Category: The Blog

In Great Waters is set in a world reminiscent of the time of the Tudors, ruled by royals who are half-human, half-deepsmen (mermen). One of their ancestors saved Venice from attack by communing with the deepsmen – who easily destroyed the armies invading by sea – and showed the tactical advantage of such interbreeding. As it is strictly forbidden for all but royals to interbreed, over time the bloodline inevitably weakens. Interbreeding creates mad or disabled royals and many kingdoms suffer, particularly England where the novel is set.

Though the King’s eldest son married a healthy foreign royal and produced two daughters, his other son is considered an idiot. When his eldest son dies without creating any male heirs and the King himself grows weak, the country fears its crown will be seized by foreign hands. Anne, the youngest princess, whose face glows with the phosphorescence of the very deep, feigns stupidity as a means for survival, but when there are sailors’ bastards, foreigners and idiots threatening the English throne, she’s forced to come out of hiding.

Whistle is one of the bastards. A product of illegal interbreeding – his mother slept with a sailor – he sees himself as pure deepsman, the intensity of daily survival always at the forefront of his mind. But his split fin makes him weaker than the others and when he can no longer keep up with the tribe, and he gets too big for his mother to drag along at speed, she forces him onto the shore and abandons him there. A nobleman takes him in, calls him Henry, tries to teach him to walk with sticks – his flexible fins aren’t easy to walk on – and cowers under the knowledge of Henry’s potential for the thrown.

This is bloody and naked fantasy of the kind that would make a fantastic film or television series not unlike The Game of Thrones. The novel fully understands the highs and lows of human nature. A gripping read, In Great Waters explores the wild heart of our human history. I thoroughly recommend it.

Next week I’m reading The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan followed by Stoner by John Williams and The Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

Set in Western Australia, The Light Between Oceans is a heart-wrenching story. Tom Sherbourne, an Australian WW1 hero turns to lighthouse keeping on his return from the war and meets and marries a local girl, Isabel, who breathes life back into his heart. Though happy, they suffer three miscarriages. When a boat washes onto their island with a dead man and a tiny baby inside, their simple lives become awash with moral and emotional dilemmas.

Such a story is gripping enough but no summary can do justice to how well M. L. Stedman explores the complexities of human experience. It’s the kind of novel that gets you weeping, but in empathy rather than for sentiment. The language of the novel flows with an ease many writers would like to achieve. It is beautiful but clear, adept but not showy. There is great subtlety of feeling and expression. Even though lighthouses allow for all those beautiful plays of light and metaphor – no man is an island, though several of the men in the novel do their best to stand as beacons to others in treacherous waters – Stedman never takes it too far.

In a way, marooning a family on a lighthouse island, not much more than a rock, allows Stedman to explore the family unit in isolation. It gives the novel a feeling of timelessness, a relevance that ripples out over the oceans. Families, individuals, often like to imagine their private lives owe nothing to society, that private decisions have no impact on others but The Light Between Oceans magnifies the falsehood of such imaginings.

Through all of the emotional drama, the landscape, the flora and fauna, the wildlife, the weather of that corner of Western Australia is depicted with a precision that takes you there. And all of these aspects – character, story, setting, language, social commentary – create a book with very wide appeal. It is an impressive achievement.

Though you may well have read this novel – it has been on bestseller lists for some time and was Richard and Judy’s summer read last year – if you haven’t, I urge you to give it a go. The Light Between Oceans works on the beach as well as in the library. I can’t wait to read her next one.

Next week I’m reading In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield and following that, The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan. Do keep your comments and suggestions coming.

An aging Professor of literature marries a young ex-student with silver hair and webbed hands and feet. She asks him to take her to Orkney for their honeymoon. Orkney is the professor’s tale of their days there, the sea and weather blending earth and water and sky into a mythical, magical place of uncertainty.

Whilst the unfolding of the plot was nothing I hadn’t expected, Orkney is an absorbing read, a book that envelops you in the mists of a world out of time, a world of old stories, told with such precise language that you can’t help but long to go back to it and be lost some more.  It is a novel of Fantastical prose poetry. I thoroughly recommend it.

Next week, I’m reading The Light Between the Oceans by M. L. Stedman and the following week I’ll be reading In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield. I’m looking forward to more sea-swept tales.

Please do send in suggestions for future books you’d like me to read. I’d also love to hear your comments.

