Between the Mountains and the Sea: A Cumbrian Trilogy by Ruth Sutton

A Good Liar

I knew from the opening sentences that I was going to like these books - something to do with the voice of the narrator - you know that you’re going to enjoy listening to it.  I was also intrigued by the situation and full of sympathy for the feisty young protagonist, Jessie Thompson.  From the first page, I wanted to know what happened to her. But it wasn’t entirely to do with plot or character construction - it was language.  The prose is effortless and a pleasure to read. I realised I was in safe hands.

The first book in the trilogy is A Good Liar, which opens during the first world war.  Jessie is very much in love with Clive Whelan and they plan to marry as soon as the war is over and Jessie has finished her teacher training course.  But Clive is killed in an accident in the shipyard and Jessie finds herself in the same predicament as many young women in the first decades of the twentieth century. They say that you can’t go back three generations in any family without encountering illegitimacy.  Jessie’s harsh mother is unsympathetic and Jessie eventually gives birth in what were once euphemistically called ‘mother and baby’ homes.  Her child is adopted and Jessie is expected to go back into the world as if nothing has happened.  For the sake of respectability, no-one must ever know.  It’s the beginning of a lie that will have repercussions for the whole of her life.

Jessie works in a factory for the rest of the war and then applies to complete her teacher training course.  She changes her name and relies on records being lost in the chaos of war.  Her past is conveniently buried.  By 1937 Jessie Whelan is headmistress of Newton School and a pillar of the local community.  She is part of a generation of single, independent women who lost their partners in the first world war. But she longs for a close relationship.  She begins a secret affair with a much younger man, knowing that if it becomes public she will lose her job.  At the same time her illegitimate son begins to track her down after the death of his adoptive parents.  Andrew, Jessie’s lover, becomes his new boss.  When John reveals his identity to Jessie, she is panic-stricken because she has so much to lose.  John agrees to say that he is her nephew in order to preserve appearances.

Forgiven

The second novel in the trilogy - Forgiven - opens in 1946.  There are big social changes all over Britain.  Men are returning from the war expecting women to give up their jobs for them.  The new vicar at Newton and head of the education committee, is an ex serviceman and resents the fact that Jessie, as headmistress of the school, occupies a family house even though she is unmarried and has no children.  He puts pressure on her to give the school house up for one of her subordinates - another ex-serviceman.  The vicar begins to hint that perhaps it’s time she retired and made way for others.  Jessie loves her job and doesn’t want to think about giving it up.  But she has begun to make a tentative relationship with a widowed doctor and sees the possibility of an alternative future.

However, Jessie’s lies are beginning to find her out. The moral climate is still cold and the liberal sixties a long way away.  Andrew has emigrated to Canada and asks her to join him, and make their relationship public.   Her son John has fallen in love and is going to get married.  He tells his new wife the truth about Jessie.  His fiancée Maggie goes to confront her, accusing Jessie of abandoning her child and being a bad mother.  Jessie is forced to make a difficult decision and we are outraged on her behalf.

Fallout

In Fallout, the third of the trilogy, time has moved on ten years.  Jessie, having retrained as a secretary, has a responsible job at Windscale, the nuclear plant on the Cumbrian coast.  She now has grandchildren and leads an independent life.  Her relationship with her outspoken daughter-in-law is still fiery.  Jessie, uneasy about some of the things she sees at Windscale, is beginning to become involved with the anti-nuclear movement.  This brings her into conflict with her employer and her son, who also works at the plant.   Jessie leaves to devote more time to activism and takes a lodger to earn money.  Laurence is a physicist seconded to Windscale - a married man unofficially separated from his wife - and, though at first he and Jessie keep their lives separate, eventually the barricades come down and a dangerous friendship begins to develop between them.

We, the readers, know that there is a nuclear accident on the horizon, but we don’t know how Jessie and the community are going to deal with it, or how it will affect her friends and family. Ruth Sutton writes very clearly about Britain’s only major nuclear event - a reactor fire that could have been as serious as Chernobyl, but for the courage of several individuals.  She is also very good on the tug of loyalties within a community that has always been forced to earn a living from dangerous industries and where people have learned to take risks many of us would consider unacceptable in order to feed their families.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this trilogy.  The industrial communities of the Lake District so often get overlooked by literature - the Cumbrian west coast is a fascinating landscape ‘between the mountains and the sea’.  Ruth comments that, “most people’s impression of the Lake District and Cumbria is green hills, sparkling lakes and Beatrix Potter. For those of us who love the wild west coast, that image needs a challenge, and I think – I hope – that my three novels portray real life here, not some romanticised idyll”.  They certainly do, and - with Windscale transformed into Sellafield - there were some local shops who wouldn’t carry Ruth’s third novel with its graphic cover image of the original disaster.

The three novels are packed with interesting characters and they cover a crucial period of social upheaval - the aftermath of the first world war, the depression and the subsequent de-industrialisation of northern Britain.  Having followed Ruth’s characters through the good and the bad times I was very glad that Jessie, after a lifetime of struggle and concealment, finally gets a happy ending.  

Ruth Sutton is leading a writers' workshop at the Borderlines book festival in Carlisle this weekend. 11am at Carlisle Library on Saturday Sept. 6th.  More details here.....

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimar McBride

I've been resisting this much-talked-about book for a while.  I've sometimes been disappointed by 'experimental', 'literary' novels, too often finding them pretentious and over-written.  So I approached Eimar McBride's Bailey's prize-winner with caution.  I was intrigued, I must admit, and finally gave in and down-loaded a sample from Amazon fully expecting to be disappointed again.  But I was hooked from the first sentences and when the sample ended I pressed the Buy Now button without any prompting.

