Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

On the long list for the Man Booker 2014, We are all completely beside ourselves is a book that is hard to talk about without ruining some of its own device. The novel is narrated by Rosemary who is struggling to tell her own story by telling the story of her family who involve her, from the earliest months of her life, in a research project into the differences between ourselves and our closest animal relatives. The results of this project and its multiple complications change all of their lives irrevocably.

Rosemary used to be a talker and her father’s advice to tell stories from the middle, to save himself from having to listen for too long, is a useful directive through which the narrative can develop without drawing attention to the natures of all of the characters involved. We are meant to be entering the story with as little bias as possible, allowing us to unravel the familiar narrative of family dysfunction – parents whose seemingly intentionally damaging decisions take children years to comprehend, often when it is too late to remake their lives in the light of new discovery – to make an unusual story ordinary. In some ways the narrative succeeds too well at this. I wanted to be forced to further question my views on animal intelligence. Then again I might not be the person at whom the narrative may be aimed, I already believe humans are far too quick to judge other animals on human terms rather than their own.

Whilst I devoured We are all completely beside ourselves, embracing its storyline with increasing interest, finding the characters believable and compelling, in the end the novel didn’t go far enough for me. I wanted to be pushed further into the non-human animal mind. I wanted to further explore that alternative perspective. Perhaps, again that’s the point, but as I wasn’t engaged enough on an emotional level either, I didn’t feel as if I’d undergone Rosemary’s connection to the non-human animal mind and so for me the book is a good book, a page-turning book, but not a book I expect to see on the short list for the Man Booker. However, I’d be happy to hear from those who think the failing to engage was my own…

Next week I’m reading J by Howard Jacobson followed by The Cave by Jose Saramago. Keep the comments and suggestions coming.

I’m very fond of Magnus Mills’ work and when I found The Restraint of Beasts, his first novel, in a second hand bookshop, I was excited. I wondered what his first novel would be like and the title was promising.

The narrator is an English fencer working for a Scottish firm specialising in high tensile fencing. The novel opens with him being made foreman of a team of two almost inseparable Scots. Tam and Richie, both motivated by beer, survive on an endless system of subs and loans that dwindles their coming month’s wages. Unlike the narrator, they have no thoughts of extending their career beyond fencing. It doesn’t take long for the reader to extrapolate wider meanings for the term beasts.

The team is put together for a job in England, but before they can go they first have to fix a job they have supposedly just finished: Mr McCrindle’s fence has gone slack; not a very good start (something that gets said a lot). When they get to England they fall under the stronghold of the Hall Brothers who seem to be in charge of all the beasts from pigs to men. Before long they are working for the Hall Brothers on a seven foot high, high tensile electric fence with no gates. They wonder how you get anything out and I wonder how you get anything in. What is the fence for? Why are Hall Brothers workers all men fed only on Hall Brothers’ meat? What does it really mean to win the school dinners contract? Why is it so easy to bury the mistakes of a labourer (you’ll see what I mean)?

I enjoyed The Restraint of Beasts but in the end too much was left unexplored for my tastes. Whilst I understand that Mills is contemplating the nature of contract working, extrapolating out from one closed nit community to the workings of society in general, and that the worker doesn’t need to see the big picture to complete his job whose boundaries are as clear as the fences he’s building, I’m surprised there isn’t more conjecture on the narrator’s part. He likes to imagine he is a little higher up the food chain than Tam and Richie. Perhaps if the novel had been a little longer I would have had many more questions answered, but perhaps the book would then no longer have been the dance Mills intended. I wanted the novel to step further into the unspoken surreal edge that hovers around the story, crackling with the electric tension of the fence its main characters are busy building. I wanted more allegory and Mills went for more mystery.

The Restraint of Beasts is an intriguing book, but if I were to recommend a novel by Magnus Mills, I would recommend Three To See The King. That’s a book that does more of what I had hoped The Restraint of Beasts was working up to. Nevertheless, The Restraint of Beasts has a bleak humour that raises a rye smile about the economies of contract working and its implications for the restraints we place around ourselves.

Next week, I’m reading We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, followed by J by Howard Jacobson.

Though The Fifth Child is definitely dated by its lack of politically correct language, a lack central to the issues of the novel however, I ate this book up with frightening relish. David and Harriet are an unusually ordinary couple who long for domesticity, a large welcoming family home and lots of children. Their fifth child presents a challenge that rocks the foundations of everything they thought they stood for.

