A Catch-up of Fiction Today. 7 novels that novelist can learn from.

 

I was really lucky; my final proof reading of the new Shaman Mystery was last month. As this fourth book about the incorrigible Sabbie Dare is set in February, I was able to soak up all those drear February experiences – the perpetual rain, the sudden moments of sun, the deep frosts, the dark evenings. 

Through the Floodgate opens in early December 2014, when across the the Southwest, dramatic storms began. On the Somerset Levels, where Sabbie Dare lives, floods were threatening to yet again wreck farmland and villages. The first chapter shows the secret meeting between two feuding farmers, the torrential rain not able to dampen their anger and hate. 

When Sabbie picks up the story, at the end of January,  the floods are beginning to recede. A car is revealed beneath the floodwaters in a Somerset valley...Harper's Coombe.  Many vehicles were 'drowned' in the 2014 Somerset floods, but this one contained a dark secret. A man, dead before the floods overcame his car. And lying next to him, a shotgun.

    It seemed the saddest occurrence of the all the sadness of the devastation. According to bulletins, he was named as John Spicer. He had parked miles from his prosperous farm and big family, and shot himself in the head. 

    He must have chosen it as a quiet spot and driven there through the rain, too wrecked in his life to want to go on with it. He’d stuck a shotgun in his mouth. Not a cry for help – he knew he would die. Then, as the waters rose, he floated inside his car, like spacemen float around their cabin, alone, undiscovered, the murky waters covering him as if he was a burial at sea, the car a coffin. 

 Sabbie is thinking about John Spicer because she's at the funeral of a childhood friend. Kerry, who she knew as a child when she lived at the Willows Children's Home, had thrown herself from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

 In this latest episode in Sabbie's life, I will explore the darkness that surrounds suicide, the darkness that pervades sexual abuse, and the way natural catastrophes can wreak havoc on the farming community.

But writing should never stop you reading, in fact, it is the most important and useful method of developing as a writer. I'm going to look at seven books I've read since the pandemic has locked us down at home. All of them are very different, but they have all helped me write and rewrite.  Because the shops are shut, they came into my possession in a variety of ways; I collected an armful from charity shops, and a pile from the library before it closed. I filched a couple from a 'free books' shelf outside my village hall, people have kindly given me books, and I ordered one from the net. This was a motley collection and the reading generated a diversity of reactions from me. Here are seven, in order from most disliked to most loved. 

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

Jim Crace  is known for slightly off-beam...okay, slightly weird stories. His Harvest is a favourite of mine, a gripping tale set in a quasi-medieval village. But Being Dead left me as cold as the two main characters, who are dead within a page or two of the opening. We watch them decompose, after an opportunist thief kills them to steal the little they have brought with them to make love in the dunes beside the beach they met on, thirty-odd years ago. They are not all that likeable, in life or death, and I might have given up   entirely, had it not be

The Lonely by Andrew Michael Hurley

Atmospheric and brilliantly described, the landscape of this book supports a slow-burning story that takes you into dark places. Two brothers, one almost fully responsible for the other, discover that the grown-up world they are both almost part of is bleaker and more disturbing than they could have imaginined. I do feel that the story would have told better if we'd moved between the present day (where they're older and wiser) and the past; the visit to The Lonely to heal Andrew, the older brother.

Akin,  by Emma Donaghue 

I’d been gifted the very beautiful hardback copy of this book, with its slightly Art Deco cover depicting Nice on the Cote D’Azure. I’ve already read two books by Donaghue; Room, and The Wonder. These two books are as different as a pea is to a pod, and I was not disappointed to discover that everything about Akin is different to those earlier novels.

I was drawn to the book because I know Nice well, I have family just along the coast, but it was the moment I read the blurb on the flyleaf that I knew I would not be able to put this book down. Who could resist this; A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

As you leaf through the frontispieces, towards the first chapter, you come across the dictionary definition of ‘akin’, and also several very grainy black-and-white snapshot pictures. A grand Nice building, a strange symbol, a couple on a park bench, snapped from behind. What these mean is revealed steadily as you read into the book.

Noah Sevaggio is eighty next week. He’s never been back to the city where he was born, and in the past few years he’s lost his entire family; his brilliant wife, Joan, his sister and brother-in-law and even their son, Victor, who died of a drug overdose in his twenties. Eleven-year-old Michael is Victor’s son, and has been living with his granny since his mother, Amber, was thrown into jail for selling drugs. Now Granny has died and Michael has no-one.

