Songs from the Violet Cafe

I am delighted to have discovered Fiona Kidman's writing through Songs From The Violet Cafe as I absolutely loved every page of this book. It primarily portrays a community which feels very much of its time (1963) and with a strong sense of New Zealand too. Kidman vividly describes town and rural landscapes around Lake Rotorua as well as having great insight into the characters living there. For such a wide open area, I felt a very real sense of claustrophobia within the town. Characters from distant lands seem able to comfortably settle, but many born there strive to escape, particularly the young women.

This is very much a novel of relationships and how the effects of our interactions with each other ripple out across both time and distance. As well as the 1960s, we see glimpses of Violet and the others twenty years earlier and up to forty years later which I thought added significant depth and poignancy to the central story. Sometimes the era was tricky to establish. Some 1960s attitudes were very much of the 1940s, or earlier, whereas Violet's Cafe seemed almost shockingly modern in contrast. Kidman's measured writing is beautifully elegant and in keeping with Violet's upmarket aspirations which I think she was trying to pass on to her 'girls'. Their lives didn't have to be constrained to home and children and it was fascinating to see, decades later, what became of those who survived and what had made Violet into the woman she was. A truly wonderful novel.