Category: The Blog

Freya has returned to her lighthouse keeper’s home a year after the disappearance of her husband and son out at sea. Her hair white with shock, her mind full of dreams, legends and loss, she seeks the keys to unlock the mystery of her family’s demise. These keys are both metal and metaphysical.

When she discovers a box of secrets in her son’s room, the keys that unlock the door into the lighthouse bring her closer than ever to understanding how he and her husband died.

This is a novel to read on a beach where the sound of the waves would add an ominous backdrop to the real mystery at the heart of this novel, the unfathomable depths of the ocean itself. The mix of mourning, Hebridean legend – about the Green Island, mermaids and the inner eye – and our innate fear of the ocean is enticing. Myth works well with heady human emotion, especially when it’s accompanied by a journey both emotional and physical.

There are some aspects of the novel that work less well for me. I’m not sure why Freya takes so long over the reading of some lost sailor’s letters. Nor do I entirely believe the voice of her ten-year-old son’s diary. These are minor quibbles though because the story and its writing, particularly of Freya, are enough to carry me through.

Beyond the Sea lightly shines a warning beacon upon intense emotions experienced in isolation. I can see Melissa Bailey’s writing growing more accomplished and I’m eager to discover what she will write next.

Beyond the Sea is out on the 16^th July and Melissa Bailey will be interviewed by me not long after as part of a new section of my website ‘Authors Questioned Here’ in which I will interview authors about their work. I’ll keep you updated on the launch of this venture. My first interview is with the wonderful Heidi James whose novella The Mesmerists’ Daughter won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2015.

Next week I’m reading The Remains of Love by Zerula Shalev.

Harvest of Thorns covers three generations of one family as Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe. The novel opens with Benjamin returning from the bush war, a hero who can no longer be called a rebel. A few days later a pregnant woman, who he intends to make his wife, follows him.

A lot has changed since the war, not just in the country but in Benjamin’s family and as the novel moves through parts two, three and four we learn about his mother and how she met and married his father, we learn about what it was like to run away to war, and are given glimpses of the future.

The story is full of hope, but it is also alive to the painful discrepancies of war, especially a war fought mostly by the very young. Benjamin himself isn’t even eighteen when he goes to join the gorillas. Learning how to become a man, sexually and politically, how to decide whose authority to trust, how to accept responsibility even for the acts he regrets, is something Benjamin has to do as he fights. There are a lot of births – Zimbabwe, adulthood, children – and they all have their thematic as well as their narrative parts to play. This is clever and pleasing but the narrative is also sometimes a little disjointed and disorientating.

My favourite part of the book is when Benjamin’s commander tells a story around a camp fire after a terrible battle in which one of their large camps was bombed and many were killed. The story is a parable telling of how the white man came to Zimbabwe with a smiling face and steadily, stealthily at first, took both land and labour. How they left local people with nothing but ‘a harvest of thorns’ so their only means of survival was to depend upon them.

This is of course the story that gives the novel its title.

What is the country left with when the white men have gone? Thorns. Men who have missed out on schooling, men whose government jobs involved making tea. And Benjamin’s family don’t escape Chinodya’s searing eye: extreme religion, a desire for the comfortable life, to put their heads in the sand, all these faults and more are displayed in this honest look at family life and human beings. The difference is that the harvest is theirs.

Unsentimental, complex and honest, Harvest of Thorns is an intriguing novel whose rough edges thrum with emotion. You will know if this is your sort of book and if it is you won’t be disappointed.

This week I’m reading Melissa Bailey’s second novel, Beyond the Sea.

Love’s Dilemma is part of the Macmillan Pacesetters series that was extremely popular in Africa from the 1970s-1990s. Though mainly publishing writers from Nigeria, the series encompassed writing from all over Africa becoming extremely popular. These were the books that young educated Africans wanted to read. These books were fun, exciting, topical and unpretentious.

Knowing this, I still didn’t really know what to expect of Love’s Dilemma. I imagined I might get something of an African Mills and Boon, but there is much more to this short novel than that. Love’s Dilemma simply and carefully outlines the difficulties of Towera’s life. She is a young educated woman, with a child and a failed marriage behind her, working as the only woman in The Department of Agriculture. When she meets her new colleague, Luka, a whole new romantic story unravels, one which doesn’t revel in cheesy epithets of desire, but instead creates a cohesive worldview, a snapshot of Malawian society in the 1980s.

Walije Gondwe uses her words carefully and the concrete descriptions are masterfully evocative:

Towera was sitting down under a large tree, with her legs crossed, doing some embroidery, while the labourers were hard at work with their hoes and rakes on the tobacco plots. One of the men, who had been answering the call of nature in the bush a few yards away, came running, still fastening the hooks and buttons on his somewhat overworked short trousers. (p24)

I admit that some of the appeal of this novel for me is a desire to better understand what it feels like to be a Malawian woman – perhaps of the 1990s but I’m quibbling now – and I feel a nostalgia for the place itself, but I really enjoyed the novel and feel sad that we currently see so few African novels making it onto our bookshelves. And while this novel won’t be to everyone’s taste, I found Gondwe’s writing sensually evocative. I enjoyed reading about the food and seeing the small gestures of those we love somehow elevated into significance.