On Monday, I’m going to be taking part in the Writing Process Blog Tour. I was invited to do so by Heidi James, whose uncompromising and beautiful book Wounding I reviewed earlier this year and encourage you to buy and read if you haven’t already. You can read her responses to the Writing Process Blog Tour here. Do look back for my responses in my next blog.

Atlas Shrugged was considered by Ayn Rand to be her masterpiece, the best fictional expression of her philosophy of objectivism. Dagny Taggart, a woman of intelligence and purpose, runs the railroad built by her ancestor, Ned Taggart. She runs it regardless of private or public opinion about her right as a woman, or an individual, to run the largest railroad in America. But America is being run into the ground by a group of mindless bureaucrats who are looting the inventions and businesses of individual men for the so called good of the whole. Dagny and a series of male lovers, who seem to each outstrip the other in their heroic grandeur, stand against this destruction, ultimately by putting the thinking minds of America on strike.

As a tour de force for a heroic, righteous capitalism, the novel is both beautiful and excruciating. The idea that people can deal with each other in mutual respect, on the basis of merit, promised or earned, regardless of background, is a pleasing one. But, and there are several big buts, the novel has many flaws, for me at least: Rand is far too tempted to stray off into long monologues about her political ideals and as the novel goes on I had less and less stomach to read repetitions or rewordings of arguments already stressed many times previously (I should add that the children’s story, Denver, by David McKee, aimed at the under 5s, summarises her political argument in only a few pages with a few lines of text on each page – it leaves me equally unnerved by the simplicity of its assumptions about wealth and the lack of wealth); her capitalism and her objectivism fail to allow for humans to be anything other than heroic, which is admirable, but ridiculous, given that capitalism has always worked in practice with the looters, as she calls them – I feel that she sweeps aside the moral confusions that others have tried to explore in, say Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw; whilst I applaud Dagny’s sexuality as something that best expresses our mind and body as the whole that it is, it irritates me that the language of conquest and subjugation is the one Rand chooses to use and that Dagny’s intellectual rise is met in her choice of lovers – yes, I suppose you could argue she is the ultimate conquest, that gaining her favour is the best reward for a life lived in truth, but what about other women? Why would their intellect not excite sexual passion? She endures the struggle against a failing world the longest, but why should that make her desirable as anything other than an ally?

Ultimately, I wish I had read The Fountainhead instead: it’s shorter. That sounds cynical. Atlas Shrugged is a challenging novel that asks us to expect the best in ourselves, to love ourselves and to expect that of others. That is a beautiful idea. I’m just not sure that all the rest of it is as easy as Rand makes out or as beautiful. I understand how the world she depicts is destroyed, but I can’t decide if I have more or less faith in the expectations and hopes of most people on the planet. I’m also not sure that all of her ideas are consistent, but then again did I read the novel to be convinced of a political argument? Is that what novel writing is about? I would suggest not. I would suggest it should be about raising questions and Atlas Shrugged does just that. I would be interested to see how differently her arguments are expressed in her purely philosophical works. The fact that she chose to move away from fiction after Atlas Shrugged suggests to me that she realised that literature can’t really do the work of a philosophical tract; I think it should do more. Whether Atlas Shrugged does more, I remain unsure. Simply reading this book in a week felt like a challenge. I would probably do better to climb the summit of reviewing it in another week’s time, but that’s the nature of this blog. Reflection isn’t always an option.

Next week I’ll be reading Orkney by Amy Sackville. Suggestions for future reading and comments on the blog are always welcome.

In The Language of Dying an unnamed narrator talks through the last days of her father’s life. She speaks to him of events unfolding around him, of the past, of how she experienced the past. She is generous about his alcohol addiction and his bouts of ambitious enthusiasm for new life experiences. She reassures him, that through the waste of cancer, she can still see him.

All of this is beautifully written. The way that families adhere to their own well-rehearsed patterns and, but for the occasional surprise, act predictably albeit understandably. Like all families, this family has its secrets, its dysfunctions, but it is still a family and regardless of old wounds they cling to each other in the strange intensity of their father’s dying hold over them. The narrator’s observations of her family and their relationships are depicted with the clarity and bias of truth.

Alongside the life of the family, is the story of the narrator herself. At times of extreme stress, beginning with the night her mother abandons her, all of her unexpressed emotion manifests in a creature of darkness, a magical beast both fierce and forlorn, calling to her to lead some different wild life alongside its gnarled, mystical, muscular being. Whether it springs from the fiery bubblings of her own molten emotion, whether it is a psychotic vision, or whether it exists alongside our reality flitting among the shadows of our lives, we never know, but it breathes down through the narrative with nostrils flared.

