"Little Boy Lost" by Marghanita Laski

 

A novel with a huge emotional charge. Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian (15/09/2001) said: "If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one."

Hilary, an Englishman, travels to post-war France, searching for John, the son he only saw as a day-old baby before the Nazi invasion drove him from Paris. Now a friend of his late wife's believes he has tracked the lad down in an orphanage. But is the little boy that he meets his real son?

The protagonist, Hilary, is the archetypal ‘stiff upper lip’ Englishman. In the first chapter, disconnected by being set in England rather than France and nearly two years before the main action, we discover that Hilary’s relationship with his mother is one of “bitter incessant strife” since his father died, partly because his mother insists on enjoying a social life. He wants her to comfort him instead. He is the sort of man who, starved of familial love, has taken refuge in literature and poetry. But there was a moment in his past when, on a year in Paris, he fell in love and married and fathered a son. That happiness was snatched from him by the war and he has retreated again into his books, building a shell to protect him from further hurt. Now, if he is to find his son, he must expose himself again to the possibility of pain.

The first third of the book deals with the mechanics of how the little boy was lost. There’s a slightly disconnected preface when Hilary discovers, on Christmas Day 1943, that not only was his French wife killed by the Gestapo for her role in the Resistance but also that his son had gone missing. The informant, Pierre, pledges to find John because he feels guilty because his own wife was entrusted with John before she too was captured and killed by the Gestapo. The book picks up again in 1945 when Pierre tells Hilary that he has found a boy called Jean in an orphanage in a northern French town. The chain of events linking John to Jean is traceable but by no means certain. Jean himself is too young to remember his earlier life.

Thus we are launched into the main part of the book which focuses on Hilary meeting Jean and trying to decide if Jean is John. This section is set in a town which has been brought to its knees by invasion and occupation and even by the violence used to liberate it. The infrastructure has sustained heavy damage. The necessities of life are in short supply. The meals at the hotel are meagre and unappetising ... but there is the choice of the black market menu which those like Hilary who have money can enjoy. Life at the orphanage is even worse. Jean is poorly fed and worse clothed. His toys are “a pinecone, a stone marble with nearly all its colour rubbed away, a used American stamp, and a tiny little celluloid swan with its head broken off.” (Ch 6) His dormitory is, of necessity, shared with boys who have TB; since milk is prioritised for those under six, rickets is inevitable for the older boys.

And the people are damaged too. When your country is occupied, it is almost impossible to survive unless you collaborate to some extent. Pierre, who has lived under the Nazis and been part of the Resistance, understands that. He says: “I am tired of ‘collaborationist’ as a term of abuse; we each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing. ... Some found they were better than they thought, some worse.” (Ch 2) But Hilary, who never suffered occupation, is unable to see beyond black and white. When Pierre reveals his support for Charles de Gaulle, Hilary dumps him: “He’s a fascist ... to take him with me would be to contaminate my ordeal.” (Ch 4) Later he describes France as “enveloped in a miasma of corruption”. (Ch 10) This is a man who does not do empathy and one almost fears for the future of Jean if he is brought up by such a moral absolutist. 

There's more than a hint of Oliver Twist in this part. As he revealed in a Preface to the third edition of his novel, Dickens "wished to show, in little Oliver, the principle of good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last." Oliver's core goodness cannot be infected by the baseness of his environment. Similarly, the maths teacher tells Hilary that Jean "is the son of someone like you. ... He is of a mental calibre quite different from the other boys. ... I should certainly say that he came from a cultured and intellectual background." (Ch 10). Dickens clearly believed that 'good birth' trumped a terrible upbringing and Laski subscribes to this view; the only difference between them being that Dickens saw things in terms of immutable social classes and Laski in terms of intellect and culture.  