When I read the description of the book I never thought I'd get further than the first page - but I'm 50% through it and hurtling along!

This is Joycean stream of consciousness. Prose-poetry, written in that lyrical way that only the Irish seem to manage.  It doesn't matter if individual phrases or sentences don't make sense - you have to read with the flow and let the sense seep into you.

The girl, growing up without a father, alongside a disabled brother with a mother who can't cope, experiences life without any filters.  Rebellion, religion, reproduction - the three big R's - clatter and crash through her mind and body.

Eimar wrote it in six months, but spent nine years trying to find a publisher. I'm not surprised, given the state of publishing at the moment, that Eimar couldn't get a deal from the big 6 (or even the smaller presses).  It was published in the end by her book-seller husband and a friend (Galley Beggar Press). After the accolades and the prizes, it's been snapped up by Faber.  From Indie to Faber - now that's a story!  But it just goes to show that some of the best and most innovative work is being done in the Indie sector, or published internationally (I'm a Peirene Press addict) beyond the reach of the Big 6, who will shortly only be publishing pulp fiction and celebrity crap. Traditional publishing is in crisis.  As Anne Enright (another brilliant Irish writer) put it "Who forgot to tell Eimear McBride about the crisis we are in and about the solution to that crisis: compromise, dumb down, sell your soul?" Fortunately nobody did. Thank whatever-you-swear-by for the Indies!

The Girl in Room 14 by Carol Drinkwater

The Girl in Room 14 

Carol Drinkwater

Kindle Single


This is an ‘old-fashioned’ romantic story that will please a lot of readers - a bit of escapism set in the idyllic countryside around Cannes and Menton.

Cecile is a beautiful woman who sells lemons in the marketplace in Cannes, but there’s a mystery surrounding her.  She appears to have no private life and even her daughter doesn’t know her story.  Cecile has been waiting for someone for more than 16 years.  This is a very good 'set-up' and the anticipation of what might happen draws you into the story.

To say more would be a plot spoiler.   It’s beautifully written and I enjoyed the read - perfect for a quick 'comfort read'.  The drawback for me was that I just didn’t believe the story's resolution.  It just didn't convince me. This is a number one best-seller on Kindle mainly because of good promotion and a celebrity author, but I've read much better short stories from Indie authors - stories with real emotional power and the tug of truth.

The Girl in Room 14 - Amazon.co.uk link

Claude Michelet: Firelight and Woodsmoke - worth committing book murder for!

Firelight and Woodsmoke

Claude Michelet

This is a great doorstop of a trilogy, which I cut into its three component parts with a Stanley knife and have been carrying around with me on my travels, abandoning each section as I finished it. I’d like to think that they got adopted by a traveller on a train, a curious customer in Costa’s, or a bored passenger at Stansted Airport.

The Firelight and Woodsmoke saga was recommended to me by a friend who knows how much I enjoy European literature. Claude Michelet is one of France's most distinguished authors. The books are translated into English, but aren’t currently in print in the UK or available as e-books.  I managed to get an omnibus edition second hand for 82p. Worth committing book murder for though.  It’s the story of a village and four generations of the Vialhe and Dupeuch families, in the Limousin region of France. They are peasants in a community that still has a medieval structure - the Vialhes are relatively prosperous; the Dupeuchs at the bottom of the heap.

The first novel opens with three children tracking a wolf on the last day of 1899.  A few hours later, a baby girl is born, Mathilde Dupeuch - the first child of the 20th century.   The story takes the inhabitants from the oppressive (and often heart-breaking) observance of centuries old traditions and superstitions to a modern age of international flights and mechanisation.  We see the arrival of the first car, the first train, the first electric light, and observe the effects of two world wars and the ravages of economic boom and bust - all through the eyes of this small rural community.

It’s difficult to summarise such a wide ranging plot with so many different characters. The narrative focuses mainly on the children - Pierre-Edouard, Louise and Berthe Vialhe, Leon and Mathilde Dupeuch.  Pierre-Edouard and Leon are of similar age, but very different temperaments.  They are all the children of uneducated peasant farmers and their parents expect them to conform to traditions they believe to be written in stone.  But times are changing fast and there is considerable conflict between the generations.  Berthe escapes the oppression of her family to become a fashion designer in Paris; Louise runs away to marry the man she loves rather than accept the marriage her family have arranged for her. The friendship of the two young men soon turns to enmity in a clash over land and politics.

Pierre-Edouard stays on the farm, marries and creates a new generation of Vialhes.  His eldest son Jacques excels at school and quarrels with his father over the way the farm is being run - wanting to introduce more modern farming methods. Jacques marries Mathilde, the youngest sister of his father’s enemy, Leon Dupeuch.  Leon, whose father committed suicide when he was young, comes from a family who barely had enough to eat, sometimes living like gypsies.  As an adult, he becomes a successful cattle dealer, wealthy enough to buy out the local gentry who have been impoverished by the Great Depression.

Jacques and Mathilde quietly consolidate the family land as their neighbours, less willing to adapt to 20th century innovations, are forced to sell off their ancestral acres.  But the grandchildren they are preserving the land for want something different.  They are interested in other careers, not the back-breaking life of a rural farmer.