Of course Noah is talked into taking on this child. Michael is savvy and streetwise and battered by a young life of hardcore experience, deprived of almost everything Noah would hold as needful for an upbringing. He’s full of suppressed anger and blatant cheek, with a mouth chocked with swearwords Noah didn’t know even existed. He’s had little education, but he’s smart. Noah trails him around Nice, so that we can also enjoy getting immersed in its seascape, its sounds and landmarks, its smells and tases. They are searching out the past of Noah’s mother’s final years in the city, after she’d packed Noah and his father off to the US.They use the grainy photos he’d found in her effects and Micheal becomes as keen on the quest as his great-uncle. 

‘All Noah was attempting to do was fill a gap, throw his ungainly self down so the kid could ross over this abyss. Weren’t all of us bridges for each other one way or another?…And then it struck him that it was really the other way around. This boy was saving Noah. Rescuing him from the trap of habit, the bleak tedium of counting sown the year of his retirement. Michael was the little ark, crazily bobbing, in which one lucky old man could go voyaging. 

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood  

The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up. I imagined it would be about a twelve-year-old boy's assent into manhood, where he learns the facts of growing up by taking a trip with his estranged father. ‘I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share.’ That might have been clue enough that things were going to take a dreadful turn. Wood  breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… with the words; As we drove off, [Mum] was smiling at herself, a limp hand spread across her heart. It was the last I ever saw of her. What’s the writer doing? I had to ask. This is a dangerous tactic, only to be used when you’re hugely confident it’s the right approach. By the time I was a third into the novel, I could see his rational. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability. They’re heading towards the Lake District, but as the story moves through this beautiful landscape, it becomes a place of blood and terror, it’s beauty is replaced by a ragged, tattered, chaotic, menace. The seedy pub, the rusty gates, the cluttered interior of the Volvo’s boot. No one is going to fully survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands. 

The Beekeeper of Alepo by  Christy Lefteri 

Lefteri, herself a child of Cypriot refugees, volunteered in a Greek refugee centre during the Syrian crisis, then came home to London and wrote this book. Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his wife Afra, an artist blinded when their small son is killed as a bomb lands in their back garden take a hazardous route across Turkey and Greece to find safety in the U.K. The novel moves betweenether this journey that starting in Aleppo in 2015 and the other from England the following year, where they are applying for asylum. Nuri and Afra manage to escape their shattered hometown, but they bring with them memories that haunt them. Nuri thinks, as they travel, wait and apply, that it's his wife who is the broken one of the two. He has no idea that he is suffering silently from PTS. 'You are lost in the darkness,' Afra says to Nuri. He still has his love of beekeeping and Afra still has a gift for art, and we get deep into their thoughts, indeed their souls, helping readers to understand experiences they will luckily never have. 

The Past by Tessa Hadley   

I love Hadley's writing, and so I should as she was one of my mentors on the MA in creative  writing at Bath Spa University. Each of her novels allows for a steady and subtle exploration of very ordinary people…albeit mostly middle class ordinary people…who hardly know, at the start of the stories, what hidden depths they actually possess. In The Past, a family of four siblings arrive at their dilapidated family home, to talk about selling it.  There’s a lot of them in this former rectory, but they squeeze in and proceed to do anything but talk about selling the house. The teenagers make love, the unwelcome new in-law makes a friend of one of the three sisters. Another sister tries to face up to what she thinks is her failed life and the third has no idea what her two children are up to…they have found a dead dog in a ruined cottage…and they know who it once belonged to. As we move towards the climax, there is attempted suicide by a deep river and a devastating fire. Nobody dies, but as the past is revived, everyone changes.                

The Little Red Books by Edna O'Brien.
This book has been feted by the literati and reviewers world wide, and rightly too. It has a mythical feel from the start, but is overlaid with comedy, tragedy, horror, history and realism. It has a wide panorama which starts in a tiny village in Ireland Cloonoila, , with its priest, its nuns, its housewives and its gossipy pub and posh hotel. But it spreads out, to Bosnia, London and finally to the Haig, where the Bosnian war criminal, Dr. Vladimir Dragan, based on Radovan Karadžić. It has wide-ranging themes, but the most clearly portrayed is that of exile; immigration and asylum, focusing first on the workers at the posh hotel, one of whom, soon recognise Dr Vlad and is terrified. Through the story walks Fidelma, the draper's wife, who falls badly for the sexy Vlad, and hopes he will give her the child she's failed to have with her weary husband. She get pregnant, Vlad gets arrested, she gets bloodily attacked by his Serbian followers. Some of this book is shockingly hard to read, and it's as though, at eight-five, O'Brien has decided to pull out all the stops, employing many styles of writing and many structures of plotting. The book is full of interiors, with a lot of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, as well as a lot of pulling-back from close narrative perspectives, so that we feel as if we are soaring over countries to see violence, disregard, and strong ethical actions in equal measure across Europe. This is a must-read for anyone who loves books that really want to tell you something about our world, and are not afraid to do so.