But that's the scenery. The foreground of this part of the book is whether Jean is John. Hilary takes Jean for walks, trying to find evidence, intuitive if not physical. As the author described the pathetic little orphanage boy and charted the developing relationship between Hilary and Jean, I started to urge Hilary to adopt Jean whether or not they are related; my view was shared by some of the other characters in the story and by other readers to whom I have talked. But Hilary knows how much raising a child will disrupt the life he has built around poetry and London and intellectual company. Even encountering the orphanage’s maths teacher, who used to do research into maths at the university in Paris, he finds it “inconceivable that an intelligent man should be happy to live in a provincial town and talk about everything in the world with people less intelligent than himself.” (Ch 10)

I adored this middle section of the book. I was absorbed into Hilary’s dilemmas and I longed desperately for him to make the right choices. This was writing at its most immersive.

This part of the book is the liminal zone, in which Hilary is filled with doubts, conflicts and uncertainties. But a plot must have a conclusion and this is achieved in the final quarter of the book when Hilary goes to the cinema to watch a film and breathe in the cheap perfumes of the women in the audience. He tells himself with his trademark priggishness: “Both the film and the perfume had been manufactured on the assumption that sexual desire was a potent force and that people could choose to lead lives in which the satisfaction of that desire was the driving motive.” (Ch 12) Suddenly his sex-drive is reignited. Immediately, bursting onto the scene like a deus ex machina, temptation arrives in the form of Nelly, a lady whose way of life is supported by multiple men. But Nelly comes with a cost: she’ll only let him love her if he comes to Paris and, since his money is running out, that means abandoning Jean. The scenery changes too from the predominantly drab tones of the lifeless town to the arrival of a circus and fair.

We shift into a higher gear. The need to make a decision becomes more urgent. The tension is ratcheted up. The plot is driven towards its ending. But it all felt a little out of the blue. The transition felt clunky. I felt that I could see the mechanism of the plot being operated. The ending is nail-bitingly tense and hugely dramatic ... but it felt contrived.

In summary, the book certainly works on the level of a page-turning read with an important question and a plot which races to find an ending. There are moments when the nuanced moral challenges reminded me of a Graham Greene story. The centre section of the book was spell-binding. But I found the ending too manipulated. This was a meal that could have been a banquet but was let down by its dessert.

Selected quotes

• “As groups we often do evil that good may come and very often the good does not come and all that is left is the evil we have pointlessly done.” (Ch 1)
• “One can never be short of the end, only of the means, and so we must be sure that the means are good.” (Ch 1)
• “Once - but so long ago! - Hilary had understood food. He had treated his palate as a precious instrument of pleasure, and indulged it with esoteric knowledge. But all this was so far away that his consciousness had forgotten its sensations. For so many years now meals had been dull, methodical exercises less pleasurable, in terms of real pleasure, then the movements of the bowel that were their necessary complements.” (Ch 4)
• “I don't like children as such; they bore me. I used to think a child of my own would make me happy, but I know that isn't true any more.” (Ch 4)
• “The little boy came in and in the instant before his eyes perceived the child there was torn from his blood, his body, his very consciousness the conviction that this was his son.” (Ch 6) I found this sentence ambiguous. Was the conviction torn out of him or away from him?
• “Hilary was a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print.” (Ch 8)
• “When I was a young woman ... there was a word for women who wore clothes for this purpose - and believe me ... that was not ‘member of the Resistance’.” (Ch 10)

November 2024; 220 pages

Originally published by Cresset Press in 1949.

My Persephone Books edition was published in 2001

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler

 

The beautifully written classic of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Crime Writers Association thought it the 2nd best crime novel of all time in their list of the 100 best published in 1990. The Mystery Writers of America rated it 8th in their top 100 published in 1995. Time Magazine chose it as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923).

This is very much a book of two halves. Chandler's hero solves the case for which he has been hired by the 50% mark but he then worries away a couple of loose ends. It was no surprise for me subsequently to discover that he constructed TBS by sticking together two short stories that he had already written Killer in the Rain, 1935, and The Curtain, 1936. He then added threads to make them seem a coherent whole. In the process of this he added his trademark atmospheric descriptions.

TBS is unusual for its time in being a murder mystery in which the first-person narrator is the detective. The tradition, established with Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson and continued with Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, had been to use the sidekick as narrator. Otherwise, most of the stories of the 'golden age of detective fiction' (1920s and 1930s) are written in the never-quite-omniscient (by definition since a mystery must perforce involve hiding things) third person. 

