BELOW ARE ALL MY REVIEWS OF BOOKS I'VE RECENTLY READ
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We start with the 2024 Booker shortlist
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| the LongList |
I have read nine of the books chosen to be judged. And of those 6 didn't make it to the shortlist. For each book I've read, I've marked it with five possible points. Not sure how the judges do it, but I worked like this;
ONE POINT for the crafts of writing; dramatic tension, pace, light and shade and mood, structure choice of Point of View, appropriate imagery
ONE POINT for the narrative voice and its arc.
ONE POINT for characterisation; did I fall in love (or hate!) with the characters?
ONE POINT for creativity
ONE POINT for sheer brilliance
The Longlist - these are the books that didn't make it to the shortlist. |
In Acenstion Martin MacInnes FOUR POINTS The House of Doors. by Tan Than Eng FOUR POINTS All the Little Bird-Hearts FOUR POINTS Pearl by Siân Hughes TWO POINTS How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney THREE POINTS Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry TWO POINTS A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. THREE POINTS |
The Shortlist - these are the books that are up for tonight's prize
The Bee Sting THREE POINTS Western Lane THREE POINTS Prophet Song FOUR AND A HALF POINTS This Other Eden FOUR POINTS If I Survive You sadly, not read Study for Obedience THREE POINTS |
All the Little Bird-Hearts was another favourite of mine, especially after receiving an unnecessarily vitriolic review in the Sunday Times Culture supplement, which seemed to be suggesting a book with the theme of an autistic woman, writing by a woman with autism, would not be worth reading, let alone judging. I loved it –– it was original and inventive, heart-warming with a strong narrative voice, a very enjoyable plot and a charming outcome.
But neither of these had the 'sheer brilliance' that is needed to win the booker. Neither, I feel has any of the books I've read from the shortlist. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein was very creative and cleverly written and for those reasons has 'Booker' painted all over it, but it rather left me cold. I didn't fall in love with the unnamed narrator, and didn't thank the author for offering little, if any dialogue. Pearl by Siân Hughes, is beautifully crafted and I'm glad it had its longest moment, but there is one book that really should have moved forward and didn't.
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes was described by The Guardian as 'a cosmic wonder'. The review went on....MacInnes evokes a spread of human intimacies, simultaneously capturing them in the largest possible contexts.... I was captivated by the enormous story that this long book contains as it moves from Northern Europe and an unhappy childhood to the deepest trenches of the ocean, to quest for further space travel to to darkest reaches of the solar system. I was amazed that I kept loving this book as I am usually left cold by 'Sci Fi', but although this novel fulfils the themes of that genre, it is also warm and atmospheric, richly described, full of humanity and humility, detailed, yet amazingly profound.
Western Lane, a story about a bereaved family is almost slender enough to be called a novella, and on finishing it I felt this book would have benefitted from a more rounded approach; the main character was the youngest of three sisters, all, having just lost their mother. If we'd seen what the other sisters were thinking and feeling, as well, this might have recommended itself to me a little more.
This Other Eden, by Paul Harding is skilfully written, with strong characters and great narrative drive, and is extremely imaginative, with it's Apple Island setting, but I honestly don't think it should have that final point, for sheer brilliance, what the Booker describes as 'the outstanding book of its year'.
The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray, the story of the deteriorating lives of an Irish family which starts off in an extremely entertaining and readable manner, but I needed stamina to get to the end.
And the winner is:
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
The Booker website described the winning novel as a ‘triumph of emotional storytelling; a crucial book for our current times’.
The author received £50,000 (which he ays he'll spend on paying off his mortgagee!) The event was hosted by Samira Ahmed and Lynxg was presented with his trophy by Shehan Karunatilaka, the 2022 winner.
Heralded in one review as Prophet Song captures some of the biggest social and political anxieties of our age, from the rise of political extremism to the global plight of refugees
Paul Lynch said of the book, ‘Prophet Song is partly an attempt at radical empathy. I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves’
I fully endorse the judges decision, and that in itself surprised me! I loved this story. I read it in a couple of sittings (it's not terribly long, and totally compelling). The story is of 'our time' but is also timeless; I've seen this story in 1940 movies, in South American movies, in Kafka stories, in Russian stories. It's that story of very normal people; a very normal Irish family who are swept up somehow in the country's move to far-right authoritarian extremism. As tyranny takes over the usually peaceful, liberal politics, the father disappears into jail, along with thousands of others, and his wife, with two teenagers, a younger boy and a baby, is left to make sense of what is happening.
It's a disturbing novel, one that needed to be written here in the northwest of Europe, but I found it problematic to read in bed, as the words insidiously creep into my dreams.
My points system worked well for this book;
ONE POINT: especially for the way he builds tension in the story
ONE POINT for the compelling narrative voice and its arc.
ONE POINT for characterisation; I was terrified for the characters!
ONE POINT for creativity
HALF A POINT for sheer brilliance
Lynch was one of four Irish writers to make this year’s longlist and he's the sixth Irish author to win the Booker Prize, after Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright and Anna Burns.
In the keynote speech of the evening, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, described the ways in which books had saved her when she was in solitary confinement in Tehran.
You can watch the event on YouTube, featuring interviews with special guests.
It’s not often I get to the end a book and burst into tears. So what made me cry, and cry again, as I turned the last few pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land?
I think it’s to do with tension released. We’ve walked dangerous pathways with the five main characters in this book by Anthony Doerr (author of All the Light we Cannot See) – a tightrope journey over ravines full of spikes – and the knowledge that all of them, in their way, will reach an amazing, a perfect conclusion to their journeys led me to gush with tears of joy and sadness.
The Guardian describes this book as ‘a deep lungful of fresh air’ and the Washington Post as ‘a love letter to books’.
We all know what we mean by this fantasy place; it's an over-optimistic, idealistic state of mind where everything appears to be perfect. Someone in cloud cuckoo land believes that impossibly good things might happen and seems unaware of realities.
And so the overlaps, the convolutions, the 'stealing of stories' adds to the complexities of this story, and echoed through the real history, real early literature. Doerr capitalises on this to create a complicated and wide-reaching novel that touches on precisely what being human is all about.
Anna and Omeir are teenagers living in the 15th-century. Omeir is a farm worker with a cleft lip. His two beloved oxen, Moonlight and Tree, are dragooned by the Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror. His great army is on its way to lay siege to Constantinople, where Anna lives, an orphan with a dying sister who spends long days doing needlework for the church. Someone teaches Anna to read Greek, and so, when a manuscript written more than a thousand years earlier comes into her hands (she is stealing from a water-logged tower library to help pay for her sister to have quack treatment) she is able to decipher it as the fantasy of Cloud Cuckoo Land. After her sister dies, Ann flees the city as it falls, taking the precious, seemingly magical, book with her. She meets Omeir, also fleeing from conscription after the death of his oxen. They return to Omeir’s farm where they live out their lives together.
Zeno, a veteran of the Korean war, learned ancient Greek from Max, a fellow prisoner of war, a man he falls deeply, unrequitedly, in love with. After Alex’s death, he learns that Cloud Cuckoo Land, discovered in Italy, is being put up, codex by codex, on the internet. He begins to translate it into English. By 2020, we find him, now an elderly man, putting on a play based on the book, working with enthusiastic local children
In the same place and time – Lakeport, Idaho, 2020 – we meet Seymour, a teenager bullied and distressed by his neuro-diversity, He has become obsessed with the losses of the natural world to climate change and is groomed by an internet climate terrorist. He enters the library where Zeno is holding his dress rehearsal for Cloud Cuckoo Land, bringing a backpack full of explosives and with him.
Konstance is equally young as Anna, Omeir and Seymour. She is a passenger on the Argos, a spaceship which left the Earth 65 years before with the parents and grandparents of its passengers. They are headed to a new, healthy planet, to form a new colony after global devastation has decimated the Earth. Konstance spends a lot of time in the library that exists digitally inside Sybil, the computer. By walking a treadmill, clearly designed to keep the passengers active, she can walk an updated 'Google Earth' which not only takes you around the world, but through the ages. It is now 2146, and Konstance is now the only person still alive on board the Argos and there are hundreds of years travel ahead. How will she survive?
Reading this almost 600 page-long novel is sometimes a bit of a push. There are times when I was so terrified for the characters I hardly wanted to read on. And there are times when I wondered if Doerr actually knew where he was heading; would all these disparate stories really come together as one? There are a lot of characters and plot to keep tabs on, and if you decide to embark on this novel you might find this webpage of use; https://www.marmaladeandmustardseed.com/bookguidesblog/cloud-cuckoo-land
Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is the golden thread that stops the reader from becoming lost in this labyrinthine story. Written in ancient times, stolen from a ruined library in Constantinople, hidden in a hollow tree until Anna’s death, as I read I kept wondering how the ancient book would turn up in Italy, in ‘a place books can be safely kept’…another library…rediscovered and digitally distributed, ready for Zeno to translate.
Throughout the story, Diogenes’s book heals, keeps safe and bring joy to those that are sick, lost and troubled. And as the story ends, and the clever twists fall into place one after the other, my tears burst through with the delight of it all.
Anthony Doerr. Photograph: Deborah Hardee/The Observer
Once morning in 1654, in the city of Delft in Holland, there was a "thunderclap". That was the way the people of Delft described the explosion of a factory containing 90,000 pounds of gunpowder. Large sections of the city were devastate, and 100 people died.
When I read Donna Tartt's third novel in 2014, titled The Goldfinch, I was expecting something grand, something with an explosion at the centre of it, because her previous two novels had been acclaimed and their powerful stories were still in my mind.
on art; Thunderclap. Although the focus of this book is Fabritius and his works, she also looks at her own approach to art, as an art critic. She says, 'We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence…' I wonder if that is also true of fiction; certainly, a school of literature theory suggests that works can only be judged though the eyes of the reader, who brings their own emotional smörgåsbord to the interpretation.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Booker website described the winning novel as a ‘triumph of emotional storytelling; a crucial book for our current times’.
Perhaps one of the stand-out techniques Lynch uses is his disregard for paragraphs. He dispenses with them entirely, so that streams of dialogue run along lines, until we finally get to the end of that section of prose. It's a risky devise, but he pulls it off because, like the story itself, the layout continually prevents you even taking a breath.
Carole Fabritius was among them, and that may be why so few people have heard of this artist, who had been a pupil of Rembrandt, and, before he reached his thirties, was already an acclaimed painter of the Dutch school. He left a sadly small portfolio of work, and it's clear might have gone on to paint so much more, if he had survived the blast.
One of his most beloved works is also one of the most upsetting, from the viewpoint of an animal lover; The Goldfinch. Just 9X13 inches, and possibly as a trompe d'oeil and perhaps a clever part of a window shutter, it is beautifully rendered. A small songbird sits on its perch, staring out at the viewer. Every feather is a perfect rendering. And the little gold chain that prevents the bird from seeking its freedom is lost in shadow, you have to peer closely to see that the goldfinch is a captive. It was sitting in Fabritius's workroom, almost next door to the factory, when the blast destroyed almost everything there, including the artist himself.
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| Donna Tartt launching The Goldfinch in Amsterdam . Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty Images |
She certainly offered an explosion; moments after the story begins, a bomb blows out the New York's Metropolitan Museum. 14 year old Theo Decker is in one section, his mother elsewhere. She is killed by the blast. As Theo tries to extricate himself from the wreckage, a dying man tells him to take the small, framed picture lying in the dust. He thinks to take to his mother for safekeeping and finds his way home; she never arrives. From then on, The Goldfinch, with its imploring theme of captive beauty, is his guilty secret, and a physical connection to his mother. It becomes something he can't bear to be rid of but something he cannot admit he possesses.
How fittingly linked these two stories are. The fiction of a boy who walked out of an explosion with the painting of an artist who died in an explosion. The Goldfinch, painted in the year of Fabricius's death, was one of only about 12 of his paintings to have survived the tragic explosion, and in Tartt's story, it survives again, albeit in a setting it has never traveled to; it's hung in The Haig.
I was reminded of The Goldfinch when I read Laura Cumming's latest book
Certainly, I began reading The Goldfinch knowing nothing about the painting, or having even heard of Carel Fabritius, but I devoured this long book; it reminded me of Dickens in its complexity and with its whirlwind of amazing characters, and its 'cause and effect' plotting – the dying man who tells Theo to take the painting is guardian to a young girl named Pippa, who was also in the museum when the bomb exploded, and is the only person who Theo feels can understand his heart, as they both lost someone dear in the explosion. Their lives will collide and separate, repeatedly, throughout the book.
And yet, Tartt told The Telegraph, shortly after publishing the book that she hadn't even known about the Delft Thunderclap when she wrote it. She said. 'The the first time I saw it, I connected very strongly with it. This little bird, so brave and so dignified, and then you see that terrible little chain…' She was simply looking for the right painting, that would be small enough to carry and would appeal to a child.
The rôle of synchronicity in creating a novel can make one gasp. For, if Tartt didn't know much about Fabritius’ death when she chose the painting, why is her central character called Theo Decker? Because at the time of his death Fabritius was painting the portrait of a church deacon named Simon Decker.
Writing is full of such coincidence, as Tartt admits:
'It all fit together in ways I could never have imagined. When coincidences like that start happening you know the muses are at your side. ”
It's good to know that when such amazing moments occur, the writer should grasp them with both hands.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
I admit it; I'd never read a Maggie O'Farrell novel. That has certainly had a turnaround.
O'Farrell doesn't write historical novels as a rule, but this is set around the time that Shakespeare's son, Hamnet dies at the age of 11. Four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, changing only one letter of his son's name.
The Guardian says; Hamnet is quite unlike anything O'Farrell has written before. There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her prose in Hamnet that, though not obviously steeped in 16th-century language, is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly, as if the membrane between the natural and supernatural was more porous then. The depth of her research is evident on every page. Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets. They go on to add; At its heart, though, this is a book about grief, and the means by which people find their way through it.
True, but only half the story. Please note THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT SHAKESPEARE; IT'S ABOUT WOMEN. His wife, his daughters, his mother, his mother-in-law and his wife's dead natural mother. Shakespeare is not even named; he's called the Latin Tutor, the son, the husband, the father, the playwright. Agnes, who he marries when he is 19 and she is well into her twenties, is a cunning woman and herbalist, needed but slightly mistrusted by the community. We are in her head most of the time, as her daughter succumbs to the plague, and Agnes is so intent on nursing her back to health, that she fails to notice the girl's twin is slowly dying.
This is a book that will make you cry and laugh. At times, you'll be desperately turning the pages and at others you'll re-read the lyrical prose time and again. This is my book of 2020. If you don't read it, you will never know your lack.
And the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is:
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
The Booker website described the winning novel as a ‘triumph of emotional storytelling; a crucial book for our current times’.
The author received £50,000 (which he ays he'll spend on paying off his mortgagee!) The event was hosted by Samira Ahmed and Lynxg was presented with his trophy by Shehan Karunatilaka, the 2022 winner.
Heralded in one review as Prophet Song captures some of the biggest social and political anxieties of our age, from the rise of political extremism to the global plight of refugees
Paul Lynch said of the book, ‘Prophet Song is partly an attempt at radical empathy. I wanted to deepen the reader’s immersion to such a degree that by the end of the book, they would not just know, but feel this problem for themselves’
I fully endorse the judges decision, and that in itself surprised me! I loved this story. I read it in a couple of sittings (it's not terribly long, and totally compelling). The story is of 'our time' but is also timeless; I've seen this story in 1940 movies, in South American movies, in Kafka stories, in Russian stories. It's that story of very normal people; a very normal Irish family who are swept up somehow in the country's move to far-right authoritarian extremism. As tyranny takes over the usually peaceful, liberal politics, the father disappears into jail, along with thousands of others, and his wife, with two teenagers, a younger boy and a baby, is left to make sense of what is happening.
It's a disturbing novel, one that needed to be written here in the northwest of Europe, but I found it problematic to read in bed, as the words insidiously creep into my dreams.
Lynch was one of four Irish writers to make this year’s longlist and he's the sixth Irish author to win the Booker Prize, after Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright and Anna Burns.
The Longlist - these are the books that didn't make it to the shortlist. |
In Acenstion Martin MacInnes FOUR POINTS The House of Doors. by Tan Than Eng FOUR POINTS All the Little Bird-Hearts FOUR POINTS Pearl by Siân Hughes TWO POINTS How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney THREE POINTS Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry TWO POINTS A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. THREE POINTS |
The Shortlist - these are the books that are up for tonight's prize
The Bee Sting THREE POINTS
Western Lane THREE POINTS
Prophet Song FOUR AND A HALF POINTS
This Other Eden FOUR POINTS
If I Survive You sadly, not read
Study for Obedience THREE POINTS
With a record number of new authors on the list, and a high number of women writers, the Booker are justifiably proud of their longest this year, and also point out that none of the six shortlisted authors have been shortlisted before
For each book I've read, I've marked it with five possible points. Not sure how the judges do it, but I worked like this;
ONE POINT for the crafts of writing; dramatic tension, pace, light and shade and mood, structure choice of Point of View, appropriate imagery
ONE POINT for the narrative voice and its arc.
ONE POINT for characterisation; did I fall in love (or hate!) with the characters?
ONE POINT for creativity
ONE POINT for sheer brilliance
As you can see, my points system stirs up some problems. I was really sorry to see that The House of Doors. missed out on the short list. Set mostly in Malaysia around 1911, and featuring a fictional narrator who is telling the story of three historical figures, this scored highly with me for everything apart from 'sheer brilliance' and I recommend it as more accessible and enjoyable than Tan Twan Eng's previous booker longlisted novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.
All the Little Bird-Hearts was another favourite of mine, especially after receiving an unnecessarily vitriolic review in the Sunday Times Culture supplement, which seemed to be suggesting a book with the theme of an autistic woman, writing by a woman with autism, would not be worth reading, let alone judging. I loved it –– it was original and inventive, heart-warming with a strong narrative voice, a very enjoyable plot and a charming outcome.
But neither of these had the 'sheer brilliance' that is needed to win the booker. Neither, I feel has any of the books I've read from the shortlist. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein was very creative and cleverly written and for those reasons has 'Booker' painted all over it, but it rather left me cold. I didn't fall in love with the unnamed narrator, and didn't thank the author for offering little, if any dialogue. Pearl by Siân Hughes, is beautifully crafted and I'm glad it had its longest moment, but there is one book that really should have moved forward and didn't.
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes was described by The Guardian as 'a cosmic wonder'. The review went on....MacInnes evokes a spread of human intimacies, simultaneously capturing them in the largest possible contexts.... I was captivated by the enormous story that this long book contains as it moves from Northern Europe and an unhappy childhood to the deepest trenches of the ocean, to quest for further space travel to to darkest reaches of the solar system. I was amazed that I kept loving this book as I am usually left cold by 'Sci Fi', but although this novel fulfils the themes of that genre, it is also warm and atmospheric, richly described, full of humanity and humility, detailed, yet amazingly profound.
Western Lane, a story about a bereaved family is almost slender enough to be called a novella, and on finishing it I felt this book would have benefitted from a more rounded approach; the main character was the youngest of three sisters, all having just lost their mother. If we'd seen what the other sisters were thinking and feeling, as well, this might have recommended itself to me a little more.
This Other Eden, by Paul Harding is skilfully written, with strong characters and great narrative drive, and is extremely imaginative, with it's Apple Island setting, but I honestly don't think it should have that final point, for sheer brilliance, what the Booker describes as 'the outstanding book of its year'.
The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray, the story of the deteriorating lives of an Irish family which starts off in an extremely entertaining and readable manner, but I needed stamina to get to the end.
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| the LongList |
I've just finished a marvellous novel called Still Life, by Sarah Winman. In its 400+ pages, we visit Florence in the Second World War, post-war London, and Florence during the flood of 1966 and Europe at the start of the 20th century. Moving between these real events are a wide cast of characters, most of them allowing life to take them where it will, and land them wherever it pleases. In The New York Times, the main character, Ulysses Temper is described as 'a searching, wandering protagonist' but it's not just 'Temp' that wanders; the entire story behaves like a river journey. As I reached the final pages, I began to ask, 'what did Winman want to say in this novel?' The Kirkus Review notes this is ''the story of their friendship, though it is also a story of the creation of a family of friends', New York Times suggests, Does Life Imitate Art or Is It the Other Way Around? and the Independent says it is an 'exquisite testament to life, love and art.
Fair points, the story is all about the art of Florence and 'odd families' especially. But thinking about the characters, I've decided that what Winman especially wanted to say is: Ordinary People are Really Extraordinary. 
The story, then is a winding route, just like a river. I loved it but immediately thought; 'I don't write like this; I couldn't plot like this'. I'm a bit of a plot junkie; Winman is clearly a 'characterphile'. (I created these terms to describe different 'kinds' of plotter; you can read about them here.) 
Louise Doughty makes a similar point in her article, Taking a Line for a Walk (Mslexia No 99). 'My most recent book', she says, 'arrived – like Apple Tree Yard and Platform Seven before it – with a strong visual image'. She then takes that image 'for a walk', asking questions of it, until she has a scene, 'followed by a scene showing what happens next on the journey...until I worked it out, some 100,000 words later.'
Clio, the Muse of history
Ulysses is a young soldier in the Allied advance in Italy in 1944 where he works with Evelyn Skinner, a 64-year-old art historian. They form a friendship bond which remain after their paths diverge, But while he's in Florence, Ulysses 'talks down' an elderly gentleman who had decided to take his own life. They go back to the man's lavish but lonely apartment, and again, a bond is formed. Meanwhile in London his soon to be ex-wife, Peg has fallen for a GI called Eddie and gives birth to a daughter she names Alys, but calls 'the kid'. Ulysses is demobbed, and goes back to working at his friend Col's pub, where Claude the blue parrot is a tavern talking point but hated by Col. The post-war decade moves on, and the novel meanders through many a story, until Ulysses hears that the person who's life he saved has bequeathed him his large apartment. He decides to go back to Florence, and asks his old mate Cress to come with him. Peg, who still yearns for Eddie and is not a good mother to Alys, persuades Temps to take 'the kid'. Cress secretes the unhappy Claude into a bag and off they all go, to live in Italy. They convert some of the inheritance into a thriving pensione. Alys soaks up the Italian life as she grows into a woman and Cress, who was able to communicate with trees in London, can also communicate with trees in Italy.
Throughout the next three decades, Ulysses continues to love Peg, Peg continues to dream of Eddie, Cress finds Italian love in his golden years, and Alys finds love with another teen girl. Ulysses goes back to creating globes of the world, and in this way, is crazily linked back to Evelyn, who keeps an eye open for her old war friend, but constantly misses him until, one day, they find themselves all together; now a largish group of young and old, English and Italian.
When I start a book, I'm usually inspired by landscape, my first point of inspiration. In my Shaman Mystery series a walk, years ago, through the Somerset Levels, sparked my interest in the area, followed by a distant, then closer, then close view of the Hinkley Power Station, which is featured in On the Gallows. Landscapes do it for me, but there are many other starting points.
This is a great way to write a novel if you are a 'characterphile'. If however you are a 'plot junkie' the idea might fill you with horror! What, no chapter by chapter outline, no timeline, to plot points to lead you on? I'm a plot junkie, but I'm quite tempted to have a go at this meandering method, the next time such an image, or landscape, enters my mind. Or, as happened this time to Doughty, a line comes to you, out of the blue. The same questions can be asked of this line or phrase or sentence, the same walk take, until, chapter upon chapter, you find an answer.