There is real poetry in Claude Michelet’s prose, and the narrative has the quiet quality of a French film.  It’s a beautiful account of how life changed forever in a dramatic fashion during the 20th century - how moving away from our roots in the land that ultimately sustains us has created a fractured society that, although economically more prosperous, is otherwise impoverished.  The Correze has wifi now, but there are no more wolves left to track.

In the Beginning: Catherine Dunne

In the Beginning

by Catherine Dunne

Published by Fado Fado

£2.62 on Kindle

I'm a great fan of Irish writing - the tiny damp isle seems to have bred so many fine writers and poets. Catherine Dunne was recommended by an Italian friend who'd read her in translation and loved the novel. It's a great plot - Rose strives to be the perfect executive wife - immaculate home, pampered children, beautifully cooked meals - and she believes her world, though not ideal (what marriage ever is) to be stable and secure. But one morning her husband, off on a business trip to Europe, turns round at the door and tells her that he's leaving and he won't be back.

The shock of the announcement brings everything that Rose had believed to be rock-solid, tumbling in rubble around her ankles and there are a series of unpleasant discoveries waiting for her. What do you do if you put your card in the wall and no money comes out of the cash machine? How do you feed your children and pay the bills when the bank account is empty?

The novel also gives us the back-story of Rose's relationship, slices of narrative between the contemporary story which gradually reveal the layers of sand that her marriage had been built on.

But Rose is more resourceful than she realises and she's surrounded by loving friends. Day by day she grows stronger and, when she discovers the enormity of what her husband has done to her, she is able to deal with it. I loved the way the book was written - lived each episode with the characters and enjoyed every moment of Rose's revenge. I'm going to be reading more of Catherine Dunne's books.

Transatlantic: Colum McCann

Transatlantic

by Colum McCann

Published by Bloomsbury
Kindle Price £3.08

‘The cottage sat at the edge of the Lough.  She could hear the wind and rain whipping across the expanse of open water.  It hit the tree and muscled its way into the grass.......’

A friend lent me this book and I was so hooked I had to buy it on Kindle when I gave the book back.  It’s written in lyrical Irish prose that is almost poetry - a style that accommodates both internal monologue and external observation. There are several strands to a story that moves backwards and forwards in time across five generations of a family and from one side of the Atlantic to another.

It touches on the anti-slavery movement that became connected to women’s suffrage and the Irish republican cause. There’s a brief, but important, meeting between a former US slave and an Irish serving girl. Every detail is significant.  But it begins with the historic flight across the Atlantic made by Alcock and Brown, observed by two women - a journalist and a photographer. One of them gives a letter to Brown and asks him to post it when he reaches Ireland.  He agrees, but it is a very long time before the letter is ever opened.

At first I thought it was a series of linked short stories, but the weaving of the different strands became tighter as the novel developed and the relationship between the different narratives became clearer and more compulsive.  It's good to know that publishers are still publishing novels of this quality.

I really loved this book and it gets an extra star for the ‘wow’ factor.

Cauldstane by Linda Gillard

Cauldstane

by Linda Gillard

Since I discovered The House of Silence, I've been reading Linda Gillard's novels and wondering why on earth her publisher ever allowed her to go 'Indie'. They must be kicking themselves. She's providing exactly what readers seem to want - a rattling good story, interesting characters, romance, real dilemmas and traumas we can all empathise with, and an original mix of genre elements.  If you like this recipe, you're never going to get bored.  Not all Linda's books are to my taste, but the writing is always impeccable.

I've followed the genesis of Cauldstane via Linda's Facebook author page and been intrigued by the little snippets she's shared.  I also admired her determination to press on with the book through the long recovery process of a serious brush with cancer.  Her honesty and integrity in sharing her journey gave me a greater respect for her skills as an author.  This is someone who writes about traumatic human situations with personal knowledge.  It's this compassion and empathy that inform the pages of this unusual novel. Think Northanger Abbey meets Daphne du Maurier and Bridget Jones with a bit of Downton Abbey thrown in. It's absolutely modern and gloriously gothic.

There's a remote and decrepit Scottish castle, (with a curse attached, of course), a wicked stepmother, a feisty but emotionally vulnerable heroine, more handsome men than you can shake a sword at, and a very dangerous ghost.  The main male character, Sholto, has made a career out of adventure, but is now getting old, short of money to keep the roof over his head intact, and wants to tell his sometimes scandalous life story.  He has chosen J.J. Ryan to ghost-write it for him, picking the name from a Society of Authors' list of recommendations without realising that J.J. is a woman.  Jenny falls in love with Cauldstane and its occupants and is totally committed to the project, until ghost-writing of another kind comes between her and the family.  To tell you more would be to spoil the plot, so I won't.

I'm not a great fan of the Gothic genre, though I did read quite a lot of it when I was younger, but this novel is a really good read and I was happy to suspend disbelief and just enjoy myself between the covers.  It could only be improved by being read with a stiff malt whisky in one hand and a plate of Mrs Guthrie's ginger cakes on the side!

Cauldstane

by Linda Gillard

Death Comes to Pemberley: P.D. James

Death Comes to Pemberley

by P.D. James

P.D. James confesses, in her essay on the genesis of the novel that she is 'ambivalent' about sequels. 'The greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters, and I have never been tempted to take over another writer's people or world'.  But that is exactly what she has done in setting her new murder mystery in the heartland of Jane Austen's world - Pemberley, the home of Darcy and his wife Elizabeth Bennet. James goes on to explain that 'Austen's characters take such a hold on our imaginations that the wish to know more of them is irresistible'.  James is not the first to enter Austen's fictional domain with her own take on it - and currently another novel 'Longbourn', by Jo Baker, is exploring the upstairs/downstairs world of Elizabeth Bennet's family home and there is also 'Georgiana Darcy's Diary' by Anna Elliott and Laura Masselos.  There is also the very entertaining 'Lydia Bennet's Blog', by Valerie Laws.