For all his disillusion, Marlowe sees himself as an old-fashioned knight rescuing a damsel in distress. This theme comes from the very first page as Marlowe sees "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.” (Ch 1) Much later, he is considering a chess problem and realises: “Knights had no meaning in this game. it wasn't a game for knights.” (Ch 24) And almost - but not quite - at the end he sees that “The knight in the stained-glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.” (Ch 30) But he does solve the case and he also rescues the damsel.

The joy in TBS doesn't lie in the plot (there is a loose end that is never properly tied up) but in the prose. Marlowe is a master of metaphor and simile and he uses this to create perfect descriptions which are brief but original and as precisely tuned as a resonant frequency:

•  “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and storks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.” (Ch 2)
• “The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.” (Ch 3)
• “She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service.” (Ch 3)
• “Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.” (Ch 6)
• “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” (Ch 8)
• “He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.” (Ch 9)
• “Their accounts of the Affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come - as close as Mars is to Saturn.” (Ch 20)
• “You leak information like a radio announcer.” (Ch 23)
• “He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.” (Ch 26)

His longer descriptions are also meticulously observed:

• “The gourd player rubbed his fingertips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretence was as wasted as the music.” (Ch 22)
• “He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red riddled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.” (Ch 27)

Selected quotes:

• “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.” (Ch 1)
• “She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable.” (Ch 1)
• “I could see ... that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” (Ch 1)
• “There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn't know whether it was any good, not being collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.” (Ch 4)
• “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” (Ch 6)
• “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust. ... A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. you wouldn’t know him.” (Ch 11)
• “You have to have your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on the stray blondes.” (Ch 21)
• “The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change.” (Ch 26)
• “I’m ... just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.” (Ch 30)
• “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep.” (Ch 32; start of final paragraph)

November 2024; 251 pages

First published in 1939 by Knopf in the USA

My edition published in 2011 by Penguin

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy

 

A woman in a mental hospital visits a Utopian future by means of  telepathic time travel.

Connie (Consuela) is a poor Latino woman living in New York. Whilst trying to shelter her niece she breaks a pimp's nose, for which she is returned to mental hospital. Here she is selected for neurosurgery to have electrodes planted in her brain so that she can be controlled. This reminded me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

From time to time Connie visits, through some form of telepathy, a Utopian commune in rural Massachusetts, 160 years in the future. She meets the people and they explain their way of life. It's very communistic and, having liberated women from bearing children and breast-feeding, the genders have equal status. There has been and still is warfare against less enlightened society but her new friends look forward to the time when they will have solved their external problems. 

Connie's problem, which drives the plot, is to avoid the impending neurosurgery. She attempts escape but in the end is forced to considered a more drastic solution.

For me, the very best examples of speculative fiction  keep world-building to a minimum; for example classics such as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham are set firmly in the everyday world we all know ... with one or two little tweaks that make all the difference. Woman on the Edge of Time is the opposite: it indulges in full-throttle world-building. In order that the reader can appreciate all the finer points of the depicted utopia (and an alternate dystopia) it uses a tour-guide approach whereby one of the characters explains all the features of the world to Connie. Not only was this rather wearisome, especially when we had a full chapter on the funeral rites of one of the characters, but also it meant a great deal of telling rather than showing. On the other hand, if you like world-building, it meant that a lot of world got built quickly.

The tour-guide approach reminded me of Virgil leading Dante through Hell in Dante's Inferno and that is referred to rather more explicitly.  As Connie enters the mental hospital we are told “Here she was with her life half spent, Midway through her dark journey". This echoes the first line of the Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ('When in the middle of the journey of our life'). 

At then end of the book we are left with the uncertainty about whether the time travel was real or fantasised by Connie; she is in a mental hospital and she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I found that the sheer unlikelihood of it all made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. I am always slightly suspicious of the idea that if we all went back to nature everyone would be nicer: people in rural areas often seem more fanatically prejudiced than those in more cosmopolitan places. The process of reaching Utopia also always seems underestimated: in the case of this novel there must have been savage depopulation over a relatively short space of time. 

