Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Another review and another prizewinning novel, this time a well-publicised share of the Booker. I refer honourable members to my previous review … ’The Nickel Boys’ and my suspicion of subject matter trendiness (here, black lives matter and general wokeness) and universal critical approbation. And, once again, my suspicions would be wrong. This is a terrific novel, much better than many previous Booker winners I have read. It also incorporates nuance and complexity whilst maintaining its progressive credentials.
This is achieved because Evaristo treats its mainly black and often outsider characters as fully rounded personalities, with flaws, absurdities and virtues. She does not feel the need for them to stand for a whole series of progressive attitudes to be admired. She does though treat their stories seriously whilst affectionately ridiculing their vanities and pretensions. More of that in a moment after sketching out the book’s structure.
The book has twelves sections that focus on twelve characters. The first section is about Amma, a fifty something black Londoner and lesbian playwright – similar to Evaristo’s own background. She is probably the main character in this story as the protagonist characters in the other sections are in some way or other connected to her. For example, there is her daughter Yazz, a feisty student with a girl gang of non-stereotypical characters – one is, for example, a blinged up Muslim in a hijab, with a mouthy, opinionated attitude about everything. Another of the sections is about Roland, the gay, telly friendly academic who agreed to father Yazz when Amma decided she wanted a child.
The different sections are also loosely structured around a National Theatre premiere of Amma’s play about a tribe of African Amazonian lesbian warriors. After years running a fringe company in order to get her plays put on stage, this show marks her move into the mainstream. Whilst she is confident that it is more a case of the mainstream coming to her rather than a sell-out, it foreshadows a number of the journeys that Evaristo’s characters make from the margins of society to a more secure place in modern Britain.
What I like about this book is that is assumes that its range of characters, who as I say would have traditionally been marginalised in society and literature, are not explained but are just presented as getting on with their lives. Nevertheless, some of the narratives from older characters make one realise how much society has changed, and needed to do so. On the whole and despite their flaws, the characters are likeable and good-hearted. Some such as Carole, the black daughter of a single mother from a rundown London estate, uses her drive and academic ability to get a high level legal job via Oxbridge. She marries Freddie, a charming but privileged white man, and settles into a conventional upper middle-class life. And that’s fine because she has made her own life and choices, and she is just one part of the varied jigsaw that makes up multicultural Britain.
That’s my interpretation, though. Another reader might conclude that Carole has had to adapt her values and choices to fit into a white, patriarchal conception of society and success and to protect herself from poverty and discrimination. That’s exactly what makes a good book for me and why this was an excellent choice by Sue Gunter for our book group this month.
Scrublands by Chris Hammer
If you enjoyed Jane Harper’s ‘The Dry’ then ‘Scrublands will appeal to you as it uses a similarly harsh Western Australia rural setting for a dark murder mystery. Like that novel, the setting, a sparsely populated and isolated town called Riversend, has formed its inhabitants: the good and the bad, their resilience and secrets.
The protagonist here, Martin Scarsden, has an interesting back story. He is still suffering a muted form of PTSD after being locked in the boot of a car for three days whilst reporting from Gaza. As part of his recuperation, his editor sends Martin to Riversend a year on from a mass killing in the town by a charismatic priest, Byron Swift, who also died in the incident.
Martin is given many of the troubled traits that we have seen in maverick but brilliant cops in countless TV series. Hammer, who is a journalist, presents them, however, with conviction and hints at Martin’s growing sense about the moral ambiguity involved in his profession. He also happens to be a talented investigative reporter and begins to suspect that Swift has too conveniently been consigned to the role of paedophilic priest who, fearing exposure, goes on a murderous spree. He is prompted to this conclusion by friends of the priest who can’t tally the allegations and bloody actions with the man they knew, respected and in many cases loved. It is also clear that not only Swift but many of Riversend’s characters have hidden pasts that continue to haunt them.
So far so familiar then. Hammer, however, takes his time to flesh out his characters – they are not just there to enrich the story’s sense of mystery and to send us off on speculative imaginings. We begin to understand their shared histories and the way they are moulded to the rhythm of the environment. Martin’s thirst for a good story and his increasing sense of his own rootlessness draw him into the struggles of this community, in such beautifully constructed set pieces as when he joins the town’s makeshift fire fighters to tackle a ferocious scrubland fire.
It is this expansiveness and depth of character development that have gained critical acclaim for the book; and I appreciate that although my taste for this genre is a more narrowly defined structure with fewer characters and a restricted focus of guilt which isn’t quite the case for the denouement, here.
Nevertheless, the story is a gripping throughout and the ending, nuanced and with elements of moral ambiguity, is still properly concluded.
My friend Phil enjoyed ‘Firefly’ by Henry Porter and it has some of the pace and gathering excitement of that thriller, with elements of ‘The Shepherd’s Hut’ by Tim Winton. It is, ultimately, though a good, intelligent thriller; and as some critics have suggested seems ready made for a six part TV series.
Kala by Colin Walsh
This is the best page turner that I read in 2024. I don’t consider the term ‘page turner’ to be reductive and so it would be better to say that this is one of the best books I read in 2024. It has an archetypal murder mystery set-up but is a book with real depth and psychological insight. It proves the point that genre labels can be limiting. This story has as much resonance as many of the books that make the literary awards shortlists.
The set-up, though – old school friends meet up in Kinlough, on the west coast of Ireland, 15 years after their world was ripped apart. In the summer of 2003, their final year before finishing school, the beautiful, charismatic and fearless Kala, the core member of their gang of six school outsiders, disappeared. Now a music gig and family wedding see the remaining five all together, again, in Kinlough just at the moment that the remains of a body are found in nearby woodland.
I said it was archetypal. How many murder mysteries begin with the disappearance of a beautiful young woman? And how many stories bring together older, changed characters back to the scene of that disappearance to reflect on the youthful joys and sorrows of their past? Secrets, remorse and guilt naturally emerge; and here we also get a series of clues, some red herrings and a powerful denouement.
The novel moves easily between the story of the young friends’ typical teenage rites of passage in the early 2000s and the present-day narratives from three of them: Mush, Helen and Joe. The latter who came from a more advantaged family than the rest of the gang was always destined for some amalgam of fame and success. Mush on the other hand has remained in Kinlough with a love for the place and its people based on a clear-eyed evaluation that accepts the bad with the good. He is loyal, hardworking but damaged, both physically and emotionally. Mind you as a recovering alcoholic so is music superstar Joe. How much of this damage is linked to Kala’s disappearance becomes more clear as the search for the truth about the past unfolds. Helen, the third narrator, is different again; she has made a successful career in Canada as an investigative journalist- plenty of subtext there, of course – and she has unresolved issues in her relationships with the family and friends left behind.
What makes this more than just a superior murder mystery novel is the time and care taken with the characters. Walsh carefully develops their bond as well as the tensions between them in the flashback episodes. He explores how these disparate characters find solidarity and belonging in their gang of six because of their differences from the rest of their peers. And this in turn enables Walsh to explore the social constraints based on tradition and religion that are at the heart of the central mystery and so many of the other secrets and deceits that begin to emerge as the old friends try to make sense about what happened to Kala.
As I say, though, the mystery of Kala, whom Walsh portrays as a luminous, captivating presence, is only part of this novel’s appeal. It ranges over class, criminality as well as the sort of wilful turning away by a community that was such a strong feature of Claire Keegan’s brilliant novella ‘Small Things Like These’. Similar to that book, this story exposes the dark underbelly beneath the carefully constructed mythology of the Irish craic. Strongly recommended.
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Another novel and another prize winner – I’m so obvious with my reading choices. Trust won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Literature and it’s easy to see why – it would appeal to the literati such as the Pulitzer judges and also to the wider reading public. The latter would respond to the gradual revelation of its central characters’ secrets. Whilst the literati would respond to its four different narratives that circle around the lives of Andrew Bevel, a wealthy New York businessman from the early 20th century and his enigmatic wife, Mildred. They, the literati, would lap up the book’s exploration of where truth lies in every individual’s story, whose perception can be trusted and how truth can be constructed and mis-constructed.
Obviously, as a self-proclaimed literati, I enjoyed piecing together the story from the distinct narratives although there was also plenty to enjoy in the evocation of the modern financial system with its stocks and shares, bonds and derivatives that seems divorced from the reality of real value founded on honest work. The 1929 Wall Street Crash makes an appearance and any resonance with the 2008 crash built on the sub-prime fiasco and the bad loans that were hedged and hedged is quite deliberate.
So, let me begin by setting out the book’s different threads to give you some sense of this consistently engaging novel.
The first narrative strand is an extract from a best-selling novel written in the 1930s about a Benjamin Rask, the cold, calculating scion of a wealthy New York family. When his father dies in the early part of the century he redirects the family business from industry to finance and begins to create a wave in Wall Street with the seeming infallibility of his investments and stocks and shares manoeuvring. Rask is a bloodless character whose pleasure in his market successes is purely intellectual and theoretical, removed from the businesses and families who rely on a stable financial state to keep their lives on track. Even in the 1929 crash he thrives, which causes some suspicion about his methods. He and his intelligent, thoughtful wife, Helen – he chose a partner for form and ease and she chose him for independence – find themselves slightly ostracised from society as a result of his ability to always come out on top. Helen, whom he has allowed funds to support the arts, grows more distant and we end the extract with her trying to recover her mental and physical health in a Swiss sanatorium.
So far, so straightforward until we learn that this is one narrative, and a fictionalised one, about two real characters. In the second section, we receive the financier’s memoir, albeit incomplete with notes to self about ideas and events that need more detail. Fascinatingly, these notes hint at an unreliable narrator: they focus on the narrator’s wise judgement and financial market philosophy rather than the more personal side of his life. When he speaks of his wife, Mildred, the marriage is idealised and generalised – it rings hollow. His passion seems reserved for his work and the continual link he makes between his financial triumphs and the health of the country.
We are, of course, being invited to build up a picture we can trust. And the next twist in the third section is narrated by Ida Partenza, the Italian American daughter of an anarchist printer who has warned Ida all her life about the inequities and moral corruption of the country he emigrated to from fascist Italy. She is another fiercely intelligent woman, determined to make her own way in America whilst loyal to her complex, distracted single parent. She secures work for a mysterious financier, Andrew Bevel, who is writing a memoir of his life, career and marriage, as a counter to the novel we have glimpsed in the first section. He wants to put the record straight, ostensibly to protect the reputation of his beloved wife, Mildred, as well as to present free market capitalism as a force for good.
Without giving too much away, as this is a book that reveals its secrets in a gradual and detached manner, Ida begins to question some of the perceptions she is being guided to record. Originally employed by Bevel to record his words, he gradually makes Ida complicit in the stories of his marriage and his wife’s illness and hands over to her responsibility for the sections about Mildred’s artistic philanthropy and inner life. Ida has to decide how far she can trust the portrait of Mildred she is bringing into fruition; and eventually she is forced to confront how much she can trust herself about the nature of the book she is writing and the type of life she wants to lead.