In 'Death Comes to Pemberley', Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years and have a young son.  Pemberley is a tranquil, idyllic place - Mr Bennet is a frequent, welcome visitor, and Bingley and Elizabeth's sister Jane have established themselves nearby.  The one source of disharmony is the youngest Bennet daughter Lydia, married to the dissolute Wickham.  Lydia is 'received' (though scarcely welcomed) by her sisters for occasional visits, but her husband is barred.  Both are impecunious and dependent on their more fortunate relations and Lydia has an attitude of grievance towards her sisters.

It's hardly surprising, given Austen's portrayal of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, that James has chosen Lydia to be the messenger of an event that is going to break the tranquility of Pemberley for ever.  On the eve of the annual ball, a carriage comes to a violent halt at the door and Lydia tumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered.  Someone has indeed been murdered, but it is Wickham who is arrested for the crime.  Darcy, Elizabeth and their friends must now come to aid of a man they despise, but who is publicly part of their family.

I found the novel rather slow and the style more ponderous than Austen's - particularly the dialogue. But the plot is absorbing and the beautifully researched details of 18th century criminal procedure are fascinating, particularly to someone who once studied law with a view to being called to the Bar. It gives a very clear picture of how the law worked in small rural communities.  Darcy, who is a magistrate, is also a reformer, arguing for an appeal court to review the decisions of juries.  'Could it not be possible to have an appeal court consisting of three, or perhaps five, judges to be convened if there were dissension over a difficult point of law?'  His friend, Alveston, a barrister, comments that the jury would be outraged if they felt that their decision was to be challenged by a judge.  Public opinion, he proposes, is the best court of appeal;  'I can assure you there is nothing more powerful than the English when seized with righteous indignation'.  And so it proves.

I enjoyed this excursion into Jane Austen's world - I hope I'm still around at the age of 90 and still capable of writing such a complex novel as this one!  I wonder what she's plotting now?

The Founding: Cynthia Harrod Eagles - Morland Dynasty #1

The Founding

by Cynthia Harrod Eagles

If you like Philippa Gregory, you'll love this.  I read another writer's blog (Random Jottings - The End of a Dynasty?)  recently lamenting that Cynthia Harrod Eagles' publishers had 'dropped' her because sales of her cult historical novels weren't as high as they would have liked.  The blogger raved about the Morland Dynasty and the Kirov novels (the latter set in Russia) and I was intrigued.  Here was a writer with a long track record of rave-reviewed historical fiction and I'd never stumbled on her before.  Why?  Under-promotion, the blogger suggested - all the publisher's fault.  So I hopped over to Amazon and downloaded the first of the Morland Dynasty saga - The Founding - set in the 15th century world of Richard III, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret of Anjou and the Wars of the Roses - Lancaster and York.

I was immediately gripped by the central character - Eleanor Courtenay, impoverished ward of Lord Edmund Beaufort (grandson of John of Gaunt) - who is sold off in marriage to a wealthy Yorkshire sheep farmer and wool merchant who wants to trade his money for a bit of spit-and-polish and some aristocratic influence.  The gently born and educated Eleanor is transported to a filthy northern farmhouse and bears four children in three years.  Eleanor's courage and sheer bloody-mindedness win in the end, but the influential connection she brings with her also carries obligations that are not always comfortable.  She and her husband find themselves caught up in the civil war and torn between allegiance to the Lancastrian Beauforts or to Richard of York.  Eleanor's private loyalties prove costly.

It's been a very good read with accurate historical detail - a wonderful insight into the way women had to live - enduring superstition and prejudice and almost continual child-bearing.  I also liked the way that Eleanor's character developed through the book as she aged and was changed by circumstance. I'm off now to down-load the next book, The Dark Rose, to follow the fortunes of Eleanor's grandchildren.  There are 35 books altogether, bringing the family's fortunes up to the present day, so I expect to have to pick and choose a bit, but there are some readers who have read every one and are totally addicted!

I might also follow Random Jottings' suggestion and write to the the publishers to protest about their actions - it's time Readers started to make publishers aware of what they want.

You can get The Founding in paperback second hand for 1p or on Kindle for £4.72.

Orkney: Amy Sackville

Literary Fiction

After reading Peter May's dark thrillers set in the Hebrides, I was definitely in the mood for more about remote Scottish islands.  I bought Amy Sackville's Orkney a while ago, but (after one or two false starts) I hadn't got round to reading it.  The night of the Great Storm over Britain definitely provided the right atmosphere - the TV screens, even in Italy, were filled with images of surging tides and wild winds.

I loved Amy's first book, The Still Point, and really rate her writing - poetic, atmospheric prose of the kind that isn't fashionable in main-stream publishing these days.  Fortunately Amy's published by Granta who like the experimental and unashamedly 'literary'.

Orkney has no plot, only 2 main characters (a few walk-on parts) and feels as though it's written in real time.  But the prose compels and draws you in the further and further you go - rather like the sea around the island.