Doughty talks about how the 'synapses in your brain are prompted to join up by something'. She doesn't go on to say what that 'something' is, but I would suggest we go back to the Ancient Greeks, who personified the inspirations that arise from intuition, or 'synapses' if you like, as Muses. The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory, the Muses prompt those they visit to remember what they have forgotten. Muses with a special affinity for writers are:
Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry
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| courtesy of Wikipedia |
Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry
Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy
Erato, the Muse of love poetry
Polyhymnia, the Muse of sacred poetry, and
Thalia, the Muse of comedy
Sadly, there isn't a Muse for short stories, as these weren't around in ancient Greece. Their stories were narrated orally, or dramatically, and poetry was used in both forms, especially as it helps with memory...Mnemosyne…when retelling a story!
Like Doughty, one should never sit around and wait for a muse to visit, in the hope she'll just 'show up'. She should be seduced to come to you. Doughty had gone to Amsterdam, 'wandering around the city for a week...with an empty notebook...' in the hope that she would 'encounter my next book'. She was seducing her Muse, and finally, was obliged. 'What do you do when you're in the tase of creativity that I might as well call 'pre-technique', where all your struggles for plot construction or character development are useless because you don't have the foggiest idea what you book is about?' Suddenly a line came to Doughty. The opening line to a story she didn't yet know. The Muse had descended. She could begin.
It seems a bit extreme to visit a different country in order to find your Muse, but you should be on the alert at all times. When your muse pops in every so often to drop a story idea on you, sit up and pay attention.
When you have a story idea, write it down in a journal or notebook. You can't write every story right away, so put it in the pickling juice and go on. Also remember the wonderful 'Muse-filled' Miscellany File, or Commonplace Book, which I talk about here. Read, look through your ideas from time to time, crossing out the ones that have lost their muster. Also cross out the ones that seem too cumbersome. Keep the simple ideas and the ones that give you chills in your spine. Maintain this practice and you'll find that you always have a few good story ideas in the queue.
George Eliot; Middlemarch
Eliot subtly yet penetratingly delves into the the minds of the many main characters; their hopes, their fears, their failings. I visualised this huge cast of perfectly ordinary provincial townspeople as they rode or walked its streets and byways and went in and out of town houses, cottages and the country mansions that were satellites around the town.Read the blogpost in full here
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Creating the voice of characters who feel realistic, authentic and engrossing is one of the most difficult parts of writing. My latest blogpost for the OPEN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS blogsite looks my favourite Barbara Kingsolver novel, The Poisonwood Bible, where she creates five independent and distinctive voices. Each female member of the Price family narrates their version of this story. The magic trick Kingsolver achieves as a writer is to make their voices entirely original and independent of each other. When I read the book, this was the remarkable thing that struck me hardest. It was as if Kingsolver truly knew the five women whose stories she will tell. You can read the blog post here; https://www.oca-student.com/weareoca/creating-great-character-voices-barbara-kingsolver’s-poisonwood-bible
In the summer of 1959, the Price family carry everything they need on a lumbering plane and fly to the Belgian Congo to take up a missionary post in a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River. The Poisonwood Bible, (1988), follows three decades of their lives in postcolonial Africa. Barbara Kingsolver spent time in the Congo as a small girl "We were there just after independence, but I had no idea of the political intrigue of that era," she says. Read the blogpost in full here
One of the ways #blacklivesmatter wants to help bring equality and justice to black and minority ethnic people (and children) is by educating those who have never had to think about their role in the Western World. They’ve put out a call for everyone to better understand the experiences of black people and through that make their own contribution to proactively changing the society they live in.
The Hate U Give
The story of an invisible child, by Julia North. Modetse is brainwashed when conscripted ito the horror of the Resistance Army at 11 years old. What chance can Modetse ever have of truly finding himself again, or rescuing his little sister Thandi?
The Last Runaway
On July 1st, my story of two thirteen year-olds who get caught up in racial bullying is release on Kindle; you can pre-order now.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive.
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| Maggie O'Farrell |
So begins Robert Brownings poem about Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrata.
She was just sixteen when she died, reportedly of putrid fever, just one year of she was married and had been married for one year to Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrata. This true story was the inspiration for Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel.
I loved her last novel Hamnet so much – you can find my short review here; https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-womans-prize-longlist-is-ready-for.html – but after winning acclaim and prizes for this story about the death of Will Shakespeare's son, I approached the new book in some trepidation, because, honestly, how could any writer achieve something as good as that a second time round? Okay, O'Harrell has been writing for years, and was recently feted for her autobiography, I am, I am, but I've known novelists stymied after achieving their greatest book yet. Hamnet was sensitively and beautifully and robustly written, andO'Farrell addressed this hidden story of Shakespeare's life with originality and vigour
The Marriage Portrait is also a forgotten story, but thanks to Robert Browning (and the dust jacket, of course), 'the reader begins the book already knowing the central character will die by the end of it. Even if they haven't reads poem, or the blurb, the first paragraph the first chapter makes this plain. Sixteen year old Lucrezia sits across the dining table from her husband, and sudden realises she is doomed.
…it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some colour glass has been moved from in front her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.
Lucrezia has been taken by her husband to a remote hunting lodge. No maid, no friends, just the two of them together. Very soon the the great painter, Il Bastianino, and his apprentices, will arrive, bringing the finished marriage portrait with them. Lucrezia is a painter of immense skill herself, but of course, she is also a 16th Century duchess, and will never have her work hung, sold, or even much admired. She is just a girl, and her only job is to supply her husband with sons. What she doesn't know is that, after her death, two further wives will also be unable to do that job, just as she, after a year of marriage, has not – Alfonso is unable to have children.
This book cleverly mixes fiction with fact. Yes, Lucrezia did die, supposedly of a fever, in 1661, and perhaps we would have forgotten her but for Browning's poem. Regal ladies did have a terrible habit of dying young, especially if they displeased their husbands; Lucrezia's sister Isabella died, perhaps of strangling, just days after her cousin, Dianora died mysteriously at a villa in the Italian countryside.
The book opens only days before the murder, but then moves back and forth in time, weaving the previous story. We see Lucrezia's conception, her birth, and her childhood as the third daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. We watch her grow, into a girl with huge spirit, a lover of animals and a blossoming artist – her parents allowed her to take lessons from the same grand artists as her brothers.
O'Farrell represents Lucrezia's life, both as a child, locked away inside Florence's grandest Palazzo, guarded by guards and maids-in-waiting, and her year as Olfonso's wife, at his court in Ferrata, where her freedoms are just as thwarted and dangerous politics swirl about, only half understood by the teenager.
You may find, if you look at some of the reviews of this book, that some readers have found it wanting. The Guardian's Johanna Thomas-Corr comments on the present tense, which can become a bit wearing, I agree, but also thinks the book is:
"not nearly as horribly gripping as it ought to be, partly as O’Farrell refuses to say in one image what she can do in three…too much hospitality is shown to Lucrezia’s dreams…the symbolism of men as hunters, women as prey soon becomes overwrought."
Luckily, I read the book before I read the review, or I might have never bought this
beautifully crafted hardback edition. I beg to differ; the prose is steady and magnificent, and any repetition feels naturally how Lucrezia might feel and think five hundred years ago. The screws of tension begin to turn as the portrait is painted; Lucrezia meets Jacopo, the mute apprentice to
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| The only actual portrait of Lucrezia, at the age of 13 |
Il Bastianino, and they quickly form a deep attachment. Steadily, a possible way of escape is build into the story – but, how can Lucrezia take it? In history, she dies, trapped at the hunting lodge. In the fiction…well, you'll have to read the story to find out.
Not only is there fiction in this novel, though. Robert Browning's poem (you can find it here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess) only imagines a marriage portrait; in reality the only painting of Lucrezia was commissioned by her parents, when she was betrothed to Alfonso – with a dowry, it is said, of £50 million in today's currency.
This was Angie Thomas’ 2017 debut novel, which, for all you hopeful writers out there, began as a story she wrote in college over the police shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009.Starr, a 16-year-old black girl who has a place at an elite school, witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. What should she do with this experience? Will speaking up change anything? I devoured this book; it's a gripping and emotional read, whatever your age.
The Underground Railroad
This Pulitzer Prize winer is about Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation, and an outcast even among her fellow Africans. She learns about the Underground railroad and makes a bid for freedom. Colston Whitehead’s story is multilayered, describing the secret network of tracks and tunnels used for escape, and every stop along the way to the North offers more risk and terror.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
Published last year, Sara Collin’s story moves from the plantations of Jamaica to the drawing rooms of London. One of my favourite books this year, it's a beautiful and haunting tale.
Lieutenant Hotshot
The Last RunawayTracy Chevalier is the author of 10 novels, including the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has sold over 5 million copies and been made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. In The Last Runaway, Honor Bright, a quaker, emigrates from England to Ohio in the 1850s. She gets involved in helping runaway slaves trying to reach Canada, help that can result in fines, jail, or even losing her husband's property.
The Help
I read this book by Kathy Stockett shortly after it was released; since then it's become a film. Read or view to learn more about the American Deep South in the sixties, following the stories of two black maids, MInnie and Aibileen, and the white university graduate, Skeeter, who wants to help broadcast the injustice of their lives to the world.
Just My Luck
Three stories merge; Helen was going through her grandmother's things when she begins to wonder if she has a link to Jake Silver, a slave boy brought to England from the West Indies in the late 18th century. Meanwhile how can Brandon overcome his fears about the gang who has threatened him and tell his story to the police?
With an upbeat and fast-paced style, a quest to solve and hard-hitting storyline, Just My Luck will appeal to a wide audience – grown-ups and young readers alike – especially for its historical content and in tackling the subject of racial violence in the 21st century head-on.
Kindle released on 1st July; paperback version available
MILKMAN by Anna Burns
Anna Burns, an Irish writer has produced a clever and absorbing book about 'the troubles'. Set, perhaps, in the 1990s, and located, perhaps in a Northern Irish town locked in sectarian dispute, it's about an 18-year-old girl who is pursued…stalked, almost… by a member of the IRA looking for a bit of eye candy for his arm. There's hardly any violence described, and yet the atmosphere is heavy with the idea of violence and death. I loved it, and fully recommend it, but it would be an easy book to skim read, being rather dense and there are only six chapter over its 350 pages). None of the characters are referred to by their real names...our protagonist is 'middle sister', a previously rejected boy as 'Somebody MacSomebody, and her lover as 'almost boyfriend' But it deserves to be read slowly, with thought. It's subtle, but under its skin there is clarity.. What it tells you about the troubles, are the things no news report could tell you. Don't take my word for this, though. Here's Claire Kilroy in The Guardian… Milkman calls to mind several seminal works of Irish literature. In its digressive, batty narrative voice, it resembles a novel cited by the narrator: Tristram Shandy. It is Beckettian in its ability to trace the logical within the absurd.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve-plus characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. This is a worthy book, Each story is wonderful, each a vibrant account of women’s lives, taking stories in the past and following them through the decades, presenting a diverse spectrum of mostly, but not inclusively, the lives off black women in Britain and the US.
This story uses polyphony, a writing technique in which many perspectives tell the story. This creates a book that feels like a choral work (alto, mezzo and soprano only, of course), allowing layers of contradiction, similarity and identification. This means Evaristo can create a nuanced and complex narrative, but one where we move quickly, with a feeling of overall control, through time and space and people’s lives. To give her story about so many women a seamless feel, Evaristo choses an interesting device within her narration, in that she uses no full stops; I thought I would find this off putting, but instead of the normal convention of sentences and paragraphs, she simply breaks off wherever she wants to…Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the…
…and then takes off again in the same breath. In my head, I put punctuation in these gaps and that worked for me.
Because of what she wanted to achieve, Everisto went for a lot of exposition. Exposition is a literary device used to introduce information about events, settings, characters, or other elements of a work. A certain amount of exposition is crucial to any story, but using too much can dull the feel of the narrative. Exposition can get you from one time and place to another through a wormhole (like the passage above does), but it means that Everisto is frequently telling, rather than showing the story of so many women through the 20th century and into the 21st. I loved what she was trying to do, and loved the characters; they are massive, full of life and fight, and the subject matter is important and well realised, but I struggled with the narrative voice, which at certain points, left me cold as we fast-forwarded time and again.
by Benjamin Wood (Scribiner London 2018)
I’ve been wanting to read the newish kid on the block for sometime. I’d noticed him when he was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award in 2012, with his debut, The Bellwether Revivals, but, like a lot of short-listed stuff, I never got the book. Then in 2014 his second novel, The Ecliptic, came out to acclaim and he was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Novelist of the Year Award, and described by them by ‘a writer to watch'. In his early forties, he’s moved from the north-west of England to the south-east, where he lives with his family. He teaches at King’s College London.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better came out two years ago and I’ve had his name on my ‘must read’ list since reading the review. But it was only after the libraries came out of lockdown that he arrived in a pile of ordered books, in hardback, and I opened it with relish, and enthusiasm. 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 boys assent into manhood, where he learnt the facts of growing up when he took a trip in1995 with his estranged father. Daniel’s father, Francis Hardesty (a fantastically pertinent family name), is described on the opening page (pg 3) by his son, ‘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, but I didn’t catch on that quickly. It was at the end of the chapter, where Wood takes a huge risk in the writing and breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… I read the words that end chapter one; 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. (pg 14)
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 and behind this is the allure of those earlier words. I still couldn’t see just why he’d never see his Mum again. Okay, Fran Hardesty was clearly a liar, and a cheapskate; he’d cancelled the nice hotel Daniel’s Mum had made him promise to book, and now Dan’s sleeping above a pub, while his dad has sex with a singer in the ensuite. Okay, he’s promised Dan a trip to somewhere special and it’s becoming clear this isn’t going well. Okay, we can see that Fran is someone who hates being backed into a corner where he might have to admit a failing.
As they travel, we see the landscape develop. They’re heading towards the Lake District, but as the story moves through this beautiful landscape, it becomes a place of blood and terror. In Fran’s presence, it’s beauty is replaced by a ragged, tattered, chaotic, menacing. The seedy pub, the rusty gates, the cluttered interior of the Volvo’s boot.
Fran sucks his friend, QC, and an ex-girlfriend, Chloe, into his deceit and Dan has to watch – finally duct-taped to the carseat, as his father’s anger heats into rage and violence.
No one is going to survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands.
This is the sort of book that, as you put it down at the end of a chapter, you’re panting. And, until you pick it up again, you’re constantly haunted by the story. It became woven into my brain. If I could have helped Dan, if I could have shouted at him ‘run, Daniel, run!’ I would have. Outloud, across my bedroom. The entire scenario was so real, I was there inside it the nightmare.
Throughout the book we hear extracts from a children’s novel called The Artifex Appears, a science fantasy which became a popular kid’s TV programme, staring Maxine Laidlaw. Dan listens to the cassette, read by Maxine, as they travel north towards the TV studio, where Dan’s been promised a look around the set and the chance to meet the stars. Fran works for the studio, he says, painting scenery. I think the story of the Artifix was the hardest part for me to gel with in this dramatic and, finally, nail-biting novel. I wanted to know how it could fit, this story of a young boy who suffers an asthma attack in a forest and is rescued by alien who appears like a batty old women using alien words and cooking strange potions. She’s sure Albert is from her planet, because normally people can’t see or hear her, and Albert can do both. As Dan and Fran get closer and closer to the TV studio, I started wondering what this had to do with their story – I searched my mind for a link that was symbolic of the horror Dan will experience. And then that horror is over, the story told, but we’re still more than 50 pages away from the end. This is where we learn what happened to Dan after the events of that weekend. He’s thrown himself into his studies, gone to LSE, ended up on Wall Street, loves a girl who understands him, marries her. But he’s not whole. He drugs his nights up with sleeping tablets, he’s cold with other people and too wedded to his job. And one day he gets into a fight and feels his father’s rage inside him.
And that’s when I realised how the symbolism of The Artifex works in this novel. Daniel has become alien to the world he's living in. He is Albert, walking through the normal world after experiencing a totally different, frightening, scarring perspective on it. At the end of the novel, Dan is trying to become healed from his trauma and we learn just why he’s telling us this story – a story that will remain with me for a long time.
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
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| Angie Cruz. Photograph: ©Erika Morillo/The Shipman Agency |
‘My sweet, hollow Dominicana will keep all my secrets,’ whispers Ana Canción, trapped in the Washington Heights apartment of her husband. Seventeen years her senior, Juan Ruiz is a cruel and mean man, stealing her away from her family in the Dominican Republic with the promise that she will receive a New York education and her family’ll get Green Cards.
Then one day, Ruiz has to go away, and leaves his brother to keep an eye on his prisoner wife. César has no interest in being cruel or mean. He takes Ana to Coney Island and the Audubon Ballroom. He helps her find a job. She hides her wages inside Dominicana, a hollow ceramic doll that, in an ominous symbolism of her own entrapment, has neither eyes nor mouth.
Cruzl was apparently inspired to write this third novel after learning about her own mother’s past. Her mother was skeptical that such a book would work. ‘Who would be interested in a story about a woman like me? It’s so typical.’ Ana echoes this disbarring approach. ‘Nobody cares about us,' she tells César. He gives her pen and paper and tells her to write her story.
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
We’ve waited a long time for this final instalment; already the two other books in this series have become a historic drama on television…and the series is already historic in itself. I loved Wolf Halland Bring up the Bodies. I'm enamoured of the way Mantel approaches her subject…both the man, Thomas Cromwell, born of a cruel blacksmith, but rising to run Henry VIIIth's England––and the period, the way we see intimately into the Tudor Court. Her imagining of this time is supported by wonderful use of muscular language… Katherine’s miscarried children, their blind faces and their vestigial hands joined in prayer…and she gets right under the skin of the characters, so that we feel we know them intimately. showing Cromwell as…soiled in life’s battle, so seamed and scarred, so unwanted, so cold.Before Mantel, it could be said that Cromwell wasthe most disliked, possiblyone of the most hated man in the history of our land, along with King John and Jack the Ripper. But she humanises him, as a man who loved his dead wife and wants the best for his children, a man with a sense of humour and a great intellect. She doesn’t sentimentalise his life, but she does show him in this last of the trilogy as rather haunted. He’s appointed to the Privy Council and immediately, his enemies begin to circle him like wolves, until the rumours have him thrown in the Tower, and the man who was responsible for so much torture becomes the interrogated.
What a trilogy to have written! Mantel has shown a mirror and a light to a shadowy figure from a dark past and I ended up feeling as if I knew him well.
| The Beekeeper of Alepo by Christy Lefteri Novelist Christy Lefteri, herself a child of Cypriot refugees, volunteered in a Greek refugee center 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 JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR MORRELL by Susanna Clarke Novels sometimes grow out of short stories. In a previous blog, I talked about Jonathan Strange and Mr Morrell the 900 page fantasy that only got noticed after its author, Susanna Clarke, had a short story published. Click on the link to read more about my adventures. I’d been gifted the very beautiful hardback copy of this book, with it’s slightly Art Deco cover depicting Nice on the Cote D’Azure, and it’s black front and back pages. It had been left in a ‘book swap’ outside the village hall, but I knew it’s genesis would be my friends from just down the lanes, as they are avid readers of quality modern fiction. I put it in my bag because I’d 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 both of those. I knew I would not be able to put this book down from the moment I read the blurb on the flyleaf. 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. As Rosa, the social worker, says to Noah on the phone, there’s no where for him to go, except into care, although, when they both visit Amber in prison, other words are used. ‘”Are you going to apprehend Michael?’ A weirdly formal verb, Noah thought. ”I hope we won’t have to consider removal,” Rosa Figueroa told her. Another strange word, removal, he thought; like transporting a corpse. Of course Noah is talked into taking Michael, 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 full of swearwords Noah didn’t know even existed. Arriving in Nice, Noah is jet-lagged and out of his depth in a parenting role. Michael is in culture shock, especially over French food. 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 even its 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. What they discover throws them back into the horrors of the Vichy government and the Italian, then German, invasion of the Riviera, and to his mother’s part in all this. Was she spying on her own kind? Had she infiltrated the resistance? Or had she been captured, tortured and broken by the Gestapo for her own desperately dangerous role behind enemy lines? Their hunt for the past pulls them closer together, and Noah begins to doubt the truth behind the series of events that killed his nephew and put Amber in jail. As they fly home, he reveals to Michael his plan to get to the bottom of what happened, and try to get Amber out of jail. ‘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 is 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. (Pg 333/4) | ||
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
I’ve read many stories that reinvent Troy and the Trojan war; it's a fascinating subject, considered both fact and myth. Recently, I read Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. She takes the viewpoint of Briseis, one of the camp-girls of the Greeks, raped regularly when they weren't cookinig and cleaning. I thought Briseis a great narrator, and if Barker had stayed in her point of view, I would have loved this book. But Barker couldn't resist going into the male viewpoint, so that we can be on the battlefield and in the tents of the generals. Barker forgot she wanted to tell the silence of those girls, and instead decided to tell the story of the entire battle. A mistake, which spoilt this book for me.
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| Natalie Haynes; Photograph credit James Betts https://www.nataliehaynes.com |
A Thousand Ships is also told from an all-female perspective. Natelie Haynes is a writer, broadcaster, reviewer and classicist who was once a stand-up comic, but retired when she realised she preferred tragedy to comedy. She describes herself a feminist, and she sticks closely to the perspective of life of women in the Trojan Era. This novel gives voices to the women, who for so long have been silent. She covers not only the timespan of the Iliad, (which isn't long) or the length of the war (ten years) but extends the timeframe to show the events that led up to the Trojan War, the fall of Troy and its aftermath. One of the many characters, each with their own short chapter, is Briseis, but many of the other camp-girls also have a voice, as do stay-at-home wives like Penelope and Clytemnestra. Helen's voice is heard clear and loud, and goddesses like Calliope and Aphrodite are in here. Even Gaia gets a say.
A Thousand Ships has already been voted one of the Guardian's and TLS's 'Best Books of 2019'. It's been described as 'for fans of Barker and Miller' and I would second that. Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles', is one of my lifetime favourites, but it's all about the boys, taking the perspective of Patroclus from the moment he met Achilles as a boy to the end of Achilles' life. Starting when Patroclus is nine years old and finishing long after the Iliad finishes, Miller uses an intimate first-person present tense narrative, and fair rips along. I loved the way Miller plays with the solid classical pedigree of these Greek stories, how she builds figures that long ago became archetypal into real characters, and how she re-imagines the world of bronze-aged Greece and Turkey.
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler is my go-to comfort storyteller. You can always guarantee she'll keep you curled up on the sofa or in bed, turning the pages, desperate to go on knowing more about her marvelous, oh-so-ordinary, characters.