I have ordered Walije Gondwe’s other pacesetter novels and I look forward to reading them.

Next week, to continue the African theme, I’m reading Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya.

A Death in the Family is the first of a six-volume autobiographical novel, The Struggle. This book is about Knausgaard’s relationship with his father and focuses mainly on his childhood and early adulthood.

I rushed at this novel with a sense of hunger: the great reviews and the general reverence for Knausgaard’s writing were enticing. What I found does excite and inspire me, but it also reminds me of everything I find difficult to swallow about the canon.

Comparing Knausgaard to Proust makes a lot of sense. A Death in the Family tackles the maze of memory, how sensory triggers from the current moment create an insurgence of the past that in turn influences the present. There are passages where the words sing, creating a shared sense of experience, paragraphs which give legitimacy to banal and inappropriate thoughts one might otherwise have been ashamed of. But, and this is a significant but, I feel the constant presence of Knausgaard’s ego with the same distaste in which I feel Proust’s.

There is a chauvinism, a delight in feeling, which almost tips into the sentimental, that overwhelms any proclivity or desire for the other. Other people are considered, indeed thought in depth about, worried over, but for me at least, the writing lacks empathy for anyone other than Knausgaard himself.

Yes, I want to turn the corners of many pages to mark passages that speak to me about the way our world works or that echo my own thoughts, but collectively and as a whole there is a sense of mid-life crisis, a sense of self-importance that I simply can’t ignore. Whether this is a dramatized version of the reality of authorship in general is something I should really ask of myself. However, this self-centered self-aggrandizement is also the reason why the writing is so moving.

The book is a portal into another person’s mind, where Knausgaard’s experience of life is painstakingly recorded and recreated for us to experience alongside him.

It’s a love/hate thing. A mirror of the kind of relationship he has with his father and the kind of relationship I have with literature with a capital ‘L’. How do you acknowledge the father, bare witness to him, battle for equality (if not supremacy) with him, without giving the self an idolatrous dominion? How do you tackle the subjects of death and the desire to force life into some coherent shape without asserting the ego? These are questions I long to solve in my own work and if Knausgaard’s writing is really about the desire to understand the self and its origins he is indeed writing the novel whose insights we would all like to use to unlock our own identities. As a record of what it means to live in privileged Western Europe in the late 1900s and early 2000s, A Death in the Family feels significant regardless of the ego involved.

I will read more of these novels but I will enter them armed with the knowledge that while I admire the writing I can’t always say that I admire the man.

Next week (this week!), I’m reading Love’s Dilemma by Walije Gondwe.

This is my first collection in the Unthology series and I’m pleased to say that it lives up to its hype. Unthology 7 is a coherent, interesting and challenging collection of short fiction. There will definitely be a story here for you.

You might join recession office workers and obsess over spiders living outside a skyscraper (‘Spiders’ by David Martin). You may enjoy imagining what it would be like to witness your own funeral (‘Green by Roelof Bakker) or kill with homeopathy (‘The Morning Person’ by Adrian Cross). You might like to contemplate the two sides of a love story (‘On the truth and lies of the love story’ by Charlie Hill) or consider how teenage difficulty plays out in later life (‘Open Windows’ by Debz Hobbs-Wyatt and ‘The Harp and the Thorn Tree’ by Amanda Oosthuizen).

I think my favourite story is ‘Free Hardcore’ by Dan Powell. There is a real beauty in how he wields the power of the unspoken and the magic of the image – something the short story can do so effectively – creating a jewel of a story that feels finished and polished but continues to provoke thought.

Overall, there is a tendency to lean towards the flatulent (to quote from ‘Green’ by Roelof Bakker whose story isn’t in the least flatulent itself), but this tendency also means a leaning towards a desire for fresh expression and a longing to ring new meaning from the paltry selection of words at our disposal. It’s the kind of collection that inspires a desire to do some creative writing and that is possibly one of the best things anthologies can do. Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have put together a cracked collection that encourages me to read more from the authors they’ve selected.

Next week, I’m reading A Death in the Family by Knausgaard.

 

In the Miso Soup is narrated by Kenji, an unregistered tour guide to Tokyo’s sex district, tailoring his services to foreign, English speaking visitors. From the moment he meets his latest client, Frank, an overweight American tourist, he senses something is off about him. There is a strange tautness to his skin, a dangerous twist to his smile.

Kenji’s anxiety turns out to be far from paranoid and his sixteen year-old, high school girlfriend, is a tantalizing addition to the plot. Will she meet Frank? Will she become part of his horrific holiday?