Richard, an elderly academic, has married one of his students after a very short acquaintance.  She has no family he is aware of and no friends.  But we only have Richard's word for that - he is obsessed with her and can't see anything very clearly outside what his young wife calls 'the frame' he has drawn around her.  In Richard's first person journal, her name is never mentioned.  She has no identity other than the one he creates for her.

Richard has brought her for a honeymoon on the Isle of Orkney - to a remote cottage where he is going to make endless love to his wife and work on his book about mythologies.  They are his speciality - particularly where they relate to women:

'Transformations, obsessions, seductions;  succubi and incubi;  entrapments and escapes . . . Curses and cures.  Folk tales and fairy tales retold.  And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia. Do I wake or sleep? Fantasy and phantasm.  Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women.  Strange and powerful women.  It's an old obsession.'

And it's one that should worry his wife.  Everyday she goes to sit on the beach to watch the sea.  And Richard watches her from inside the window.

'She's staring at the sea now.  My young wife.  There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clatter of pebbles and crabs.'

Gradually more information about her past emerges - her father had disappeared when she was a young child - perhaps lost at sea.  She is fascinated by tales of Selkies and Finfolk - men and women who come from the sea to land, but must always go back again.  She can't swim and dreams of drowning, night after night.  The novel creates a real intensity and claustrophobia as the relationship between the two is exposed within the four walls of their tiny cottage buffeted by wild Atlantic gales.

'I lay awake for hours, on my back, listening, eyes open or closed, I could not tell, an equal darkness within and without.  Our bed a berth in a boat, below deck, the sea pressing up at the window and rolling and moiling below us;  the fish swimming by the glass indifferent;  tiny shrimp coiling and stretching in meaningless Morse code;  all the sightless, glowing life of the ocean floating past. A Leviathan's eye, filling the portholes, peering in.'

I won't spoil it by writing about the ending, but I'm still speculating about just how reliable Richard is as a narrator - he has a tendency to see everything one way and can't be contradicted.  The clues to what is happening are in the fairy tales, re-told by firelight, the myths and superstitions that inhabit the abandoned hearths of the island.

Orkney
by Amy Sackville
Published by Granta

Death Order by Jan Needle

Death Order

by Jan Needle

Historical Fiction
Published by Endeavour Press Ltd 2013

Churchill once said ‘There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true’.  History, as we all know, is a very unreliable narrator and the viewpoint of the story depends on who is telling it.

One of the great mysteries of the Second World War is the flight to Scotland, in 1941, of Rudolf Hess - Hitler’s deputy.  He came, apparently, to sue for peace, but was imprisoned in Britain, put on trial with the rest of the Nazi high command at Nuremburg and jailed for life as a war criminal in Spandau. Though he had never been part of the horror machine that unfolded during the later years of the war, he was never released and died, equally mysteriously, at the age of 93, in Spandau prison. 

Was the man in Spandau really Rudolf Hess, or was he - as many people claimed - a man called Albert Horn? Did he commit suicide, as the Allies claimed?  Or was he killed to prevent his real identity being revealed to create a Humanitarian scandal of epic proportions.

This is more than a conspiracy theory - of which there are trillions - this is a beautifully researched, well substantiated theory.  Jan Needle has clothed it in fictional form (or should that be factional?) to create a stunning novel. It’s as pacey and compelling as a Dan Brown and much better written.  The central male character - the burnt-out MI6 operator Bill Wiley, and the spy turned academic Edward Carrington - are utterly real.  The female characters - Erica, Hannele and Jane - are intelligent, feisty and equally believable.  There’s some fantastic sex!

But the best thing is the way that this book exposes the lies that governments tell that can’t be found out until the papers are released decades after the events.  The Iraq war, with its sexed-up dossiers and phoney weapons-of-mass-destruction, was only the latest in a long line of cover-ups and propaganda coups.  The Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon came out of nefarious doings in the Vietnam/Cambodian conflict.  We probably shouldn’t believe anything we’re told.  ‘History,’ as Edward remarks in the book, ‘is bunkum’.

Death Order by Jan Needle
originally published by Harper Collins as ‘Butcher’s Bill’

© Kathleen Jones

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behaviour

by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction, Published by Faber and Faber.

 Whatever happened to Barbara Kingsolver? She is one of my all-time favourite authors - the Poisonwood Bible one of my all-time favourite books.  I read her last novel, The Lacuna, when it came out and was a little disappointed - though it still had some of the old magic on the page.  There were still beautiful passages to admire.

Flight Behaviour promised a return to form - an eco-novel with environmental issues integral to the plot.  But, oh dear, not very far into the novel, I became bored - really bored - and found it difficult to turn the pages.  Eventually, wading through virtual mud, I skipped to the end and found it as predictably dull as the rest of the book.  The only spark of magic was the moment when the heroine walks up into the woods for an illicit meeting with a lover and witnesses the leaves turning to flame.

It's sad to see one's favourite author losing the edge they had, particularly when their message has more relevance now than ever before.  And one does wonder how much authors' work is being influenced these days by what their publishers want from them, rather than allowing them to write what they want.  Please can I have Barbara Kingsolver back?

Country Girl: Edna O'Brien

Country Girl

by Edna O'Brien

Autobiography

Published by Faber and Faber

I was lucky enough to be sitting near to Edna O'Brien in the Green Room at a recent literature festival and she was holding the whole room spellbound with an anecdote about Philip Roth. She's a natural raconteur - the gift of the Irish, some would say.