I was interested...a little puzzled if I were honest...about the ways she's structured this story. There are four parts, 1967, 1977, 1997 and 2017. The last part takes up over half the book, and the reason for this is that it contains ALL the story. The previous parts would have more normally be presented as flashbacks, with the story actually starting in 2017, when Willa, whose life we've traced as she learns never to trust her mother at 11, accepts a proposal of marriage against her better judgement at 21 and loses said husband at 41, as he veers off the road in rage. 20 years later, she's married again, to yet another moaning, boring old lawyer. Her two sons hardly contact her and she's already tried learning golf, but really didn't like it. Then, suddenly, she finds herself flying across the US to help out a woman she does not know and has never met. She starts to look after 9 year-old Cheryl, and Airplane, the appealing dog. What happens next makes Willa think hard and long about the previous 60 years and the decisions she made as she lived through them. At the very end of the novel, as she flies home to her tedious husband, she realises she had this one chance to make the right decision.
I was interested...a little puzzled if I were honest...about the ways she's structured this story. There are four parts, 1967, 1977, 1997 and 2017. The last part takes up over half the book, and the reason for this is that it contains ALL the story. The previous parts would have more normally be presented as flashbacks, with the story actually starting in 2017, when Willa, whose life we've traced as she learns never to trust her mother at 11, accepts a proposal of marriage against her better judgement at 21 and loses said husband at 41, as he veers off the road in rage. 20 years later, she's married again, to yet another moaning, boring old lawyer. Her two sons hardly contact her and she's already tried learning golf, but really didn't like it. Then, suddenly, she finds herself flying across the US to help out a woman she does not know and has never met. She starts to look after 9 year-old Cheryl, and Airplane, the appealing dog. What happens next makes Willa think hard and long about the previous 60 years and the decisions she made as she lived through them. At the very end of the novel, as she flies home to her tedious husband, she realises she had this one chance to make the right decision.
Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell
I admit it; I've never read a Maggie O'Farrell novel. Perhaps, at last, I'll get round to it, espcially with all this time we have on our hands for reading, and an underused Kindle in the house primed for action. O'Farrell doesn't write historical novels as a rule, but this is set around the time that Shakespeare's son, Hamnet dies at the age of 11. Four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, changing only one letter of his son's name.
The Guardian says; Hamnet is quite unlike anything O'Farrell has written before. There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her prose in Hamnet that, though not obviously steeped in 16th-century language, is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly, as if the membrane between the natural and supernatural was more porous then. The depth of her research is evident on every page. Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets. They go on to add; At its heart, though, this is a book about grief, and the means by which people find their way through it.
Another Women's Prize winner, in 2011, Tea Obreht'sTHE TIGER’S WIFE has been feted as a stunningly original novel. Tea Obreht is the youngest winner of the Orange Prize, and it is clear she had a fantastic imagination and can weave incredible tales. I did love the story, but there were times when the reading became difficult, not because it is a dense read or literary read, but because the writer, still only 24, doesn’t yet know how to take several short stories ( previously published) and pull them into a cohesive story. We meet innumerable incredible characters but these never glue the novel into one, heart-thumping piece. Emotion seems to be painted on, and I’m sure that is because Obreht tried to plait her short stories together without remembering the one piece of advice I always give to my students...be sure you know your own Core Emotional Truth. http://www.kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com
Weather by Jenny Offill
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| Weather by Jenny Offill ‘shows us what we are selfishly ignoring’. Photograph: Christopher Lane, The Guardian |
In 2014, I read two books described as 'a sort of new writing'; Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. I began to like 'autofiction'. This descibes a book that blurs the boundaries between novel and memoir. In fact, I also think this is a legitimate way of writing memoir, as if it's fiction, and even of writing biography...almost, this brings us back to the Mantel trilogy.
Six years later Offill has created what might be called another kind of book altogher. Always known for her brevity (Dept. of Speculation was described as 'not so much a novel as the X-ray of one'), Weather uses extremely short paragraphs and is barely novella-length. Her style can be dense, but none of that should put a reader off. Here is the opening line; In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. ‘Bucket of black paint’ it means. Surely that can't help but get you reading!
Lizzie Benson feels a bit helpless, confronted with of modern life. Don't we all? A university campus librarian married to Ben, who works in IT, they have one son. Surely they are the 'every-couple, filled with 21st century wit;
I wish you were a real shrink, my husband said, then we’d be rich.…I can only imagine what it would be like to be this age and in love,’ I tell Ben. ‘You are in love,’ he corrects me…He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandana on a stick…Last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money?”…
Autofiction has been attacked for its solipsism, the theory that the self is all that can be known to exist...which admittedly can allow a slide towards being self-centred or selfish. Although some books are written in a ego-centrtic style, I still think that autofiction has a huge part to play in narrative writing. As Offill says in Weather; the core delusion is that I am here and you are there.
I loved this book. A thin arm emerged from it, as from a lake, and snatched my hand, dragging me into the water, where I bathed in the words and their meaning.
No, really. This book kind of forces you to dive deep. Partly, it's the language; the voice Greengrass uses. Partly it's what the main character, a young woman's memories of her childhood, her mother and grandmother, her own pregnancies, her own motherhood. But at the same time, Greengrass stretched the novel form, rather, I thought, like WG Sebald does, by examining other ways of being which seem almost to come into the writer's mind like a stream of consciousness. These include Freud's daughter Anna, the inventor of the x-ray, Wilhelm Rontgen and the man who sketched cadavers, to aid understanding of early anatomy. Finally, I surfaced and felt I had swum with beautiful, terrifying and macabre things.
FATHERLAND by Robert Harris
I've been enjoying Harris for years, since I listened to him talk about Egnigma. He brought an Enigma Machine with him to the talk, but more fascinating for me as his explanation of how he'd taken a factual subject and found the way to create a thrilling novel from it.
Strangely I'd never read his first foray into the world of fiction. In this edition (Random House) he includes an introduction explaining what led him to write this thriller, after completing Selling Hitler4 in 1986, and having a mass of research on Hitler's war and plans for post-war German victory. In the back, is an Author's his use of facts to blend seamlessly with the alternative universe he creates. It's 500 words of absorption, tension and thrills and towards the end I was reading day and night.
No wonder it was an instant hit, and no wonder he's gone on to write so many more excellent fact-based thrillers.
I've been enjoying Harris for years, since I listened to him talk about Egnigma. He brought an Enigma Machine with him to the talk, but more fascinating for me was his explanation of how he'd taken a factual subject and found the way to create a thrilling novel from it.
Strangely I'd never read his first foray into the world of fiction. In this edition (Random House) he includes an introduction explaining what led him to write this thriller, after completing Selling Hitler4 in 1986, and having a mass of research on Hitler's war and plans for post-war German victory. In the back, is an Author's note his use of facts to blend seamlessly with the alternative universe he creates. It's 500 words of absorption, tension and thrills and towards the end I was reading day and night.
No wonder it was an instant hit, and no wonder he's gone on to write so many more excellent fact-based thrillers.
WE NEED NEW NAMES by NoViolet Bulawayo
NoViolet Bulawayo won the Caine Prize for African Writing with Hitting Budapest a short story which tells the story of poverty-stricken children on the hunt for food at any price. Now she’s been shortlisted for the Man-Booker with what feels like an expansion of this tale; We Need New Names. A great title, by the way, as it both demonstrates the major theme in the book but is also uttered by one of the children in the story as they play their games around a grim shanty town ironically named Paradise. Bulawayo uses the eyes of ten-year-old Darling to portray everything she believes is wrong with government policies in her home country, Zimbabwe. Her characters are destitute – and desperate – they no longer have a school or a house, or even enough food, since the police bulldozed their township.
Darling, and her gang of friends, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina may be children, but they have experienced a lot of life. Chipo is pregnant after being raped by her grandfather - later in the novel we watch her childhood disappear as she matures into a very young mother. Playing in the scrubland, they see a body suicide hanging from a tree. They steal the woman's almost new shoes to sell for bread.Then Darling's father returns from South Africa with AIDS and she empathetically describes how the children respond to a terminally sick person.
In the Guardian, reviewer Helon Habila, does raise the issue of cramming into the novel every ‘African’ topic” …as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning's news on Africa… (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review) and this is a good point, new writers should always do well to avoid the temptation to ‘tell all their world’, but I think she pulls this off using a brilliant combination of continued action with a fine sense of rhythm and use of language. Bulawayo uses original images to portray her scenes of Darling’s world…the bulldozers appear boiling… constructing a powerful ‘voice’ for Darling’s narration, which imbues her with dignity, resilience and a fighting spirit. In a tense chapter, the gang are ‘scrumping’ for guavas in a posh neighbouringsuburb, when, still up in the trees, they witness a pro-Mugabe attack by black partisans on the whites living in the huge houses, binding their hands and taking them away, chanting "Africa for Africans!”
Darling has been promised that she will be sent to America, where her aunt Fostalina lives. This move is needed in the novel – Bulawayo clearly wanted to contrast Darling’s two lives – but I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more.
Being a very real pre-pubescent girl, Darling soon reinvents herself as a typical US kid, and this weakens the link with the core themes of the novel. Even so, we’re reminded just how much work that might take…“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.
But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, it's as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it's the language and the whole process that's messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don't know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying…
Darling naturally begins to forget her old land and previous love of her old friends, although not so completely that we can’t keep tabs on them in the book; during a Skype call Chipo tells her, “Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?”
NoViolat Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele. Born in Zimbabwe, In 2010, she gained a fellowship after completing her MA in Creative Writing at Cornell University. This short, very readable book that bravely recounts a life in a country we’re usually allowed to know very little about.
WINTER by Ali Smith
I love this writer. Loved the way this is about Shakespeare's furious winter rages, and yet also a gentle look at family dysfunction. So beautifully written and perspicacious, I will have to read the series in order now, starting off with Spring, the latest, and waiting for Summer, then finally reading Autumn.
Or should I just go for it and read in any old order?
ODD CHILD OUT by Gilly Macmillan
Set vividly in my home town of Bristol, it’s about fifteen year old Noah, found floating unconscious in the Feeder Canal, and his best friend Abdi Mahab, whose parents arrived in Britain after terrifying experiences in a Somali refugee camp. I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to tell you the book ends by affirming there is justice in the world, and that those who deserve a better chance in life should be offered it. The parents of both the teenaged friends have to face personal suffering, and their own demons, before the case is resolved by Jim Clemo, returning for his second case in Macmillan’s series. This is a police procedural at its heart, with Clemo and his team arduously sorting through lost iPhone records, searching out CCTV images and interviewing recalcitrant witnesses, as they determine if foul play, or even a racially motivated crime, has been committed. But to balance this, Macmillan includes a host of different points of view – first and third – to allow the various characters to have their say. This is a precarious device for a crime novelist, but it worked perfectly for me, allowing me to hear Noah’s story as he drifts in his deep coma, as well as see into the personal life of the detective, Clemo. Each of the Mahab family…the high achieving Abdi, his sister Sofia, now a midwifery student, his taxi-driving father Nur and his mother, Maryam, who speaks little English…all offer important perspectives to the story.
This is not a book that has high octane gun fights or car chases. Instead it steadily delves into the lives of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, just as I have tried to do in my Shaman Mystery trilogy. It is a study of human nature and human dilemmas, deeply absorbing and full of tension and suspense.
This is certainly not ‘cosy crime’, but neither is it filled with gruesome gore. It’s not even clear, at first, if anyone is going to die at all, and then, suddenly, a lot of people are in danger. By the end, I was gripping my Kindle as if that would help the good guys survive.
Gilly Macmillan lived in Northern California in her late teens, but now she’s in Bristol (West of England) and writing full time. You can hear her talk about her previous book, The Perfect Girl, at https://soundcloud.com/harperaudiopresents/gilly-macmillan - in a very revealing interview.
DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING
By MADELINE THIEN.
Praised by Alice Munro (whose name is on the back cover), Do Not Say We Have Nothing earned Madeline Thien the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for most promising Canadian writer under the age of 30. Then went on to win a Carnegie Medal, the Scotiabank Prize and the Stanford Travel Writing Award (Wikipedia 2016), but although shortlisted for The Man-Booker and the Bailey’s Prize, it didn’t win. I was shocked. The reviews I’d read suggested a forgone conclusion…It speaks to the humanity that continues even in the harshest, most self-destructively paranoid conditions, and it shows how the savagery of destroying culture comes hand-in-hand with the destruction of human bodies. For this reason alone, I hope it wins the Man Booker prize…(Boland 2016). Read my blogpost here
THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE by Ted Chaing
Reading a novel alongside a play or film demonstrates how differently prose fiction and dramatic script can be. I’ve done this too with the film Arrival; it blew me away and I immediately got the book of short stories it comes from on my Kindle. The original, Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang, is basically the same story, but the screenplay reimagining the landscape and made more of a final twist.
Arrival (2016 screenplay by Eric Heissere) is a film that had its genesis in short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang 2002, Tor Books) I saw the film, watched the ‘extras’ on the DVD and bought the book of short stories, I was so enamoured with the film. Having read the story on the page, I asked myself about the way the adapting writer approached the challenge of taking a long short story into a movie. For instance, there is a massive, esoteric plot twist at the end of the film, which in the book, is known by the reader almost from the start. The theme of both is linguistics and precognition, which is slowly revealed in the film, but fully apparent from the start of the story. The filmmaker reimagined the sci-fi element so that it was far more pleasing, visually. The poster does not give away any of the subtle of story, the theme or even that there will be a mystery within it, revealed at the end. It is focused on its stars, in the hope they will sell the movie. The ET spaceship, which is visible to the left, is not clarified, except as an UFO which is being threatened, or attacked, by the US helicopters. The film is a complex emotional drama, and very beautiful in both script, structure, and art work, but it’s almost as if the poster wants to hide this, instead giving the wrong impression that this will be like most sci-fi movies. Which it is not.
May Angelou said in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
I can identify with that. Story is massively important to humans. Lisa Crone has been re-examining the human experience of story, demonstrating that the brain craves story, not for ‘entertainment value’, but because it allows us to plan for the unknown. She believes that very early man listened to stories and processed them as ‘simulators’ which might point out ways to approach and survive the unknown and unexpected. The reason we get so ‘lost’ in books, storytellings and dramatisations is a deliberate ploy on the part of our brain…it’s a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine that’s triggered by the intense curiosity that that an effective story instantly engenders…we don’t turn to story to escape reality, we turn to story to navigate reality because story translates big ideas, dry facts, abstract concepts, into very specific scenarios… watch her TED talk Wired for Story here.
SOMEONE ELSE'S SKIN Sarah Hilary
Sarah Hilary admits she thinks of dark things. ‘I do have a dark mind…’ she’s quoted as saying, ‘a friend of mine pushed me into crime writing, saying…‘your mind is in a dark place already, you should make some money from it’.’
I love dark minds. I have one myself, especially when I’m asleep. My dreams are a deep recess full of images and actions useful to a writer. I dream of torture, of lost babies, of running at night from beasts, of hiding from men with guns. One morning I woke to discover I’d scribbled something at three am, before falling back to sleep. The words ran down the page like oozing blood – death and mayhem all night long.
So Sarah Hilary’s first novel, Someone Else’s Skin – a brilliantly apt title, by the way – was right up my dark alley, absolutely my cup of hemlock. Everything about the story leads to darkness. The symbols are disturbing; a woman blinded by an acid attack, a hand severed by a scimitar, a victim chained, waiting for torture. The themes explore hate, violence, misogyny, and sadism. Her characters are women fighting for some peace – some justice from men who have attacked them – but they all have inner demons to contend with. Even Hilary’s fiercely intelligent investigator, DI, Marnie Rome, has memories of a violent family event, and losses she’s trying to forget while she’s doing her dark, dark, job. Her partner, DS Noah Jake, is black and gay, which isn’t a problem to anyone except dyed-in-the-wool homophobe, DS Carling. However this is not a formulaic police procedural. KTW readers will know how I love my crime novels (read and written!) to be about why crime is committed, and what affect that has on victims, investigators, bystanders and even the perpetrators.
On the WH Smith Blog, http://blog.whsmith.co.uk/sarah-hilarys-fictional-heroines/ Hilary says: ‘Marnie Rome walked fully formed into a story I was writing two years ago. She was undercover, in biker boots and a black wig, but she was unquestionably Marnie. I recognised her at once. Later, I came to realise how many secrets she was hiding.’
According to C G Jung everyone has a ‘shadow aspect’. This is a repressed area of the unconscious reflecting the side of us we don’t see in our conscious selves. He wrote: The less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. I don’t know Sarah Hilary well, but she looks a lovely cheery person in her photos – slightly quixotic, in fact, rather ethereal. If, like, me, she’s fundamentally a sunshiney person, it stands to reason your shadow aspect is going to be a cold sweat of despair and agony.
Jung believed that we should endeavour to be aware of our shadow aspect, so that we grow into balanced people, and I have a theory that writers have a way of gaining that balance, even without knowing it. They draw out their shadow aspect in their writing. That might explain why nice people end up writing about the worse sides of human nature. Ann Cleeves, a crime novelist and judge of the 2015 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, which Hilary won with Someone Else’s Skin, said… ‘she has this dreadful sense of horror, but it is done delicately and subtly. It always stops just as your imagination takes over.’
Rome and Jake want to interview a resident of a women’s shelter in Finchley, Ayana Mirza. They want her to testify against her own brothers, who have driven her to the shelter with violent intimidation. But as the detectives arrive they witness a stabbing. A husband has sneaked in, bringing flowers for his wife, and now lies bleeding on the floor. In that moment, the book gains its delightful complexity, because Rome and Jake thought they had one, cut-and-dried crime to investigate, and now they also have a mystery. Was the knife inside the flowers? Has Hope Proctor just saved her own life, or did she always plan to attack the husband she’s been hiding from? The answers to those questions are dark and twisted, and the story will spiral out of the detective’s control before they’re answered. As Simone, another woman who has sought refuge remembers in the book…‘He thought he'd broken her in a thousand pieces, but sometimes... when you are broken... You mend hard.’
Domestic violence has often been lumped under ‘misery memoirs’ and it’s refreshing to see someone take the subject and create both a complex, crime novel and serious examination of the problem, without descending into cliché. Hilary writes with understatement. She doesn’t shout out her messages, but when she wants to describe violence, she does it with such power…Mum's bread knife, its steel teeth full of tattered red skin…Despite its subtlety, Someone Else’s Skin has its terrifying moments, the sort you have to hide behind the sofa to read. I read this book on Kindle, and right now it's only 99p on Kindle if you click here.
Since its publication in 2014, Hilary has published the second Marnie Rome novel, No Other Darkness, and I believe she’s ready to publish the third. I can’t wait to read them – I have my sofa all prepared to hide behind as I do so.
THE CHIMES by Anna Smaill
I could tell The Chimes was written by a poet, as soon as I opened it and started reading – long before I discovered Anna Smaill has also had a book of poetry published. The language here is lyrical, with the introduction of words that add to its strangeness, the narrative necessarily fragmented and filled with sensory impressions. But it’s perhaps because Smaill is a violinist, that in her first novel, she’s deeply imagined what a world without writing, but full of music, might be like.
She describes a dystopian future, where Britain’s democratic government has been swept away by a catastrophic event called the ‘blasphony', and replaced with an autocratic, musical ruling elite in Oxford, known as the Order. The written word has been replaced with the ‘Carillon’, a vast musical instrument made from palladium, the ‘pale Lady’, a rare metallic element, which sweeps away people’s memory, leaving them with a life that feels the same each and every day. At times, the pitch of ‘the chimes’ causes physical collapse followed by death
Simon Wythern has inherited a gift from his mother, who died of ‘chimesickness'. Like her, he can see other people’s memories. Now, he's heading for London, his memory bag over his shoulder and a melody in his head that leads him along…
‘You going in to be prentissed?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m going in to trade.’
He studies my farmclothes and my single roughcloth bag and is tacet awhile. ‘And a ride back?’ he says. ‘You’ll be looking for one, I suppose?’
I meet his look and there’s nothing in my eyes. I don’t need a ride back. I have a name and a song to find, a thread to follow. But it’s not something to share. With my gaze I dare him to ask again, but he turns to the front and hitches the reins. We go forward and the cart’s bumping goes through me…
Simon joins a pact of urchins, run by a boy called Lucien. They mudlark the Thames riverbank and search ‘the under’, the abandoned subterranean city tunnels, for the Lady, which they can trade for food, not knowing that this trade maintains the Carillon which oppresses them.
Simon’s friendship with enigmatic Lucien becomes a beautifully described love affair, as they begin to piece together the memories Simon’s mother left him, with the memories Lucien has of being a gifted musician in the Order.
Rather like Pullman’s His Dark Materials, every small child in The Chimes learns to play an instrument and finds the meaning of themselves through the music they make. This creates a focus for the novel, a point we can understand about this complex world;
I pick up my recorder and I start to play, even though I don’t know how to make the voice that is missing. When I have played all my feeling into the first part of the tune, I still don’t know, but by then it is too late and I no longer care, so I just play it. I play it high and reckless and free so that it flies above all the others. I play it with some of the anger I feel and some that I throw in for extra. I play a voice that has never known anything except for luck and beauty…
It took me a little time to get used to Smaill’s use of music as a controlling, menacing force, but I loved the way she used musical terminology in her character’s speech. Above the story, which starts out as an absorbing read, is a wider theme of shared memory and how important that is for a cohesive society, and the dystopia she creates is very believable.
But as Lucien and Simon travel to Oxford, bent of destroying the Carillon, the plotting thins and loses its connection with the body of the story. When Smaill needed to ‘up’ the dramatic tension, as we reach the climactic end of the book, her plotting doesn’t quite succeed as well and her rich writing style. I can vouch for how hard it is to create a convincing, plausible and yet thrilling end to a story, tying in the loose ends needed to be tied, while yet not knotting them up too tightly or letting them unravel completely, and keeping the reader believing in the tale and its inhabitants. I wished Smaill had spent a few months sorting out what was wrong with her denouement, but it didn’t stop me enjoying the world she’s invented, the language she uses, and the glorious characters who inhabit The Chimes.
THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller won the 2012 Orange Prize for ‘fiction written by a woman’...but this novel told through the eyes of a man; a gay man; a gay man living over 3000 years ago. Patroclus doesn’t have a large role in the Iliad, but he is a large part of its story. His death at the hands of Hector, the Trojan hero, sparks his friend Achilles into action after months of refusing to fight in the war. He steps out from the Greek camp and slaughters the prince of Troy, then drags Hector’s body behind his chariot in triumph. The second half of story of the Iliad is mostly centred on Priam’s need to get his son’s body back from the Greeks and give it a proper burial. In the Iliad, Patroclus and Achilles are described as good friends – it is never actually stated they are lovers – but how far does one usually go for a drinking buddy? The rage Achilles clearly feels at Patroclus’ death explodes from the pages of the Iliad...the first ‘written’ piece of ‘fiction’ (or rather, life writing in storytelling form). Partly, this anger is related to who is to blame for his death...is it Hector...or is it Achilles, who unwittingly pushed Patroclus into going out to battle in his friend’s armour, representing Achilles in a bid to strengthen the moral of the Greek side?
