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.