I've always loved her writing - her first book The Country Girls (Country Girls Trilogy 1) was part of my growing up. But I haven't read anything of hers for some years. So this autobiography intrigued me. I found the first part of it gripping and saddening - the cruelty and emotional manipulation of young people in the name of religion makes me very angry. Her mother was a martyr and her father was an alcoholic. Between them and the nuns she grew up insecure and ill-equipped for life in the real world.

An early, disastrous marriage to a control freak who was also an author almost destroyed her. When she wrote her first novel and it was a runaway success, her marriage ended. 'You can write, and I will never forgive you,' he told her after he had read her book. She had to fight a three year court battle to get her children back.

But after the intensity of these first chapters, the narrative slips away into reminiscence. Memories go backwards and forwards in time and the reader is left looking for connections. There are some wonderful anecdotes - seductions by film stars, Princess Margaret dropping in for parties, a close friendship with Jackie Onassis - but it lacks a structure. I loved the writing - she is as lyrical as ever and I can hear her voice as I read the prose.

A flawed book, but she's always worth listening to.  One of the twentieth century's iconic writers.

Country Girl
Edna O'Brien
 

The Hired Man, by Aminatta Forna

The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

Bloomsbury Publishing

Contemporary Fiction

‘September 2007
                                     
At the time of writing I am forty-six years old.  My name is Duro Kolak. Laura came to Gost in the last week of July....’

I didn’t read Aminatta Forna’s first, Orange Prize-listed, novel, The Memory of Love, but may now go back and read it on the strength of The Hired Man’s quality.

This novel is set in post-civil war Croatia.  An abandoned house has been sold to a woman from England who arrives with her children for the summer and employs Duro as a handyman to do the repairs.   Her appearance, and the restoration of the house awaken memories, not only in Duro, but among the villagers too.  Unwelcome memories of a time when people as well as animals were hunted.  It’s told purely from Duro’s point of view, as he watches and remembers, and becomes a pivotal person in the lives of the family, who are oblivious to the ripples they’re creating in the scarred community around them.  Only the young daughter senses that things are not as idyllic as they seem and that the glorious scenery they inhabit has a dark history.

This is a beautiful, moving book, very well written.  I wanted a slightly different ending, but I think the book has the ending that is right for it. Nothing can be resolved.  Memories have to be lived with.  Broken love affairs can rarely be mended.  We can’t always have what we want.

The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

Published by Bloomsbury

Mr Darwin's Gardener, by Kristina Carlson

Mr Darwin's Gardener

by Kristina Carlson

Published by Peirene Press

I loved Asko Sahlberg's The Brothers, translated by mother and daughter team Fleur and Emily Jeremiah, so I picked up this book, by another Finnish author Kristina Carlson, translated by the same team, with some anticipation.  I wasn't disappointed.

It is impossible to describe this book - a novel, yes, but not in any conventional sense.  Poetry in prose?  Certainly that.  There's a concentration on language, observation, a polyphony of voices.  Kristina Carlson is also a poet, so it's no surprise to find her prose so rich and allusive.

Thomas Davies has lost his wife;  he has two children with congenital defects and is an aetheist;  he is Mr Darwin's gardener.  The villagers watch him, as they watch each other.  We move in and out of their heads, listening to their thoughts and opinions and most intimate concerns.

The doctor drinks and his wife cries.  Stuart Wilkes invents impractical domestic objects.  Jennifer Kenny brews herbal remedies;  her niece dreams of the novel she will probably never write.  Rosemary Rowe fears her violent husband.  Thomas Davies ponders the meaning of life and finds consolation in the garden;  'the most beautiful thing about plants is their silence'.

A stranger arrives in the village, but then he is recognised as someone whose identity stirs the men into violent action; 'revenge brings great satisfaction'.  But the body disappears, causing consternation and fear.

It is difficult for any writer to take the reader back past the two great watersheds in human psychology - Darwin and Freud.  How do you get inside the minds of people who believed that the world was created, complete with all the animals, in 7 days, and were not troubled by theories of self-consciousness?  Kristina Carlson,  writing very simply, about the day to day concerns of the people, their hopes and private tragedies, takes us back to a Kent village in the 1870s, very successfully.

Kristina is a highly regarded author in Finland.  I was lucky enough to hear her talk at one of the Peirene Press supper clubs, where she said that this novel is the one she had wanted to write since she was sixteen.  It's beautifully translated.  I noticed a lot of 2 star and 1 star reviews on Goodreads because people have found it difficult. If you try to read it as a conventional novel then, yes, it will not meet your expectations.  It's post-modern, experimental - a fluid, multi-layered, multi-voiced narrative that flows like music. You have to forget everything and immerse yourself in  the language and the voices.

For me it is like water in the desert to find a novel that hasn't come out of the Creative Writing Factory, a novel that is about language and image, that carries ideas and stirs the imagination. We live in the characters' minds, translated through time. I read it twice and will read it again.  It's the kind of book you can just dip into, like a collection of poetry. 

Mr Darwin's Gardener

Indie Book of the Month: The Threads of Time, by Cally Phillips

The Threads of Time

Cally Phillips

Pub by HoAmPresst

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to wander around an archaeological dig and be physically whisked back in time?

Paul is taking part in a dig in Galloway, southern Scotland, one of the lowly muck-shifters.  But he really fancies one of the senior archaeologists - Diane - older than him, beautiful, out of his league. 

Strange things begin to happen.  Paul has dreams, but are they dreams?  And Diane begins to notice him.  Is she really interested, or is it a game she’s playing with their boss, the man in charge of the dig who has his own agenda and isn’t playing by the rules?