Miller tells the story through the eyes of Patroclus, rather than any of the big guns of the Iliad. This has been done before, Mary Renault uses the device in her tales of Alexander the Great, which are narrated by Bagoas, his catamite. Starting when Patroclus is nine years old and finishing long after the Iliad finishes, Miller uses an intimate first-person present tense narrative, and fair rips along, making it an extremely easy read for such a long book. A young reviewer for the Guardian Kids’ Fiction pages said she’d finished it in a matter of hours.It is without doubt my favourite read this year; it feels a long time since I so enjoyed a book; was so unable to put it down. I loved the way Miller plays with the solid classical pedigree of these Greek stories, how she builds figures that long ago became archetypal into real characters, and how she re-imagines the world of bronze-aged Greece and Turkey. However she does have her critics. The Telegraph describes her narrative as... swoony soft-porn prose...Patroclus’ early years are a bit Judy Blume-ish ...The Guardian seems to agree...Miller’s book is unashamed to be a - not a bodice-ripping, so let’s call it a breastplate-ripping – romp...The Telegraph points out that...Miller’s book doesn’t swell or ripen into a meaningful engagement with the ancient literary tradition, as any serious attempt to appropriate the classics... I have to say that I didn’t think Miller was trying to do so, although she is a classics scholar. However, the Guardian goes on to admire, as I do, the clever twist at the end (I’d been wondering how she’d end it, as Patroclus dies some time before Achilles), But, as the Guardian review says...The book reaches a more thoughtful level when it continues to give Patroclus a voice after he is killed. Here it creates its own beauty, and achieves a sense of the uncanny which is otherwise lacking.
This is Madeline Miller’s debut novel, the second debut to win the Orange Prize in that number of years. In 2011 it was Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife which I enjoyed but have to say didn’t rate all that highly. I thought this was far better; better plotted, better structured, better researched with stronger characters. And it saw off
off strong competition: I’ve also read the short-listed Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, and Ann Patchett’s slick State of Wonder, which I have to say I enjoyed equally, but The Song of Achilles won the prize and it seems more than a little churlish to moan at it, when it truly is such a remarkable feat. One thing the reviews seem to have bypassed is the title. The story isn’t about Achilles as much as it’s Patroclus’ autobiography, but the haunting title comes straight from the writer’s first source; The Iliad’s subtitle is Song of Ilium.
Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me …
Dressed in an oriental robe and a white skin-suit scribbled all over with the predictions of a medieval English magician, I cried out those lines in a fit of madness.
I was playing Vinculus, a character in the amazing, intriguing and compelling book called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. A group of 10 of us, all lovers of this 1000 page (if you include the copious footnotes) work of magical fiction, had gathered together to enact, discuss and explore this amazing achievement. Acting out a huge piece of fantasy is not as daunting as it may seem; the same group of people have acted out Tolkien’s work and all of Homer’s, using a three day period to do so. In that time, we eat, dress and sleep the book in question.
Susanna Clarke writes about her invented world with such ease; it’s easy to believe England could really be like this – filled with magic and romance. It has been described as 'Harry Potter for grownups’ but that really does not do this eloquent and momentous work justice, although adults who adored Harry Potter will be impressed with the rich characterization and the great finale to the story.
Clarke has a flair for language, utilising the right words at all the right moments. She chose for her style an emulation of Jane Austin, (including archaic spellings). Some passages made me laugh aloud – Austin was funny, and here is another layer spread upon that ironic wit.
I’m not alone in loving the book; Neil Gaiman said, Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. It's funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical...
This was Clarke's first book, although she’d prepared the ground by writing some short stories set in her parallel universe – a world that has the same history as our own, except for the fact that England was once filled with magic and magicians, and the North of England was ruled separately, by the Raven King – John Uskglass – a man who had been spirited away to fairyland as a child and returned full of fairy magic.
But all that was centuries ago. When the book starts in1806, England is struggling with the Napoleonic war, and practical magic has faded into the nation's past – now magic is only studied ‘theoretically’. But two of these students discover that Mr Norrell can really do magic. He’s studied the books all his life, and his displays of magic lead him, and his mysterious servant, John Childermass, from the north of the country to the bustling city of London. After he successfully brings a beautiful woman back from the dead and terrifies the French army with a fleet of ghostly ships, he is taken to the bosom of the rich and fashionable. Gilbert Norrell is dedicated to book-learning and he's trying desperately to ignore and forget that in raising Lady Pole from the dead, he has awaken an amoral fairy king, who is now strutting around our world, enchanting people. When Jonathan Strange, the 2nd magician in the prophecy emerges, a dangerous battle of wills begins. Strange is young, dashing and daring, and not at all interested in only learning magic from books. While Norell, a reclusive and cautious man, is trying to get rid of any taint of dangerous fairy magic, Strange is actively bringing it back. He has no idea what a menace the fairy king posses, especially to his own lovely wife.
I was soon hooked on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell the first time I read it, even though you need to get through at least the first 200 pages to even begin to see where the plot is going. Reading it again for the weekend event made me love it even more. All its depth and humour and the true cleverness of the carefully crafted plot became even more clear. One thing I really loved was the vast history of magic Clarke invents for England. Long after I finished it, I was still thinking about the menacing settings, the wonderful characters, the brilliant narrative development and the history she creates.
Of course, I also watched the TV series, now available both in the UK and the US to watch again. Bertie Carvel who plays Jonathan Strange so well, said; I read it years ago and loved it … They've preserved the scale and majesty of the story … So you have credible, fully imagined characters recognisably of the same world we inhabit. Paul Kaye, who played my chosen character in the film said, I read the book and loved it. It sort of obsessed me for a while and I felt an affinity with what turned out to be my character, Vinculus. I found the footnotes addictive! If there wasn't one on the next page I would be disappointed
You can watch the TV adaptation at:
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
The Miniaturist is set in Amsterdam, at the end of the 17th Century. I was rather expecting Girl with a Pearl Earring (Tracey Chevalier, HarperCollins,1999) all over again, which, for me, was a beautifully written romance, but a romance, none the less. The endorsements to this debut novel, which are plastered all over the cover, should have told me otherwise. “Full of surprises” says SJ Watson. “Fabulously gripping” says the Observer.
I was hoping for exquisite detail…miniaturist detail, in fact, and that I got, but I also found I was reading an absolute page-turner. I turned the pages of this book all the way from Aberystwyth on the west coast of Wales, to Barnsley, in Yorkshire, on some very slow, long-and-winding, cross-country trains. I hardly noticed the dark, satanic mills, the still snow-capped Pennines or the little towns that moved past my carriage window, because I was in Holland, where silk rustled and sumptuous feasts were consumed as deals were done for the slave sugar of the West Indies…and Nella, eighteen, innocent but savvy, hopes that married life will be the tulip bed she dreamed of as a child. Romance of any kind fails to blossom, and she soon discovers that Jonhannes, the wealthy merchant she’s married, has secrets which will lead them into escalating danger. In fact, the only the thing that her husband gives her in their marriage is a cabinet house; a doll-house sized, but vastly expensive, replica of their home in Amsterdam. An elusive miniaturist creates tiny items to fill the house, each of which eerily predict the shocks Nella begins to experience.
Despite the fact that The Miniaturist soon became an international best seller, I've taken my time about reading it because my first encounter was last summer’s Guardian review – http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/29/the-miniaturist-jessie-burton-review
Rachel Cook was not particularly nice to Jessie Burton's first book, and I have to admit, she put me off. But the word-in-the-library was of a wicked page-turner, so in the end I threw reviews to the wind and read it.
The Miniaturist has flaws, that's undeniable. I understand exactly why Cooke says, “somehow it fails to convince. Again and again, I found myself thinking: that would not happen. We are expected to take so much on trust…Emotionally, they move from A to Z in the blink of an eye, and nothing in between.”
In writers’ terms, this single problem is the result of a little bundle of plotting issues, which beset us all, and which take time and effort to overcome; implausibility. Like Rachel Cooke, there were times I felt like echoing Victor Meldrew, from One Foot in the Grave, crying; I don’t believe it!
I’m not going to tell you which bits of this book I couldn’t believe. It’s a cracking read, with a vivid period setting, distinctive, even striking characters and a story so seductive and outrageous, it drags you in by the collar of your coat. But, having read the book yourself, you might, as a writer, want to ask yourself what you can learn from its problems. Are there sections of your own stories that are implausible? And if so, what can you do to alter that, so that your eventual readers don’t turn into grouchy Victor Meldrews who long to throw your novel across train carriages?
Naturally you want the reader to feel fully committed to what’s happening on the page. But some confusion arises between being convincing and suspending disbelief, which is what happens when readers are so caught up with the fiction, that they are prepared to go along with what the narrator is telling them, even when it patently could not happen ‘in real life’. New writers mistakenly believe that they can be as implausible as they please, and readers will suspend disbelief when reading their work. Completing a fictional tale isn’t a magic key to the good will of the reader. They will suspend disbelief for you, but you have to work hard to gain their trust beforehand. I recommend five strategies for this problem;
- The reader needs to feel grounded within the story. Overload of information, or conversely, lack of relevant information (usually because the writers hasn’t taken into consideration that the reader isn’t familiar with what the writer is telling them), are two major factors. The reader needs time and help to absorb the details of the story. In The Miniaturist, Burton researches her time-period very well, even adding a glossary. But, Nella, as Rachel Cooke points out… “has a sensibility more akin to that of a 21st-century teenager than a 17th-century one: outspoken, determined, reflexively feminist.” This cut me adrift from her as I read – was she really from the 17th Century?
- Communication with your reader. Stories (or parts of a story) appear implausible because the writer has assumed that the reader ‘will understand’ what they are writing about. Don’t ever assume that; check as you go that your plot is comprehendible and that there are clear links as you move along it, filling in details that will help your reader to keep up with plot developments. It annoyed me, when Nella recalled, towards the novel’s end, all the ‘thrilling conversations’ she and Johannes had, because the reader hadn’t been privy to any of these. We’d barely seen them communicate and when they did, Johannes would peremptorily curtail the dialogue. And yet, Nella seems to gain an affinity with him that I could not credit.
- Character development and identification. It’s often the character, especially the narrator, who convinces the reader the story is believable. Your characters should be well-developed on the page, so that the reader can identify, possibly emphasize with them. This links closely with communication above; it will be the narrator who communicates the plot and fills in those all-important linking details. Rachel Cooke writes; “We know their tastes, but little of what lies in their hearts; we know all about their failings, but their motivation remains elusive.”
- Cause and effect. When the causes of character action are solidly imbedded in the story, leading directly to the naturally realized effects, the story is likely to feel convincing and believable. There is one plot-line in Jessie Burton’s novel which is never fully explained, and as that concerns the title of the story…the miniaturist who makes strangely predictive furninture for the cabinet house…I felt decidedly let down by this. However, I must commend Burton for the ending to her book. I thought her denouement and final flourishes were cracking – not only plausible, but shocking and perfectly balanced.
- Motivation should always be driven by character emotion. Cook writes, “I had the sense that the novel's characters were simply figures (from a doll's house, perhaps) to be moved around on an Amsterdam-shaped board.” I agreed At times, Burton concentrates too much on her fabulous plot, and forgets the emotional motivation of her characters. Motivating your characters successfully isn’t easy, but here’s a little template that will help you make that check:
- The author wants certain things to happen. This creates poor motivation.
- The actions further a character’s objectives. This creates strong motivation.
Please don’t let me put you off reading this amazing book. The Miniaturist is a popular choice with bookclubs, and I can see why. It would generate discussion about the era and setting, the story and characters, but especially the themes and events of the book, which are unsettling and powerful. And anyone searching for aphorisms will find an abundance within this story, which is why I’ve chosen Burton as my “Quote of the Month”.
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
This book will go down in my experience as the one that took me back to writing Haiku (occasionally, and mostly on twitter). It was all because of an ordering mistake online; I saw what I thought was a very cheap copy of the novel, and being both cheap and impatient myself, clicked to order a completely separate book. What I received was The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho, a 16th Centuary Japanese poet, which describes his journeys and relates through his haiku. I loved this book, actually quite a lot more than I loved Flanagan's. His Booker prize-winning story was described, by the judges described The Narrow Road to the Deep North as a book that "kicks you so hard in the stomach it takes the breath away." I felt kicked in the stomach, but not in quite the same way. The book is unwieldy, and fails to get inside the male characters in a way that this female didn't warrant. The story is too similar to others set at the same time with the same prisoner-of-war events, but for me failed to deliver in the same way because the panoramic view doesn't ever get in deep enough.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981). I read this directly after Satanic Verses. At that time I was writing short stories and thinking of how I could write a novel for children. Rushdie's books made me realize anything was possible. Okay, I cannot reach Rushdie’s dazzling heights of invention and literary prose, but I loved how he used his own personal experiences, while pushing the novel form to extremes. Rushdie was born in 1947, a year before the transition to independence in India, and used that moment in time to create a dazzling, game-changing novel of a young man born at the very moment of Indian independence. “Let your mind go,” Rushdie seemed to be saying directly to me, “and you can write the things you want to say in the way you want to say them.”
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I’ve chosen this book from the series because its publication in 2002 was the moment things changed in the children’s book market. Children had always been ready love nr newly-pressed books, but these books, including the first three of JK's series, were usually about 200 pages long. Goblet weighed in at more than 600 pages and kids gobbled it up. Publishers finally realized that children loved to read and could read enormous books, as long as the words on the page moved and excited them.
Rowling has her critics, but she is the master of 3 important areas of writing; she can extend plotting, theme and structure to allow seven long books to reach their own climax yet take you on to a final, gripping finale where all important threads are tied. She can handle a vast cast of characters, in which the least has a personality potentially as big as the protagonist. And she makes you laugh.
The Alchemist. I read this a long time ago, loving it to bits and lending to everyone as something they must read. This book is an epic allegory about finding and pursuing your purpose in life and has millions of readers across the world for a reason – it’s inspiring and motivating. Published in 1988 by Paulo Coelho, it was apparently written in 2 weeks, because the writer had ‘found it in his soul’. It follows the journey of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who journeys to Egypt to seek a promised treasure. As he moves across the desert and through the market places, he meets a series of people, who, to me, represented all humanity. Its basic plot, with its remarkable ‘twist in the tale’ is ages old, though, apparently first seen in The Thousand and One Nights.
Recently, I read it aloud to my husband who enjoyed it as much as I had. But a strange thing happened as I read it again. Perhaps I’d grown older and more cynical, but I saw nothing but flaws – simplistic, artless writing and prosaic plotting. Don’t let that put you off reading it. At the right moment in your life, it is a tremendous book that can mean everything.
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Rose Tremain; Trespass
Rose Tremain has won the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Award, the Sunday Express Book of the Year and been short-listed for the Booker Prize. So what is she doing, writing a crime thriller? Because you can hide the fact that Trespass, published in 2010, is a novel about murder.
Maybe she didn’t realize that’s what she was about. Perhaps she thought this terrifying and bleak story documenting the cultural clash between rich, cultured English people and a provincial French family was the usual contemporary literary fiction that is expected from Tremain’s pen. After, the narrative is beautifully written, the language deeply satisfying. But I don’t think so. She knew what she was doing. After all Tremain is now in her seventies and so just the right age to take over the Crime Writer’s Crown from P G James. And her take on a crime thriller is edged with noir. Each character is filled with deep psychological pain and the opening is classic crime fiction; a young schoolgirl sees something in the waters of the river. She runs, screaming. The book then takes us from the beginning of the story that leads up to the event which made her scream.
Don’t suppose she’s going to listen to me – why should she – but I think Tremain should keep going with crime. The late PD James said that “A detective story can give a much truer picture of the society in which it’s written than a more prestigious literature.”http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/27/pd-james-in-quotes-adam-dalgliesh And, interviewed, would you believe it, by Amazon Books, James is quoted as saying “Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can make no reparation, and has always been greeted with a mixture of repugnance, horror, fear, and fascination. We are particularly intrigued by the motives which cause a man or woman to step across the invisible line which separates a murderer from the rest of humanity. Human beings also love a puzzle and a strong story, and mysteries have both”. http://www.amazon.com/Talking-About-Detective-Fiction-James/dp/0307743136
So go for it, Miss Tremain. Your exquisite prose and consistently dark themes are perfect for creating crime noir, and I for one enjoyed Trespass as much as Music and Silence and Restoration. The characters are filled with real existence, despite being to a person damaged by their troubled histories. There is no sympathetic protagonist to latch on to, but even so this is a compelling story.
The novel centres around Mass Lunel, a crumbling, ancient family farmhouse in the Cevennes in southern France, the home of Aramon Lunel, a man who is so ridden with guilt at the crimes he has committed in his past and now sickening from a very unhealthy lifestyle. He hits on the idea of selling the house and land, which would net him more money than he has ever imagined. But he needs the help of his half-sister, Audrun, who has suffered a lifetime of abuse at his hands and is now exiled to an ugly modern bungalow on the edge of the land. She is horrified at the idea of selling the family home, especially as her home, and the forest land she inherited with it is threatened by the sale. Alongside this fear, she is already festering with long-term hate and resentment towards Aramon.
We have already met Anthony Verey, an elderly antiques dealer with a penchant for young men. When he hits financial trouble in London, he visits his sister, who is living in the Cevennes with Kitty, her lover. Kitty has never been able to stand Anthony and is suspicious of the close bond between the siblings. She know that Anthony would be pleased to break up their French love nest and his horrified when Anthony announces he’s going to buy a property in the area. It’s not long before he claps eyes on Mas Lunel, and he loves it from the start. But he does not love Audrun’s bungalow. He covets her land, too.
Tremain makes this story a forensic study of the way the shadows from the past always catches up the present until the climax mingles loss of justice with issues of identity and the philosophy of what happiness really is.
This is a troubling book, because it takes crime seriously, examining it for what it really is; messy, dirty. No one comes out of the events within the novel very well. The complexities of all the various relationships and their secret agendas, flare up, as we reach the denouement of the story, and as the book closes, real flames flare, leaving the reader gasping with the strength of the symbolism within it. Tremain wants you to go on thinking about impasse she’s created, long after you close the pages.
So, even though Tremain writes literary, prize-winning fiction, I recommend that you read this book as if it were a psychological thriller, and then you won’t be disappointed at all.
- THE HELP by Katheryn Stockett. My book club read this book and there wasn't a member who didn't love it from page one to the epilogue. We all agree that it taught us so much about the lives of the women - both black and white - of the deep south of the US in the early sixties. But I am also in praise of it because of it's confident use of writing technique; it is a multi-viewpoint book, with three 1st person voices, all as engrossing as each other (although I can't help loving Minny best) and a single chapter writen in the omnicsient which worked perfectly...very hard to pull off. The plotting of the story drew the reader in, hooking them from an early stage - the first pages of chapter one, infact - as Aibeleen learns of the plan for each 'help' to be given their own 'bathroom'...so that the white families don't catch their diseases. The irony and balletic comedy between the white classes, who are clearly terrified of the black community that they dispise and pay despicable wages, is beautifully drawn. And the dramatic tension that builds as Skeeter becomes more and moresecretly involved with her black friends is terrifying and heartwarming at the same time. A first time author, Stockett is one to watch.
Elizabeth Haynes Into the Darkest Corner and Human Remains
It hit me, only moments after I received the contract for my three Shaman Mystery novels; I really did have to write a book in a year. I had never written a book in anything less than – well, a decade – and the fear slapped me off my office chair. Luckily, it didn’t dry up my writing, it got me searching for help. I found that help with NaNoWriMo – the National Novel Writing Month which challenges writers to reach 50,000 words during the month of November. I wiped November off the calendar to achieve 2000 words a day; watching no TV and never going out in the evenings. On December the first I emerged, like something from a chrysalis, with battered but beautiful wings and 60,000 words; more than half the second novel in the series; Unraveled Visions. (Midnight Ink 2014).
I was delighted to discover that one of my favourite crime writers took the same route with her first published novel; Elizabeth Haynes and Into the Darkest Corner (Myriad Editions 2011). In an Afterword at the end of the book she admits to becoming a Nano bore; “it’s very different from the usual way of writing a book.”
During this time, Haynes was pursuing a creative writing course at West Dean College near Chichester, and they encouraged her to submit Into the Darkest Corner. This is just the sort of incentive a new writer needs; it was soon being devoured by crime fans. It won the Amazon UK 2011 Rising Stars award, and became a New York Times bestseller. The Guardian review http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/26/first-novels-review-roundup, describes it thus; “From its uncompromising prologue – a young woman being bludgeoned to death in a ditch – Haynes’s powerful account of domestic violence is disquieting, yet unsensationalist.”
Into the Darkest Corner is a tense thriller with a clever structure; it is topped and tailed by two court transcripts; the first transcript sets you up to wonder just how sane and believable the narrator of the novel, Catherine, is. She looks back to 2007, when she met and fell in love with a charismatic police officer called Lee. Lee is vulnerable in a lot of ways; he’s also possessive and aggressive, and ultimately sadistic. We watch the slow but inevitable deterioration, until Catherine, like a lot of women in abusive relationships, is trapped. Catherine tells this story of this past while describing her life now, where she is controlled by a different jailor; OCD. She exhausts herself checking and rechecking everything about her life, but especially the security of her little flat.
Her two stories, with alternating time settings, are taut as pieces of elastic that sting you if you flick at
them.
Although Into the Darkest Corner is Haynes first book, it wasn’t the first of hers that I’d read; last year I read Human Remains (Myriad Editions 2013), which is even more psychologically tense and even more clever in its critique of mental conditions that make us dangerous to others. In Human Remains, Haynes explores NLP, a technique with is intended to be therapeutic and empowering, but her character, Colin, twists these aims chillingly. Haynes explains in the Afterword; “things that people actually want – to die without pain or fear – is accomplished in such a way that [Colin] can benefit too.”
I was impressed that, rather than running out of ideas or inspiration, Haynes’ work seemed to just get better and better. In her first book, I liked the way she brought abusive relationships to the fore as the main theme alongside obsessive, compulsive disorder. But I felt she’d reached deeper for Human Remains, and developed her writing, investigating the sad phenomenon of people who withdraw from society and end up dying alone…I wanted to explore the potential reasons why people make this choice…I also liked the idea of the roles of predator/prey and hunter/hunted.”
It’s almost unsurprising that right up to publishing Into the Darkest Corner, Elizabeth Haynes was a police intelligence analyst. “At the time,” she explains on her website http://www.elizabeth-haynes.com/, “I was producing a quarterly report on violent crime and as part of this I read a lot of accounts of domestic abuse. I was guilty of having very fixed ideas about violence in the home and the sort of people who were victims of it, and this stereotype was challenged in every way by the reports I was analyzing. I’d always thought of domestic abuse as something that happened to ‘other people’, but it affects many couples and families from every part of society and is often very well hidden.” In Human Remains, Annabel is a police analyst, just like Haynes. She is concerned about an increase in people dying at home yet remaining undiscovered until the overpowering smell alerts a passer-by. And when Annabel discovers her own neighbour in this state, she seriously begins to investigate something that Colin is delighted to exploit.
Haynes says, “I’ve always felt the role of analysts within law enforcement has been sadly overlooked by fiction writers.” Well, no longer. I’m going back for more of Elizabeth Haynes; an unconventional approach to writing psychologically thrilling books that has crime reviewers singing her praises.
Lord of the Rings by professor J R R Tolkien, published between 1954 and 55. I’ve read this book several times, often just turning to the songs printed within it and singing them. I’ve also loved the BBC Radio 4 serialization, which took most of those songs and put them to music, and the wonderful trilogy from Peter Jackson.
