academic life.

Violet states that for her students she has "the humblest wish that they would have fewer really stupid ideas". The novel is dedicated to Dowling's real-life students.

The funniest parts of the book are reserved for the ex-husband, about whom Violet's comments are pretty lethal but not bitter.

And she seems to capture, almost incidentally, the flavour of life in Kalk Bay with a cast of characters that includes the fishermen, the regular swimmers at the tidal pool, eccentric residents with old money and the newer black emigres to this area. Her friend, Marina, is an expert, in surprising ways, on sleeping with men.

This is a wonderful read; it is light and clever and, only on reflection, does one realise how much has been incorporated, with affection and insight. There is a happy ending (but not too resolved) which involves books, friends and theatre.

All of these are encapsulated in the title of this novel, Flyleaf. For it is on the flyleaves of the books we give our friends and lovers that things are written - sometimes rather theatrical protestations, which might last a good deal longer than the relationships.

Dowling is already well known to South African readers for her first novel, What Poets Need, and her wonderful collection of poems, I Flying. This novel, Flyleaf, will establish her further as one of South Africa's most important writers in English and on a par with many on the international scene.