Who we can trust to tell the world’s stories and who actually gets to tell the authorised version is, as I’m sure you’ve picked up, central to this book’s purpose and multi-layered structure. What the duty of a novelist is to the truth is also explored. And, the trust we place in the financial institutions and the men who run them with their shifting of risk via bonds and derivatives is the context for this exploration – Diaz is reminding us that the personal and public are always intertwined. I guess all the people who vote for the Trumps of this world and Brexit showed they had learnt this lesson following the financial crash that left those already disadvantaged worse off whilst the establishment was untouched. Those who have turned to populist solutions may have made bad choices but the analysis and instincts that led to those choices seem sound.
This book does, however, eventually point out that whilst the nature of truth and who or what to trust can be complex, there are some facts out there that can’t be denied. This is revealed in the powerful, final narrative that quietly and powerfully modifies and undermines much of what was uncovered in the earlier sections. This final story, which I won’t say any more about, has much of the satisfaction of a whodunit denouement mixed with an uneasy sense of frustration and sadness.
I can heartily recommend this book. Trust me, it is a thought provoking and consistently engaging read.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Keegan is a noted short story writer and this is a novella – I read it in one lazy afternoon – and, like the best short stories, it packs a powerful punch and leaves the reader with a sense of lives and events that will carry on after the story comes to a close. In that spirit, I will eschew my normal rambling approach to reviews and keep this brief.
It’s 1985 and Bill Furlong, a small businessman with his own coal merchant business in a small Irish town, is on a treadmill of hard work and family life. He is making his way with diligence and good humour – his energy and enterprise, we assume, will in a few years fuel the Celtic Tiger economy. Now, though, he is bound by the restricted and traditional society of this church dominated country. Keegan subtly hints at Bill’s restless inner life that occasionally bursts through the conscientious routine of his daily life. He reflects on issues of fairness in such a hierarchical society, and beyond the ties of family he considers the individual’s responsibility to others.
Then one Christmas during his final delivery to the local convent, an unexpected encounter forces him to challenge his passively complicit role in a society that turns a blind eye to the cruelties of the Magdalene laundries. It also reawakens childhood memories and the individual kindness that protected him and his unmarried teenage mother. Life for him is now secure but the fate of the teenage mothers imprisoned in the convent underline its precariousness and the misery that ensues. The question for Bill is: will he continue to turn a blind eye, or do something and act on his innate common decency that Keegan has so clearly delineated?
Well, that’s a pretty good question for us all to answer, and it provides a powerful climax to this little gem of a story.
Precipice by Robert Harris
I’ve become a big Harris fan over the last few years. I love being taken into the heart of key moments in history and wallowing in the fruits of his journalistic research. The pleasure is doubled, though, because this research is so lightly delivered in thrillingly structured narratives. Occasionally, these stories have seemed a little flat to me – The Fear Index, The Second Sleep – but these have been his more speculative, less specifically historical works.
Nevertheless, I was doubtful before starting this book. The historical hook that it is based on is well known – Asquith’s relationship with a young aristocratic woman as he leads the country into conflict with Germany in 1914; and marked by his almost obsessive writing of scores of love letters, sometimes as he was chairing the cabinet. My concern was twofold. How would he create a thrilling narrative from what seems simply a peculiar footnote in history? And what is there of emotional, psychological resonance in the story of an older, powerful man fixating on a younger woman?
The first issue is dealt with by the creation of a fictional character, whom Harris inserts into the historical events of this tumultuous period in both Asquith’s political and personal life. Paul Deemer is a young, ambitious police officer who, at the start of the novel, is investigating the reckless death by misadventure of one of The Coterie, a group of young, hedonistic and cynical sons and daughters of the powerful and wealthy. Venetia Stanley, the object of Asquith’s attentions, is part of this group as is Asquith’s own son.
Later in the novel, Deemer’s detective skills see him recruited by the nascent Special Branch. Here his path again crosses Venetia’s as he begins to investigate a baffling mystery and potentially significant problem with Europe on the brink of conflict – fragments of confidential communications from the heart of government have been found discarded along the byways of England. This leads him to the correspondence between Venetia and Asquith and a lengthy mission monitoring this strange mixture of scandalous love affair and potential threat to national security.
The success of the books rests on how compelling this strange and secretive menage a trois is for the reader and how involved we become with the three main characters. Deemer’s story is more straightforward for Harris to handle as he is a working class boy, at first bemused and incredulous about the recklessness of the correspondence by his betters. He is, however, a bright and sensitive member of the proletariat who gets to know the characters intimately through their letters, particularly Venetia. He begins to feel a certain moral queasiness that his job has forced upon him. Eventually, he has to face the dilemma of whether to remain an observer or become part of the story.
Harris applies his formidable skills to fleshing out Venetia’s character. This is partly achieved by giving her a distinct voice in the replies to Asquith’s letters that he creates and which were never, in fact, brought to the public record. In these long and frequent letters – she and Asquith corresponded several times each day thanks to an excellent postal service – Venetia emerges as an intelligent, sensitive young woman looking to define herself independently of the role expected of her as a wealthy Edwardian woman.
What attracts her to Asquith is at first, however, hard to understand. He was a married man old enough to nearly be her grandfather and at the moment the book is set he was beginning to show some wear and tear, physically and emotionally, after several years at the heart of government. Yet there is also an intensely romantic streak in her nature which is rooted in an admiration of Asquith’s intelligence and sense of duty. And, of course, there is an illicit thrill, not in the purely conventional sense, but because through his letters she is given a front row seat to history in the making. More than this, she becomes his most important and secretive advisor. So, yes, I did gradually believe in her feelings for Asquith – admiration and power is a heady mix.
The one person we know the most about before reading the book was for me the least comprehensible. Asquith has some claim to being a transcendent prime minister. His Liberal government paved the way for a less hierarchical country, with a clearer idea of what the state needed to do to support all its citizens. However, he was forced to hand over to Lloyd George during the war and this eventually led to the break-up of the Liberal party as a major political force. And that is where this book is heading at the end. Things seem unresolved but the personal and public, as the title suggests, are on the precipice: Asquith and Venetia’s relationship is changing and the Gallipoli campaign is turning into a national humiliation.
Despite the pressures of his long political career, the early part of the book presents Asquith as handling the twin pressures of Irish independence and the bellicose threats of the Kaiser with political confidence and diligence. This is, however, the only section of the book where I really understood why he had been such a successful political leader for so long. After that, his loyal colleagues and family tell us about his political skills but these are clouded by his infatuation for Venetia. I’ll say no more about this because the outcome of their relationship is not as well-known as the fact of their correspondence; and there is some emotional power in the way Harris brings the book to its conclusion.
As ever with Harris, a great deal of the pleasure comes from his recreation of the feeling of these critical moments in history as well as the real-life players in these events. Winston Churchill is particularly well done. There is, of course, the bluster and impetuosity that led him to push forward his Gallipoli plan. Harris is, however, fair to him. He becomes more than a prototype Boris because of his kindness and loyalty to Asquith alongside a quick brain and political skills.
Lloyd George seems a deliberately shadowy character. There is a sense that he is holding himself back waiting for the moment to seize the crown. That though is the next story after this. Here the horrors of war and the way it is changing people meld with the personal dilemmas of our central triad. Venetia and Deemer are changed by the personal situation that they are involved with as participant and surveyor as well as the impact of the European conflict which they both sense changing the world imperceptibly but irrevocably.
Is Asquith changed? I’m not sure and I’m not sure what I make of him or his behaviour. Writing love letters whilst discussing matters of life and death in cabinet and the needy nature of those missives is almost unbelievable. He may have been distracted by his love
affair with Venetia but it was his mishandling of the war that led to Lloyd George taking over as prime minister in 2016.
If, however, we are to see this as the story of an over-stressed, rather sad old man looking for one final romantic moment as a counterbalance to his life of work, duty and conformity then it seems to me a slight focus for a book. I think there is something more being explored here but I’m just not able to articulate it at the moment.
Despite my initial reservations, though, this was a book that always held my interest and I was fully engaged, especially with Venetia’s personal journey. So, if you enjoy Harris’ books then I think you will get something from this story of a most curious episode in our political history.
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Having submerged myself in the classics during my three years at Sheffield University, I began the 1980s keen to explore the best that contemporary fiction had to offer. Penelope Fitzgerald, with a Booker Prize to her name, was a prominent part of this new literary diet. The problem is, though, having read several of her novels there’s little that I can recall about them. At that the time I found her work, as I did many of the English novels I experienced, rather flat in comparison to the American and European writers I was also reading. Therefore, when this was the book group’s choice for this month, I must say I was a little wary. And, once again, my instincts have proven to be wrong. This short, consistently enjoyable book is worth reading alone for its brilliant and, what seems, authentic depiction of Moscow life in 1913.
It was written in 1988 and I assume it must have been affected by Gorbachev’s Glasnost and the imminent break-up of the Soviet bloc. There are plenty of hints in Fitzgerald’s story that Tsarist Russia is on the brink of a significant moment although this is background noise more than a catalyst for the novel’s action. The catalyst at the start of this story is in fact another breakup but domestic in nature: Frank Reid, Russian born but from an English family, is the owner of a small printing business in Moscow who is coming to terms with his wife Nellie’s sudden departure from the family home. She has taken their three children with her but in short order Frank has to collect them from the railway station where they have been abandoned.
Frank seems to be a deliberately low key, rather passive character. He has a tolerant, empathetic feeling for Russia and his Russian friends and business life but, as a defiantly wry, quietly self-assured Englishman, there is also a sense of detached amusement. His wife’s sudden departure seems merely a setback to be addressed like a business problem, and Fitzgerald keeps the full range of his personal response slightly hidden from the reader. Instead Frank is shown making arrangements for the care of his children, enquiring about Nellie’s whereabouts to her brother, Charlie, in south London and then making arrangements for Charlie’s visit to Moscow. Remarkably, it is not just Frank who seems relatively unaffected by his wife’s departure but the children seem to carry on without any emotional trauma. This may be a hint at the nature of their relationship with Nellie but they also seem to genuinely enjoy life in Moscow. As a place for young Edwardian children to grow up it seems much more lively and exotic than a similar childhood in bourgeois Blighty.
The main story takes place over just one month and focuses on Frank’s life with a range of fascinating characters. There’s Selwyn Crane, his friend and finance officer whose devotion to Tolstoy and a life of simplicity and good works make him an admirable, slightly ridiculous but respected figure in the community. He serves as a contrast to Frank’s friend, neighbour and business associate, Kuriatin, a wily, archetypal Russian. Frank is amused by him and enjoys his friend’s self-serving practices and venalities as much as his energy and zest for life. Frank is intelligent enough to realise how different Kuriatin’s approach is to his own self-contained behaviour and yet he also accepts that it is simply different. That is, of course, part of Frank’s likeability as a character: he lacks the colonial era sense of superiority associated with Englishmen overseas at this time.