At the time of first reading as a girl, the book excited my young imagination. I use to believe it had changed the writing landscape – no fantasy novel had ever been written before this and no writer would ever create something so wonderful again. That 1st belief hold true, I think – there isn’t a writer alive today unaware of its impact, but probably not the 2nd and 3rd. Of course it wasn’t the first fantasy novel, and although for many years it was the best, Land of Ice and Fire may now have claim to a similar crown.
The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch. This was her second book, but it was my first introduction to my number-one writing hero, which made me long to also write about love and power and goodness and beauty and what makes up a human being. Suddenly, at the age of twenty, I wanted to say great things, like Murdoch, who, being a professor of philosophy, has a far greater claim to be able to write such things than I will ever have. However, if we can’t be inspired by the great exemplars, what hope is there?
Once I’d put down Enchanter, I went in search of all her other books, and then lay in constant wait for her to write the next, which she did, for years, every 18 or so months. Only her very last book, written while in the grip of Alzheimer’s, is not among my very favourite reads to this day. Enchanter isn’t her best book, for me that is The Sea The Sea, but it was the first I read. I loved Iris Murdoch from that moment on, and reading her made me think more deeply, write more avidly and dream great dreams
THE UNCONSOLED. Kasuo Ishiguro remains one of my favourite contemporary writers. His books are imaginative, inventive, strongly crafted and push the boundaries to the very edges. This my favourite of his novels, all of which I've read. It's a slippy book, disorientated in time and space and drenched in music. The book sank like a stone, which didn't surprise me, its messages are subtle, and unlike the feted Ian McEwen, who can do no wrong with the critics, I fancy Ishiguro is less liked - and I do (secretly) wonder if that is because he is less English. Unlike his previous books, including, of course, Remains of the Day, and his subsequent books, especially Never Let Me Go, now a film, The Unconsoled sank like an anchor after receiving universally bad reviews at the time of its publication. The Telegraph review said it was a sprawling, almost indecipherable 500-page work and the Guardian said it left readers and reviewers baffled. One literary critic said that the novel had invented its own category of badness. Meanwhile, I was reading it with intense absorption and enjoyment, understanding exactly what he was getting at...at least I thought I did...clearly a reader's interpretation is their own. The Unconsoled is set over three days in the life of concert pianist Ryder, who has come to an unnamed European city to perform. His memory seems patchy and selective and he drifts from situation to situation as if in a surreal dream, unable to totally understand what is going on.
I'm glad to say that by 2005 literary critics were beginning to agree with me...they voted the novel as the third best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005, and The Sunday Times placed it in 20th century's 50 most enjoyable books, later published as Pure Pleasure; A Guide to the 20th Century's Most Enjoyable Books.
One scene in the book has never left me; Ryder is in his hotel room when he notices that the rug is similar to the one he played soldiers on when a child. Suddenly, he realizes that the room is actually his old bedroom; he's back in his childhood. What follows is a tender, almost cherishing memory of better times which seems totally part of Ryder's life now. At the time I had just finished nursing my mother, who'd died of the advanced stages of a particularly psychotic form of Alzheimer's disease, and Ryder's problems and experiences reminded me of the twilight world she'd lived in, where real life probably invaded her dream world in unpleasant ways...she was happiest when imagining I was her sister, Beatrice, and that we were both in our twenties and living together before Mum married my father (Beatrice never married – in fact she came to live with the newly-weds!) Listening to Mum's mad conversations with herself gave me a wonderful insight into what life was like before the second world war (my mum was quite old when I was born).
I would recommend Ishiguro to anyone who hasn't yet read him...all his books. But The Unconsoled has a special place in my heart and will never leave my bookcase...so get your own copy!
My copy of Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER'S DIARY seems to be a first edition of 1953 from The Hogarth Press. It has that smell of an old book about it – a mix of tobacco, spores and midnight oil. The original owner of the book has written her name in on the first page in slanting black ink...Marjory Todd...and dated it 1/1/54,suggesting that this was a Christmas present. Dipping into it on occasion, as I do, reminds me of something Virginia wrote...What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever...Virginia Woolf’s diaries were kept over a period of twenty-seven years and after her death, her husband, Leonard, gathered extracts from them together. He went through 30 handwritten volumes and selected passages that related only to her writing life. They take us from 1919, when she was 36, to 1941. The last entry, just 20 days before she walked into the River Ouse with an overcoat filled with stones, finishes...I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
It has been suggested that Leonard kept the more intimate areas of Virginia’s diary from publication because she wrote of their relationship, her sexuality and the state of her mental health. But he maintained in his lifetime that the abridgement was far more to do with concentrating on the entries that demonstrated her art and intellect as a writer so that her reputation could be restored. It seems remarkable to me that this might need to be done, but in fact through the 50’s and 60‘s Woolf was not widely read and no university taught her work. She had lost her rating as a writer in the vanguard of modernism and English literature. And so the published diary accompanied her return to recognition; in the 80’s the full diaries were published for the first time and she become reinstated as a great writer.
Woolf teaches the 21C writer through humility and humanity. She feels ‘like us’; we can empathize on the depressions and mood swings of a writer’s life...I’m a deal happier at 38 than I was at 28; and happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel...(January 26th 1920)..the creative power that bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in...(May 11th 1920) I expect I could have screwed Jacob up tighter if I had foreseen, but I had to make my path as I went...(October 29th 1922 – all referring to Jacob’s Room). Sometimes she witnessess and records things that feel historic...It is a decaying village (Rodmell) which loses its boys to the town. Not a boy of them, said the Rev. Mr. Hawkesford, is being taught the plough. Rich people wanting weekend cottages buy up the old peasants' houses for fabulous sums...(September 25th 1927)
Although she is modest in her own appraisal of her writing, clues to the homilies people have recently paid to Wolfe can be spotted. I was gripped to read on June 19th 1923...But now what do I feel about my writing?–this book, that is The Hours, if that’s its name?...Finally, Woof called the book she was writing Mrs Dalloway, but that The Hours was the title Michael Cunningham chose for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about three generations of women affected by Mrs Dalloway.
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m often amazed at how organized she was. On April 12 1919, she wrote...Moll Flanders, which I finished yesterday in accordance with my time sheet...Not everyone likes to be so regimented in their work, but any of my students who have suggested to me that they can’t get a routine going will know I do recommend using tick lists, time sheets, work diaries and pie charts to get motivated – I would certainly recommend reading A Writer’s Diary as a wonderful way to inspire your own writing, and one of my OCA students, Helen Steadman, has been doing just that...
I’ve had a Virginia Woolf splurge this month...she wrote to me... I particularly liked Woolf’s discussions about using her notebook and especially her entry on 20 January 1919 which talks about her freewriting leading to “the diamonds of the dustheap”...She went on to say how the diary contained lots of very useful nuggets of advice on writing generally and this led to me reading To the Lighthouse and Orlando....which has provided some helpful lessons in bending the boundaries of life writing and I was inspired by Woolf’s amusing observation that when the facts aren’t there, sometimes the writer has to make them up... Helen quotes Woolf in Orlando...We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination...explaining how this affected her her own writing... With this in mind, I have conflated a number of events to create a more focused story... bringing techniques from fiction, I’ve used some stream-of-consciousness to try to convey the strangeness I felt ...
I can’t recommend Woolf’s diaries highly enough to any writer; it won’t matter one whit if you’ve not read anything else of her work...although reading the diary may entice you into the marvel of her novels. Perhaps we should end with Virginia's words; a marvellous description of the June 1927 eclipse of the sun...In our carriage were Vita, Harold, Quentin, Leonard and I. This is Hatfield, I daresay, I said. I was smoking a cigar...so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got out our sandwhiches and I came in from the W.C to find Harold being rubbed clean of cream....We got out (at Barton Fell, Yorkshire) and found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting...We could see a gold spot where the sun was, but it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm...Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping - it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we got out our smoked glasss; we saw it, crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We felt cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were very like old people, in the birth of the world - druids on Stonehenge. At the back of us were blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now, the colour going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over - this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills - at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. If was like a recovery.
Belinda Bauer – Blacklands.
I like to read books that inform my own writing, so I was drawn to Bauer because I agree that moorlands are evocative landscapes, sometimes breathtaking…sometimes chilling. It’s easy to lose a body on a wide moor; sheep, even horses die unannounced, and it’s possible to imagine a walker wandering in bad weather until they finally lie down and are not discovered until their bones have turned white.
We know murderers of the most evil distinction (presuming you can tolerate the idea that there are different levels of evil intent in murder), use moorland to dig shallow graves which even they won’t ever find again.
Steven’s uncle is out there – buried somewhere on Exmoor. Steven is as obsessed with his dead uncle Billy as his nan – Poor Mrs Peters, she’s called around Shipcott town – she lost her son to serial killer Arnold Avery, now languishing in a high security prison. The body has never been discovered, and Steven believes, with every sinew of his twelve-year-old body, that if only Billy could be given a proper burial, everything that is wrong in his family would come right again:
His nan would become a proper nan; she’d smile, play with him, bake cookies.
His mum would settle down with one man, instead of regularly chucking boyfriends out of their cramped house.
Maybe, even, Steven would be more popular at school, not bullied, not ‘almost friendless’.
Every spare moment Steven has, he spends out on the moors, digging with a ‘brute spade’, hoping to hit on his uncle’s skeleton. It’s a hopeless task, and Seven knows it, so he decides to enlist a helper. The only person who could actually tell him where Uncle Billy lies – Arnold Avery.
Steven writes a letter to his uncle’s murderer. I loved the letters Steven composed in Blacklands. It’s easy, when using a child as a protagonist, to give them an intellectual maturity they would not really have, but Bauer doesn't do this. Steven’s letters totally convinced me. He’s not a stupid boy; he knows what he’s doing. Except, of course, he does not. Avery’s letters back to Seven are equally convincing, and utterly frightening. They offer a series of connecting clues…and we all know how twelve-year-old boys love a quest.
From almost the beginning of the book, the reader is in a lather of sweat over the safety of Steven. Avery will hunt him down; we understand that. He may be languishing at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but that won’t stop him pursuing yet another victim.
In the Moors (2013), the first book in my trilogy, The Shaman Mysteries, is set on the Somerset Levels, a moorland that stretches from the wide arc of Bridgwater Bay right across to the mysterious and esoteric Glastonbury, and I use all that landscape for the two following novels, Unraveled Visions (2014) and Beneath the Tor (out this year). Unlike Bauer, I use a single protagonist, Sabbie Dare, whose adventures as a modern-day shaman in practice as a therapist leads her to understand that she can sometimes help people who bring very dark problems to her…very dark problems indeed. Linda Bauer, on the other hand use the town of Shipcott itself as a link between her first three books, turning them into a trilogy set on Exmoor. Bauer has gone on to write further ‘stand-alone’ novels, all of which are scary beasts – I hope to do the same! (see my previous post http://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-mood-board-different-way-of.html)
I had just a few plausibility problems with Blacklands, but these were nowhere near troubling enough to stop me reading, because there are two toweringly exquisite aspects to Bauer’s writing that make this a crackerjack of a book.
I loved Bauer’s writing style. It takes us deep into the minds of the characters. And, because of this, her characters are as real as people down the street; you feel their turmoil. In this extract, Steven tries hard to please his his nan, who has never recovered from the murder of her son and takes out her desperate misery on all around her. Steven has made her a new shopping trolly, working secretly with borrowed tools, using an abandoned pushchair; it was one of those all=terrain buggies, as if the parents who’d bought it were planning an ascent of Everest with their infant in tow…When Steven presented the rejuvenated trolley to his nan, she pursed her lips suspiciously and jerked it roughly back and forth across the floor as if she could make the wheels fall off this instant if she only tried hard enough.
‘Looks silly,’ said Nan.
‘They’re all-terrain wheels,’ Seven ventured. ‘They’ll bounce over stones and kerbs and stuff much better.’
‘Hmph. That’s all I need – some kind of cross-country shopping trolley.’
Blacklands won the 2010 CWA Gold Dagger and it was the 2010 Channel 4 TV Book Club choice. The Guardian thought it had…“lucid, uncluttered prose” and was “genuinely chilling”.
Bauer says that Blacklands is “probably my most personal, reflecting as it does my own memories and experiences of childhood. Into that mix I've introduced Arnold Avery - the most heinous monster any child could imagine. I wanted to write about the way a terrible crime can pass through the generations like ripples on a pond.”
This is an approach I appreciate, both as reader and writer. I don’t enjoy crime novels that concentrate on the gratuitous; that only show how terrifying and shocking a murder is and how clever those who solve the mystery are. I like to hear the voices of those who are affected by crime, essentially the victims and their families, but often others who come close to the crime. In Blacklands, we are truly able to empathize with Steven and his family, and for me, that’s what makes this book a prize-winner.
- My daughter recommended SARAH'S KEY by Tatiana de Rosnay, a book by a French author who is an expat American. Although her first language is English, this is the first book she's written that is not in French. A story about the 6oth anniversary of a dreadful moment in the days of Vichy France, which proves how culpable that government was for the fate of French Jews during the 2nd WW. It's written in a light tone using two main voices; Sarah, who is nearly ten in 1942 and Julia, a journalist who is doing an article on the round-up of Parisienne Jews...the Vel D'HIver. I'd recommend it as a book club read that would stimulate debate.
- Reading ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT by Jeanette Winterson led me to SEXING THE CHERRY, and through her work to WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL, one of her most recent books. This tells the 'other story' told as fiction in Oranges; the search for happiness. I have heard reviewers say that Winterson is not so much a novelist as an essayist; I'd agree with this. Her first book was autobiography; since then her novels have been only a hair away from being essays. This new book seems to be a bit of all of these; I'll report back when I've read it through!THE TIGER’S WIFE has been feted as a stunningly original novel. Tea Obreht is the youngest winner of the Orange Prize, and it is clear she had a fantastic imagination and can weave incredible tales. I did love the story, but there were times when the reading became difficult, not because it is a dense read or literary read, but because the writer, still only 24, doesn’t yet know how to take several short stories ( previously published) and pull them into a cohesive story. We meet innumerable incredible characters but these never glue the novel into one, heart-thumping piece. Emotion seems to be painted on, and I’m sure that is because Obreht tried to plait her short stories together without remembering the one piece of advice I always give to my students...be sure you know your own Core Emotional Truth.
Pat Barker; Life Class
I loved Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, and this book, set at the beginning of the 1st WW feels like an addition to that canon. The story looks at how people responded to the outbreak of war, and how it changes some lives, unsettled others and didn't seem to affect some people one little jot.
I didn't feel it was quite as well structured as the others. Characters move in and out of focus, as Paul Tarrant, a working-class strudent at the Slade, and Elinor Brooke, an scholarship artist from an upper-middle class background live their lives in detailed moments which give the story a slight 'journal' feel. The war comes quite late into the novel and, unlike some of her other work on this period, never really felt to me like a 'character' in itself, but rather something incidental that was happening to Paul when he volunteers to drive an ambulance at the front. What seemed to be missing from the novel; and what I found most frustrating, are the mentions of Paul and Elinor’s professor, Henry Tonks. This man pioneered developments in plastic surgery by drawing patients pre- and post-operation, after leaving the Slade to go back to medicine at the start of the war. But not a lot of this is covered in the book, and Tonks, like Paul’s first love Teresa, slide out of view. I would have liked more of this, and I would have like a more traditionally conclusive ending, especially as we leave the characters as the war moves into full throttle. Maybe if you haven’t read any of Barker’s 1st WW books yet, you might start with this one, leaving the others to entice you afterwards.
We are All Completley Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Witty, stylish, page-turning and very finely written. Fowler takes a startling subject and creates deeply-felt characters as well as a shocking twist in the middle of the book. The disturbing lives of the Cookes family consists of a pedantic psychologist father who specializes in animal behavior, an emotionally fragile mother and three children: Lowell, Rosemary and Fern.
One daughter mysteriously vanishes, the other changes from a prodigiously talkative child to a silent adult; the brother runs away. And beneath the basic plotline lies a story as fantastic, terrible and beautiful as any Grimm's fairy tale.
This unconventional, dysfunctional family can't be too autobiographical, but Bloomington, Indiana where they live in the novel is also where Fowler spent the first 11 years of her life.
I found the ending didn't live up to the promise of the rest of the book, but that may be because I wanted it to be fairytale, and in reality, that woulnd't have been fair, right or very convincing.
One daughter mysteriously vanishes, the other changes from a prodigiously talkative child to a silent adult; the brother runs away. And beneath the basic plotline lies a story as fantastic, terrible and beautiful as any Grimm's fairy tale.
This unconventional, dysfunctional family can't be too autobiographical, but Bloomington, Indiana where they live in the novel is also where Fowler spent the first 11 years of her life.
I found the ending didn't live up to the promise of the rest of the book, but that may be because I wanted it to be fairytale, and in reality, that woulnd't have been fair, right or very convincing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
“I’ve loved all of Adichie’s novels,” I read in one review of Americanah, “but not this one. It has no story.”
The reviewer is wrong, in my opinion. Americanah has a wealth of story. Even the slightest of minor characters have stories they are bursting to tell. What the book does not have, is a plot.
Plot and story are different things, albeit sometimes difficult to pull apart. In fact, in a well-plotted novel it should be damn-near impossible to separate them, because good plotting intricately intertwines its underlying stories into an almost invisibly woven fabric.
In the past, Nigeria’s war-torn modern history supplied Adichie with rich themes, giving her an abundance of story that neatly hid any absence of tight plotting techniques. But Americanah is set in a more politically stable Nigeria, in England and the Princetown campus of New Jersey. The novel doesn’t deal in war, tribal hatred or violent death. It is of the perceptions and emotions of her characters which she writes primarily.
Americanah has strong, over-arching themes that moved and informed me, and Adichie defines these in a straight-forward manner, at time using blog posts to strike them home. At its foundation, the book is a well-crafted polemic – that is a contentious argument presented to establish the truth of an understanding. Through her main character, Adichie explored her argument in convincing depth.
Ifemelu is a young, educated Nigerian woman who fulfills her desire to travel, leaves her sweetheart and goes to America without a Green Card. She wants to embrace American life, ‘softening’ her hair rather than plaiting it and adopting a New York accent, but she’s struck with a difference she observes. In Nigeria, everyone is black. There is no discrimination over colour. What she experiences in the US – and then documents in her blog – is how colour prejudice survives in the enlightened, racially equal 21st century. It’s subtle, this prejudice. Understated. Sometimes, people seem embarrassed by their own racism. But Ifemelu notes it down, incident by incident. She describes herself as “the non-American-black”, commenting to Black Americans on their own naivety.
The polemic of the novel, the quality of the writing and the strength of the characters powered me through the book, even though I’m less than fond of plot-less novels. Not that there is anything wrong in the idea of a novel without a plot. Some of the best literature in the world is substantially plot-less, including Ulysses and The Life and Opinion of Tristam Shandy. Some readers hate plot-driven books and many writers prefer to present ideas and explore character rather than neatly sculpt a perfect plot; I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of those.
Readers often get confused – understandably – with the differences between story and plot. But consider your own life as a story. Every life you touch also has a story. Story infiltrates the way we understand our lives...it’s almost how humans think.
Plot, on the other hand, is a literary term defining the structure a piece of dramatic prose or poetry. These form a pattern or sequence of composed, causal events which are usually organized into and contained within a logical shape. They comprise six or so steps; the introduction, the conflict, the rising action, the crisis, the falling action, and the denouement and/or conclusion. Our lives occasionally take such causal paths, but mostly, like a plot-less novel, our story drifts though space and time, never really ending until we have.
Note that characters are hardly mentioned in my definition of plot above; another way of thinking about the differences between story and plot is to consider how stories are always about people (or people substitutes) while plots are the structure such a story can assume within the narrative. Adichie gains balance by expounding her opinions through the development of her characters.
There is, for instance, Aunty Uju is a village woman who educates herself and becomes the lover of “The General,” living in luxury in Nigeria until it all goes wrong then escaping to the US where she finally finds works as a doctor. A favourite of mine was Ifemelu’s college boyfriend, Obinze. In the UK he has to undergo the humiliations of a person without status, but when he returns to Nigeria he becomes successful in the corrupt regime which he hates and offers the poorly paid workers he met in England a slice of that success.
One interesting literary device used throughout the book is worth examining by any prospective writer. After 13 years in the US, Ifemelu is going home and she wants to braid her hair again. She travels out of Princetown to a shabby area where the hairdressers are illegal immigrants working in bad conditions. It takes over six hours for the braiding to complete, and in that time, the rest of the story, mostly in flashback, is completed too, making the braiding a great symbol for the weaving of a tale. Naturally, braiding African hair is also an important statement about blackness, but the contrast between Ifemelu and the hairdressers (she was once an illegal immigrant, like these girls, but now owns a condo in New Jersey), investigates a subtle underlying of the theme of discrimination; although the workers in the salon are black, there are bigger class differences between Ifemelu and the hairdressers than she’d wish to admit. She is the embarrassed one, thinking thoughts she wishes she wouldn’t have. She can barely force herself join in their conversations.
You can’t beat Aristotle, if you need to sum something up, and he thinks that…the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole. (from The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle). Right on, Aristotle. That’s exactly what I was trying to say about plot.
I recommend you read Americanah, then read the reviews, especially those from ‘ordinary’ readers, which you’ll find on Goodreads, Amazon and readers’ blogs. Note how different readers see the book in various ways…as a love story, as a book about the black agenda, about isolation and immigration. Some people loved the book, some were disappointed, and this demonstrates what readers ask primarily of the authors they love. Yes, they want stories about people…brilliantly coloured stories of life in all its glory. But they also want causality – that cause and effect that encapsulates and ties together random events, making more sense of them than we could ever make of our own lives. They want plot – a structure that unites character and story together, perhaps not in too perfect a manner, but not so that the narrative is as amorphous as our personal life story.
How to Be Both by Ali Smith, one of my favourite writers. How to be Both is almost two stories, intertwined, with more than 500 years separating the characters - one a Renaissance painter, secretly female, the other a modern teenager living in the UK and desperately in need of some love. Smith suggests you can read them in either order, but I would strongly suggest you start with 'camera' not 'eye' as you're far less likely to give up! "As always, Smith is being playful and inventive 's work. How to be both, almost eludes description, which I’m sure was the very effect Smith was aiming at. It’s well worth the slight struggle although not my favourite; The Accidental will remain that.
THE CHILDREN'S ACT, BY IAN MCEWAN
I think Ian McEwan might be in a bit of a fallow period. I've read Chesil Beach, and Solar, and found the first distasteful and the second a bit of a piss-take; very funny, but rather disquieting, seeing it's remit, which was to write something about climate change. Sweet Tooth has been described on goodreads as 'boring'. Anyway, I started The Children Act with optimism and in a lot of ways I was rewarded. I enjoyed the factual details about Fiona Maye's job as a High Court judge in the family court and thought the start - which sets the subplot into action - was gripping. This fifty year old woman's husband is leaving her for his floosie because she hasn’t made love to him for seven weeks. Seven weeks! Wow, said hubbie (or maybe McEwan) should review what they expect of 50 year old wives, frankly. Anyway, off he goes and I thought his portrayal of Fiona, alone in her posh London flat was extremely empathetic.
At the same time, the main story kicks off. This investigates, sensitively, I thought, the dilemma the Jehovah Witnesses have when they need blood. A 17 year old boy is adament he’d rather die of his leukemia, than be tainted. She visits him in hospital and something sparks between them.