Whilst I’m sure that the author does not see these narratives as two halves, it is quite easy to view the book in that way. On the one hand, the precise and painful tale of a father’s passing; on the other, the fantasy of a dark Arcadian alternative to contemporary life. It almost forces a debate about genre fiction. Should there be such clear divisions between what we consider to be literary fiction and what we consider to be fantasy? The living pulse of story will always have routes in the miraculous. But I think I would have liked more room for uncertainty in the ending. I won’t tell you why though, because I think this is a book that deserves a wider readership.

Sarah Pinborough’s prose feels almost effortless. She is very well known in the world of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, but she should have wider recognition. There are resonances with Angela Carter amongst others. I would be quite happy to offer The Language of Dying as an alternative candidate for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. What makes Eimear McBride’s novel more prize-worthy? Read them both and let’s start a debate!

Next week I’m reading In The Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahmen. Please do send in suggestions for the following weeks.

The Goldfinch is a first person account of Theo Decker’s relationship with the Fabritius painting of the same name. Theo walks unharmed from the bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the goldfinch painting in a canvas bag. His mother is killed in the bombing and what begins as the salvage of a masterpiece that belongs to everyone, becomes the invisible anchor of Theo’s new and painfully unfettered life.

The novel is undoubtedly well written, full of poignant moments and beautiful descriptions, but there was almost too much. Sometimes I felt as if the narrative was sucking me into Theo’s numb, often drugged, world in a way that left me unable to account for paragraphs of text. Intentional or not, it left me unsympathetic towards Theo. I wouldn’t have been distressed by a suicide endnote. I was remarkably uninterested in his survival, but I was engaged in and frustrated by his behaviour.

It struck me while reading that there is a similar feel to all of Tartt’s fiction: a sense of lost childhood and of the adolescent’s yearning to unravel the mystery of that loss and the mystery of the human condition, which must face the red in nature’s tooth and claw. Freud, Jung, Kristeva, Neitzche, Dionysus, always hover at the edges of her work. Whilst there is a charm and intensity to this exploration and unending reinterpretation of memory and people, there can occasionally be a lurch into the sentimental or, even worse, intellectually postured musings on the meaning of life. Much of the last chapter I would happily have excised. Do we need the protagonist to explain the first person narrative? Somehow, setting down the reasons for writing, at the end of the novel, felt like an after note for any readers who may not have understood what Tartt was trying to say through the story itself. I felt saddened by it, partly because Theo summarises his love of the painting as a love of whispered provocation rather than hackneyed message:

‘The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between the painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.’

He goes on to say,

‘As much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. / And – I would argue as well – all love.’

Though it seems to me that life is all about that middle zone where perception meets and indeed filters reality, the idea of truth as an illusion speaks to me. This is why I consider literature to be a more useful exploration of the world than philosophy: life isn’t just about thought, the subtler edge of perception should be a fundamentally accepted premis and accompaniment to thought. The chaos of coinciding event and experience feels, for me, too much for cold reason. Art, narrative in particular, can provide the muddied mess of that meeting point, whether it be considered beautiful or not. I’m not sure, however, that laying these ideas out as a kind of postscript to the events of the novel (it’s an irony that both of these quotes come from the last chapter), is the best way to provoke readers into questioning the value of art. Did we need a helpful summary of the pull and sway of art as it affected the characters in the novel? I’d be interested to hear other people’s opinions about this.

The nature of these criticisms, however, could only really arise from something that lives and breathes enough to allow the reader to grapple with it. I’m not sure that I would have given The Goldfinch the Pulitzer (though perhaps the idea of awarding prizes itself feels strangely arbitrary), but it is certainly a novel I would recommend, a novel that more than earns its literary status. Whilst I suspect other novels surrounded by less fuss may have moments that stay with me longer than any in The Goldfinch, I’ve deliberately left out much of a plot summary to allow more readers to read it unspoilt.

Next week I’ll be reading The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough, followed by In The Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman. As ever, please do send in suggestions for books you’d like me to read in future weeks.

I’ve been meaning to read a book by Polly Courtney for some time and rather arbitrarily picked Feral Youth as the first one I wanted to try. Set around the time of the London riots of 2011, the novel follows the life of one young, mixed race girl from Peckham, Alesha. Alesha’s father has never been around and her mother is an alcoholic. Her only family, her fam, is JJ, and he isn’t her real family at all, but more like the brother – possible lover – she never had. As they become more and more reliant on the estate and the local gang to keep them off the streets, we learn how rage against the police and the authorities in general create an explosive climate.