This is a time-slip novel with good, passionate characters and a thorough knowledge of archaeology and pre-history. As you'd expect from an experienced actor and playwright, the dialogue is excellent. It’s a little slow in parts, but apparently it was Cally Phillips’ first novel. Wonder too about this current fashion for brevity and galloping pace - perhaps we should have a new ‘slow book’ movement as in ‘slow food’?  Paragraphs of reflection and description are, perhaps, something we should give time to in our crowded lives. The Threads of Time is definitely a good read, a page-turner, and the ending is very unexpected.

I've also read Cally's Cuban novel 'Another World is Possible' - definitely worth checking out!  And I really liked her short story collection 'Voices in Ma Heid', written entirely in Scots - not easy for a sassenach to read initially, but when I got my ear in, the stories were moving and sometimes shocking.  Cally is a highly political writer and her books are a must-read if you're looking for something different.

Check out Cally's work here.

David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky

David Golder
by Irene Nemirovsky
Random House

There was a time when it was perfectly acceptable to write short novels without the danger of it being classed as a ‘novella’.  David Golder is short - 159 pages of large type in paperback, but it says everything that’s necessary - terse, efficient and unsettling.  It was first published in 1929 but it’s a modern parable.

The central character is a wealthy entrepreneur, who has made his money from oil and financial currency speculation (sound familiar?).  David had been born in Russia, on the Black Sea, in extreme poverty and had come to Europe and America, as many Jews did, to escape the pograms.  But it’s a long time since he has thought about his origins.  Now, David is in his late sixties, and his body is beginning to show the stress of a life spent amassing wealth by constantly taking risks.  He is overweight, physically unfit, driven, lonely and unhappy.  Taken to a small kosher restaurant in the poor quarter of Paris by an old acquaintance, he has a moment of recall. 

‘Outside, a man walked by carrying a long pole; he touched the street lamp opposite the restaurant and a flame shot out, lighting up a narrow, dark window where washing was hanging above some empty old flowerpots. Golder suddenly remembered a little crooked window just like it, opposite the shop where he’d been born . . . remembered his street, in the wind and snow, as it sometimes appeared in his dreams.
“It’s a long road,” he said out loud.’

David’s wife Gloria and daughter Joy live a life of luxury in Biarritz, supported by his money.  They have no affection for him and, as his life begins to collapse around him in the financial melt-down of the late nineteen twenties, he begins to realise that he may have spent his life in a hopeless quest.

 ‘What a fool he was!  He had really believed he could possess something precious on this earth . . .  To work all his life just to end up empty-handed, alone and vulnerable, that was his fate.’
But this isn’t just a moral tale of the Midas type. David Golder is the product of what poverty and despair have created between them.  It’s a very powerful novel - the first one that Irene Nemirovsky published, when she was only 26 and living in France. Quite a startling feat for a young woman to portray the anguish of growing old and the fear of death.  It is apparently a portrait informed by her father, who was a Russian refugee in Paris - forced to take a job in the same bank he had once owned, but destined to rebuild his financial empire again at the cost of his family life.  He is not an attractive figure: ‘Golder was an enormous man . . . he had flabby arms and legs, piercing eyes the colour of water, thick white hair and a ravaged face so hard it looked as if it had been hewn from stone by a rough, clumsy hand.’

David Golder’s wife Gloria is believed to owe much to Irene’s own unhappy mother, and this too is not a flattering portrait.  Gloria cares only for status and wealth - her diamonds, her house, her white Rolls Royce and her lovers - burying the memories of Havke, the impoverished Jewish girl, daughter of a money lender, who had left Russia with David Golder in search of a new life.  It seems that the only thing they ever had in common was a desire for material wealth.  Gloria and Joy are parasites who, when one host has gone, will re-attach themselves to another. Despite Golder’s enormity - he’s a monster - we are left, at the end of the novel, with a great sadness and sympathy.  That is the great achievement of the young Irene Nemirovsky.


David Golder
by Irene Nemirovsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ir%C3%A8ne_N%C3%A9mirovsky

The Wanderer in Unknown Realms: John Connolly

John Connolly
The Wanderer in Unknown Realms

I’m having trouble with Kindle Singles - they’re either so short they’re barely a short story, or they really need to be a novel to do the subject justice.  You just don’t know what you’re getting.   The Wanderer in Unknown Realms is John Connolly’s much publicised Kindle Single, a horror story of novella length that should really be a novel.  He’s a brilliant writer, so I wasn’t surprised to be engaged with a world of Dickensian characters (the lawyer Quayle, the sinister booksellers Dunwidge and Daughter) all caught up in a spine tingling plot.  Soter - a world war one veteran, shell-shocked and bereaved, works as a private detective and takes on the case of missing Lionel Maulding, an elderly country gentlemen with a taste for antiquarian books.

Soters search takes him into the world of arcana and rare occult books.  Soon he begins to experience the occult world for himself and has moments when he doubts his sanity.  Lionel Maulding had been on the trail of a book so rare, so dangerous, that it has eluded generations of occult specialists.  The Atlas of Unknown Realms has the power to change the space time continuum and re-write the nature of reality.  Soter soon has reason to fear that the book has been found and opened when time begins to bend around him and horrific creatures materialise out of the darkness.
           