I think McEwan is exploring, again, the way one person can have an explosive effect on another, at first meeting, previously examined in Enduring Love. He does this with intimate depth and with the consummate skill of an long-experienced novelist. But I did miss the twists and explosions of previous books, such as Enduring Love, Saturday and Amsterdam. Maybe he’ll have a little fallow period, in which we can all enjoy, but not really rave, about his releases, and they he’ll be back POW! hitting us with something amazing.
The Children’s Act isn’t it, but it’s certainly a lovely, absorbing read that deserves good reviews.
Jon McGregor and Salley Vickers: Glints of Gold
In September I travelled to the cathedral city of Wells to speak at the Bishop’s Palace during the http://www.wellsfestivalofliterature.org.uk/ I was bursting with pride to be asked to do so. I had been a prize-winner in their short story competition years ago
and my brief was to give heart to the audience of writers, most of which had entered this years award, by sharing my success in writing since then.
I told them about the day I’d received my prize. Salley Vickers had presented the cheques and had gone on to speak, telling us about the writing of Miss Garnet’s Angel, her first book. She’d spoken of how she’s had started this book, with a strong idea of the main character and her story. But although she had a story, she didn’t yet have a novel, there was no ‘glint of gold’ within it, no twist that would attract a reader.
Salley Vickers confessed she’d had the basic idea for Miss Garnet’s Angel, in her mind for years, without finding the spark that would turn it into a novel. Then she went to Venice, and got lost in the back streets, fell upon the most beautiful church. Inside, a panelled painting, recounting the story of Tobias and the angel. This was her ‘Glint of gold; a flicker of inspiration’.
Vickers says…“the very old tale of Tobias, who travels to Medea unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael [is] powerful and evocative. It has the quality of a myth or fairy story, seeming to mean much more than its literal sense. In 'Miss Garnet's Angel' I tell the contemporary story of Julia Garnet, a retired school teacher, who comes to Venice prompted by the death of a friend. She finds the Guardi panels...”
The majority of writers find it hard to compose something new. We are all waiting for the glint of gold - the flicker of inspiration that comes out of the blue. So when I read Jon McGregor’s account of writing his first novel, I noticed he’d had a similar experience.
Jon McGregor burst onto the scene in 2002 by being long-listed for the booker for his first novel, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things. Once again, Bloomsbury had taken a risk with a new writer and it had paid off for them, both in sales for this book and the books he’s continue to write; interesting, original, contentious, often disturbing novels.
McGregor is like Marmite no doubt about it. The reviewer's were soon at each others throats over him. The Telegraph, 17th September 2002 said; "You won't read anything much more poignant than this." McGregor was awarded 2002 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and a heap of other prizes for this book, yet Julie Myerson, in The Guardian, spat vitriol, as if it was her raison d’etre to make sure everyone hated the book. She called it doom-laden…oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused, undoubtedly well-intentioned. She said the narrative voice was pompous, with a fatal lack of humour, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant. She quotes the text; “An elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel", and says, “if the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first. She had a book out herself at the time, and it felt like she didn’t think there was room in bookstores for both of them. I was expecting her to pull out a revolver any moment and mumble something about leaving this town by noontide. Even so, it did put me off reading the book at that time.
Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, went to Bradford University and began getting his short stories published, including on Radio Four. An agent heard the reading and contacted him, suggesting he write a novel. Don’t all new writers dream of such a contact? Once you have your agent on your side, it does get that little bit easier. Even so, you need your basic idea, characters, setting, plot...and a glint of gold.
McGregor says… “In the summer of 1997, a boy was shot in Bolton, round about the same time that Diana died. This got me thinking about the significance that gets attached to people's lives and deaths, about perceived levels of tragedy and newsworthiness. I was interested in the anonymity of city life, the fact that I still didn't know my neighbours after three years, the damage that transience does to the community. And a few almost-terrible incidents in the street I was living in at the time gave me the magic.” He began to write If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things on a narrowboat in Nottingham.
“The character of the narrator - and therefore the hook and drive of the novel as a coherent whole - didn't come until May 2000, when I went to Japan to visit a friend and he showed me the Buddhist temple at Kamakura, where they have a shrine for mothers of stillborn/aborted children. This sparked off a chain of thought about what a responsibility and a fear pregnancy must be, which gradually rolled into a storyline able to tie together what was happening in the street. So in a sense I only really started writing the novel then.”
Once I’d learnt that McGregor had been visited by the ‘glint of gold, I wanted to read the book. Unlike Myerson, I was gripped and absorbed from the first page, because of the clever trick McGregor plays on that first page. He sets up an incident, and only by reading the entire book can you know what that dreadful moment really contained.
I thought the book was as close to a kind of poetry as it is to prose. Its opening is evocative of inner city life everywhere. We’re in a North of England street, terraced housing packed with people going through the motions of everyday existence. This is almost the delight of reading Henry James all over again, although McGregor dips into their physical activities rather than their minds, and through this ‘show, don’t tell’ structure we see both mind and actions. McGregor writes in the book…“You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
“I’ve loved all of Adichie’s novels,” I read in one review of Americanah, “but not this one. It has no story.”
The reviewer is wrong, in my opinion. Americanah has a wealth of story. Even the slightest of minor characters have stories they are bursting to tell. What the book does not have, is a plot.
Plot and story are different things, albeit sometimes difficult to pull apart. In fact, in a well-plotted novel it should be damn-near impossible to separate them, because good plotting intricately intertwines its underlying stories into an almost invisibly woven fabric.
In the past, Nigeria’s war-torn modern history supplied Adichie with rich themes, giving her an abundance of story that neatly hid any absence of tight plotting techniques. But Americanah is set in a more politically stable Nigeria, in England and the Princetown campus of New Jersey. The novel doesn’t deal in war, tribal hatred or violent death. It is of the perceptions and emotions of her characters which she writes primarily.
Americanah has strong, over-arching themes that moved and informed me, and Adichie defines these in a straight-forward manner, at time using blog posts to strike them home. At its foundation, the book is a well-crafted polemic – that is a contentious argument presented to establish the truth of an understanding. Through her main character, Adichie explored her argument in convincing depth.
Ifemelu is a young, educated Nigerian woman who fulfills her desire to travel, leaves her sweetheart and goes to America without a Green Card. She wants to embrace American life, ‘softening’ her hair rather than plaiting it and adopting a New York accent, but she’s struck with a difference she observes. In Nigeria, everyone is black. There is no discrimination over colour. What she experiences in the US – and then documents in her blog – is how colour prejudice survives in the enlightened, racially equal 21st century. It’s subtle, this prejudice. Understated. Sometimes, people seem embarrassed by their own racism. But Ifemelu notes it down, incident by incident. She describes herself as “the non-American-black”, commenting to Black Americans on their own naivety.
The polemic of the novel, the quality of the writing and the strength of the characters powered me through the book, even though I’m less than fond of plot-less novels. Not that there is anything wrong in the idea of a novel without a plot. Some of the best literature in the world is substantially plot-less, including Ulysses and The Life and Opinion of Tristam Shandy. Some readers hate plot-driven books and many writers prefer to present ideas and explore character rather than neatly sculpt a perfect plot; I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of those.
Plot, on the other hand, is a literary term defining the structure a piece of dramatic prose or poetry. These form a pattern or sequence of composed, causal events which are usually organized into and contained within a logical shape. They comprise six or so steps; the introduction, the conflict, the rising action, the crisis, the falling action, and the denouement and/or conclusion. Our lives occasionally take such causal paths, but mostly, like a plot-less novel, our story drifts though space and time, never really ending until we have.
Note that characters are hardly mentioned in my definition of plot above; another way of thinking about the differences between story and plot is to consider how stories are always about people (or people substitutes) while plots are the structure such a story can assume within the narrative.
I am of the mind that writers fall naturally towards one way of being or the other – either they love character and want to primarily tell story, or they love theme, complexity and construction; the use of narrative to build ideas and expound argument. There isn’t a right or wrong way, but knowing which way you are driven will only help balance your writing. Adichie gains that balance by expounding her opinions through the development of her characters.
There is, for instance, Aunty Uju is a village woman who educates herself and becomes the lover of “The General,” living in luxury in Nigeria until it all goes wrong then escaping to the US where she finally finds works as a doctor. A favourite of mine was Ifemelu’s college boyfriend, Obinze. In the UK he has to undergo the humiliations of a person without status, but when he returns to Nigeria he becomes successful in the corrupt regime which he hates and offers the poorly paid workers he met in England a slice of that success.
One interesting literary device used throughout the book is worth examining by any prospective writer. After 13 years in the US, Ifemelu is going home and she wants to braid her hair again. She travels out of Princetown to a shabby area where the hairdressers are illegal immigrants working in bad conditions. It takes over six hours for the braiding to complete, and in that time, the rest of the story, mostly in flashback, is completed too, making the braiding a great symbol for the weaving of a tale. Naturally, braiding African hair is also an important statement about blackness, but the contrast between Ifemelu and the hairdressers (she was once an illegal immigrant, like these girls, but now owns a condo in New Jersey), investigates a subtle underlying of the theme of discrimination; although the workers in the salon are black, there are bigger class differences between Ifemelu and the hairdressers than she’d wish to admit. She is the embarrassed one, thinking thoughts she wishes she wouldn’t have. She can barely force herself join in their conversations.
I recommend students read Americanah, then read the reviews, especially those from ‘ordinary’ readers, which you’ll find on Goodreads, Amazon and readers’ blogs. Note how different readers see the book in various ways…as a love story, as a book about the black agenda, about isolation and immigration. Some people loved the book, some were disappointed, and this demonstrates what readers ask primarily of the authors they love. Yes, they want stories about people…brilliantly coloured stories of life in all its glory. But they also want causality – that cause and effect that encapsulates and ties together random events, making more sense of them than we could ever make of our own lives. They want plot – a structure that unites character and story together, perhaps not in too perfect a manner, but not so that the narrative is as amorphous as our personal life story.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt deserved every bit of praise. It's a long book, and when I reached pg 100 I can remember thinking, 'thank heavens, I've still got 600 pages to enjoy...' it's that sort of read. Characters - so colourful and real and unforgettable Theme - clever and deep.
Setting - contemporary and fascinating. Plot - tight, with a brill twist towards the end. It's the sort of book you want to start again as soon as you've finished.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Gaiman said in an interview that ironically, while he was writing a book for children narrated by an adult, he was also writing "Ociean" a book for an adult reader told through the eyes of a seven year old boy. This young narrator is captivating; he tells us about the adult world but he's reinterpreting what he sees so that he can make sense of it and this develops into a fantasy that pulls you along. Magical Realism rather than fantasy, in fact. A very competent story with a tight plot and good, strong characters. If you're looking for a book to keep you going on a long journey, as I was, this is ideal; fast compelling and quick to read.
Candide by François-Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire, was published in 1759 during the European 'enlightenment’ and at the time was banned as blasphemous, and politically seditious – Candide pokes a lot of fun at the establishment of the day. Voltaire was a sharp witty man, and (the two don’t often seem to go together) a philosopher, who strongly opposed certain Enlightenment ideas about social class. Candide is a naive young man whogrows up in a baron’s castle. His tutor Pangloss teaches him that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Candide is discovered kissing the baron’s daughter, his secret love, and is expelled from his home. He wanders the world with Pangloss, surviving the most awful disasters and tortures, while Pangloss continues to describe life as ‘the best of all possible worlds”. Shortly after reading this novella, I saw the film Oh, Lucky Man, staring Malcolm McDowell, a sprawling musical intended as an allegory on life in the 20th century. I could not help linking the two stories. I still to this day believe that the screenplay takes its inspiration from Candide.
"Marley's Ghost",
original illustration by John Leech
from A Christmas Carol
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A Christmas Carol. Did you know that when Dickens wrote this little novella in 1843 as part of his ‘Christmas Series’, it changed all our Christmases? Traditional practices were going out of fashion at the time, and the book revived them. Groaning boards of turkey and iced cake, presents, dancing and mistletoe were all saved for our enjoyment…or not! At the same time it was a clear comment on early Victorian society, as when the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals two children saying; “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
For me, the book was a tradition in itself. Every year, as my children grew, I’d read it, over four or five nights, ending the story with Scrooge’s transformation on Xmas Eve. Heady days!
Life after Life by Kate Atkinson
I'm sorry, Kate; really, really sorry. I've loved all your other books, but this one just left me cold. Maybe it's the constant return to all that snow.
Winter of 1910, and a child is born; and keeps being born until she survives this first ordeal; and then keeps being born each time her life takes the sort of turn that leads us all at times to wish we could go back and try again. This is a book that tackles a tricky premis; I commend it for this. The concept of allowing a character to try at life until she gets it right – life after life – is an appealing one and one that has not been attempted overmuch.
The scope of this novel is vast; two world wars and the landscapes of England and Germany. But I never got to like any of the characters, especially Ursula and her irritating mother, Sylvia. Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more self-determining; Ursula may keep going back until she gets it right but quite a lot of the problems are random; if , as a small child, you drown in an undertow, you surely learn very little (not to go paddling?) on your return.
I wanted to get closer to Ursula; see what made her tick, and was prevented by the sheer speed of the narrative. I wanted her to tell me why she did this; why doing this was any better than striving to live one, solid life.
All the prize-givers loved this book; all the papers loved it too. The Telegraph review tells us…Each time Ursula is reborn, she tries to prevent the traumas of previous lives. She’s not exactly conscious of what’s been before, but she feels looming dread and déjà vu. This leads her mother to pack her off to a psychologist who talks of Nietzsche and Amor fati (love of fate). I would have really liked the opportunity for Ursula to find herself discussing her strange life experience, of which she's not quite aware, but she can't; she not quite aware of it.
The Guardian reviews their own review of the book…This description of Atkinson's looping, metamorphosing narrative inevitably makes it sound tricksy, almost whimsical. Structurally, it is, but its ceaseless renewals are populated with pleasures that extend beyond the what-next variety.
I agree. Structurally it's tricksy. The emotional whimsy did not impact on me. So; 10 out of 10 for a clever idea, Kate, but sorry, sorry I didn't like the result.
Grail Alchemy by Mara Freeman
Mara Freeman is already known in Druidic and Western Magical circles as the founder and director of the Avalon Mystery School, and her life’s work has been to offer seekers on the path a profound route into their personal quest. Her earlier book, Kindling the Celtic Spirit is one of my handbooks for living the sacred wheel of the year, and I was keen to read her latest book, Grail Alchemy (Initiation in the Celtic Mystery Tradition), published by Destiny Books.
Some books illuminate as you read; as if there are dark shafts and closed chambers within our minds which need a key to access the locks and a torch to light the sconces. No wonder Eastern sages describe such a process as ‘enlightenment’. Sometimes, as I’m reading a book that opens my thinking in this way, I can physically feel the lights going on and the doors swinging wide. Often, this involves no words, not even within introspective thought. Which is why the experience of bringing an inner journey into full consciousness cannot be properly described; it is too profound for our lexicon.
I knew, as I began to read Grail Alchemy, that it would be a work of scholarship. Freeman’s careful research, combined with an attractive writing style that is never difficult to read, allows this – perhaps the most enigmatic story we have in the west – to be fully comprehended as history, literature, legend and, above all, myth. The book’s format explores the myriad symbols connected to the Grail…Fisher Kings and Loathly Ladies, cauldrons and silver branches among so many others. As reader, I was able to engage with these to discover meaning in both my inner life, and the life of the world; a profound method of making sense of how humankind inhabits this planet.
Early in Grail Alchemy, Freeman speaks of using ‘focus’ and ‘imagination’. The depth of that instruction is possibly one core of the book’s messages. By entering the ‘language of the soul’ through the exercises, meditations, VisionJourneys and rituals contained within the book, pursuing a meaning to the Grail becomes a personal quest that certainly connected me to my deepest inner parts, and from there, to moments where I felt able to reach the spirit of the Divine. This is not achieved by the physical act of reading the book, thoughtful commentary though it is, but through the work the reader will do around the text, including using that combination of concentration of will and the creative imagery of the mind to walk into the world of the beautifully spoken guided journeys that accompany the text. My intention is to return to each ‘VisionJourney’ time after time, reaching deeper into their magic.
Freeman recently was quoted as saying ‘As the Soul of the World is feminine, so is the individual soul within each of us, so that to seek the Grail is to go in quest of the essential Self which has been devalued and disregarded in a world that values the material over the spiritual.’ I truly felt this, as I worked through the book, which for me has become a cypher to aid initiation into deeper mysteries not easily tapped – an unravelling which results in bolts being pulled back and sconces being lit within the mind.
Joseph Campbell called the Grail ‘the founding myth of Western civilization’, and Freeman’s working of this myth creates a possibility for the reader; that of truly being part of the spiritual path of the Grail traditions. This book feels exquisitely wise and, for the reader, transformative and inspiring.
The Visitor, by Katherine Stansfield is written with an aching poignancy and vivid, intense descriptive powers. Set between the 1880s and the mid 1930s, it brilliantly contrasts its protagonist, Pearl, as a child, a young woman and an old woman on the verge of being sucked under by dementia, which allows Stansfield to withhold essential facts until she’s ready to allow us to piece the clues together. The past is now clearer to Pearl than the present, demonstrated by Stansfield through her clever structural weaving of past and present.
Stansfield now lives in Wales, but spent her childhood in Cornwall, and a major character in the story is the beautifully described Cornish fishing village of Morlanow, where in the last century, huge shoals of pilchards made some people rich, while others are lost at sea. Now, between the two world wars, the shoals have gone and the village is preparing to look to tourism and holidaymakers for an income.
Pearl has lived in Morlanow all her life, and her love of swimming, which she still sneaks away to do in her nightie, comes across as her enduring pleasure. Slowly, throught memory and the troubled times of her present life, it emerges that Pearl ‘lost’ her first and only love, and has lived through an unhappy marriage with Jack, hoping that her Nicholas will return. Now, she is certain that he will. She see the signs everywhere…
I couldn't put The Hours, by Michael Cunninham, down, It's the perfect accompaniment to Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - which at one point she was going to title ‘The Hours’. It is also a great achievement in itself. Written somewhat in the Woolf style, it moves deftly, never making a shortcut, through a single day in the lives of three women.
In 1923 Virginia Woolf, living in Richmond, but longing to go back to London, is setting out to write the first words of her new book, about a woman holding a party.
In 1951, in Los Angeles we meet a woman with a small son and one on the way. Laura Brown is reading Virginia Woolf, struggling with her husband’s birthday cake and contemplating suicide. In 1990 in New York, Clarissa Vaughan a middle-aged woman with a grown daughter and a female partner, is planning a party for her friends, to celebrate her early love’s recent literary award. But Richard has AIDS and doesn’t want a party in his honour.
I saw the film before reading the book, but the book itself is the revelation. Stunning.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri's short stories, which I love, often seem to ramble and have no tight point to make. But if one stops and thinks about them, not only does one see the point and see it clearly, but all those rambling make perfect sense; the entire thing makes perfect and satisfying sense and leaves you changed and pensive. So I did expect The Lowland to ramble; I did expect to have to think, long and hard, after finishing the book, to find the sense, the meaning and the point. And it's all there in the first chapter, which shows a scene of two inseperable young brothers up to mischief and punished for it. The brothers go their seperate ways, with different passions and in different continents and the decades pass. It told me a lot, eventually about love; how it works, how it pulls us to act and react, and how it can't be forced.
I was also fascinated to read about the Naxalite movement in India, something I knew nothing about until reading this book. That's something I love in a novel; learing something new.
The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
I read somewhere that if Toibin had written this book 500 years ago, he would have been burnt at the stake. Although this is probably true of a lot of modern authors, it is also true that writers today still receive death threats when they write openly about religion.
There is no doubt that Toilbin takes a good hard look at what Christianity has become by examining what Mary, the mother of Jesus, might have thought of her son's life. Toibin's Mary is pretty underwhelmed - in the way of mothers everywhere, this Mary thinks it was all a full about very little, that her son risked and lost his life for some 'fit in his head' that she still does not understand and still cannot tolerate. But now she's being hounded by the men who want to write the life of Jesus. Understandably, they want her to say the things they want to hear; she will only tell it as she sees it.
Toibin's portrayal of a mother is acute; her thoughts are a mother's thoughts, right down to the feeling one experiences at birth and the protection one feels for a child througout life. Mary only wants her son safe; Jesus ignores and rejects her council. This story could be about any woman who has lost her child to a radical cause. It's as much a story for today as for 2000 years ago.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
I was holidaying in Whitby when I first realised that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a surprisingly modern novel. I’d watched the Hammer film versions of the book in my misspent youth and they left with the opinion that the book was a bit of late Victorian gothic horror, no where near good enough for me to need to wade through all that gore. But every Whitby bookshop had a copy of Dracula in its window, and naturally, I soon succumbed, reading it on the top of blowy cliffs and in the shelter of the beaches below. I took it on every walk, along with my butterfly identification book.
We did a lot of walking that holiday, passing the whaling arch on West Cliff, which Stoker would have passed too, with his family, when he holidayed here in June 1990. He stayed at Royal Crescent and it was there I discovered just how inspiring his time in Whitby must have been. Bram Stoker had found his inspiration. Standing in the crescent, you have a view of the North Sea, past sloping green cliff and grey sands. Across the river estuary are the imposing ruins of the Abbey, which must have been at least as gothic then as it is now. The churchyard of St Mary lies below, the location of a vampiric attack in the second half of the story. As twilight falls, bats begin to swoop into view.
Mina, one of the two young female characters in Dracula, voices Stoker’s thoughts on the town: Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows…
Bram Stoker also spent time at Whitby library – he made notes from 'An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’, in which he must have seen the name ‘Dracula’ for the first time. The fifteenth-century Vlad Dracula (Vlad the Impaler) was as bloodthirsty as his fictional counterpart, impaling his enemies on long spikes and nailing turbans to the scalps of foreign ambassadors. Stoker gives his reader the historical allusion that Count Dracula is the descendant of Vlad – in his Author’s Note he explains that the documents assembled in the novel are real. Even as I read this, before starting the novel, I was reminded of the hype around The Blair Witch Project, and saw how astute Stoker was as a writer.
He’d called this story The Un-dead for all the time he was writing it. Just before publication, he changed his title to the wonderfully charged-up name of the antagonis. This may have changed its destiny, although ‘un-dead’ remains a popular trope today, especially in Young Adult literature.
I began my holiday read, and soon found that it was not at all like the Hammer Horror version…or for that matter like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) which I found almost unwatchably hammed up. Dracula contains elements of the conventions of gothic fiction…dark-shadowed, cobwebby castles juxtaposed with vast remote landscapes and vulnerable, virginal girls threatened by black-coated evil-doers… but Stoker contrasts his Transylvanian castle with parochial Whitby and the bustle of London in the 1990s.