Finally, in the second half of the book we see Frank employing Lisa, a rather enigmatic young peasant woman recommended by Selwyn, to look after the children. She bonds with the children and in her quiet, composed manner enables the household to return to some form of happy equilibrium. The fact that she is an attractive, younger woman provides his Russian neighbours with some amusement and slightly discomfits his English friends. This is particularly the case as, in an amusing episode, he escapes well-meaning attempts to foist a dowdy, unsuitable English spinster onto him as a solution to his child caring problems.
It is worth mentioning, here, how funny the book is. There are hilarious set pieces, especially the occasion when the Kuriatins are looking after Frank’s children and see no problem in providing them with a baby bear cub for entertainment. Predictably, chaos ensues.
I have already mentioned that the details of early twentieth century Muscovite life seem authentic. I have no way of knowing if that is the case although I know that Fitzgerald was steeped in research. However, it is the throwaway lines about how to handle the state secret police, or what Kuriatin really meant when he offers an expansive invitation, for example, that show Frank’s knowledge of the Russian way of doing things – and it is that which seems authentic.
Eventually, there are two twists at the end of the book which make some things clearer and yet also leave an element of ambiguity. In other words, a sort of resolution but subject to change just like Russia on the edge of its momentous revolution. You all know Churchill’s aphorism about Russia being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Well that is the enduring image left by this book in an extremely engaging, entertaining manner.
Brotherless Night by V. V. Gananshananthan
I have just been re-reading Lizzie’s fantastic review of Black Butterflies about the sectarian conflict that took place in the 1990s as post-Tito Yugoslavia bloodily broke apart. I did so because Gananshananthan’s book covers an equally savage civil war that was fought in living memory in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. I was curious to compare the approach taken to the historically repetitive and depressing story of diverse communities viewing one another with suspicion, fear and frustration until uneasy cohabitation turns into extreme violence.style=”padding-top: 100px; margin-top: -100px;
Sri Lanka provides me with only two strong images apart from that great spin bowling wizard Murali Muralitharan. There’s the idyllic holiday beauty of sun kissed beaches and sparkling blue sea; and then the sporadic news coverage of atrocities committed by the majority Singhalese against the minority Tamils who then retaliated with atrocities of their own. Despite this conflict playing out over 26 years, it was one of many – Rwanda, Sudan for starters – that was happening in a land far away of which I knew little and, normal fleeting human compassion aside, cared little about. However, reading this excellent novel, it is hard not to become involved in the growing horrors that are gradually revealed by Gananshananthan, with the brutal and complex authenticity of an insider.
I think the key similarity with Black Butterflies is what Lizzie explains is the way normality disintegrates around the narrator, Zora, until it erupts into a horror which is described with visceral power and realism. Lizzie also explains, though, how people maintain their humanity through art, objects and memories. Does Gananshananthan’s novel do something similar? I’m not sure and perhaps that is my main issue with this book – but more of that in a moment.
Similar to Black Butterflies, there is a point of reference for our empathy and interest in the book’s narrator, Sashi. We are introduced to her at the start of the book as a teenage girl keen to do well at school and train as a doctor. She is part of a big, close and loving, well educated Tamil family living in Jaffna. Whilst her father is often working away from home in some form of government administrative role, Sashi revels in the care of her strong mother and brothers. It’s not long, though, before this seemingly idyllic childhood is threatened by increasing Singhalese repression of the Tamils and the eruption of counter protests leading to violence, riots and retributions. These are the foothills of the civil war but we quickly learn why the book is titled as it is because, after her eldest sibling is killed in a riot, two of her brothers are drawn into the conflict – nights at home become brotherless as her siblings go about the bloody business of the Tamil Tigers.
The public sadness of a country and people’s lives ripped apart is reflected in the personal tragedy of Sashi’s blighted youth. She is a strong young woman, with a fierce intelligence but the demands of the time test her loyalties. Her natural sympathy for the persecution of Tamil society is compromised by the violence meted out by the Tigers to those, including Tamils, who act as peacemakers. She finds
herself working crazy hours struggling on with her disrupted medical studies yet drawn into extracurricular, covert nursing of wounded Tigers.
Then there’s the romantic narrative arc foreshadowed at the start of the novel in her teenage friendship with K, a school friend of her brothers, that ultimately places Sashi in a terrible position. She was, perhaps unconsciously, expecting a future of love and intimacy with him. Instead, his elevation as one of the Tamil leaders provides him with a different priority and passion. Finally, she becomes a reluctant handmaid bearing witness and offering care at K’s public martyrdom as he goes on hunger strike in support of the Tamil cause.
Now, I suspect that you like me can see shades of Northern Ireland here. And indeed, the gradual build-up of grievance and atrocities into what seems to be a never ending and insoluble conflict on the island was strongly reminiscent of those dark days in the 70s and 80s that we witnessed on our television screens, nightly. The Sri Lankan ‘troubles’ is the everyday backdrop to Sashi’s life and whilst her compassion constantly drives her on, she is at turns frustrated with her family and friends and angered by the way she and others are pressurised into taking a side when all they want is peace.
There are many memorable characters in this book but it is Sashi’s character that provides the story with its power. She is complex and altered by the civil war in a believable way. Yet there is something sad about the final scenes as the civil war reaches its bloody endgame and Sashi’s increasingly embittered character rails against the world’s seeming indifference. Perhaps it was unrealistic of me to expect shards of hope but it’s also hard to follow characters through decades of war yet find no way forward at the book’s close. Don’t get me wrong, though, I am glad I read this book and would heartily, if not joyfully, recommend it.
The Great Swindle by Pierre LeMaitre
I chose this book with little care. I just fancied a novel by a French writer and LeMaitre was a name that kept popping up, especially his detective books. This, however, does not fit into that genre. In fact, it starts in the dog days of the First World War and, rather shamefully, I braced myself as I have read a lot of novels about this historical period. Quelle surprise – this well-written (or well translated) book fictionalises an actual scandal that took place after the war and consistently engaged and entertained my jaded fiction sensibility.
The book starts at pace as Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle prepares to send his men over the top to take a hill occupied by the enemy. Everyone knows this is a redundant act as the terms of the Germany’s surrender are currently under negotiation. However, Pradelle urges his men to revenge the killing of two of their comrades who were sent into no man’s land on a scouting mission. The only problem – Pradelle had shot these scouts as a pretext for a final attack that he hopes will gain a flourish of glory prior to his return to post war civilian life. This sets the cynical tone that infuses the whole novel as well as establishing Pradelle as a particularly odious villain.
In these opening, fast paced sections the mood of cynicism and the lieutenant’s villainy are entrenched. When mild mannered accountant Albert Maillard charges over the top only to discover the bodies of his dead colleagues with bullets in their backs, he quickly grasps the reality of the situation. His suspicion of the lieutenant makes this a shock but not a total surprise. As an enemy shell buries Albert in a deep crater it is just his luck that Pradelle has spotted him and pushes him down in the earth to ensure that there are no witnesses to his infamy. Fortunately, for Albert another soldier, Edouard Pericourt, heroically saves him. Unfortunately, a huge piece of shrapnel rips the lower part of his saviour’s face – not fatal but maiming Edouard in a hideous way.
After this breathless and powerful opening, LeMaitre develops his story at a more measured pace with elaborate set pieces and Dickensian-like descriptions of character and place. What at first seems like a modern take on the familiar horrors of the first world war becomes a character driven piece in the style of Balzac or Zola exploring the moral corruption and venalities of French society.
Yet, in contrast to the prevailing tone of the novel, it starts with powerful acts of goodness: Edouard’s bravery in rescuing Albert is matched by Albert’s devotion to standing by his maimed and traumatised saviour. In their post war life, Albert helps his friend escape from the indignity of returning to his uncaring father by organising the second swindle after Pradelle’s bogus bid for glory. He tricks his friend’s powerful and wealthy father and loving sister, Madeleine, into believing that Edouard has died and he even provides a corpse for the family mausoleum.
The two ex-soldiers, both damaged in different ways by the war, then set up as an impoverished odd couple, with Albert tirelessly working to provide food and shelter and the pain killing drugs to which Edouard is addicted. So far, so morally noble in the style of a
Dickens’ novel where the hero has to plumb the depths before his moral rectitude is rewarded. When we factor in that Pradelle has forged a buccaneering business career using his heroic reputation and has married Madeline, then the narrative arc begins to take shape. Pradelle also knows about the deception Albert has organised for Edouard and has threatened to expose them to the family if they reveal the initial war crime that has driven his post war success.
The story takes some unexpected turns after this, though. The odd couple become disillusioned and angry about the world they have returned to after the sacrifices made in the Great War. They can see that the wrong people seem still to be benefitting from the suffering that occurred in the war and society doesn’t seem to understand or even care to understand what the ordinary soldiers went through. And the most potent symbol of that injustice at the heart of the post war world is the burgeoning career of Pradelle. He has married into Edouard’s family – although Madeleine’s father, himself a ruthless operator, realises that Pradelle is a bad ‘un.
At this point in the novel, the next great swindles occur; and these are the ones that are partly based on real events in France. After initially wilfully ignoring the returning soldiers in the year after the war, the country suddenly goes through a convulsion of grief, guilty sentimentality, patriotic relief – well LeMaitre lets us decide about the societal motivation. The upshot is that every city and district seems to compete to dedicate funds for the building of a memorial in their locality to honour the fallen.
Without revealing any more, suffice to say our disillusioned pair make use of Edouard’s artistic talents to get a piece of the action. Pradelle, meanwhile, has secured a contract linked to the cemeteries being developed as the final resting place for the corpses of the French soldiers. He comes up with some typically despicable ways to reduce his costs and maximise his profits, figuratively and literally on the backs of the dead.
A large chunk of what I liked about this novel was the moral ambiguity. Most of the characters are grifting for something better after the horrors of the war. And all, apart from Pradelle, have the readers’ understanding even as they are on the make. Pradelle, however is just awful and we, hopefully, anticipate his comeuppance. Yet, at the same time, every episode in which he appears is charged with his devilish, egocentric energy and determined villainy.
As I say, if you like the nineteenth century novels, with their rich plots and heavy focus on character and morality, then this novel will appeal to you. There are flashes of the gothic in the evocation of Albert and Edouard’s shabby existence and particularly the latter’s disfigurement. There is something of Eliot’s exposure of Middlemarch’s bourgeois hypocrisies in the description of Pradelle’s club, his string of mistresses and his strange marriage to Madeleine. In the final part of the book, LeMaitre also presents us with a shabby, disgruntled and mid ranking civil servant, Mallard, who becomes the plot’s unlikely figure of rectitude and retribution.