It very much reminded me of News From Nowhere by William Morris in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in another rural paradise in the future. Both in the 'brooder' baby hatchery of Chapter 5 and in the children attempting to have sex in Chapter 7 there are clear echoes of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, WotEoT lacks the moral nuancing of BNW; this is very much a tale of goodies and baddies.

But there are some great characters. Many in the supporting cast felt real and Dolly was a delight, especially when she visits the mental hospital in Chapter 11 and is so befuddled by drugs that she keeps recycling though the same conversation. I enjoyed Jackrabbit as well, although most of the creation of his character came from what others said about him, again a matter of telling rather than showing.

There are some stunning descriptions too, especially of the mental hospital and Connie's attempted escape. The first scene is wonderfully dramatic. I also enjoyed the way the author gave the characters in the future their own words whose meanings the reader had to work out for themselves, a technique used with great effect in The Book of Dave by Will Self and, supremely, in The Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, another book with psychological personality manipulation as a theme.

Selected quotes:

• “She pitched forward, weak as string.” (Ch 1)
• “When blocked, manoeuvre to survive. the first rule of life inside.” (Ch 1)
• "Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror.” (Ch 1) 
• “Houses filled with machines and lapped by grass.” (Ch 2)
• The modern world is described as “fat, wasteful, thing-filled times.” (Ch 3)
• “We are born screaming Ow and I! the gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate.” (Ch 12)
• “Your drug companies labelled things side effects they didn't want as selling points. It's a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers.” (Ch 14)
• “A factory makes a product. But that's not all. It makes there be less of whatever it uses up to make that product. ... A factory may also produce pollution - which takes away drinking water downstream. Dead fish we can't eat. Diseases or gene defects. These too are products of that factory. A factory uses up water, power, space. It uses up the time, the lives of those who work in it. If the work is boring and alienating, it produces bored, angry people.” (Ch 14)

An interesting book but too heavy on the exposition and too light on making the future believable. 

November 2024; 417 pages

Originally published in the US by Knopf in 1976

I read the DelRey edition published in the UK in 2016.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"At the Jerusalem" by Paul Bailey

A compassionate portrait of old age, written almost entirely in dialogue. It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. Its author went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in both 1977 and 1986.

Old Mrs Gadny, still grieving the death of her daughter, goes to live with her stepson and his wife and children. Tensions multiply and she is placed, still depressed, in an old people’s home.

It's a well-paced story with some interestingly nuanced characters. It is written mostly in dialogue. Actions are also recorded but there is virtually no description. In this it reminded me of the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett. However, the dialogue in this novel is much more vernacular than the formal and grammatically correct dialogue that ICB employs. Furthermore, there is a substantial amount of interior monologue from the principal character, Mrs Gadny, interspersed with the dialogue. Here is a typical extract:

"Nurse Barrow watched her eat.
‘Have they missed me?’
‘The ladies?’
- Ladies!
‘Ladies! Have they missed me?’"

Note the extreme brevity of the paragraphs which are often a single sentence long, the preponderance of dialogue, the simplicity of the described action and the inclusion of a single line, in this case a single word, representing  Mrs Gadny's thoughts.  

This gives the novel a bare-bones, minimalist feel. It makes it distinctive. I need to read more novels by Bailey to judge whether this accurately represents his style. 

It is very much of its time. There are only ten ladies in the home and several nurses, a matron and a cook, but they all sleep together in the ward. Some of the ladies used to be ‘in service’. One of them never,  learned to read, this is also true of some of Mrs Gadny's relatives. Some of the patients object, in bluntly racist terms, to being cared for by a black nurse. The phrase ‘Jew-boy’ is used and the word ‘cripples’.

Of course it is sad, since it charts Mrs Gadny's decline. She herself feels that she has been thrown away like "trash". Nevertheless, there are a number of moments of wryly observational humour to lighten the mood.