At this point I was really gripped.  I wanted to know what had happened to Lionel Maulding and how the world was going to be saved - hopefully by Soter.  But the novella’s ending is a complete let-down and unfortunately ruined the whole for me.  Maybe others will disagree. I’m not going to do a spoiler - but I think it was a cop-out!



There are wonderful, creepy illustrations by Emily Hall that make the production of this book a class act.

The Long Delirious Burning Blue by Sharon Blackie

The Long Delirious Burning Blue
by Sharon Blackie
Published by Two Ravens Press

This is one of the most satisfying novels I've read in a long time - it really had me gripped and when I got to the end, I cried.  Not many books nowadays reduce me to tears, particularly ones that have happy endings.

The main character, Cat, is a 39 year old legal executive with an American pharmaceutical firm based in Arizona.  She's in a long term relationship with a nice guy, earns lots of money, has a beautiful home and is deeply unhappy.  Cat has begun to have crippling panic attacks which, at first, she believes to be the symptoms of physical illness and it is only when faced with a doctor's diagnosis that she realises they have their roots in anxieties that go back to childhood.

Everyone believes Cat to be completely in control and indestructible.  But it's only a mask to hide her vulnerability. Not even her partner knows how fragile she is.  Cat is afraid of flying, and when she has a massive panic attack on a business trip and is almost unable to get on the plane, she makes up her mind to deal with her fear the only way she knows how; by confronting it.  Cat decides to learn to fly and the terror and exhilaration she experiences become the key to understanding herself.

  'I have been asleep for forty years. This is what I need: this fear, this risk, this wind rocking my wings. This is what I have been missing. This is what it means to be alive – up here, on the edge of death.’ 

This is a novel about how fear can cripple our lives and prevent us living fully.  It's a novel about mothers and daughters - Cat's mother is an alcoholic and their relationship has been poisoned by guilt and blame and anger. But it's also a novel about the power of stories.  Our lives are a narrative and we can choose how to tell it - not only that, if we don't like the story we can change it.  As Cat does when she walks out of her career and her relationship into 'the long, delirious, burning blue'.

Cat's mother, Laura, is a story-teller, an author of children's books.  When the novel opens she has been sober for years, but has lost the ability to write.  Returning to the west-highland village where she had lived with her violent husband, she begins to work through her own story and, in writing it down, begins to heal herself and her relationship with her daughter.

One of my favourite bits from the book is the 'mission statement' Cat has to approve in a board meeting, which is the subject of her first rebellion against corporate America.  She can no longer swallow the meaningless jargon and the half-truths.  My other favourites were the flying scenes - so vivid I was up there in the cockpit almost sick with vertigo.  And I really fancied the flying instructor . . .

The author, Sharon Blackie, is the editor of Two Ravens Press, based on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Two Ravens publish poetry and fiction and the beautiful glossy magazine 'Earthlines'.  Their remit is broadly 'ecoliterature' but they state that they are looking for 'writing that is capable of challenging and unpicking the status quo, of shifting the worldview of their readers away from the creed of "Progress is Growth is Consumption".'  This novel certainly does that.  It's Sharon's first novel - and the only parallel I can think of is Barbara Kingsolver, who manages to combine ecological and political issues with beautiful prose. I'm now eagerly awaiting Sharon's second novel, The Bee Dancer, which is apparently coming soon.


The title is a quote from a poem called 'High Flight' written by 19 year old Canadian poet John Gillespie Magee, a spitfire pilot killed in a mid-air collision in 1941.

Dreams of the Blue Poppy: Angela Locke

Dreams of the Blue Poppy

by Angela Locke

Historical Fiction -

At Bambeck Hall in the Lake District, two children are born on the same day, a boy and a girl, but their fates are supposed to be very different.  Elizabeth Richardson is the daughter of the butler, and Charles Fergusson is the son of the owner.   Betty, as she comes to be known, lives below stairs, but her flaming red hair hints at a closer Fergusson connection.  Charles, suffering from a congenital heart condition, is confined to a wheel chair, but is encouraged by his grandmother - the enigmatic Maud - to dream of the Himalayas and a rare species of blue flower which had once been given to her by a Tibetan prince.

The two young people find great happiness in each other’s company and feel curiously compatible. Only Betty knows of the blood-lines that draw them together, but even she doesn’t know the whole truth of their ancestry.

This is a story of how Victorian social values and conventions warped the lives of generations of young people and how it encouraged a culture of secrecy - there were things that simply weren’t spoken of.  But the first world war was just around the corner, ready to sweep away a hundred years of rigid convention.  Betty’s father and Colonel Fergusson fight side by side and on the battlefield one man’s blood is just as red as another’s.

It is also the story of how hopes and dreams are attainable, if only you have enough courage and a little bit of luck.  Betty is a feisty heroine who isn’t going to let anyone put her down and she is quite willing to fight Charles’ corner as well!  This isn’t a conventional ‘upstairs/downstairs’ story - the plot turns this on its head, though I can’t give too much away.

The novel is beautifully written by an author with a long pedigree in publishing.  Angela Locke began working in children’s television and is the author of the Search Dog books set in the Lake District, a children’s novel ‘Mr Mullet Owns a Cloud’,  a book on travels in Tibet, 'On Juniper Mountain',  as well as being a published poet, journalist and former editor of glossy magazines.  You know you’re in safe hands from the first paragraph.  And the book is also beautifully designed (by my partner Neil) with small floral motifs framing every chapter.  Good to look at and good to read. 

Dreams of the Blue Poppy
by Angela Locke
The Book Mill
(Previously published in hardback by Robert Hale)