As much as I would like to say that I’m not sure about issue-based literature, and that all that matters is a good tale, it wouldn’t be entirely representative of my own interests and practice. However, when approaching an overtly issue-based novel there is the worry that the story will get buried under the issue: characters can seem two-dimensional, storylines forced. But if a novel that sets out to explore some reasons behind the London riots of 2011 gives us a live character with whom we can sympathise or even empathise, then the issue should be subsumed in the story.

I was concerned that I would find Feral Youth issue heavy, rather than character heavy and I’m pleased to say that in general I did not. Whilst I can’t in any way account for the veracity of Alesha’s experience growing up in an estate in Peckham, I can honestly say that I cared about what happened to her and felt that I could understand at least some of the reasons why she behaved in the way she did. I’m not sure if the connection with her old piano teacher, Miss Merfield, who is white and privileged, certainly in relative terms to Alesha, quite worked for me. Miss Merfield becomes a possible ticket out of the estate and whilst I certainly believe in their connection, is it too neat that Alesha has a talent for music or that the middle classes, namely Miss Merfield, can have problems too? I don’t know. I wanted to feel attached to this novel in the way that I’m attached to Of Mice and Men, which is mentioned in the opening pages. I wanted the voices of the characters to strike chords whose echoes would continue to reverberate years later, but Feral Youth isn’t that kind of novel. It’s pertinent, it’s interesting, it’s provocative, it’s well crafted, but it doesn’t transport me. Again, as with Little Egypt, I hanker for raw edges, for emotions that escape careful plotting.

Feral Youth is an interesting read, but perhaps in my naivety, I wanted to see more. I wanted to know more about JJ. I wanted to see what lies behind his street face. Perhaps I wanted more voices. Perhaps in the end the issues do overwhelm the narrative, whether simply because they are predominant in my mind or because the writer has been unable to push beyond them, I remain unsure of. I suppose ultimately I’m unconvinced and again it has something to do with the novel’s neatness and clarity. But perhaps you won’t be unconvinced. If you have read it, or read it in the future, let me know what you think.

Next week I’m reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, followed by The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough. Do get in touch if there’s a novel you would like me to read and review.

In many ways, The Wrath of Napolo reminded me of The Luminaries: it’s an epic unravelling of a tragedy that involves a re-evaluation of nationhood. Though set in the fictional country Mandania, this is a very obvious veil for Malawi, and the tragedy of the novel, the sinking of the Maravi, is a representation of the historical sinking of the M. V. Vipya off Florence (now Chitimba) Bay, Lake Malawi, in 1946.  This national disaster was buried by the politics of several governments, colonial, independent dictatorship and newly democratic. Ignored for 50 years, freedom of speech and a need to expose historical truths encourage the protagonist, Nkhoma, a journalist from the South, to investigate what really happened in 1946 and to uncover who could be considered responsible for the deaths of so many Mandanians. Nkhoma’s interest in discovering the truth comes at a time when other events of previous administrations are under scrutiny, and other leaders see the Maravi as a political tool for gaining power. The search for truth is rarely unmotivated by personal gain and this struggle with the past becomes a personal as well as a national journey.

The whole novel is about unravelling Malawi’s identity. How do you uncover the past and forge the future of a country using colonial tools and with previous administrations’ influence, both colonial and independent dictatorship, still at work? What does it mean to take responsibility for your own and your country’s actions? Heroism, racism, sexism, slavery, tribalism, religion, infidelity, AIDS – all of these are explored through Nkhoma’s search for the truth about the sinking of the Maravi. In the end Nkhoma recognises that redressing the past of his country requires redressing his own past, and the novel ends with him intending to start a truth commission into his own life.

There were things in the novel that worked less well for me. I felt the dialogue sometimes ran away with itself and there is a tendency to speechify. My main issue, however, is with Chimombo’s invention of a country, Mandania, to talk about his own Malawi. It felt disingenuous, especially when the acknowledgements and dedications make it more than clear where the novel is really set. Although being ‘accidentalised’ (murdered if you were thought to speak or act against Banda’s Life Presidency) must still feel fresh to Malawians, the fictionalisation was so overt I wasn’t sure what the point was. I’d be keen to hear other people’s views on this, though of course the likelihood of anyone getting hold of copies of this novel is very slim. I read The Wrath of Napolo sitting in the British Library.