Well, I got my French novel and also a rather old-fashioned, sprawling state of the nation novel, with crimes and wrongdoing. So, not a detective novel or even a mystery but hugely satisfying and enjoyable, nonetheless.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Over the last few years, I have become more interested in the American Civil War for two reasons. The first is why I now read so much non-fiction: an increasing awareness of my ignorance about so much. The second is because the recent chaotic state of America, still the leader of the free world in my opinion, clearly has deep roots. It seems increasingly obvious that such shocking events as George Floyd’s public murder and the Capitol riots are part of the ongoing, and seemingly unresolved, consequences of the Civil War.
That’s why then I was drawn to this Booker long-listed novel about that tumultuous period in American history. Fowler takes as her key point of reference the assassination of Lincoln – the first of those murders that characterise America’s modern history – and explores the state of the nation through an epic, sprawling focus on the family of John Wilkes Booth.
Like all good schoolboys, I knew that Booth was an actor who shot Lincoln in his box at the theatre in the dog days of the war. What I was not aware of was the fact that he was part of America’s foremost acting dynasty – think the Redgraves for a more homely British equivalent.
The novel begins in the early 19th century and as we surmise not long after famous Shakespearean actor, Junius Brutus Booth, has brought his family from London to a rural homestead in Maryland – we later learn the scandalous reason why he has chosen to make his career in America and in such a remote location.
Junius’ hugely charismatic and idiosyncratic personality dominates the first half of the novel. Interestingly enough though, Fowler regularly switches the family character whose perspective leads the narrative but does not use Junius for that purpose. Instead it is his range of unusual or unfashionable views – vegetarianism, anti-slavery – and his brilliant public performances and wild behaviour away from the stage that light up the family’s domestic routines. He is away for nine months of each year taking the bard to the different corners of this sprawling new country, sending back money from his triumphs to support his growing family.
The story, however, remains rooted with the left behind family and the perspective comes initially from his eldest daughter Rosalie and then her younger sister, Asia. Rosalie early on accepts her role as the unobtrusive family carer, deeply affected by the childhood deaths of her siblings, who supports her mother to run the family in her father’s absence. Asia, beautiful and spirited, constantly fights against the restraints of being a woman and rather surprisingly becomes the family’s chronicler.
This early section is as much social history, with fascinating insights about the acting life as the country moves westwards, and about life on a 19th century American farm with a family of a similar status to Austen’s Bennetts. However, in two respects there is a larger perspective. Throughout the novel, Fowler intersperses the family’s story with short extracts from letters, speeches by Abraham Lincoln and news reports about him. We know how this story ends and we see the man of destiny moving towards that tragic destiny.
The second level of subtle perspective is supplied by Joe Hall and his family. Joe is a freed slave who runs the Booth farm. Yet his family is spread around the surrounding farms and are not free, and he is helped to run the farm with indentured slaves whom Junius leases from his neighbours. Despite the Booth family’s enlightened views they are compromised – much like the American economy where morals often clashed with business.
When Junius abuses himself to death via his wild roistering, the focus falls more on his sons. They have all moved on to the family business and begin the arduous yearly round of touring in order to support the increasingly stretched family. Fowler particularly focuses on Edwin, the second eldest surviving boy, and the true inheritor of Junius’ acting talents – this is significant. There is a deliberate turning away from John, the youngest, spoiled child. We learn about the circumstances of his birth that provides him with his own sense of destiny as well as his less benevolent wild nature. He is handsome, dashing and has some of his father’s charm but it is skin deep and does not encompass Junius’ big-heartedness.
As I stated, we know where the story is going and yet it is still thrilling and disturbing to see the family unwillingly bound up in a national tragedy. John’s confederate sympathies, at odds with his family, eventually become intolerable for his indulgent family to contain. His arrogant sense of being chosen for this moment, leads John to Lincoln. The two strands of the story come together briefly and portentously; and this is perhaps where this excellent novel faltered slightly. The ending was tidied up, with Lincoln and the family quickly consigned to history. Having spent so long with the family, this was disappointing but then, again, it must be difficult for a writer to move on from such a senseless real-life climax.
I can thoroughly recommend this book. It is an imagined history of a resonant period in the modern world’s history and it had the ring of truth and deep psychological insight.
The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
This is a book that has been creating quite a stir recently. Written in 1938 by Boschwitz, a young German Jew who had fled to London from his homeland to escape the Nazis. This long-neglected story about life in Germany on the brink of the second world war has just been re-launched and published for the first time in Germany; and it is drawing favourable comparisons with contemporaneous fictional accounts of this turbulent period such as ’Suite Francaise’ and ‘Alone in Berlin’ – high praise indeed.
‘The Passenger’ is a powerful, tense and slightly unusual story that begins in Berlin in 1938 but goes on to provide a panoramic account of the atmosphere and attitudes prevalent in the third reich just at the moment when the brutalities and persecution of the Jews were about to intensify. In a dramatic opening, Hitler’s thugs are rounding up Berlin’s Jews in a bogus response to an assassination in Paris. They arrive at the home of Otto Silbermann, who is forced to flee out the back door and keep moving. And that in essence is the plot – the novel is subtitled ‘The man who took trains’ and Otto spends most of the novel moving around the country in a Kafkaesque limbo where all his attempts to escape the country or seek other possible solutions are thwarted.
Whilst the plot is undoubtedly exciting and tense the book is an inside account of what it is like to find your world and your place in it turned upside down. And Otto’s place had seemed assured, secure and fulfilling for many years: he is a successful and wealthy businessman, a veteran of the first world war with a solid family life, social status and a sense of belonging. He is intelligent, a little complacent and slightly detached from the lower classes – not a hero just a very realistic member of the bourgeoisie. He had his chance to leave Germany a couple of years earlier but like many he felt that Hitler was a passing phase, that the good sense of his countrymen would reassert itself. Now it is too late.
As he travels around Germany he encounters all types of citizens: hard line Nazis who treat him with courtesy and respect due to his wealth and Aryan features; ordinary citizens too self-centred or cowed to speak out; a few brave idealists who risk everything to help the victims of the new order; and other Jews inhabiting a similar tormented inner exile to himself. One of the most disturbing scenes is when he separates himself from an old acquaintance whose too Jewish features might increase the threat to Silbermann if they were to become travelling companions.
All this, we experience close up and personal with Silbermann. At times the narrative reads like a stream of consciousness narrative as he alternates between manic energy to take control of his life and a listless sense of drift as every plan meets an unmoveable block. Eventually, his ‘groundhog day’ of hellish frustration impacts on his emotional stability and psychological ability to imagine a way out; and because we are forced to follow his internal thoughts and feelings as he scurries around, we feel, experience and understand the disintegration of a man that Boschwitz presents to us.
The great strength of this book, which makes it a vital text, is the undoubted authenticity of life under the Nazis, the complex mood of fear and exhilaration in the country and that awful sense of your own turning on you. The content of this book makes it a classic but I do
not think that the writing matches its insights. That’s no surprise: Boschwitz was in his twenties and this was only his second book. It is a young man’s urgent response to the growing crisis in his homeland and so there is some immaturity in his technique. He also did not have the chance to revise his first draft as his life was tragically cut short in 1942 – by the way, it is worth reading what happened to him after he sought refuge in Britain. Yet despite these niggles, this is an important and thrilling (in an awful way) novel. It provides an account of this terrible period that gave me a perspective I had not previously experienced.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
As they say on television: this is a fictionalised account of real events. Although it might be more accurate to say that this is a fictionalised account about events that we don’t know much about at all.
I imagine most of you know the basic outline of this book. After all, O’Farrell won The Women’s Prize For Literature for this novel. And you, the well-informed readers of this blog, will know most of the sparse facts about Shakespeare’s life – he was born and died on the same day (probably) which for England’s greatest writer was appropriately St George’s Day, and he had a son Hamnet who died as a child. You are probably also aware that, after his son’s death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, a great play obsessed with death and pervaded by a sense of loss and melancholy.
O’Farrell makes a virtue of our sketchy knowledge not only of the bard but his family who stayed rooted in Stratford whilst he ascended to literary immortality in London. This book is partly about him and his grief even though he is never named; but it is more about his wife and family and their life in a provincial Elizabethan town. Now, again, you blog readers will be ahead of me – so, yes, it is about Anne Hathaway the older woman he married when he was only eighteen and whom he spent most of his married life separated from as she remained in Stratford with their eldest daughter, Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.
With little to go on, O’Farrell creates an engrossing story about Anne, more commonly referred to as Agnes, an unusual and good woman who forges an important place for herself in Stratford society as a healer of people’s ills both physical and emotional. We are given a plausible but charming account of her relationship with the eldest son of the disgraced glove maker John, Will’s cruel, demanding father. Agnes, with her ability to sense the inner essence of people, especially when she squeezes the skin between thumb and forefinger, discerns the potential in Will, his largeness of spirit and emotional generosity.
The narrative focus moves between the different members of the Shakespeare family, although Agnes’ is the dominant perspective; and it also constantly shifts chronologically. It begins with Hamnet at the centre as he tends to his twin who seems to have fallen victim to the plague, before covering Will and Agnes’ background and the start of their relationship, then moving to the repercussions of their son’s premature and unexpected death.
This is a study of the impact of grief, especially that most poignant of deaths when a child pre-deceases its parents. I found it moving and, thankfully, there is a redemptive aspect linked to the world’s most famous play. This is, of course, wholly speculative and yet it seems right and it makes important points about memory and the importance of art.
The book also does that trick typical of the best historical literature – it wears its research lightly. O’Farrell’s narrative blends in the routines of daily life for this provincial town four hundred years ago in a wholly natural way. The reader can grasp the different imperatives of the past which shape that particular society whilst also reminding us that the nature of the Stratford community’s relationships, with their petty domestic rivalries, passions and personal kindnesses, are like Shakespeare’s plays “for all the ages”.
Yet my abiding memory of this book is focused on its central figure. Agnes is a beguiling character, a fine creation by O’Farrell. As already mentioned, she is a healer who dispenses medicines and treatments for physical ailments whilst also tending to people’s psychological and emotional distress with her calm, listening skills. We see her grow into a slightly ethereal but respected figure in her community from the rather strange young woman to whom Shakespeare was first attracted.
Now, regular readers will know that I am impatient of magic realism and, in some ways, Agnes, with her visions and super sensitivity about the inner lives of those she encounters, seems to be a figure right out of this genre. Funnily enough, though, it reminds me a little of a strange book called ‘Being a Beast’ chosen for the book group by my friend Chris. In that book, the writer decides to live for large chunks of time as an animal – for example, as a badger gobbling worms in a dark, dank den or an otter exhilarating himself by dunking his head into an ice-cold stream. His purpose was to experience the world as an animal to see if this develops his sensibilities in a way that would make him more sensitive to the natural world. Well, Agnes has this type of sensibility and sensitivity in spades. O’Farrell presents her as having grown up on a farm with licence to roam the surrounding countryside. Her environment has moulded her and she has an ability to be able to discern people’s emotional states and find solace in the flora and fauna around her. It seemed wholly plausible to me, particularly as lockdown has made me appreciate the natural world more than ever.