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the Head of Zeus (2020) edition

• “As crafty as a pox doctors clerk.” (1, p51)
• “This hospital’s in Lambeth, where they've done it. They have a machine there, it's the only one of its kind; just for stomachs. People come from all over the world to take advantage. All over the world ... Dulwich - everywhere.” (1, p 70)
• “This is what you come to: you live for seventy years and you find one night you're stuck in a room, in a chair, and your body’s beneath you, waiting for the chill to strike it, till your eyes see only black and no sound to remind you. You've memories of rooms and faces and all manner of things but they go as quickly as they come. How long before she was nothing? Years?” (3: p208)

November 2024; 216 pages

First published in 1967

This edition published by Head of Zeus

Other, more or less contemporary novels about old people reviewed in this blog include Memento Mori (1959) by Muriel Spark, and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor. Both these books focus on people from a rather higher social bracket; in the Spark book the protagonists live independently and Mrs Palfrey lives in a 'private hotel'. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Her Winter Song" by Anna Vaught

A spooky story set in a village full of rustics under a White Horse hill.

This tiny novella, little more than a short story, 

A Cambridge academic heads to a village in chalk-hilled Wiltshire, where another don, now missing, has recently been doing archaeology. He meets 'the Man' who issues a mysterious warning and describes how he was seduced by the Woman. There are the usual cryptic comments from the yokels in the pub, there is a drink of strange spiced wine, and there is sex both on the hill and in a church whose font is strangely carved. It is the celebration of the 'old' winter solstice symbolising death and rebirth, and there are monsters.

Very Wicker Man but told in a luxuriously lyrical style, full of a Victorian ghost-story vibe but saved from melodrama by some delightful modern touches (eg the Man fits kitchen: "there was a particular fashion for cupboards with many shelves and built-in racks").

Selected quotes:

• "If you hear the strike of the farrier's hammer and remember that there are none in the village, or the blacksmith striking his anvil, when none have lived here for years, leave here quickly. And if you hear hoof taps but see no horse striding towards you ... I am sorry for your loss; it is too late, and you must stay here with me in this perpetual dusk." 
• "I found the instability alluring"
• "As the winter solstice tells us of nights shortening and days lengthening, what we pray for is darkness. Rich aphotic pools of it."

November 2024; 58 pages

Published by Renard Press

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks" (and two other stories) by Natsuko Imamura

 Strange stories from Japan which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion.

The first story concerns a girl who, growing up, discovers that no-one will ever take any food she offers them. Ever. This so upsets her that when she becomes a pair of chopsticks, the joy of delivering food straight into the mouth of her owner is transcendent. (In a nod to panpsychism, the flat is full of other girls and boys who have become blankets, doorknobs, rucksacks, reading lamps etc.)

The second story is about a girl who, no matter how hard she tries, cannot get hit. Water bombs thrown at her miss, frisbees are intercepted by dogs ... She starts self-harming and it is all downhill from then on.

In the third story the protagonist spends her youth lying in her bedroom until one night when, despite having lost the use of her legs, she goes into town. There's a sort of weird 'what if humans were domesticated pets' vibe going on here?

Fiction is all about the art of imagining things that aren't actually true. Although I personally prefer my fiction to stay within the realms of likelihood, fantastic stories have a long and honourable provenance, underlying myth and fairy tales and, in literature, classics from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Often, the point of travelling to the edges of imagination is to critique reality, as with Swift's Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine by H G Wells. Each of the stories in this collection could be analysed in that way (the first is about the need of people to feel useful, the second about the fact that suffering is a psychologically necessary part of the human condition?).

I was intrigued by the fact that these stories are told in a dead-pan style as if weirdness is a normal part of the everyday. I've just read Ronan Hession's Ghost Mountain and that has the same style: a stripped-down delivery without embellishment that leaves no room for doubt despite the unlikelihood of the events it recounts. This style, as encountered from the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.") seems to be able to blur the line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Where the protagonist themselves are transformed, the narration is always in the third person. The only first person narrative in which the narrator-protagonist are themselves transformed that I can recall offhand is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. So it is possible but are there any other examples?

I imagine that there are a number of stories nowadays written from the perspective of a ghost (eg Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost), a zombie, a werewolf, or a vampire but this is a genre I don't really know. I believe Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is narrated by the horse. Other examples? Perhaps I need to dedicate a page on my blog to these sort of stories.

November 2024; 178 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ghost Mountain" by Ronan Hession

 “A meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” 

One day, on the outskirts of a small town, a mountain suddenly appears. This novel, written like a myth, chronicles the effect the mountain has on the lives of those living near it.

