"A Town Called Solace" by Mary Lawson

Elizabeth, an old lady dying in a hospital gifts her home in Solace, a town in northern Canada, to Liam. When he moves in he learns that the neighbours' daughter has gone missing. Their other daughter, eight year old Clara, looks after Moses the cat. 

The story is told from the alternating PoVs of Clara, trying to make sense of whatever has happened to her sister, Liam, bearing the wounds of a failed marriage, and Elizabeth, seeking redemption for something that happened long ago, when she lived next door to Liam and he was four. Their stories gently intertwine. But perhaps the most important character is Solace, the small town where everyone knows almost everything about everyone and neighbour looks out for neighbour. Never has a town been more appropriately named. 

It is, perhaps, a little naive. Solace is an Eden of innocence, from the friendly local cop to the unfriendly waitress to the friendly local carpenter and builder to the over-friendly ice-cream making librarian. Everything bad happens outside the town limits, particularly in the fleshpots of Toronto. 

And I'm not sure that I agree that High Noon has an awful theme song. I quite like the tune. Although I must confess that it has one of the worst rhymes of all time in the lyrics: "He made a vow while in state's prison/ Swore it would be my life or his'n." Please!

Selected quotes:

• "The kitchen had seemed to smoke with her rage." (Ch 1)
• "Clara couldn't look at him because his face frightened her as much as her mother's. It wasn't blotchy with crying; instead, it had a cheerful look pasted on like a mask that didn't fit properly." (Ch 1)
• "Liver for lunch. I hate liver. And I don't think it's tactful serving offal to patients whose own innards might be causing them distress." (Ch 2)
• "She must have picked the nightie out of an Eaton's catalogue under the horribly mistaken impression that it would make her look like the girl modelling it. Clearly there is no full-length mirror in the house. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose." (Ch 5)
• "His life prior to coming north seemed to be taking on the qualityn of an old movie, one in which he'd been deeply engrossed while watching it but which now seemed trivial, unconvincing and profoundly lacking in either colour or plot." (Ch 15)
• "Their father cried, right there on the porch, right there in front of Dr Christopherson and Sergeant Barnes." (Ch 16)
• "Arrogance is so unattractive it amounts to a disfigurement." (Ch 17)
• "They were in bed, lying on their backs, wearing nothing under the covers but a light sheen of sweat." (Ch 18)

An easy if unchallenging read with some moments of delicate lyricism. May 2024; 288 pages.

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

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

"Memento Mori" by Muriel Spark

A group of old people start getting anonymous phone calls: each one says, "Remember you will die." They attend one another's funerals. Old people in and out of geriatric wards write and rewrite their wills. A housekeeper companion, disappointed not to receive an inheritance from the woman she had been caring for, infiltrates another old household and tries to convince the elderly woman (a famous novelist) that she is losing her marbles; she blackmails her husband. Old people remember love affairs from long ago and the ramifications haunt some of them. Memoirs are written. One old man has a penchant for staring at suspenders and stockings in situ.

As John Mullan said in his 2021 Gresham College lecture, "n Muriel Spark novels, murders are common while blackmail is more or less a narrative principle." In this novel, Spark considers the issue of ageing with her trademark humour. It's a fun book but it is dated and not just by the 'geriatric ward'. Almost all of the characters are posh (not just a famous writer but also a Dame) and wealthy, employing maids and manservants, and it says something for the author's prejudices that the main villain is one of the few lower class characters. 

• Selected quotes:
• "Godfreys wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology." (Ch 1)
• "Godfrey ... took from a drawer a box of matches and a razor blade and set to work, carefully splitting the slim length of each match, so that from one box of matches he would eventually make two boxes." (Ch 3)
• "He ate half of what he had been sent." (Ch 5) In Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (which also includes blackmail) the protagonist loses weight by eating half of whatever is on her plate.
• "Godfrey was turning upon her as one who had been awaiting his revenge ... It was an instinctive reaction to the years of being a talented, celebrated woman's husband, knowing himself to be reaping continually in her a harvest which he had not sown." (Ch 6)
• "These thoughts overwhelmed Mrs Pettigrew with that sense of having done a foolish thing against one's interests, which in some people stands for guilt." (Ch 6)
• "Then she suddenly felt sorry for him, huddled among his bones." (Ch 10)
• "How banal and boring, Guy thought, do the most interesting people become when they are touched by a little but of guilt." (Ch 14)

Not only entertaining but full of acute observations regarding old age and the approach to death. May 2024; 226 pages)

Also by Muriel Spark and reviewed in this book:

• A Far Cry from Kensington
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye

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

"An Orchestra of Minorities" by Chigozie Obiomoa

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.

This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)

A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen. 

As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).

But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality. 

Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp? 

Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education. 

But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).

I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity. 

I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world. 

Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.

A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.

I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him. 