Starting with that holiday in Whitby, Stoker used a wide range of research methods and a clear understanding of modern character development to write the story, but a stuck with the traditional gothic novel structure; diary entries, letters and newspaper cuttings etc. It opens with the most famous section of the book, Jonathan Harker's Journal, which recounts his visit to Transylvania as a lawyer helping the count through his London property transaction. Harker falls under the spell of the Brides of Dracula and succumbs to the vampire’s influence. This opening feels like it has an impossible resolution and I turned the pages as fast as any modern thriller, needing to know how he could possibly escape with his life. At that point, I had no idea how many other characters would not escape with theirs. The novel keeps twisting and surprising us, as Dracula, on his way to London aboard a ship (hidden in a coffin) is washed up in Whitby and escapes in the shape of a black dog, and we’re introduced to Renfield, who is incarcerated in a mental asylum where he lives on a diet of flies and spiders.
Stoker's masterpiece was part of a fin-de-siècle literary culture obsessed with crime – this was the time that Jack the Ripper stalked Whitechapel – and sensationalism – these were the original ‘naughties’. The book strips away the layers of late Victorian anxiety such as loss of religious traditions, colonialism, scientific advancement, plus a growing awareness of female sexuality and a continued fear of homosexuality. The book is a mirror in which generations of readers have explored their own fantasies.
Maurice Richardson described it as; a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match, and no one could argue with that (or prevent themselves from rushing to read such a book).
Tracy Chevalier is a renowned author; I’ve previously read and enjoyed Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Lady and the Unicorn. For her most recent historical drama, The Last Runaway, she turns to the American slave trade. Honor Bright is young, naïve, an English quaker who goes, in the 1850’s to the northern USA to live (Ohio). Against her new family’s wishes, she befriends runaway slaves, helping them escape to Canada through secret routes and safe houses. Torn between her conscience and the law, she become more plucky and determined when she meets other strong women. It’s a good insight into the early Quaker settlers’ lives and the dark period of American history just prior to the Civil War, beautifully written in a ponderous read, but this is, in the end, a piece of historic romance. Chevalier does not care to dig too deeply into what the Northern States of America were like at that point in history, or into the slave trades excesses, or even, to be honest, into her main character’s mind. She is now often compared to Maggach and Philippa Gregory, downgraded from literary status; maybe she never wanted that anyway! This is an easy, enjoyable read; keep it for the beach.
A Perfectly Good Man, the second book I've read by Patrick Gale, is engrossing. The story examins events from various character viewpoints, moving around in time seemingly randomly to create a rich canvas. The characters are finely drawn, and the theme is deeply mined. I'm steadily becoming a fan of Patrick Gale's work and their fairly constant themes of Cornwall) dysfunctional families,and his continual theme of religion and Man's struggle within the confines of its boundaries of morality. The perfectly good man of the title is destined to fail - not precisely become a bad man, but indeed a flawed one. He did this in gloriously with horrendous consequences for him, his family and the wider community.
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
She wrote the first draft of The Girl With The Louding Voice in eight months during the MA course, and quickly entered it into the Bath Novel Awards for unpublished manuscripts. Having won the competition and secured an agent she began revising the book –– that took about three years. The novel was finally published after a bidding war in 2020 and soon gained critical acclaim.
The Girl With the Louding Voice is set in Nigeria, Daré’s home country, and focuses on 14-year-old Adunni as she is taken out of school by her poverty-stricken, widowed father and sold to become the third wife of a local man. When Adunni runs away to Lagos, dangers await her. She effectively becomes a slave to a wealthy family. But Adunni dreams of continuing her education and finding a voice to stand up for herself and girls like her.
One of the most resonant areas of the novel are the voices of other young, poor girls, and it was interesting see their various opinions of what is happening to them. Early on, we meet Enitan, Adunni’s best friend. Her approach to marriage is at odds with Adunni’s; she loves make up and hair-do’s, and is excited about this development in her friend’s life. Later, as Adunni moves into her husband’s compound, she meets Kiki, his daughter by his first wife, who is also 14 and about to be married. She is sanguine about this – men have everything, she explains to Adunni. They own everything. They have all the power. Kiki also wants to continue at school and become a dress designer and she plans to sweet talk her husband into paying up. If men have all the power, she argues, then the best thing for a girl is to grab a man.
Just a few years older than Adunni is the second wife, who is pregnant. Her story is harrowing, and her demise cuts short Adunni’s life in the compound. She runs away in fear of her life, and finds herself in Lagos, working for Big Madam for no wage. Here, the investigation by Daré into the superstitions around pregnancy continue when we meet Ms Tia, a neighbour of Big Madam, who recognises the qualities and spirit in Adunni and helps her prepare to take a scholarship to a prestigious school. She has so far avoided getting pregnant, but begins to decide she would like to have a child with her husband. She agrees to undergo a shocking ritual to begin the process.
As the story of all these women progress, Adunni also begins to investigate the mystery of the previous maid; Rebecca disappeared after being made pregnant by Big Madam’s wastrel husband. As Adunni wonders: “Why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?”
The twists and turns are held together with a clever control of language by Daré. The story is told in the first person by Adunni, who’s voice uses a country dialect. Meanwhile this is countered by the characters in Lagos, who speak very standard English.
Daré talks about the development of this voice to Aramide Akintimehin, writing for the Assembly Website. ‘I started the first draft about a week before I was due to submit about 3,000 words to my dissertation supervisor. I wrote the first sentence in my character’s voice and did not stop writing until I had the required 3,000 words. When I went to see him a week later for his review and assessment, I was pleasantly surprised when he told me that he loved it… I felt that I needed to break [Adunni’s] English down and break myself down in the process to understand her, so that she could be understood by anyone else who’s reading it…I wanted it to be nonstandard English…
Later in the book Adunni comes to the realisation that, just because the rich Lagos women speak better English than she does, they are not better people. Daré wanted to make this point strongly in the novel – ‘it’s just a language. It’s not a measure of intelligence.’I wanted to explore the amount of talent and dreams and intelligence that we kill and waste when we don’t allow these girls to go to school, when we hire these young girls and get them to work. I wanted to show that this was a girl that needs to be up at 4 a.m. in the morning. She’s intelligent, and if she was given a chance, and other young girls in the world, they will shine and they will thrive.’
The inspiration for Abi Daré’s first book struck when one of her daughters, then 8, didn’t feel like unloading the dishwasher. Daré told her that there were girls her age in Nigeria who did housework for a living. This conversation gave Daré a new perspective on something that was common among middle-class families like the one in which she was raised: employing young girls as so-called housemaids.
Daré admitted that for years she wrote quietly, and had moments where she felt like giving up. Taking the MA in Creative Writing helped her gain the confidence to complete this debut novel, get it published and continue writing. She says; I just wanted to create a character that shows that a girl can be a fighter.… I wanted her to be a role model. So if you create a character and you want that character to be a role model, she has to be able to stand up for something. If you don’t stand up for something, you fall for everything. And so that’s why I wanted to create this character that young girls could look up to her, older women, even I looked up to Adunni when I was writing the book.
A BUSHEL OF CRIME;
I love it when work (research) is also pleasure...in other words, I'm reading crime fiction. the emphasis today seems to be on Eurocrime; from the dark and slightly dismal north to the glowingly sunny south. As we are members of the EU, I’ve included the UK in this category, to review the books I’ve recently read. Each one has been read as a writer, as well as a reader of crime fiction; I’m looking at how other people achieve structure, plausibility, powerful, empathetic characters and maintain that sense of mystery right to the end, as well as appraising the ending itself; did it surprise, did it satisfy, did it droop and above all, can I later remember who did it?
The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths from the series which feature an archeological pathologist. Griffiths’ books are always steeped in the past (her husband is an archeologist) and in the landscape of the Norfolk Coast, where the Seahenge was found earlier this century, so she’s able to use the wonderful flat lands, the looming mists and intricate waterways to good effect.
To be honest, the reason I read this book is because the reviewer who reviewed my book IN THE MOORS for the US review publication to the trade, LIbrary Journal, compared me to Elly Griffiths.
The Independent starts their review of the book thus…Funny it's so difficult to find a doctor on call when pathologists seem to be queuing up to sort you out once you're dead. Here comes another one, but Ruth Galloway, expert in Roman remains, is a special creation. She isn't a sexless zombie in a starched white coat; she is really, messily, female. And she doesn't always get things right: her pregnancy is a big surprise. It's even more of a surprise to her puritanical parents Ruth and her DCI [lover] face the big decisions: will she continue with her pregnancy, will he tell his wife? I closed the book wanting to know more about them as well as feeling the satisfaction that a really intelligent murder story…can give in
Yes, a good read, but with one really sticky side issue; I do hope I don't make the mistake, of not properly researching a subplot; Griffiths' tame druid, a minor character in each of her books, is like no druid I know...and I know a lot of druids. No druid would celebrate Imbolc in May, Elly!!
The Summer of Dead Toys by Antonio Hill is translated into English by Laura McGloughlin (who has to make do with the tiniest of mentions). This is the first of the ‘Inspector Salgado’ novels; a second, The Good Suicides, now awaits me on my bookcase. The first thing that struck as I began to read was the evocative prose. Even in translation, the narrative has a lyrical lilt with masses of Barcelonian atmosphere; you really feel the heat of the city’s summer. We begin the story by discovring that Hector Salgado, living in Barcelona but from Buenos Aires is still recovering from a brutal beating by a suspect . A teenager's fall to his death and Salgado has to peel back layers of corruption until he’s able to reveal clandestine truths about history in polite Barcelona society. I like the way he links together two unrelated cases on his books, to solve the crimes. The characters are large, but not larger than life. There is some empathetic understanding with the characters - in other words I did feel for them, even the unpleasant ones, but I found it hard to identify with all their motivations, and in the end, didn't quite believe in their actions, despite the fact that the author’s other speciality is psychology. The Independent’s review suggests this…seems to have arrived fully-formed with confidence and authority, peeling back the skeins of deceit and betrayal in a most satisfying fashion…but to be honest, I wanted a slightly less cliched mystery, with a more satisfying outcome. Maybe I'm over-particular - I’ll certainly be reading his second novel.
The Guardian loved My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir; the reviewer says that Thora Gudmundsdottir is her favourite female slueth. Maybe the first book in this series was better; that is sometimes the case with second books, and the reviewer was still basking in that early warmth, because I couldn't take to Thora; as a person I found her underwhelming and super-irritating. The setting is a newly opened health resort on the Icelandic coastline, but I found it hard to imagine the setting clearly. Eurocrime reviewed this as...superbly plotted, Agatha Christie-style...Yes to the Christie structure because it is hard to create that archetypal plotline where 'everyone is under suspicion', but nil pois for the plotting, Yrsa. The architect of the resort’s renovations, Birna, is found dead on the nearby beach and meanwhile, the new owner is crying out that 'this house is haunted'. That sat uncomfortably with me. Why would Thora not even consider his protestations might be a poorly thought through defence from the man who is under suspicion for murder? Thora is an attorney by trade, but I could not believe her unprofessionalism. She uses the bunch of keys she is returning to their owner to get into Birna's room, searches and removes the murder victim's diary and does not tell the police she has this vital piece of evidence. I’d never let Sabbie Dare to that! (Well, not for too long, anyway…)As the clumpy clues built up, I lost patience entirely and threw the book down, so I never got to where her investigations...uncover some very disturbing occurrences at the frm decades earlier - things that never before have seen the light of day... Perhaps when I'm very bored, I'll finish this book but don't hold your breath; I found Thora extremely annoying.
A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson delves back into a Nazi past to link with a present day murder. I knew nothing about Portuguese history in the 2nd half of the 20th century before I began this book, and I learnt a lot. I also learnt what wolfram is!
If as a reader you are a little nervous of lots of 'foreign' names, then beware, this book is bursting with characters, mostly of German and Portuguese origin with names that frighten...but the names are not half as frightening as the personalities, which are brutal, grasping, amoral and egocentric. Above this, shines Ze (joe in English) Coehlo, the detective looking into the recent rape and murder of a Lisbon schoolgirl. As we read his 1st person account of his investigation, we are subjected to the 3rd person narrative of the story of Felsen, an SS officer, who moves through WWII and its aftermath as the perpetrator and observer of all sorts of darkness and evil.
The NY Times described it as…a historically sprawling, richly distilled thriller…and I would second that. The book is long, complex, involved and passionate. It’s an extremely difficult read if you're not too keen on the most base instincts of humanity; through the long history recounted, we experience torture, rape, murder and paedophilia. No one seems to emerge unscathed. Even Ze has his faults, especially his eruptive and dangerous temper. I was beginning to sink below the ink-black waves when suddenly, right at the end, is the best twist ever. A very dark book with a very scary end and my favourite from this selection of EuroCrime.
PATRICK GALE
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- NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION is my first Patrick Gale; it won't be my last. I love novels that are 'about something' that inform as well as entertain, and the setting of Cornwall, and the theme of contemporary art was enticing. I also love unusual structures of narrative, and Gale uses changing viewpoints that dot around in time and place, like pieces of a jigsaw, but he's confident about showing the reader the way through the story.
While engaged on a groundbreaking new series of paintings, Rachel Kelly dies of a heart attack in her loft-studio was an artist. Her son can remember giving her six stones collected from a Cornish beach and believes they were her inspiration for the paintings. Gale has a great writer's skill; he allows the reader intimate acquaintance with the inner lives of characters. Rachel is bipolar and this is a convincing device which demonstrates the upside of her condition; the mystery of creative inspiration. When free of medication she soars towards a high, producing great work. Her suicidal lows are considered by her family to be the punishment for so many things.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,published in 1962. During the seventies, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was hitting headlines, I read most of his works. Some, likeThe Gulag Archipelago, are long and involved, and written to make people aware of what was going on in the USSR. But one of his smaller novels hit me the hardest. Denisovich is an account of life in a forced labour camp, and therefore of Stalinist repression. The book graphically illustrates what was happening behind the iron curtain – why people were thrown into camps and what happened to them there. Probably more than his longer non-fiction accounts, this was the book that forced the West to stop ignoring violent breaches of human rights behind the “iron-curtain.” Strangely, though, what struck me about it was its optimism, its emphasis on hope. I most clearly remember the scenes when, for instance, Ivan managed to gain a cigarette and inhaled the sweet smoke deep into his lungs. It seemed to sum up how humans will always seek something to cling to and make the most of the tiniest moments of joy.
THE STRANGER'S CHILD I always notice, when I’m reading a Hollinghurst novel, that, despite the fact that I’m reading with ultimate pleasure, enjoying every word, gripped by the characters and their lives, there will be a moment, about halfway through the book, when I reaIize that nothing much has happened yet...
This certainly happened to me with The Stranger’s Child. It’s a glorious novel filled with the colour of the last century and characters I took away from the novel and thought about in my quiet moments. But I was waiting for a clear denouement - a twist, a shock...towards the end I was praying for it. But I should know by now, this is Hollinghurst; his is a comedy of manners, and as such he doesn’t go for big shocks. He has always reminded me of the 21C Jane Austin, writing with a fine brush (although I don’t know what Jane would have made of his subjects and themes; no doubt taken them in her booted stride). He rightly wins all the prizes, and now seems to be edging ahead of Ian McEwan in the ‘best British Novelist’ stakes. I do wish they’d stop doing that, as such things are all so subjective. ‘One of the best...’ would be sufficient for me.As the situation in Libya increases in tension (21.2.11)
The Road
'Read Classic', an occasional series of posts on
Kitchen Table Writers
Cormac McCarthy is known for his gratuitous violence – blood, gore, screaming pain and horribly inflicted death. I’ve seen three of his books as films – No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and The Road. I was determined to see The Road as soon as it came out, as I’m a big Viggo fan, even though I’d already taken the book out of the library some time before and so knew it would be full of cellars of decomposing bodies – worse – cellars full of living bodies, waiting to die at the hands of the cannibals who imprisoned them.
Reading it once again, on Kindle, I don’t have such a terrible sense of doom, because I know there is a possibly glimmer of light at the very end of the story. This time, I spotted the signals of hope that are lightly threaded through the story. I didn't feel so tense and worried about ‘The Boy' and his future. Even so, it’s The Boy that brings a sense of tension to the story, because he’s the one that’s always asking…is there danger? Don’t lets go in there…what’s that noise, Dad? Are those bad guys? He articulates the fears of the story, while ‘The Man’ constantly reassures his son,…it’s okay…keep moving… This doesn't reassure the reader, though; we know that The Man is equally terrified of everything they may find ahead on their road. Secretly, as the very same concerns as The Boy. In his head, he often asks himself why he’s taking this journey in the impossible hope of finding warm seas in the south of the USA. But aloud, he simply encourages his son to keep going.
Time moves back and forwards in the story. We see man and boy journey along a bare landscape after a final apocalypse has devastated everything, and, (it feels at first), killed most of the people and possibly all of the wildlife. From the start, I assumed that this devastation is world-wide, although we’re not told this. For a long time we only see man, boy, and the occasional lost soul along the road, while, in his mind, The Man thinks back to before the apocalypse, remembering, in short passages, his wife and their love, her pregnancy, and then the event atomic or natural, whatever has caused this absolute brokenness, and after it, the baby being born, and their decision to try to journey across the land to the sea. Perhaps they hope to get board some imagined boat; perhaps he just thinks it will be warmer down there, in contrast to the conditions they travel through, where ash blows all around them, and their shoes are wrapped in sacking against deep snow.
In one flashback we see the wife decide to leave them while they sleep, and go off to her death, her suicide. I found that particularly shocking, and wondered if a woman writer would have imagined this in the same way; women rarely leave their children voluntarily. So I have to think of this as a writer’s device; McCarthy wanted The Road to be about a boy and a man. I don’t blame him. What he created was powerful reading which, for all its masculine tone, is moving and full of tender love. He gets right into the head of The Man for most of the time. We never see The Boy’s thoughts, but often McCarthy moves out of the thoughts and immediate perceptions of The Man while constantly shifting from The Man's warm-hearted love to an more objective viewpoint to observe the savage, dreadful landscape and its inhabitants.
McCarthy injects much power into his writing. A clever strategy to help this is that he drops all use of speech marks. There are no long dialogues, so they are easily dispensed with, along with some apostrophes, some capital letters and all semi colons. Alongside this bid for immediacy the use of heightened language, which, as we move away from inner thoughts to McCarthy’s narration, becomes lyrical. He uses this technique because The Man doesn’t have the time or energy to be ‘poetical’ – he’s too exhausted, in fact he’s half dead, even when we first meet him. The two travellers barely have strength to talk;
[The Boy:] It's really cold
I know.
Where are we?
Where are we?
Yes.
I dont know.
If we were going to die would you tell me?
I dont know. We're not going to die.
This becomes one of two main tensions, or questions of conflict, in the book. The first is ‘when will the bad guys come’. They do come, often. The first takes one of the bullets in The Man’s gun; it leaves him with one bullet, which is not enough for him to be able to execute himself and The Boy if they need to die rapidly. It was the one thing that had kept him going…that he had those two bullets. This happens about a 1/4 of the way into the book, and is one of many points in the story where tension…and blood pressure…is raised. The second main question of conflict is ‘will The Man die before The Boy is safe’. There might be a third question, but I found it hard to ask. ‘Will they both die?’ was something I didn't have the heart to think about. I didn’t want to believe even McCarthy could do that to his story, even though I know he can be absolutely brutal in his writing. I know McCarthy wouldn't spare me the honest reality, which was that everyone in that world would surely die. I read on, wondering why I was so hopeful.
The story is crisscrossed with the image, and symbol, of roads. The man and boy spend much time on the road, described wonderfully by McCarthy. It is the guideline of the novel, a desolate, transient thing, full of danger. It always points to where they need to go, even though it would be a rare reader who, while reading, sees the point to going there. The road was a physical reality, the ever onward walking, walking, but also a state of mind…the understanding that we see our journey through life as the ‘road ahead’, which we are always taking, until we die. A second symbol of journeying is the shopping cart (supermarket trolley) they push, filled with all their wordy goods. This is their grail, their treasure, and yet it’s almost impossible to drive smoothly along, especially up or down hill, or through snow. As I read, I was always aware of its vital importance. When they hide it to run away from the ‘bloodcults' who form lethal gangs, or to search derelict houses, I worried about the cart, fearing that it would be looted while they are gone. And sometimes, it is. Fire, another symbol used cleverly, punctuates the roadway. They build fire every night, when they can, even though sometimes it might draw the wrong attention. Eventually, The Boy has to leave his father, and The Man lists instructions…keep going south. Keep the gun with you. Find the good guys. But, most important…
You have to carry the fire.
I don't know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes, it is.
Where is it? I don't know where it is.
Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
McCarthy refuses to let you look away, but at the same time, you’re allowed to, sort of, because the reader is likely to identify deeply with The Boy. Like fire, he is a symbol of hope, and The Man, perpetually tender towards his son, is always making him look away from the grossness of their world, to lie in a ditch, stay out of sight. Their relationship stabilises and motivates the father. Of course it does; The Boy is all The Man has to live for and move forward for. The Boy often uses the word ‘okay’ as if to console, reassure. An understanding, came right as I began to read that first time. The Boy has learnt quickly. He does not run out of sight, he does not play unless something is initiated by his father. He does not laugh. He is rarely ‘naughty’, but occasionally, he can be cruel to his dad. He has grown old, while still small, and with it, he’s gained amazing wisdom. He’s been born into the post-apocalyptic world and has known nothing but cold, pain, ill health and fear, and yet he’s actually the one that has compassion for outsiders. I found that convincing. Children can be wonderfully ‘self-righteous’, but this compassion seems more than this, as if, with no play and no fun in his life, he’s worked through a philosophy in which kindness is paramount. After all, it’s what he has constantly received from his father, for whom he is a…golden chalice, good house to a god… His constant approach becomes another rich symbol in the book. I began to see The Man as representing the human – the brutal, if sentient, creature with a strong instinct to survive. He keeps going because he must. To do what his wife did is unthinkable, even though he knows there might be a time, if they fell into the hands of a bloodcult, that death would be preferable. But to survive, they cannot show compassion to any outsider. They cannot offer food to the starving, for they are starving too. They cannot stop to help the trapped, or the distressed, because they have no time to waste, and in any case, all others are seen as a threat – best they stay trapped.
The boy, in contrast, has a shining empathy with those in need. He is constantly exploring his father to be benevolent, to show fellow-feeling, to stop, to help, to share what they have. When his father uses the penultimate bullet in the gun to save their lives, The Boy cannot speak or even look at his dad for a long time. Even though it’s clear The Boy, in his young wisdom understands, why The Man has made such rules, he constantly rises above them.
The boy kept looking back. Papa? he whispered. What is wrong with the man?
He's been struck by lightning.
Cant we help him? Papa?
No. We cant help him.
The boy kept pulling at his coat. Papa? he said.
Stop it.
Cant we help him Papa?
No. We cant help him. There's nothing to be done for him.
To me, The Boy’s response represented the soul within the sentient being, and the core understanding that together, they make up a sort of duality of being human; the father’s brutal drive for survival is an external need, but locked inside is a sort of radiant grace, that links with the way The Man considers The Boy as a chalice. And that’s why I think the book has the end it has – why I didn't need to worry about asking that third, awful question.