The most distinctive feature of this novel is its prose style. It is written in a deliberately simplistic manner, baldly stating facts, with a lot of repetition. It reminded me of the way that a myth is written: this hero did this, this happened, then he did this. It reminded me of the first paragraph of Kafka's Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." This is telling a fantastic story but it does it in such a pedestrian style that it allows no speculation as to how it can possibly be true. Compare it with four paragraphs taken from Book 3 (Elaine is not cold) of Ghost Mountain:

“As she was explaining everything she thought, ‘Am I cold? Is this a cold thing to think?’

But it was not a cold thing to think.

Elaine asked him what he would do afterwards.

Dominic said he would join a monastery. or he would go back to being the town drunk.” 

Perhaps the only way to tell a fantastic myth is to do it simplistically.

The other feature of the story is the repetition of leitmotifs, something else that crops up in myths and religious texts. For example, it seems that no-one can lie down on Ghost Mountain without feeling the discomfort of a stone pressing against their tailbone. Two characters in separate incidents lose their front teeth. A mother and daughter both vomit into a patch of nettles, although one does it because she is dying and the other because she is pregnant. One character enjoys watching European films, each one being described in the same was, as “a meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” (Book 1: Ocho wasn't always like this)

There's also an unsettling moment (Book 2: Weeping Mountain) when a character seems to become another character momentarily while in a lift. Please tell me that's not a misprint!

It is these features that make the book haunting (like the mountain, brooding over the landscape) and, despite the echoes of Kafka (and, perhaps, of Ivy Compton-Burnett), utterly original. Other reviewers have detected a Japanese influence and it has also been described as 'post-modern'. 

Selected quotes:

• “The new overseas landowner of Ghost Mountain sat at his desk, eating a sandwich he had bought from his savings. What he thought of as his savings was actually the limited spare capacity on his credit card.” (1: Overseas landowner)
• “He opened the cupboard to look for food but all he saw were ingredients.” (1: Ruth not with you?)
• “Ruth distrusted organised people. Organised people liked to take over, while pretending they were not taking over. Organised people liked to shape things their way and call it helping.” (1: Night on Ghost Mountain.)
• “They had organised a celebration or commemoration or festival. The organised people always seem to be carried away with something or other. They had a whole story about why the date was significant. It all sounded simplistic to Ruth. They were building a bonfire and playing crude, repetitive music. Drugs were involved.” (1: Bitter soup)
• “He and Ruth were like two sides of the same ladder. Her death was a sundering of the ladder down the middle. Holding one half of a ladder is in no way comparable to holding one side of a complete ladder.” (2: Ocho)
• “She thought about how even though young women were so pretty and older men were not so generally pretty, an older man with two missing teeth could still be a cause of jealousy.” (2: Is he dead?)
• “For the first time, Elaine began to understand likeness in her painting. It was not about recording what somebody looked like so that they could always look that way. It was about capturing a moment of change. A simultaneous moment of change in the subject and in the artist.” (2: Likeness)
• “She thought about the artist thinking about his meat pictures. How was he so sure they were terrible? That they weren't terrible art.” (3: Meat Gallery)
• “Ursula did not like landscapes. ... Most of all she disliked the mental projection that landscapes involved. The fly tipping of the mind onto the landscape. The turning of the landscape into things. Into metaphors.” (3: Ghost Mountain)
• “He had learned that credit disguised failure as success. That a person who owned and owed a lot was viewed as rich whereas a person who owned and owed a little was considered poor. That a rich person was someone who had access to credit and that a poor person was someone who had no access to credit.” (3: Christopher)
• “Dominic was no longer Elaine's husband. He was what was called a widower. That word felt new and also very old. It felt like a word that had been worn by many people and which was now offered to him to wear, even though it did not fit him. It felt too big and baggy and heavy. It was not tailored and had no lines. It was generic and it generically erased his past except for one event. My wife has died, it says. And that is who I am now.” (3: Diesel)

Delightfully enigmatic. November 2024; 281 pages

I've ordered Hession's debut from the library.