Coincidentally, I have been reading a book of very good short essays about the need to strip away history’s accumulated assumptions about Shakespeare’s plays. It makes a strong argument that ‘Hamlet’ gains emotional heft from the context of late Elizabethan culture, especially the Virgin Queen’s impending demise, rather than from its author’s inner landscape. Perhaps, but who cares when we get a book like O’Farrell’s that has something important to say about the human condition. After all, nobody watches ‘Richard III’ for its historical accuracy.
The White Girl by Tony Birch
This is a quietly powerful story about the experience of Australian Aborigines in the period straight after the second world war.
The novel is set In Deane, an isolated, small, rural town, where the Aborigines live separate from their white neighbours and are alternately brutalised or condescended to but always seen as a group to be guided like children by an overweening state power. This means that they are classified as ‘native fauna’ with fewer rights than animals and under the protection of the local authorities who decide what’s best for them. The civil rights movement campaigning for Aborigines to gain citizenship may be making ground in urban areas but they are a long way from Deane.
The story focuses on Odette a tough, resilient older aboriginal woman whose skill as an artist gives her a degree of financial independence, and her thirteen year old granddaughter, Sissy, the white girl of the title. We quickly learn that Sissy’s mother, Odette’s daughter, left when Sissy was a baby, traumatised and shamed by what had been done to her and which had resulted in this fair skinned, mixed race child.
The bond between Odette and Sissy is strong and their life is relatively good as the whites tend to leave them alone. Then three elements of jeopardy are introduced. The first is that Odette knows she has some aches and pains that are not just the usual afflictions of an ageing body. She is ill and worries for Sissy’s future.
Worse still is that Sissy begins to attract the attentions of the reckless and violent son of a white trash family – think the Ewells in “To Kill a Mockingbird’. Abused by his drunken father and trapped in a womanless, rundown farm, he poses a threat that will only grow as Sissy grows into a young woman.
The greatest threat of all comes from the new policeman, Lowe, who is determined to sweep away the laxity of his drunken predecessor, Bill Shea, who found it easiest to let the Aborigines get on with things without his ‘protection’. Lowe’s zealotry begins to fix on Sissy. As a mixed race child, she is the state’s responsibility, not Odette’s, and it seems inevitable that as he investigates her background further, he will eventually take her away to a state residency.
I recently read and reviewed ‘Beloved’ which similarly deals with the harsh realities for people’s lives in a racist state. My friends, Chris and Emma, put up a cogent defence of why Morrison’s book is critically acclaimed and has such an esteemed status, and I think they are right. The problem is, though, that I just enjoyed this book more.
This may be because of my wilfully optimistic personality – it is not always as helpful as it seems – that meant I enjoyed the hopeful nature of this book. All the characters are given their due, with their motives and frailties exposed. White characters are not sidelined and presented as alien as they were in ‘Beloved’. The love and kindness that a whole range of characters display drive the plot. Yet the difficulties of everyday life for Aborigines are not minimised.
There was even a small amount of magic realism, sort of, in the way that the spiritual world of the Aborigines was evoked; and it didn’t annoy me, which is a first.
Thank you to my brother-in-law, Paul, who recommended this to me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will look out for other novels by Birch who is one of Australia’s foremost writers and is himself of indigenous heritage.
A Rising Man’ by Abir Mukherjee
It is 1919 and Sam Wyndham an ex-Scotland Yard detective, is newly arrived in Calcutta headhunted as part of a new CID force. He is looking for a fresh start following his experiences in the trenches and the death of his wife to Spanish Flu.
The uncertainty and turmoil in his own life is matched by the turbulence of Calcutta. A mixture of terrorist attacks and the more damaging effect of the nascent non-violence/non-cooperation movement are beginning to undermine British rule in India. In addition, Wyndham quickly recognises that the brutal, authoritarian behaviour of the Raj’s forces of low and order are beginning to erode the British aura of moral superiority.
Within days of his arrival, Wyndham has to lead his first Calcutta murder investigation. And not just any old murder: the body of a senior Raj administrator is discovered outside a brothel located on the wrong side of the tracks. The note stuffed in the victim’s mouth immediately throws suspicion on ‘Independence’ supporters as part of their campaign to terrorise and drive out the imperialists.
Wyndham is not so sure. There are too many anomalies – why is one of the brothel’s girls so jittery; what was the deceased doing in such a dangerous place; why had the victim’s behaviour been so odd in the weeks preceding his murder? Just as significant is Wyndham’s awkward personality that makes him unwilling to accept the convenient, easy solution that the authorities seem keen for him accept.
The plot accelerates from this point to a thrilling finale with a satisfying twist.
What lifts this into the realm of superior historical thriller is the character of Wyndham and the excellent evocation of the strange relationship between the ruled and Raj as well as the increasingly frayed attempts of the British to impose a sense of order and purpose on Calcutta.
Wyndham’s criminal investigation team includes Sergeant Bannerjee, a Cambridge educated Indian, and Mukherjee uses the officers’ developing respect and relationship to explore the conflicts raging in both men. Bannerjee knows that one day India will be an independent nation and will need effective senior police officers. The only problem is: can he stomach the compromises necessary to maintain a flawed regime of law and order until then.
Wyndham’s dilemma is similar. He recognises that his precise need for justice makes him appear a traitor to his caste; and he understands that if he rocks the boat too much he will be sent packing to Britain with no opportunity to bring some kind of fairer justice to the city.
The vibrant inner life of these two characters is matched by numerous other well-developed characters especially the mixed race Miss Grant. She is the beautiful secretarial assistant of the murder victim and her exotic beauty catches Wyndham’s eye as does her intelligence and unwillingness to accept being side-lined by the harsh prejudices of the Raj community.
This was the best sort of detective novel, not just because of the characterisation but the authentic whiff of fully realised historical milieu. I believed this was the way people in that city at that time would have thought and behaved. Mukherjee evaded many of the lazy stereotypes often portrayed in books and films of this period.
I believe this is the first of a several books featuring Wyndham and Banajee. I will definitely be reading more.
Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Barker’s 2018 novel, Costa nominated, is one of a recent trend of books based on well-known stories, many drawn from the classics, that present events from a female perspective. Here, the text is the Illiad and the main narrator is Briseis, a Trojan princess from the city of Lyrnessus. When the city is captured and sacked by Achilles and his Myrmidions, she is claimed as his prize. In one fell swoop her world changes utterly: she witnesses her husband and family being butchered by the seemingly unbeatable Achilles before being dragged to his camp on the beaches outside the great city of Troy as his prize, an object, and his slave who is forced to wait on him at post-battle feasts and in his bed.
The Illiad is considered to be the basis for most of western civilisation’s tales and literature but it is an heroic epic with a male dominated view of the world. Women are generally passive, reacting often with grief and pity to their male folk but rarely expressing a view, and even more rarely initiating action. Of course, they act as catalysts for action – Helen and Briseis herself – but this is only as a reflection of the struggles for honour between the men.
Although the title of the book hints at a didactic approach – these historical women are silenced but they have their own stories and here they are – Barker’s approach is more subtle than this suggests. Only at the end as Briseis develops some form of agency, limited and accepting rather than active in nature, does Barker make her purpose clear: “They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They don’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer.”
The combination of the endlessly fascinating story of Achilles, the child of a man and goddess, his symbiotic relationship with Patroclus and the simmering contempt he feels for Agamemnon, the Greeks’ leader, can’t fail to engage the reader especially in the hands of a skilful writer such as Barker. However, the familiar story is given urgency and drama by the vigour and brutality of her description of the battle for Troy. It can be no accident that the author of a brilliant First World War trilogy brings out the parallels between the two conflicts. There is the exhausting and seemingly interminable slaughter of young men with its impact on their psyche, as well as the women who can lose everything important in their world without having any say or control about it.
Briseis is a perceptive and sensitive narrator who is able to rationalise her reversal of fortune whilst never forgetting what she has lost nor the grief she feels for that loss. She forms tentative relationships with the men around her, particularly the kindly Patroclus, but she never loses a sense of wariness that her menfolk’s defeat and enslavement make every moment precarious. On a macho whim, she could quickly fall out of favour and be thrown out of Achilles’ tent into prostitution or worse.
Towards the end, Barker seems to succumb to her fascination, which we share, with Achilles. And so the novel alternates between Briseis’ view and an omniscient third person perspective that closely tracks Achilles as, traumatised, he tries to come to terms with Patroclus’ death, his guilt about it and his own prophesied destiny that is hurrying towards him following his revenge killing of Hector.
Achilles sees himself as exceptional but also out of kilter with the men around him due to the circumstances of his birth. It is, therefore, a bold move by Barker to take us closer to a character whom it is difficult for the reader to respond to, in much the same way that Briseis struggles to grasp his essential alienness. And yet gradually, like Briseis, we begin to understand him a little better and accommodate ourselves to him without ever forgiving him for his destructive ego that leads him coldly into acts of immense brutality.
Ultimately, however, it is the voice given to the silent women of this conflict and wider history that is most moving and thought-provoking. Barker makes important points about our patriarchal society and the way history and literature has served its purposes. Even here, as Achilles faces his fate, his concern is what his reputation will be as the story of the Trojan war passes down the generations. Well, we know the answer to that but Barker gives Briseis a chance to tip the balance a smidgen back the other way.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
This is a solidly entertaining novel by a very good contemporary novelist. If you have read any of Miller’s previous novels such as ‘Pure’ or Oxygen’, then you will know what to expect and you won’t be disappointed.
This is a historical novel with thriller elements and characters coping with physical and psychological issues that they struggle to overcome. As befits a literary craftsman, the early nineteenth century world is engagingly and plausibly realised as is the mood in Britain as it responds to or turns away from the looming threat of Napoleon’s rampaging across Europe.
The start establishes a mysterious but personal sense of crisis for John Lacroix, a cavalry officer, brought home to his rundown family estate in Somerset. He has escaped the Napoleonic War, fleeing from defeat in the Spanish Peninsular, injured and frail but carrying an emotional burden that is just as damaging. Nell, his family’s loyal housekeeper, nurses him back to physical health. He remains troubled, however, and seeks solace and then escape in his love of music when he sets out to the remotest areas of Scotland to collect folk songs, his dead father’s passion. It is a deliberate turning away from his unfinished military responsibilities.