I couldn’t get enough of this family and the extended relations that brought class, education, money and disability into the mix. There were so many brilliantly evoked scenes where the unspoken bristled and that strange tense acceptance of family relationships, regardless of their faults that brews under the bottle cap waiting to explode, sat cleverly beneath surface discussion. It’s a very well observed book full of the complexities of relationships and family decision-making. The blame, shame, anger, resentment and exhaustion make for compelling reading. This is the book we should have been discussing in relation to the difficulties of loving an emotionally distant, unloving and violent child, not We Need To Talk About Kevin. But perhaps this novel has been forgotten, lost to the ravages of political correctness and to welcome psychiatric developments. Certainly the situation would provoke different handling in 2014 and I did find it difficult to listen to the mother describing her fifth child as a genetic throw back – though of course the expression of how people actually feel should never be censored and finding it difficult is a reaction the book certainly intends – and the care home he is sent to does anything but care for its charges. The issues, however, of how a family meets and deals with difference are fascinating and relevant. The novel is riddled with parenting dilemmas all crying out for discussion. Read it and lets have some of those discussions. I wonder, when the mother says she has given birth to a monster, if it possible to be more controversial?

Next week I’m reading The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills, followed by We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.

Reading The Lost Horizon is a bit like being transported into a grown-up version of a boy’s adventure story. There is a touch of Conrad, a feeling of Greene. It’s all secrets, conspiracies, the aftermath of war and how that impacts upon a person.

Told within the framework of two school friends speaking of another, the narrator tells his friend’s account of Conway’s story. Rutherford met Conway on a ship. Conway had lost his memory but Rutherford’s memory of him reawakens Conway to himself and allows him to tell Rutherford his unusual tale.

Conway was being evacuated from Baskul to Peshwar but his plane was high-jacked and crashed somewhere in the Tibetan mountains. The surviving passengers were met by an old monk who takes them to the hidden valley and monastery of Shangri-la under the beautiful shadow of the Blue Moon Mountain. As their stay at Shangri-la is prolonged, Conway begins to unravel the mystery of this hidden vision of utopia.

I’m not sure if I would embrace the moderate lifestyle of Shangri-la but it is exciting to believe there could be secret places unbound by poverty, hunger and war, carefully maintaining human achievement without the fierce bias of self-defence.

The Lost Horizon is a clear-headed account of human nature and endeavour that combines mystery, ambition and adventure. The handed down nature of the story beautifully conveys the development of myth making The Lost Horizon a great telling of a great story.

Next week I’m reading The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, followed by The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler which has been longlisted for the Man Booker. I look forward to more of your comments and reading suggestions.

Stoner is a novel of a life, a supposedly unremarkable life whose telling shows the beauty of a quiet every day lived in love. The protagonist, William Stoner, is the son of a farmer who is the first in his family to go up to university to study agriculture and make more of their arid patch of land. Whilst there, Stoner discovers literature and never turns back. He becomes a literature professor, turning away from worldly pursuits in favour of the academic. The careful turn of words earns his love and passion in a way that occasionally lives in his personal life. He never amounts to anything but a teacher academically and his marriage is a difficult one, but there is such beauty in this life of principle that none of these things matter. To live, to love to live, even for a little, is enough.

Stoner is a beautiful novel that stands in the face of the Great American Novel and calmly, gently, with delicate precision, sticks its fingers up and asks what really matters. Brilliant. I don’t want to say more than that because I urge you to read it for yourself.

Next week I’m reading The Lost Horizon by James Hilton, followed by The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing and The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. Do keep your comments and suggestions coming.

Set in rural Ireland after the housing bubble burst, The Spinning Heart takes individual voices and blends them into a story of loss and despondency. The stories spin around the heart in Bobby Mahon’s childhood home, around living hearts that struggle to push through hardened arteries or nervous dispositions, around the family, the hearth that is the true heart of generations grown on father’s anger, God’s anger, or on motherly cowardice or resentment. There isn’t a tale that escapes some kind of family cruelty, every person trying their best to make it one day more.

The craft the novel displays is artful and well-conceived, though I would argue at times a little sentimental. Bobby Mahon is the local hero against whom other men measure themselves and Donal Ryan allows the law of tragedy that rips through lives with an unfounded chaos, driving men mad, to tear up this community with Bobby as their scapegoat. Someone has to pay for the scams of the boom years. It can’t be the man who made off with everyone’s money because he is long gone. The desire to kill one’s father becomes enough to condemn Bobby, and over it all hangs the question of what now. Amidst the chaos what really matters?

The Spinning Heart is a beautiful, powerful novel and deserving winner of the Guardian First Novel Award last year, but it wasn’t quite for me. I’m not sure if it was Bobby’s father’s dead voice that lost me, or simply my corresponding despondency in the face of the well-described listlessness of recession. I read the novel almost as if it were a dream that is all too easy to wake from. That may say more about me than the novel. There can be no doubt this is a novel worth reading, it’s just simply not my favourite so far this year.

Next week I’ll be reading Stoner by John Williams, followed by The Lost Horizon by James Hilton and The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Please do comment and send in suggestions for future reading.

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.