McCarthy is a renowned recluse, and would never write a happy(ish) end just because he thought his readership might like it, or because his editor demanded it. I think at the end, what we see is the body stripped away, and the soul walk out of it. The boy walks into the light, taking the inner fire. As if to prove it, McCarthy finishes the book like this…
https://www.videoblocks.com/video/wild-trout-spawning-in-stream-1-9pzkxku/
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Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional…In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
- THE DISCOVERY OF WITCHES. Deborah Harkness is a new writer from the US. The book attempts to bring an adult feel to the subject matter that Twilight and Harry Potter fans. It did feel a bit like a fusion of the two series...except I think that's a bit of an insult to JK Rowling, who's overall plotting, theme and narrative is exceptionally rich and inventive...unless the author had previously watched True Blood, which has a very similar premise. Nothing much happens, but the hero, Matthew, a vampire is worth following...sexy and dangerous.THE FINKLER QUESTION, Howard Jacobson. A shaply funny, but powerfully intellectual look at all things Jewish, from Zionism to Judaism. The 3 main characters share the story, in fact this is that rare thing; a contemporary novel successfully written from an omnicsient POV. I did enjoy it; more so, I did amire it, but its intense concentration on a world I know nothing about did leave me floundering at times. A comic novel filled with pathos.UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE. Thomas Hardy is one of my favourite 19C writers, and this is the only novel of his I hadn't read. I'd noticed that people fall into two distinct camps over this one; either they think its his best or his worst. Sadly I fall into camp two. This first novel is his 'juvinilia', with almost none of that fantastic, complex plotting that comes later, or the deep emotional identification which is present by the time of Jude the Obscure. But yes, you could love it for its fantastic characters; the minor players are more fascinating than the protagonists. Very readable and quite short (for him), it might make a good start for a teenaged reader, but on the other hand it might bore them solid, which later novels shouldn't do.A collection of Annie Proulx's short stories, FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS was described by the Telegraph as heartbreakingly beautiful. In some ways this is true; Proulx's prose is lyrical yet blunt, even brutal and the combination of rough settings and unfortunate outcomes (an awful lot of people die) does leave you gasping.Milan Kundera FAIRWELL WALTZ- This is one of those 'comedies of manners' that delights the literary theorists, I fancy, a lot more than it delighted me. I thought the characters were quite thinly developed and behaved in ways not explored within their psyches. Sort of Iris Murdoch without atmosphere - but to be fair to Kundera, an exhaulted figure in the workd of literature, translations can weaken a story.BLACK WATER RISING, on the other hand, Attica Locke's first book is resolent with the deeply explored, delightlfully flawed character of the protagonst, a black lawyer pracicing in the 1980's in a predudiced Deep South. It is a strong and lyrical thriller with an atmospheric miliue.
I did enjoy The Girl on the Train, even though I knew there were flaws in the plot, because I firmly believed in the main character and her descent into alcohol hell. Paula Hawkins’ new book Into the Water, is out in 2017, and I wish her all success with it. She’s sticking to the psychological thriller genre, using, I hear, themes of truth and family secrets. Definitely one to try.
It always puzzles me, why some first-time authors with huge success, don’t write a second book, while some churn out one every year. I loved Arundhati Roy’s Booker winner, The God of Small Things when I read it in 1997, and now, 20 years after its publication, her 2nd book, The Ministry of Utmostherppiness (Hamish Hamilton) is due out. The one thing I now know, is that she’s still good at titles! I do hope it’s worth the long wait.
Colm Toibin only came to my attention when someone recommended Testament of Mary. I was impressed with his take on a New Testament character, and also with his ability to get deeply into the female mind. In May 2017, he’s releasing House of Names, telling the story of how Agamemnon orders the sacrifice of his daughter, to gain good omens for the Trojan war. When he sails home victorious at last, he’s faced with a family filled with hate and the need for vengance. The last book I read about the Illiad was THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller, which won the 2012 Orange Prize. I loved that book, and I hope that this one proves as exciting.
One of my favourite writers, Neil Gaiman, has also chosen to weave mythology and legend into modern storytelling in his latest offering, Norse Mythology, due out in February. Gaiman’s ability with words, and his subtle understanding of how to use symbol and allegory, will surely promise this to be a great read.
Right this moment I’m reading Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, a book of essays about reading and writing, but he’s most famous for Wonder Boys, one of my favourite books and also a great movie staring Michael Douglas as a washed-up author who discovers the next wunderkind
in his creative writing class. I’ve always had a theory about Wonder Boys; surely it started life as one of those writing exercises where you take various crazy items and have to work them into a story – in this case – Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, a dead dog, a tuba-paying transvestite and a squashed boa constrictor. Will Moonglow, (Fourth Estate) be as inventive and funny as Wonder Boys? I sincerely hope so.
Later in the year, lovers of William Boyd will have a treat with The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth. Last summer, I read his story of an early female photographer, Sweet Caress, and I’m ready for more.
I’m ‘into’ The Hogarth Shakespeare Project at the moment, which is asking bestselling novelists to retell Shakespeare's works. "Hogarth" was launched in October last year, with Jeanette Winterson's take on The Winter’s Tale. I’ve just finished Margaret
Atwood’s Hag-Seed and loved it – laughed all the way through, while marvelling at her brilliantly woven analysis of The Tempest. Read a full review of the book here. Since reading it, I’ve watched Helen Mirren as Prospera in the DVD of Julie Taymor’s version of The Tempest, and have booked up to see the Royal Shakespeare version which is on now in Stratford on Avon.
I can hardly wait for the
next book in the project’s series, written by Tracy Chevalier, famous for Girl with a Pearl Earring. She has rewritten Othello. In New Boy, the story of Othello is set in a Washington school, with 11-year-old friends Osei, Dee, Ian and Mimi being the key players in the tragedy.
And finally, I’m looking forward to Tessa Hadley's next book of short stories. She was my tutor on my creative writing master’s degree, and I’ve admired her work every since. Brilliantly observant of the human condition, and a lyrical writer, she’s particularly great at the tricky form of short fiction. In Bad Dreams, the stories focus in on crucial moments of transition, and the blurb is enticing me to put my pre-order in…real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams.
In the meantime, while we’re still waiting for these books to arrive from Amazon, or at our chosen bookshops, I’ll wish you a very happy, prosperous and healthy 2017, and get back to putting the finishing touches to my latest novel, in which I delve into some shocking secrets that Sabbie Dare discovers in her past…
Alias Grace. Like Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood has taken an historical figure and fictionalized an account of their life. Grace spent thirty years in prison convicted of the murder, at just 16 of two people. Atwood makes an excellent fist of creating a riviting story around the basic facts, but I still think Mantel has the edge if one compares the books - perhaps one shouldn't compare the books!
- WAITING FOR COLUMBUS, Thomas Trofimuk. I think this book is trying the same trick; take a famous life (in this case Christopher Columbus) and fictionalize the account, but in this case the writer goes further, creatinig an entire fantasy around the the events of so long ago. This makes it slot into what I think of as 'books that made a stir' for being original in their treatment; Lovely Bones, The Book Thief, The Time Traveller's Wife (all of which I've read, but not reviewed here), are others. I didn't think any of these books meric a 'literary' sticker, and I think they will all be forgotten in time. But Columbus is an interesting read, although I thought it dipped badly in the third quarter.
- CARRY ME DOWN, M.J. Hyland. By exploring the emotional development of a dreamy young boy, Hyland uses very simple language to look at big issues; truth, marriage, and pre-pubescence. I enjoyed it enormously.
- Delphine De Vigan NO AND ME This has been translated from the French - a slender volume which is clearly a crossover novel for young adults and teens as well as proper grown ups. The voice is young, innocent, vibrant. It flags a bit in the middle, and the ending was a teeny bit disappointing, but it is a lovely story of a 13 yr-old whose life - and that of her family - is changed when she meets a homeless girl.(France 2007)
- Siri Hustvedt WHAT I LOVED. This featured on Radio 4's Book Club. I had never heard of this US author, but I was impressed with her flawless narrative voice (male) and the scope of her timescape. The story's plot is structured unconventionally - not exactly Holliwood material - but the depth of character development is stunning, and she does that sooo difficult thing; discuss and describe fictional visual art on the page.(US 2003)
- Iris Murdoch A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT I read every Murcoch as it appeared in the bookshops and read this one when I was about 30; I re-read it recently to see if it had changed in my eyes and mind. Actually, I was surprised at how much I 'missed' the first time round and knowing the end (which I won't spoil for you) didn't matter at all, especially as I could not remember it perfectly. I knew what the tragedy was, but could not recall who befell it! I understood more of her philosophical insertions, and clearly saw how she was 'puppet master'. Murdoch was always my first love as an author and did not lose her currency as the count of books went up and up. If you've never read one of her books, choose from the early to middle period, as the later period is heavy and deteriorates, understandably towards the very end of her life (UK 1970)
- Kate Williams ENGLAND'S MISTRESS. Subtitiled The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton. Kate wanted to write a definitive biography of Nelson's mistress after she discovered her personal letters during research for her doctorate. She was still very young when the book proposal was accepted, but this doesn't show; the writing is mature yet fresh. I loved the way she tells us about the life and times of Emma; the slum world of her childhood, the great monarchic houses of Europe when she lived abroad, the facts on childbirth when she was having her first baby, and the art world, because she was painted time and again. Nelson comes in late on, but then dominates the canvas. I soaked up every word, and felt I knew the 18C better as a result. (UK 2006)
- Marina Lewycka WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE. Having read her first book A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, I was keen to see if this one would suit me better. I find some of her writing a little predictable and rather dependent on poking fun at eccentric (usually foreign) characters. Well, she continues to extract comedy in this slightly distasteful way, and I didn't find parts of this any more convincing that her first book, but it did make me laugh. A lot.(UK 2009)
- At the other end of the spectrum, THE SHIPPING NEWS, by Annie Proulx, a lyrical, textured novel that is almost unrelentlessly grim but so beautifully told - like all Proulx's work - that it pulls you in and won't let you go. (USA 1993)
- Clare Morrall THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED. Having gained a shortlisted Booker place for Astonishing Splashes of Colour, Morrall has had to make do with being a TV book club 'summer read' with this one. But it is an interesting take on a crime novel, using solid psychology to endear us to the characters on both sides of the 'criminal divide'. I enjoyed it at least as much. (UK 2008)
- CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN, Louis de Bernieres. I agree with most critics - an editor should have taken a massive red pen to this book to chop it into readable size. And although I admire alternative endings, this one seemed contrived to be as awful as possible...I just don't think that's cricket! However, its landscape is seductive and the characters wonderful. He does poke fun at the Italian fighting machine, but that was probably fair game.(UK 1994)
- GOTHAM WRITERS' WORKSHOP FICTION GALLERY (Bloomsbury) is a wonderful array of US short stories, each with a summary and author's notes. There are some old favourites, but lots of new (to me) stories too. A definite must for the short story reader. (US 2004)
- William Trevor THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT Shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2002, I stumbled across this in a charity shop. But I can't say I enjoyed it, despite the beauty of the writing. It is a gaunt (redolent of Gault) tale, which has an unhappy beginning, middle and end. Some of the set-up didn't convince me and I didn't fall in love ...or even like Lucy. I am now reading FELICIA'S JOURNEY, which is an improvment.
- BIRDSONG, Sabastian Faulks most acclaimed novel attempt to reinvigorate the voice of the lost generation of 1st WW soldiers. It is unremittingly emotional - occasionally manipulative of the emotions, and there isn't much attempt at plot - the war is the story, and that remains shrouded in vague truth. But a gripping read and in my opinion, Faulk's best attempt at a novel. (UK 1993)
- Peter James SWEET HEART men never quite get female characters right, do they? If I was desperate to get pregnant and had pregnancy symptoms, I'd think I was pregnant, periods or not. In this book the crime is in the past and a little supernatural element creeps in; but then, I can talk!
- Davide Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS is a masterly attempt to weave several stories together through time and space. I enjoyed this more and more as I read into the book. The links are clever, but more importantly, the stories are great - thrilling, absorbing and full of brilliant characters.(UK 2004)
- Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney (Eds) EMERGENCY KIT If you should want just one large anthology of recent poems, I would recommend this one, as it is both disturbing and exuberant and brings renown poets between the same covers as lesser-known ones. (UK 1994)
- Carl Hiaasen SKIN TIGHT. Billed as funny, and yes, LOL, but I could have done with a bit more 'slowing down', it is so fast paced that it lacks atmosphere at times. I did not like the end. I felt it tried to aim for black (gory) humour, rather than stick with the characterization of the 'hero'. (US 2003)
- Sarah Waters THE LITTLE STRANGER don't believe the critics, who are saying Waters latest book is her first without a theme of lesbianism. They are just blind! This tense thriller/ghost story held me from first to last, and her male protagonist was well crafted. This is not my favourite Walters; that remains FINGERSMITH, but it's a pretty good addition to the cannon. (UK 2008)
- Ali Smith THE ACCIDENTAL An extremely competent novel with a stream of consciousness format that sucked me right in. I wasn't completely convinced by the plot/setting - the idea that an odd girl wanders into a family's holiday and stirs things up completely - but stranger things have happened, I'm sure. What I loved was the structure, style and masterful narration techniques and the way the girl is cleverly used by the writer as a tool to understanding.
- Kate Atkinson WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? - Atkinson knows that you can explore the deeper side to life and literature via the crime novel (UK 2007)
- Christopher Brookmyre A TALE ETCHED IN BLOOD AND HARD PENCIL - a very funny writer, although this novel had an overload of lowland dialect (UK 2000)
- FUGITIVE PIECES, by poet Anne Michaels won many awards and is just a beautiful read...rather like doing a jigsaw of an Old Master. A story of the Holocaust, but rightly so, we shouldn't forget. Michaels interlocks lives across cultures and generations.(CANADA 1996)
- Sue Grafton THE ALPHABET SERIES love or hate - these books are frothy and joyful, if you like mile-long runs and clever detection (US from 1980...still going!)
- Frank McCourt ANGELA'S ASHES. Sorry, but I've got to churn out the cliche; the book is heaps better than the film that could not do justice to either the lyricism of the writer or even the true squalor of the living conditions. (US 1996)
- I read THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS quite a while ago, when it won Booker Prize. It is both a joyous and tragic look at an Indian family through the eyes of 2 young twins.Its massive theme is love, and this is conveyed through clear prose and careful structure.(INDIA 1997)
- Sara Paretsky KILLING ORDERS - a loved US writer of good crime, however, although her creation, VI Warshawski is delightfully flawed, Paretsky is also no flawless as a writer. (US 1999)
- VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE. What Paulo Coelho loves to do...what his readership love him for him to do...is write fables. This book is built on the understanding that we don't really value our lives until they are snatched from us. It also describes mental institutions in stark and bitter terms My favourite Coelho novel remains THE ALCHEMIST, but this is a fascinating read. (BRAZIL 1998)
- Frances Fyfield, in COLD TO THE TOUCH, spares no quality in her writing - she is the natural successor to PG James, but in my opinion her characters are more realistic and I can identify with them more closely (UK 2008)
- I met Frances Fyfield and Mark Billingham during my week at Arvon. I really enjoy his appearances on Radio 4. But now, he's on TV, too! Billlingham's flawed detective Thorpe is a great protagonist. In LIFELESS, he goes on the streets to solve the murder (UK 2004)
- Hilary Mantel WOLF HALL. I've followed Mantel's career with interest, after reading her very first book 20 or more years ago. That was brave and original. Wolf Hall is simply stunning. If you don't know much about the mid-Tudor period, you will if you read it. But if you do know a lot about that period, you will be even more impressed, as she constantly takes situations recorded in history and zones into them, interpreting them as fiction and making them zizz with colour. I was fascinated by the ending - rushing to my 'Kings and Queens of History' to check certain dates. I'm still not sure if she's saying what she seems to be saying, but it's certainly staying my mind as the most enigmatic ending...up there with Basic Instinct...(UK 2009)
- WHITE TEETH is actually not my favourite Zadie Smith novel. That remains ON BEAUTY, which I think is more expansive and mature. But this first book catapulted Smith into favour, and is resonant with great characters, a broad vista and a compassionate tone. (UK 2000)
- THE COLLECTOR by John Fowls. His first book, it has that controlled style and once-removed eye on the chosen fictional world that later brought us THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. I do recommend it, especially if you enjoy books that uses an unreliable narrrator. (UK 1963)
- THE LINE OF BEAUTY Alan Hollignhurst only just tips my admiration for his earlier work FALLEN STAR, with this much vaster and heavier novel. Both are filled with wit and sparkle, and both have graphic scenes of gay sex. The former is perhaps a little more acidic in the earlier book, the latter better handled in Beauty, where a hedonistic life style is well described. I think of him as the Jane Austin of gay fiction.(UK 2004)
- HALF A YELLOW SUN. This is another panoramic novel, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie's most challenging and expansive, it tells the story of the Biafran uprising using several perspectives, returning to the start of the story half-way through to present a further point of view. Very thought-provoking.(NIGERIA 2006)
- Donna Tartt wrote THE SECRET HISTORY, a marvellous story of intrigue between pretentious students, which I very much enjoyed. She almost fell apart from the overwhelming responses, which were both good and bad and only produced THE LITTLE SISTER ten years later. This is also weighty and nicely written, but ponderously plotted and means less, I think. (US 1992)
- There is only one way to read THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Onjaatje. Read it - watch the film - read the book again. Then read all the really lovely, lovely bits again. My favourite is the candles in the church.(SRI LANKA 1992)
- Ian McEwan, ATTONEMENT. Having pilloried him for being loved, I'd better mention that I’ve really enjoyed all his books, but especially this one for its breadth of vision. Keira Knightley does well in the film version, but best read the book first. David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS is a masterly attempt to weave several stories together through time and space. I enjoyed this more and more as I read into the book. The links are clever, but more importantly, the stories are thrilling, absorbing and full of remarkable characters.(UK 2004)
- • THE WILD PLACES by Robert McFarland is a rare treat; a piece of non-fiction written with a poet’s eye. McFarland chooses to explore wilderness landscapes of the British Isles with madcap pluck and a deep understanding of the natural world. Into this mix, he blends a knowledge of science and history with little snippets of his own memories. Betwitching. (UK 2007)
- echniques and the way the girl is cleverly used by the writer as a tool to understanding.
- • Andrea Levy's SMALL ISLAND is now well thumbed, I've lent it to so many people. I loved the way she keeps this weighty story of immigration and changing landscapes light, while still being thought-provoking. She perfectly capturing the dreariness of fifties England, compared to the colour of the Caribbean (UK 2004)
- It must be dreadful trying to follow up a best-seller with a second book, and LAKE OF DREAMS by Kim Edwards did try to be different at least, with this one, choosing fresh subject matter, settings and characters. I don’t remember The Secret Keeper’s Daughter being quite so beautifully written, actually; this is lyrical prose with brilliantly painted scenes, something that’s reflected within one theme...stained glass art nouveau. At 377 pages, it’s clearly a long book and complex in that she keeps several plot balls in the air at one time. Sadly, for me, after a good start in the symbolically rumbling and shaking world of Japan, these ball in the air seem to float in slow motion for most of the middle of the book. She sets up some crackers of plots, mostly related to family dynamics now and in the past, but none of these are able to fully develop or be realized until the end, when she'd want her explosive finish. I wasn’t precisely bored at any time, but I did begin to wonder when things would reach their dramatic climax.
I didn’t think the characters, especially Lucy, behaved in a plausible fashion for a lot of the time. Having been away for five years, she hurts her brother by telling her mother that his girlfriend was pregnant after he specifically asked her not to do so, then calls him at 1:00 am (in bed with said girlfriend) to tell him that she thought that he was handling his career choice all wrong. Long overdue, in the final chapters she asks if she needs to apologise – unbelievable behaviour and by no means the only time in the book this happens. Lucy discovers her uncle has committed manslaughter and yet she does not contact the police...instead she gets away scot free with vandalizing his store. I recognise that she might be described as a multi-dimensional character with many conflicting personality traits, but by this time, Lucy was irritating me too much for me to be convinced. There is also too much coincidence. She finds an old package of documents in her mother's house; why has no one else found them and who put them there...we are never told, but her mother suddenly recalls that she found a baby blanket hidden in the lining of an old trunk in the barn twenty-five years ago, which had a note with the same hand-writing. I found this hard to swallow. But I did get caught up in the story that is revealed by the package and particularly liked the minutia of the Art Nouveau stained glass work Rose was involved in. I liked the end; at least this wasn’t forced.
Sylvia Plath's only novel, THE BELL JAR, was a second-hand purchase from a lovely cafe we use as we head south east into Wiltshire...Dick Willow. I'd been meaning to read it for ever, and so enjoyed the wonderfully unself-concsious, almost artless tone which was lighter and funnier than I could have hoped. The story of a young woman setting out on her higher education and her life only to be beset by a dark emotional destruction of her mind and her subsequent incarceration in a mental hospital, it turned out to be a 'can't put it down' read. Like Angel at my Table, Janet Frame's 3 part autobiography, (filmed by Jane Campion), it describes the desperate state of psychiatric care in the 50's and 60's. It has an upbeat end, which makes Plath's own end more poignant.
As the situation in Libya increased in tension (21.2.11), Hisham Matar's Booker shortlisted IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN felt a very pertinent and current read. As Colonel Gaddafi's regime took hold in the seventies, a boy of nine watches his father taken away for questioning and does not know what to think, or whom to trust. The novel is writing in such deceptively simple prose, but powerfully examines themes of conflict, family ties and betrayal.
- GODS WITHOUT MEN by HARI HUNZRUI had not encountered Hari Kunzru before, despite the fact he was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2003. In fact, I knew so little of him, that on starting the book he published this year, Gods Without Men, I wrongly presumed he was American; the control and confidence he uses within his setting...mostly an area of the California desert called the Pinnacles...convinced me he knew the US well. The breathtaking sweep of the novel immediately reminded me of Don Delillo, Tom Wolfe or even John Irving.
The novel bobs back in forth in time, from 1778 to 2008. The main theme is that of Jaz, who has a Punjabi background and his wife, Lisa, who is Jewish. They’re from New York and live acutely New Yorker lives – Jaz is a computer whiz working within Wall Street. Their story is the tragedy of a disrupted holiday in a holiday resort close to the Pinnacles. Their autistic son, Raj, disappears into the desert, setting up a dramatic hunt that reminds the reader of recent media hype around ‘missing children’ cases.
The modernity of these lives is counterpointed by other characters that are also drawn to the desert . These include mystic North American Indians, hippies, an eighteenth century Spanish official, a British rock star, a UFO quester called Schmidt, a man with murder on his mind and a shell-shocked soldier from the first world war. Hari Kunzru manages to bring all his characters together using specific themes and leitmotifs, together with a quote at the front of the novel from Balzac...in the desert there is nothing...C'est Dieu sans les hommes...
I wondered, at first, as the myriad sections of the novel got underway, if this book was going to be too conspicuously clever for its own good, but Kunzru’s main objective, thank heavens, is to tell stories...they were all extremely readable and I was soon hooked by the characters’ lives, experiences and personalities, which allow the reader to become inolved while the underlying text makes itself known.
I thought of comparing this book to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; it has the breadth and quirky approach to structure that Mitchell likes to take, alongside a gripping narrative that delves deeply into the many characters. But in my opinion, the scope of Gods Without Men has even more control and heart than Atlas, and I loved Kunzru’s concentration on one landscape, which he describes so vividly that it becomes a character in its own right.
Gods Without Men was not eventually short-listed for the Man Booker this year; I thought that was short-sighted of the judges. It also proves that taste in literature is a subjective thing...I’d be interested to hear what other people think.
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