At the same time as he begins what he hopes will be some sort of healing or even redemptive journey, the sinister forces of real politik are after him. In the aftermath of the brutal, frenzied retreat from Spain, a debt of honour for a war crime is coolly discussed between the British and Spanish military leaders. Someone must pay – John- and two avenging angels, more devilish than angelic, are sent to make good the English state’s debt to the defeated Spanish.
We spend the majority of our time with John, whose guilt, vulnerability and willingness to do the right thing make him an appealing companion. Yet we also travel with his assassins, Calley and Mendoza, who are gradually but nearly as fully realised as John.
Calley, in particular, is brought to terrifying life: a malevolent product of his orphaned and impoverished upbringing – impoverished emotionally as much as materially – whose only sense of belonging comes from a loyalty to the cold machinations of the military machine. He is a psychopath whose actions, often not graphically described by Miller, are disturbing. And yet it is hard not to feel some guarded sympathy; Miller presents him as John’s twin in terms of the damage that, during brief moments of reflection and insight, make him self-aware that he has a great gap in his humanity.
It is telling that he begins to feel that Mendoza, his fellow assassin and someone with a much more romantic notion of his life, is a friend, his only friend. Yet, at the same time, Calley disdains his companion for his foreignness and what he sees as a weak refusal to take a default attitude of cynicism to the ways of the world.
As his nemeses relentlessly pursue him, John makes his way to the Hebrides. He is welcomed into a community that is far removed from the impact of the war. He enjoys the reflective isolation of the landscape but he is not isolated. Lodging with a family of
freethinkers who have chosen this removed life to think, feel and behave unrestricted by society’s conventions, he begins to re-discover the core of his personality. Yet at his back, unknown to him, Calley and Mendoza are hurrying near to bring … what? A sense of reckoning, catharsis, tragedy or, at the very least, a thrilling denouement. We, the readers, wait with bated breath nervous not just about John and his friends’ fates but nervous over what we might discover about his behaviour during the retreat from Spain.
I really enjoyed this book. It works in the way it presents John’s emotional and psychological narrative arc; and it works as a historical novel that captures something of the impact of the Napoleonic period of ascendancy on individuals, as well as the complexity of this period when enlightenment ideas began to challenge the conventions of our rooted society.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Here’s why this book is very much of the moment – this is a story written in the first person by a young, talented and successful Asian American woman about a young, white American woman who appropriates and plagiarises the writing ideas of her deceased friend, a young, talented and successful Asian American writer. Meta or what!
Its zeitgeistiness isn’t all there is to this book, though. It’s an entertaining satire about the shallow, amoral nature of the publishing world as well as a perceptive insight into the invidious influence of online readers and critics on the way writers and their books are perceived and received.
June is at a difficult moment in her life. Her early promise that saw the publication of her debut novel soon after graduating dissipated quickly when the book failed to attract any buzz and few sales. Increasingly bereft of ideas and confidence, her dream of becoming a writer, a dream that has been at her core since childhood, is slipping away along with the years. Her sense of failure is twisted into grievance as she witnesses the success of other young female writers. The mixed cultural and ethnic heritage and minority status of this group seems to be a barrier that excludes her from literary relevance. And this is no more apparent than in the seemingly effortless success of her college friend, Athena Liu. Friend, as Juno, realises is a little bit strong. Even before Athena’s publishing successes and establishment as a media friendly voice of the new, diverse generation, they were different people on different trajectories who simply shared a place on a college writing course. As Juno was always aware, Athena’s beauty, style and self-assurance, as well as her ethnic background, proclaimed a golden future.
At the start of the book, these contrasting trajectories seem well established as they drink wine together at one of their infrequent catch ups. This all happens in the first section of the book. Athena’s self-satisfaction and June’s carefully concealed bitterness and jealousy are concisely detailed by Kuang. And then, an unfortunate incident occurs; and as Athena’s body is being taken away by the emergency services, June takes away her dead friend’s draft manuscript and notes for her next novel.
Whilst the playing out of the novel from this point on seems predictable, things are not so clear cut. Yes, we see June, who changes her nom de plume to the more ambiguous Juno, achieve the sort of literary success she had always dreamed about with Athena’s book. And yes, she then has to cope with the fear of being revealed as a plagiarist which is always in the background undermining this success. Without giving anything away that you wouldn’t anticipate, June has to cope with revelations that threaten her credibility. What might seem to be a familiar route from hubris to shameful exposure does, however, take us down many surprising and uncomfortable byways.
Whilst Athena is, even by June’s reckoning, a talented writer, June is clearly a skilled wordsmith herself. She is, of course, also an unreliable narrator but it does appear that she has put in time and effort to craft the story purloined from Athena’s apartment – how much is Athena and how much is June is, however, left nebulous. The story about Chinese workers in Europe during the First World War is an alternative narrative about forgotten, marginalised voices. It not only sells well but gets June on the lucrative and well-paid media and book tour circuit. Here, she has to handle the questions about cultural appropriation and who has the right to tell stories. This is fascinating and it is easy to begin rooting somewhat for June as she mounts a thoughtful defence of writers having freedom if it is allied to responsibility and sensitivity.
Alongside this, though, is what seems to be heartfelt exposure of the publishing world. Literary merit gets the publishing houses interested but the marketability of the writer, predominantly, and then the theme of the book are the key ingredients. June gains a public profile and financial security but she is treated like a piece of meat, albeit her literary handlers spout faux concern for her. Without giving too much away, her publisher has less concern about the authenticity of her writing and more about profile, publicity and sales.
As various, vicious attacks occur towards June, her publisher veers between bulldog defence against the trolls and hands-off indifference to their writer. And what Kuang does well is to make you sometimes forget, or at least sometimes park, June’s initial literary transgression as one becomes transfixed by the venality and hypocrisy of this world.
I really enjoyed this book. Central to this is June’s personal, self-inflicted tragedy that has the classic qualities of such a psychological journey. As she doubles down on her initial deception, her paranoia becomes manifest. She now has something to lose. However, she is also a writer with the empathy and sensitivity to analyse her story as if a character in a novel. I repeat, she did not seem to me the least sympathetic character in this book even though she was the catalyst for the online storm that begins to obsess her.
The book also provides a nuanced, non-didactic consideration of contemporary debates about the stories we want to tell, who we think has a right to tell them and what we seem to increasingly, and probably unreasonably, expect of creative people. It’s a consistently engaging modern morality tale. The only problem – there was little or no decency on display in the literary world Kuang presents to us.
This is Pleasure’ by Mary Gaitskill
This will be a review of two halves. In the first half, I will set out my response to this much discussed and lauded novella that dramatises the key issues around the ‘Me Too’ debate.
As I identify as a man and am, therefore, a privileged, not unwoke but slightly drowsy man, then I understand it is a less valid response than others. The good news though – and this is when I will move into the second half – is that I have chosen this for my book group to read and discuss; most of the group identify as women. I will add their comments when we have met.
The book alternates between the narratives of Margot and Quin, two influential movers and shakers in the New York publishing scene. We learn straightaway that Quin, a charming, flamboyant and risqué character is in disgrace, accused by female colleagues from throughout his career of inappropriate touching and comments.
With his career falling apart and his family life under strain, Margot reflects on her own history with Quin but does not condemn him. Quin seems simply baffled at his betrayal by women whom he considered friends, and had supported professionally and personally for many years.
The book deliberately blurs lines to set up a certain ambiguity so that readers have to decide where they stand. And, if you have read any of my other reviews, you will know I think that’s a good thing. However, Quin’s behaviour strikes me as inappropriate, mainly because it is so odd. It is nothing like any behaviour I have witnessed from my colleagues, and I have worked with some odd people.
The question, therefore, about whether or not his behaviour is that of a powerful man exploiting his status in the way he treats the women, is overwhelmed for me by Quin’s lack of plausibility.
That is my one issue with the book, although it is a big one. I do think though that Gaitskill blends, with great skill, things that are revealed and those inferred. As a consequence, some people will think that some of Quin’s actions are beyond the pale, whilst others will wonder about the fuss. Perhaps, more importantly, some will be unsure one way or the other.
Watch this space then for views that count.
Well that was interesting. Just before I summarise the response of my book group, I wanted to make a couple of comments following my second reading of the book.
My second reading was with pen in hand in order to pick out a few key lines about the two characters’ reactions to Quin’s fall from grace. Well, I might as well have copied out the whole book as it seemed that every thought, every image every piece of dialogue was integral to the nuanced, complex exploration of the MeToo issue.
My friend, Angi, a reviewer on this blog, felt that the book did not benefit from the structure adopted by Gaitskill. She wanted a greater variety of perceptions – Rob also felt that Quin’s accusers’ absent voices would have enriched the novella – and she felt the exploration of his behaviour and reactions to it were repetitive.
I appreciate this view but do not agree. Some of the challenges to the reader that this book provided, in my opinion, benefitted from this narrow view. Still, you pay your money…
The thing that struck me most forcibly during my second reading of the book was that I realised Margot was an unreliable narrator. I think on the first reading I saw her perceptions as an objective view of Quin and his actions. However, the things she reveals about her past perhaps prod the reader to infer that her loyalty to Quin might be more complicated than it appears. I could say more about this but would urge anyone who reads this book to look carefully at what she says about ‘women and horses’ and also ask yourself what exactly is she so angry about.
I expected the women in the book group to feel upset and disturbed by Quin’s behaviour and they were. Quite rightly, they highlighted his controlling and egotistical character as well as the way he goes beyond what is acceptable in the highly intimate verbal and, at times, physical goading of his female acquaintances. Hilary, however, seemed to be the only woman in the group to support my view that Quin’s fall and disgrace seemed out of proportion to the nature of his misdemeanours.
I think this is an important book and, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, it makes a good case for nuance and understanding in this current cause celebre.
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Nolan
When discussing this book with Sarah, I described it as being similar to ‘Fleabag’ which, surprisingly for a conventional sixty something man, was television that I considered unmissable. Martha, the talented and attractive forty year old narrator in this novel, comes out with a range of zingers that skewer social pretensions and modern foibles with the same impeccable timing as Waller-Bridge’s character. And, on the flipside, she shares Fleabag’s endless capacity to sabotage her own life. Much as I loved the black comedy of that television series, though, this novel was much more illuminating. Bluntly, it is about a woman with mental health issues who knows there is something wrong with her; this manifests itself in a sense of helplessness about her capability to change her damaging behaviour and dark moods, as well as in her lacerating sense of being useless.
Although the book moves back and forth to explore significant episodes from her life, we know that Martha is reflecting back in the aftermath of her separation from Patrick, her doctor husband. He loves Martha deeply, and has done since they were very young, and yet even his endless patience and understanding has a breaking point. He leaves their flat for his own sanity and Martha drifts back to her chaotic family home.