All the way through the novel, which turns a tour of Tokyo’s sex trade into an exploration of Frank’s sick mind, are the considerations of what it means to be alive and why being alive should have any value.

The front cover of In the Miso Soup quotes its Guardian review, ‘Reads like the script notes for American Psycho – the Holiday Abroad’. This quote was not only the reason I bought the book, it set the novel up for a continuous internal game of comparisons which I ultimately decided I wasn’t qualified to judge. Not qualified because if this novel was to be anything like American Psycho it needed to be a critique of society specifically, in this instance, Japanese society. And while there was indeed a great deal of criticism that spread beyond Japan, the psycho at the novel’s heart is American, which strikes me as an easy way out: why use a foreigner? That is where my ability to compare falls apart: I don’t know enough about Japan and Japanese culture.

I understand that young people in Japan and elsewhere feel a sense of loneliness and futility in the face of social media and technological advance etc. etc. and this novel certainly explores whether vestiges of meaning can be wrung from a life all about connections that never seem to go beyond the surface, the touch screen if you like. And yet, should this really suggest a ruthless cull, a virus that wipes most of us out, is really the answer?

I enjoyed reading In the Miso Soup and was impressed by how nervous I felt about completing the book (wait and see). Whether it does more than reiterate themes from American Psycho though, I’m not sure. Whether that is even the right avenue for exploring the novel, I doubt.

In the Miso Soup treats violence seriously, but how deeply it has thought about its manifestation of that violence and the reasons for it, I can’t be certain. Frank claims to be ill, but I wonder if sickness excuses his monstrous deeds when in fact the real horror would be to warn us not of what mad people can do but of what sane people might do. Perhaps this is what Frank means when he says, ‘And now with all this social surveillance and manipulation going on, I think you’ll see an increase in people like me’ (p171).

Next week I’m reading Unthology 7 edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones.

I was excited about reading Persepolis. Not only did I want to read a graphic novel, this was one I had intended to read since its popularity a good ten years ago. I haven’t been disappointed.

Not only is Persepolis moving and funny it is also a mini education in its own right. Marjane, the author and protagonist, is always returning to education as a way to better herself and to improve her life. Reading Persepolis has given me a new perspective on Iran and on the eighties and nineties of my youth. I was one of those westerners worried about what the Iraq war would mean for Europe, one of those people that Marjane and her father laughed about. How could I be so worried about a war so far away? My house wasn’t about to be bombed. I didn’t have to black out my windows so neighbours couldn’t see me having a party or drinking alcohol.

The nature of the illustration – its way of distinguishing people whilst giving them a flavour of uniformity – along with the careful choice of words is enough to turn one woman’s life into the story of generation. I really enjoyed reading Persepolis. I laughed, I cried, I questioned my judgements. I will certainly open its pages again and no doubt enjoy it just as much a second time. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to pick up a copy.

Next week I’m reading In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami followed by Unthology 7, edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones and published by Unthank Books.

I’m not sure what to make of In the Beginning was the Sea. ‘She was the spirit of that which was to come and she was thought and memory’ says the Epigraph from Kogi Cosmology. Is it possible to have memory before anything else?

The novel begins when two rich Colombians, J. and Elena, decide to lead an alternative life on a Caribbean island just off the Colombian shores mostly populated by fishermen and farmhands.

They buy a finca (a farm) with cattle, wood and crops and whilst Elena resents the attentions of the locals who stare at her young, butternut skin – she assumes them ignorant – J. has no difficultly in seeing the people of the island as people just like himself and he is well-liked by the villagers.

But J. and Elena are a tempestuous couple. The heat drags them down. They drown in the waters of the sea, their sweat and aguardiente. Were they ever really cut out for this life of sea sand and nature?

I enjoyed the heat of this novel that set fire and languor against each other, but the ending seemed to offer no clear meaning or trajectory. True, life can be full of surprises, but I wasn’t sure what I was meant to understand from an ending that has the definitive hallmark either of a writer just learning his craft and seeking the easiest means to an ending at a creator’s disposal, or of autobiography. The elegance of the ambiance created by Tomás González, the excellent depiction of these two characters and their differences, their unfulfilled passions and ambitions, seemed to me to be at odds with the narrative arc, but perhaps I was meant to leave the novel with a sense that meaning is a futile pursuit.

I definitely enjoyed In the Beginning was the Sea and I would recommend it to those interested in reading about how rich people unintentionally fritter their opportunities and in so doing knowingly waste the life under their care. The atmosphere is beautifully rendered. The relationships painfully believable. Perhaps, though, my dissatisfaction lies in my feeling that it all ends too soon. And though I wanted more, such forays into foreign parts with no training or local knowledge, merely the sense of entitlement, often do end too soon.

If you like the idea of spending time in a beach house with waves lapping a perfectly sandy beach, if you like the idea of stranded characters living with limited space, money, goods and people, you will relish In the Beginning was the Sea. Certainly it lingers on the taste buds of the mind.

Next week I’m reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.