Alternatively, one of the members of my U3A Meads reading group suggested that the chi might be an unreliable narrator. She supported this contention with the following evidence (page numbers from the paperback edition):

On page 374, the chi explicitly states that he is only allowed to remember what the host 'affirms to' which is a little at odds with the fact that the chi can relate occasions when he has left the host's body and gone to places of which the host has, presumably, no idea, unless the host dreams these experiences.

On page 339, the chi says: “ I know it is possible that our recollections are not always accurate.....”

And in the preface, the chi has assrted: “If the prey do not produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in the stories of the hunt”.

Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.

Selected quotes:

• "Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief." (Ch 2)
• "After he had combed through the thick hide of night, as one would search for lice on the skin of a densely furred animal, he returned home in anguish." (Ch 2)
• "He broke from the group like a wheel unhooked from a fast-moving car and rolled into the void." (Ch 3)
• "When a man encounters something that reminds him of an unpleasant event in his past, he pauses at the door of the new experience, carefully considering whether or not to go in. If he has already stepped in, he may retrace his steps and reconsider whether to re-enter." (Ch 4)
• "Discretion was at the centre of his self-esteem. It was must be kept alive to maintain him." (Ch 4)
• "I have dwelt among mankind long enough to realise that they do not store information about those who have hurt them as they do others. This kind is kept in tightly sealed jars whose lids must be opened to remember them." (Ch 4)
• "He decided to attend the party with only a part of him attuned to it, dragging along the other intransigent half." (Ch 7)
• "The character of human shame is chameleonic." (Ch 8)
• "Soon, someone who has a bachelor's degree would be useless, because everyone would have it." (Ch 8)
• "A person must reconsider their position if everyone else is saying something that contradicts their own position." (Ch 8) A refutation of Kipling's "If you can keep your head while all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 
• "Seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit." (Ch 9)
• "For this was the way of the universe: when a man has reached the edge of his peace, the universe lends a hand, usually in the form of another person." (Ch 11)
• "The worst thing adversity can do to someone is to make them become who they are not." (Ch 12)
• "Speak only what you know. If a fact is thin, do not feed it to make it fat. If a fact is rich, do not take from it to make it lowly. If a fact is short, do not stretch it to make it long. Truth resists the hand that creates it, so that it is not bound by that hand. It must exist in the state in which it was first created." (Ch 13)
• "It is God that swats the fly from the bottom of a tailless cow and from the food of the blind man." (Ch 15) Another refutation , this time of the proverb "God helps those who help themselves"; inverting it to become 'God helps those who cannot help themselves."
• "A man sits here all day, merely alive, the enamels of life peeling away from him and withering into flecks at his feet." (Ch 18)
• "Anticipation is one of the most curious habits of the human mind. It is a drop of vicious blood in the vein of time." (Ch 20)
• "Revenge is a debris field." (Ch 20)
• "He wept for the time which would not replenish itself." (Ch 20)
• "The mind of man is a field in a wild forest on which something, no matter how small, must graze." (Ch 26)

A carefully crafted novel with an ingenious narrative technique and some delightful insights into the human condition. May 2024; 512 pages

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

"The Other Renaissance" by Paul Strathern

Strathern attempts to show that things happening in Northern Europe during the 'Renaissance' (which he fails to define but I presume he means the period from about 1450 to 1600) were on a par with, or more important, things happening around the Mediterranean: "three of the most significant events of the entire Renaissance era would take place north of the Alps" (Prologue), those three being: the invention of movable-type printing, Protestantism, and a heliocentric universe.

To prove his thesis, he provides a number of mini-biographies of mostly well-known figures such as Gutenberg, Luther and Copernicus. Such a cherry-picked sample can't prove anything. Indeed, some of his selections (Paracelsus, for example) seem self-defeating. At one stage he suggests that “The entire Renaissance can be seen as bursting free from the constraint of systematic medieval thought.” But this is in his chapter on Montaigne and on the very next page he points out that Montaigne’s philosophy saw belief in God as a precondition and science as superficial, both attitudes which I would suspect Strathern would regard as typically mediaeval. 

He also repeatedly makes the point that much of what he would characterise as Renaissance behaviours were accompanied by a background of strife, such as the religious wars catalysed by the Lutheran revolution: “Civil turmoil has frequently been accompanied by historic transformations.” (Ch 16) But other renaissances, such as that in twelfth century Europe which led to the first universities and the explosion in demotic literatures, depend on stability (in this case the reduction in threat from Viking raids from the north, Islamic invasion from the south, and Huns and Mongols from the east).

I also think he minimises the intra-Europe links. For example, amongst other contributors to the Northern Renaissance he lists John Cabot, who was born in Genoa, Pietro Torrigiano, from Florence, and Catherine de' Medici, another Florentine. Others such as Copernicus and Nicholas of Cusa were educated or worked in Italy. 

On the other hand, if his intention is to show that developments in northern Europe were equally significant to those south of the Alps, I think he has succeeded. 