Published by Bluemoose books

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rare Singles" by Benjamin Myers

Fifty years ago Bucky cut two records before living the rest of his life in obscurity. Now, newly bereaved, crippled with arthritis and addicted to opioids, he has been invited to leave the US for the first time and travel to Scarborough in England where his four songs have achieved cult status. But he leaves his pills on the plane. Will he be able to battle cold turkey, his pain and his grief to get on stage and sing?

The plot may be stereotypical (aimed straight at Hollywood?) and its inspiration seems to be a blend of Demon Copperhead and Searching for Sugar Man (see below) but the question is whether Ben Myers, a superb author responsible for Cuddy, Pig Iron and The Perfect Golden Circle, can breathe life into it? 

I was disappointed. The key characters all seemed to be exactly as you would expect them. Bucky with his "sweetpea" and his "honey" was a stage American. Dinah's husband and son were predictably awful. The Moslem hotel cleaner had a heart of gold, of course she had. Even the malevolent seagull came straight from central casting. 

Worse, there were several paragraphs of dialogue, mostly involving Dinah, that seemed artificial, designed to provide information rather than to build character. They broke the verisimilitude; I was no longer absorbed in the story but alienated, realising I was a reader and this was a book.

There were some stunning pieces of prose:

• “The whisky tasted of burnt oranges and wet ash, lonely nights and bitter mornings.” (p 106)
• “Voices of doubt grew like stalactites in the dark, dripping caves of his mind.” (p 106)
• “The day had drifted, the morning yawning into afternoon, the afternoon tightening into a cool autumnal evening. Evening glancing towards night.” (p 127)

From most authors, this would have been a decent book but I have come to expect more, much more, from the author who can create the young labourer with the mother dying of cancer in  the final part of Cuddy, John-John in Pig Iron, and the wonderful pair of mavericks in The Perfect Golden Circle. 

Selected quotes:

page references refer to the Bloomsbury hardback edition 2024

• “Down into the rough, cloying quicksand of a second strange sleep.” (p 13)
• “It bombed like Dresden.” (p 22)
• “Dinah knew her love for her son was diminishing ... but she refused to succumb to guilt over this recent realisation, and in fact wondered if love and the capacity to give it had a limit. ... Was there a discernible moment when all the love for someone is gone?” (p 63)
• “Sometimes it seems like the working  life is out to break a man rather than make a man.” (p 85)
• “He had known that this day was coming for years ... What he hadn't expected was that it would be here, wedged between a dreary sea and a low -ceiling sky in a foreign land.” (p 92)
• “The weight of history was pressing him deeper down into the pit of withdrawal. All those memories that he had put into holes and buried. They hadn't disappeared though, merely corroded.” (p 97)
• “Everything that stands against the sea is scrubbed away eventually.” (p 105)
• “Maybell was just better equipped to deal with the day-to-day act of living than he was - and it was an act, because pretending was part of it, always had been. Pretending you were thriving rather than just surviving; pretending you were strong when you felt weak; pretending you didn't give a damn when really you were scared of every shadow; pretending you were happy, you were cool, you were chilling.” (p 132)
• “Rain was indifferent. Rain ruled the world. It amplified his insignificance; it reminded him that just when you think you're at the bottom, there's always further to plummet.” (p 163)
• “Were we simply stagnating like the lonely pond that is no longer being refreshed by rain, and is simply sitting in the sun, losing all its oxygen; all of the life forms that it harbours slowly suffocating, the foetid stench of decay hanging over the unmoving body of browning water.” (p 184)

November 2024; 207 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film about Sixto Rodriguez, a musician from Detroit who cut two albums in the early 1970s which bombed in the US but achieved cult status in apartheid South Africa. The film rather gives the impression that, following his rediscovery, his comeback tour of South Africa was the first time he had played his music for nearly thirty years; in fact he was also well-known in Australia, where he had concert tours in 1979 and 1981, and New Zealand, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Just as in 'Rare Singles', his work has been sampled by rappers and featured in a movie. In my humble opinion, the intro to 'I Wonder' is one of the great bass guitar riffs.

"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “We are made of stories, and if we don't know them - the ones that make us - how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God