Whatever minor quibbles I might have with character or style, The Wrath of Napolo is an impressive novel of substantial weight that tackles the rebirth of a nation. There is intrigue, danger, beauty and myth. Napolo is a creature of Malawian folk law, an underground serpent, a conflation of ancestral spirits, that causes earthquakes, tornadoes, destruction and death wherever he goes. Why is he angry? Who is he angry with? The Wrath of Napolo suggests that whatever answers you give, his destruction forces the land to be reforged. This is a novel that deserves a wider readership. It saddens me that literature from the developing world, unless published first in America or the UK, is so hard to access. If any English publishers read this, please consider adding Steve Chimombo to your list.

Next week I will be reading Feral Youth by Polly Courtney, followed by The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough. As always, please do suggest ideas for future reading.

There is a lack of pretention to the writing of Beauty that is very enticing. This is storytelling in its richest, oldest form, and as new twists to old fairytales unwound I was taken right back to a period in my childhood when all I did was read Anderson, Grimm and various other fairytale collections. Such stories are dark, full of the metaphoric transformations that mirror the divisions of what it means to be human. Sarah Pinborough’s Beauty brings all of these mesmeric myths to life.

A story about royalty, beauty and beastliness, wolves, spindles, girls with hoods, shining slippers, promised children and witches, what is not to love? Beauty is a reworking of all those familiar tales that weaves new life into their telling, hinting at the impossibility of escaping the recurrence of stories that speak from the foundations of human sensibility. It is not a reworking into the modern day, however, rather a retelling that works for the modern day. If you enjoy fairytales, you will love Beauty.

Next week I’m reading The Wrath of Napolo by Steve Chimombo, followed by Feral Youth by Poly Courtney and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Any suggestions for future reading would be very welcome.

Little Egypt is a manor house in decline. It is all that remains of an estate sold piecemeal first to fund exploration and excavation in Egypt and then to fund the excavation fall-out. Set in the brief gap between the world wars, and in modern day England, Little Egypt follows the life of Isis, or Sisi as she later calls herself, as she lives under the burden of her parents’ obsession with Ancient Egypt. Hers is a childhood of parental and peer absence, but for her twin brother Osiris who is just as obsessed with Egypt as his parents. Despite frequent visits from their mother’s shell-shocked twin brother, their only real carer is Mary, the housekeeper. When Mary too falls foul of ancient obsessions, Little Egypt and all its secrets become Isis’ responsibility.

I wanted to really like this novel. My parents lived in Egypt for five years when I was in my early teens and I have a hugely sentimental love of the country. I did really enjoy the passages set in Egypt and felt the heat, the sandy, dusty grittiness of everything, and the young person’s confusion over poverty and stray dogs, mixed with the strange faith that adults know better and will navigate you through a world you do not understand. It came as no surprise that an awakening to adult sexuality and responsibility began in Egypt.

Set in beautiful contrast to ancient Egyptian glamour was the older Sisi’s love of consumer gaudiness. Part of the estate was sold to a supermarket chain and for Sisi it becomes a lifeline to the modern world.

However, I wasn’t always happy with the divisions between the past and present. It was almost too neat to wipe away the quiet uneventfulness of the years in-between childhood and old age. It also made the older woman’s forgetfulness divisive, given that we could fill in her memory losses for her. It gave question to Sisi’s reliability in a way that was not supported by the rest of the novel.

I did enjoy reading Little Egypt, but felt frustrated by it because I felt the author had more to give. I wanted to breathe the characters and their experiences, I wanted to feel my gut wrench alongside theirs, but I was somehow distanced from them. Perhaps it is the ease of arranging a novel in a way that avoids all but the most salient of moments? I know any creative writing or literature teacher would tell you that choosing the salient moments is what good writing is all about, and it is true that structure is half of the business, but there is more to it than that and in the end the heart of the novel didn’t beat loudly enough in my ears. What really did happen to Isis in that tomb? My response to the novel is undoubtedly personal and it wouldn’t put me off reading another of Lesley Glaister’s novels, I just have a longing for raw edges, and I would have liked a few more in Little Egypt. Perhaps I like my dark secrets to be darker?! If you don’t, then Little Egypt is probably the well-crafted, compelling novel for you.

Next week I’m reading Beauty by Sarah Pinborough followed by The Wrath of Napolo by Steve Chimombo, Feral Youth by Poly Courtney and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.