We learn that their relationship had deep roots and that both felt a sense of isolation when young. Patrick’s was physical as well as emotional: he arrives at Martha’s aunt and uncle’s family home for Christmas because his own father, living overseas, had simply forgotten that he wouldn’t be able to stay at boarding school for Christmas. Nicholas, Martha’s cousin, invites his school friend, Patrick, back to his own rather unusual extended family Christmas celebration. From then on, habit as well as Patrick’s genial, kind personality, see him incorporated into the extended family.
Martha’s isolation is the result of a prickly, distant relationship with a mother, whose low key but significant fame and success as modern sculptor, was based on an obsessive focus on her work; and it is now bolstered by quite a lot of alcohol. In contrast, Martha’s kindly but ineffectual father is a poet incapable of writing poetry. This is a bohemian household that barely functions and relies on Martha’s wealthy uncle and aunt to fund their artistic lifestyle.
As Martha looks back at her relationship with Patrick and her family, she and we understand that during the repetitive cycles of darkness and aimless behaviour, she was loved for herself by many people. Her foulmouthed and witty sister, Ingrid, has always been her warmest support and yet Martha can see that Ingrid’s own burgeoning family also need her. And that, of course, is what I like about this book – Martha, foremost, but most of the characters are kind and capable of unselfishness and understanding despite the muddle of their own lives. It’s also good to read a contemporary novel where not all the males are toxic. Although Martha sometimes maliciously views Patrick’s endless patience and devotion as someone trying too hard to be good, he has loved her deeply and forever, as someone rather surprisingly points out to her towards the end of the book.
There are revelations about Martha’s background and her condition that enable her to move forward at the end of the book. None of these were particularly revelatory but that was not the point. The key for me was that as Martha begins to analyse how she ended up separated from a husband, whom she loves and who loves her, the reader develops their own understanding of her condition and, because she is fundamentally decent but damaged, want her to find a way forward.
I was surprised to discover that this was a debut novel because the set pieces, such as the excruciating public marriage proposal by her first, very definitely toxic, husband, are handled with great skill, incorporating laser sharp humour and real pathos. Yet, unlike many first novels I have read recently, there is a sense of completion and a properly worked out structure. Most of all, though, it was moving and funny. Highly recommended.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
I still need to spend some more time deciding what I think about this book. I am not sure that is a great or helpful way to start a review but it is honest. And by the way, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy this book, I did. I found a propulsive rhythm in its third person narrative that meant I quickly devoured this slim book – about a hundred pages long. The ease of this read did surprise me because the book began with a detailed description of the rather coolly stylish décor, furniture and possessions of what we assume to be our protagonists’ chic accommodation and I strapped in for an endurance test of stylised writing. Yet, similar to my experience reading ‘Of Mice and Men’, what follows this rather ponderous first chapter is much more engaging.
The start of ‘Perfection’ was not, though, an aberration: the novel may move quickly through a couple of decades from the early part of the century to the present day but it hones in on the detail of Tom and Anna, our protagonists’, life together – their possessions and living space primarily but also the way they spend their days and their response to the changing zeitgeist.
I’m so glad I was able to slip in a pretentious German word there because the novel is set in Berlin among the reasonably priced, stylish accommodation of a group of new technology bohemians: young millenials, with progressive attitudes, and amused by conventional ideas of home in the shiny new globalised playground of possibilities for people like them.
Anna and Tom – despite these names they come from an unnamed southern European country – both have new technology skills in design and marketing which means they are, in effect, digital natives able to work anywhere; they are confident that they will always be in demand and glory in the freedom to be at the centre of things. And in this novel, Berlin is the coolest, most happening place to be for people like them who are making their own destinies. They have their own conception of home and seek out their tribe unshackled from their roots and past – they are Frankensteins who can create a perfect life that they can also curate with online posts and photos.
A possible criticism of the book might be that Tom and Anna are not differentiated, but that, I believe, is deliberate. They are representative of a type of rootless professional who forms loose but inclusive links with one another that take them to the right clubs, restaurants and art exhibitions dressed in hipster clothes and conversing in the world’s lingua franca which is English because their German isn’t good enough in order to make ironic asides. They are drawn mainly from southern Europe, Scandinavia and some of the Baltic countries.
Based on the obviously ironic title, I assume that Latronico wants us to see that the couple’s attempts to lead a perfect life are futile. This is underlined by the way that, in their first year or so in Berlin, they are constantly shifting the focus of the social aspects of their life – visits to hip art galleries, drug fuelled clubbing, sexual experimentation are just some of the things they embrace, sometimes with intensity and sometimes anxiety, before looking elsewhere. The loose nature of the relationships within their fashionable set also mean that friendships are never that close or important. In the same vein, their inability to develop a decent standard of German reflects their detachment from the local Berlin community.
As the years pass, they throw themselves into work but ultimately return to their default situation where they can earn a decent living but not life changing sums with work that gradually becomes rather repetitive and unrewarding. Life is comfortable, which is exactly the fate they moved to Berlin to escape. Then they throw themselves into activism in response to the migration crisis that galvanised progressives in Germany in 2015. This is one of the most fascinating parts of the book because they show some self-perception analysing their motives for helping and the usefulness of what they can do. It also made me reflect on my efforts in this area. Finally, they try a change of location – I’ll avoid spoilers, though, and leave you to see how that works out.
Anna and Tom are not bad people although I think Latronico is a little judgemental about their profession and the way they conduct large chunks of their working and social lives online. That criticism doesn’t focus on society’s current discussion of bots, clickbait and divided camps of keyboard warriors. It is the atomising nature of new technology which fuels their sense that there is something more they could be doing to give their lives purpose and live in a better way.
Although I really enjoyed this book, I think that is an easy conclusion to view Anna and Tom this way. As I mentioned earlier, I believe Latronico does not bother differentiating the couple, deliberately. However, not developing Anna and Tom in a conventional style means that we, the reader, can’t relate to their privileged, modern but real dilemma to find purpose in their life together. Nathan Hill did this much more effectively in ‘Wellness’, a great sprawling novel that follows a similar sort of couple based in New York, significantly with a child, that has space to explore the psychological and emotional twists and turns they go through, together and individually, to build a good life.
Ultimately this novel is as hollow as the lives the characters lead and left me thinking that all their efforts to have and do things that fulfil them was slightly ridiculous. Which is funny, really, because isn’t that what we all try to do? Anyway, caveats aside about the structure chosen by Latronico, this is an enjoyable read that has some worryingly familiar aspects in the life portrayed.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
This is a really good novel, and an ambitious one. Writing about Palestine brings its own challenges. Here the perspective is provided by a London-based Palestinian actress visiting her sister in Haifa. She arrives just at a time when this contested land is experiencing one of its frequent flare ups – this adds some complexity to a part of the world with too much complexity already.
Sonia, our protagonist, brings a sense of reluctant guilt with her as she understands that her life seems privileged and emotionally detached compared to the daily struggles of her sister, Haneen and her friends. Hammad doesn’t leave it there, though: the novel also presents us with an exploration of the power of art as Sonia becomes involved in a Palestinian production, in Arabic, of Hamlet. And once you introduce the Dane, you can’t ignore him – in my opinion, this greatest of plays encompasses a consideration of everything it means to be human all within a tension-packed revenge drama; and it seems that Hammad thinks so, too.
The story is set in 2017 and you may think that even at this short distance from the Hammas massacre on October 7th 2023 the novel’s events seem like ancient history, a time when things were very different. Perhaps … and some of my book group thought so. The strength of this book, though, lies in the sense it gives of the daily indignities and inconveniences that the Palestinians live under even though the story spends a lot of time with Palestinians like Haneen who live and work in Israel. There is a heavy sense of a people treated like second class citizens. The Israelis are largely absent in this book – they are mostly soldiers, mainly undistinguished, inexplicably making life hard for the Palestinians as they try to go about their everyday lives. Sonia, at the very start of the novel, for example, simply accepts that she will be taken aside by security officers at the airport and kept waiting for no discernible reason. Later a Palestinian teenage pop star chosen to play Hamlet is pulled aside at a checkpoint as the actors are travelling to rehearsals in the West Bank – the point is clear: wealth, fame and status don’t protect you from the Israelis.
Obviously, there is another side to this story – the Israelis. But if one accepts that this is a picture of life for the Palestinians from the Palestinian perspective, then it provides insight into why the conflict we have been watching on our screens with incomprehension evokes such bitterness and emotions. As already mentioned, the Israelis themselves, not necessarily their impact, are at the margins of this story. Most often the division and arguments are between the Palestinians. This can focus on the different experiences of those living behind the wall in the Gaza or the West Bank with those in Israel, for example, or how much they want to be directly involved with the ongoing struggle against the oppressors as opposed to getting on with their lives. And then, of course, there are the exiles, such as Sonia, who seem to constantly have to prove themselves. This means, therefore, that after reluctantly helping out director Mariam with the play, she eventually commits.
From this point on the novel gains momentum as the Israelis continuously throw obstacles in the way of the production. The cast scrabble around for a location and an audience as they cope with the last minute decision by the pop star playing Hamlet to step down after an altercation with a rival for the role. There is also the discovery of an Israeli spy within the production team. At the same time, they become caught up in public protests based on a real-life flare up involving the murder of two Israeli soldiers.
An oppressive big brother state – Claudius and Polonius; an indecisive hero – the pop star actor; the ghost of the 1948 exiles pushing them for justice – Hamlet’s father’s ghost. These are just three random echoes of the play in the characters’ situation. There are more if you care to look for them. Mind you, it is possible to also concentrate on the uneasy relationship between the two sisters – one who stayed and one who left – a relationship built on love and misunderstanding. As I say, there are many more thematic byways that Hammad takes us down and whilst interesting in themselves too often they took me out of the main story.
This is her second novel and the jumpy narrative seemed to reveal a writer in progress. The rest of my book group was unanimous on this point as well as finding the actual writing at times brilliantly descriptive and at others too determinedly focused on mundane details. Where there was some disagreement was about the character of Sonia. She is a complex, intelligent woman but not obviously likeable. There’s no problem with that, of course, but some of the book group felt that Hammad kept Sonia’s response to the events around her detached and opaque. For what it’s worth, I agree with that but did not see it as a flaw. She is fleeing from a broken relationship with an older, married theatre director as well as returning to all the issues with her sister and as a returning member of the diaspora that I have already mentioned. She is damaged and cautious and so her reticence seemed understandable to me. The reader has to work in order to dig into her response to the people and situations she encounters.
I was pleased to have read this novel but, at times it dragged and it is not without flaws. I guess, like the Dane, you must decide if you will engage with the ghost or turn away. At least, unlike Hamlet, it won’t be fatal whatever your decision.
‘An American Marriage’ by Tayari Jones
This recently published American novel was short-listed for a top women’s fiction award and seems to be characterised as an issues book, specifically contemporary black American experience and what it means to be a young black man.
The set-up is quickly unveiled. Roy Othaniel Hamilton, an ambitious, educated and aspiring black man visits his parents in his home town, with his talented, attractive bride of one year. At a local hotel where they are staying he is accused and arrested for the rape of an ageing white woman. There is little doubt that a rape did occur but there is no doubt of Roy’s innocence as he was with his wife, Celestial, when the attack occurred. All this counts for nothing, nor his obvious respectability; he is black, and a white woman thinks it was him no matter what Celestial says. He is sentenced to ten years in prison and his life changes just like that: his career hopes are broken and his nascent marriage is placed under immense pressure.
The story plays out in the first half from the narrative perspectives of Roy and Celestial, often in their exchange of letters. In the second half, another important narrative voice is added before an explosive denouement when Roy is discharged prematurely for a miscarriage of justice. The denouement is linked to whether or not this particular American marriage can survive the pressures that institutional state racism has imposed on it but it is so much more than that.
Roy and Celestial are convincingly and entertainingly individualised by Jones, including rich details about their families and upbringing. You understand exactly what it is that attracts them to one another; yet you are also made aware of the fissures in their hopes and ideas for the future which exist in all couples who commit to long-term relationships and which might grow perhaps intolerably into fault lines or be smoothed away as each partner adapts to a lifetime’s experiences. So, in that sense this book is about relationships and, particularly, being married. Whilst Roy’s incarceration provides a dash of accelerant to the evolution of their relationship one way or the other, Jones wants to explore what it is that needs to exist to bind two people together over a long period.
I’m not black and I hope to avoid jail but the two characters’ constant reflection on the state of their union made me think about being married for thirty two years in a deep manner and, happy to say, positive manner.
There is no doubt that, even though Roy and Celestial are a socially progressive couple, with encouraging economic prospects – an upwardly mobile couple – they are two black people in a country that we know is still struggling to come to terms with its history of slavery and segregation. Roy and Celestial are not naive and understand the circumscribed context of their lives as black Americans, a context that can only partially be loosened up by their education, wealth, values and mainstream decency. They simply did not believe things could fall apart so quickly and utterly having constructed a life so obviously an example of a model American couple.
So, yes this is about the black experience in contemporary America but also, at a wider level, it is about the nature of love and commitment. The particular and universal are also explored in Roy’s passionate inner dialogue about what it is to be a good man in the modern world when freighted with the baggage of all those absent black fathers. This is beautifully handled by Jones as Roy genuinely struggles with his rights and responsibilities in a relationship.
I really enjoyed this book and thoroughly recommend it for all the reasons set out above but also because it is dramatic: as it hurtles to its denouement, I wasn’t sure how it would be resolved or how I wanted it to resolve.
Memorial by Bryan Washington
Just as a reminder, here’s how I started the review on my first blog of Washington’s previous book, the short story collection ‘Lot’.
There is a buzz around Bryan Washington. With only two published books – this short story collection from 2019 and his novel, ‘Memorial’, from 2020 – he has garnered a heap of awards and ‘Lot’ was selected by Barack Obama as one of his books of 2019. Washington is young, black and gay and his subjects are race, sexuality, identity and that part of American society that has been disenfranchised from the American Dream. That is why I was drawn to this collection in the first place because of its stories’ pertinence. I expected to encounter a world, characters and issues far removed from my life, and they are. I also suspected that these stories might have been lauded because of who wrote them and the world they describe rather than for their craft; my suspicions were unfounded. Washington is a fine writer – more of that in a moment – but that doesn’t mean that the lives he describes and the deprived milieu and culture he explores were easy for me to respond to. This novel is probably not written for the likes of me… but I am getting ahead of myself.
As you can tell, I was pleased to have read ‘Lot’ and I feel the same about this novel. The point I made previously about the milieu and characters being outside my orbit – and that was my main reason for reading it – applies also to this book. That being said, the dilemma facing the two central protagonists, Mike and Benson, is universal – they are a few years into their relationship and are beginning to suspect that it may have run its course. The fact that Mike is Japanese, a decent chef working several jobs in not very decent restaurants, and Benson is a slightly buttoned up young black man who works in a day centre looking after disturbed children, and both have fraught, distant relationships with their respective families, only provides further complexity. As with ‘Lot’ the setting is Houston; they share an apartment in a black neighbourhood that is becoming more gentrified … white. Although both are educated and smart, there is a sense that both are drifting; and that’s the starting point for the story.
If the catalyst for what happens in this story is the state of Mike and Benson’s relationship, it manifests itself in a specific set of events. Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, is just about to arrive from Japan for an extended stay with Mike but, at the same time, Mike has decided to travel to Japan to stay with his terminally ill father, Eiju, whom he has not seen for several years. His motive for doing so seems more bound up with his own sense of disorientation about his relationship with Mike and the direction of his life. Benson and his mother are both bewildered by his decision and, in a repressed manner, furious with him. This first section is seen from Benson’s perspective and his unease about hosting a stranger, a middle aged Japanese woman, for an indeterminate period is clear and yet it emerges in a muted manner in-keeping with his emotionally controlled personality.
Now, in a different writer’s hands, Mitsuko and Benson would have gradually bonded over their love for Mike, and in some sense they do, but any hint of understanding is hard-won and complex. Theirs is a spiky relationship in a home without Mike. Mitsuko cooks for Benson whilst he goes out to work and then patiently but rather gruffily shows him how to cook the meals that she must have once shown to Mike. Mitsuko is waiting for Mike to return as well as trying to understand something about her son’s life by staying in his home and living with his partner. Benson, however, intensely re-examines his time with Mike but life also intervenes as the possibility of a different future emerges with the older brother and carer of one of the children from his work.
In the second section of the book we see events from Mike’s perspective. He is confused as to why he has decided to live with and care for his father whom he had rejected following Eiju’s drunken decline and abandonment of his family. In many ways, this father son relationship is a more aggressively spiky relationship than the one back in Houston. Yet, in the same hard won and complex manner, Mike and Eiju begin to evolve a companionable rhythm to their lives. Mike works alongside his father in the small, local bar he has set up and gradually takes charge as Eiju’s illness advances. He appreciates the sense of rough community that his father has created and has to reassess his options when Eiju offers him the bar after he dies. Like Benson, Mike constantly replays scenes from their relationship in his head and things are not only confused by his father’s offer but also the possibility of a new relationship.
It is at this point, in the final section of the book, that Mike returns home. The focus inevitably falls on what is going to happen to Mike and Benson and their life together. Some form of external perspective is provided, however, by a set piece where Benson’s family, including his estranged father, meet Mitsuko and Mike. There is something rather manufactured about this scene but nevertheless Washington handles it well. Deep familial scars are examined as Benson expresses his anger at the lack of support, especially from his father, when he experienced some difficult times with his sexuality in the past. Mike and Benson both reassess their understanding of one another as they learn about each other’s families and the way they perceive the young men’s relationship.
That makes the ending seem rather schematic and it’s really not. At the very end, there are no real answers about their relationship, other than the ones that the reader supplies. You feel that you know both men more deeply but certainly not fully. I have twice used the phrase “hard won” about the emotional progress made by the characters and, at times, this makes the book uncomfortable reading. There is a mixture of psychological honesty alongside disorientating complexity that reminded me of many of the short stories in ‘Lot’. Ultimately, I felt I knew these two men better but wasn’t sure that I liked the values and behaviour in their world which seems so far removed from my own. Yet, isn’t it a good thing to sometimes examine the lives of people one rarely encounters?
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
McEwan is considered by many critics to be this country’s finest living novelist. After a series of well-received early works that had a grotesque, disconcerting edge, he built a gold-plated reputation on a series of novels that tackled universal moral issues set in urgent contemporary frameworks. A previous choice of my book group, ‘The Children’s Act’, was a typical example – medical issues and the state’s right to intervene in people’s lives were explored. Latterly, his work has admiringly engaged with the country’s professional classes – surgeons, judges and scientists – to whom society has delegated responsibility for resolving some of our most knotty ethical issues.
Yet in this novel his narrator does not fit this reassuring template. Yes, Charlie Friend is educated, decent and resolutely middle class, but he is an idler without a sense of purpose. His online dabbling in the stock market just about pays for a modest lifestyle in a modest flat in London. When left a generous inheritance, he uses it not to get his life back on track but to purchase the newest gadget on the market. It just so happens that this gadget is Adam: a limited edition, cutting edge android.
So, another increasingly urgent contemporary issue – society’s accelerating reliance on artificial intelligence with all the possibilities and dangers this poses – well, yes and no. I’ll get to the yes in a moment but if this setup leads one to expect a contemporary or near future world, then forget it. Instead, McEwan chooses to set his novel in an alternative version of the early 1980s. Thatcher is in power but diminished by her defeat in the Falklands and challenged at home by a charismatic left-wing Labour leader, Tony Benn, whose Corbynista policies are gaining traction with the British public.
Now I don’t know why he chose to create this ‘sliding doors’ setting but it does allow him to resurrect Alan Turing as a central figure in the book. Comfortable in his homosexuality and assured in his position as one of the most influential people in the country as a result of his ground-breaking work on computing and robotics, Turing has also shared his research online, and encouraged others to do so, which has led to the dramatic breakthrough in realistic human androids.
The Britain McEwan describes has all the damp drabness of the real early 1980s alongside extraordinary technology. Yet these breakthroughs seem as appropriate as the introduction of video recorders and clunky computers did to us at the time. This means that the reader concentrates on the everyday practicalities and curiosities of living with an android. This then leads on to deeper ethical questions about the nature of consciousness avoiding ‘big issue’ clunkiness.
Nevertheless, these big issues are explored as, predictably, problems emerge amongst the small community of Adams and Eves spread around different global owners.
Coming back to my earlier yes – then yes, the link between the programmed consciousness of these androids and the possibility of autonomous decisions and actions are covered as they often are in this type of story. Yet the novel doesn’t always go where you expect. Adam is part of Charlie’s world but not the central, all consuming part. Charlie’s girlfriend, Miranda (yes, it is a reference to ‘The Tempest’) brings a whole set of baggage to the story and it is the moral dilemmas from her past that drive the second half of the book.
I do not want to say more about this as Miranda’s story becomes dramatically entwined with Adam’s developing sense of self, leading the reader to consider the nature of consciousness more fully.
I am not sure what the conclusions are that I was being led towards, except to appreciate that AI is a much more complex ethical issue than I had thought beforehand. I assumed that machines processing capacities gave them knowledge and analytical abilities well in advance of the human brain but I also naively thought that our creativity, imagination and, yes, emotional capacity gave us some sort of edge or special status. What this book makes one realise, is that we may be creating consciousness that is no better or worse than human consciousness just different, with capacity to develop in ways that we can’t fully comprehend. The implication is that so many possibilities and so little certainty should make us wary of making value judgements about human and machine reasoning and behaviour. Scary.