The selection of biographies seemed eclectic. As I have said, some were so well known that it scarcely seemed worthwhile rehashing the details. But there are plenty of others about whom I knew nothing, such as Dietrich of Freiburg (although he scarcely fits the time frame), François Viète, and Etienne de La Boétie, or little, such as Nicholas of Cusa, the Fuggers, Mercator, and Vesalius. Unfortunately, for some of these relative unknowns, such as Rabelais (quoted as saying both ‘If you don't want to see a fool, then break your mirror.’ and ‘A child is not a vase to be filled but a fire to be lit.’), and Montaigne, I wished there had been more information. I definitely want to read them both. Strathern can't win! He's wide-ranging but this inevitably comes at the price of an element of superficiality.

The asterisks used to indicate a footnote were extraordinarily small and so very easy to miss. This was a shame since the footnotes sometimes provided fascinating information (see the Selected Quotes below). Otherwise, it is well written (although there are a couple of typos where a date in the 1500s has suddenly been put back 100 years), easy to read and enjoyable. Overall, it is an excellent introduction to the subject.

Selected quotes:

• “There appear to be certain elements common to all these early capitalistic exchanges: a thriving commercially minded bourgeoisie, an entrepreneurial ethos willing to take risks in order to achieve gain, and a form of loosely democratic city governance.” (Ch 2)
• “At the time, the word ‘idiot’ was a general term used to describe any layman or private individual who did not hold public office.” (Ch 3 fn)
• “As a polygon inscribed in a circle increases in number of sides ... so the mind approximates to truth but never coincides with it ... Thus knowledge is at best conjecture.” (Nicholas of Cusa, Ch 3)
• “The decay in China largely came about because of the separation between the intellectuals of the court (philosophers, poets, theologians) and the common people, whose mercantile practices were leading to ever-greater efficiencies, innovations and wealth.” (Ch 3)
• “The silver for these coins would come from the mines at Joachimsthaler in Bohemia, which provided silver for coins all over Germany and Austria. such currency became known as Joachimsthalers, which became shortened to thalers - the origin of the word ‘dollar’.” (Ch 8 fn)
• "Georgius Macropedius [was] regarded by many as the greatest Latin dramatist of the 16th century. Indeed his plays were so widely known that they would later influence the young William Shakespeare. Some of Macropedius’s works were adaptations of ancient Roman comedies by Terence and Plautus.” (Ch 13)
• “Not for him the easy dismissal of human actions or monstrous behaviour as simply ‘evil’, ‘barbarous’, ‘depraved’ or the like. It is by means of such words of disapproval that we distance ourselves from such acts. Montaigne insisted that we instead identify ourselves with such acts, and try to understand how we ourselves might have committed them.” (Ch 16)
• "Ivan the Terrible ... insisted that all his close advisers and courtiers drank with him each evening to ensure that they were too drunk to oppose him, and too hungover in the morning to plot against him.” (Ch 19 fn)

A wide-ranging and enjoyable history. April 2024; 324 pages

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

"The Jew's Beech" by Droste Hulshoff

 First published in German in 1842, this novella includes lots of Gothic elements such as poretending thunderstorms and corpses discovered in forests ... and two men who look very much alike. Friedrich Mergel is the clever peasant son of a mother who was physically abused by her husband; he has a short temper and ideas 'above his station in life'. He is best friends with his lookalike Johannes Niemand, a rather dim peasant whose name means Johnny Nobody. 

It's basically a prototype murder mystery. At the core of the story are Friedrich's Uncle Simon, a dodgy dealer for whom Friedrich works, and a team of crooks who are illegally cutting down trees, repeatedly pursued by foresters. One of these foresters is found dead after having had an argument with Friedrich; the lad is suspected but there is no proof one way or another. Four years later, Aaron the Jew, to whom Friedrich owes money, is found dead. Friedrich runs off - with Johannes - and disappears and is consequently again suspected of the crime but later exonerated after another man who later commits suicide confesses to killing a Jew named Aaron. Then, twenty-eight years later ...

The biggest difference from today's whodunnit tropes is this statement just over half-way through the book: "For the sake of those readers who are perhaps eager to learn the outcome of this affair, I must mention that it was never cleared up." (p 59) It seems that Anthony Trollope (as I have observed in reviews of his books The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, and Barchester Towers) was not the only author who enjoyed the self-spoiler. In this case, Hulshoff excuses herself: "It would be unfair to leave the reader's curiosity unsatisfied in a tale of fiction, but all this really happened - I cannot subtract or add anything." (pp 59 - 60)

The story has the folklore quality of a Grimms' fairy tale and the rustic setting of a pre-industrial Germany in which the countryfolk are utterly unromantic and mostly, it seems, petty thieves. There was a whiff of Silas Marner in the relationship between the party-loving peasants and the paternalistic squire. It was a delightful glimpse into a vanished world.

Selected quotes: 

(page numbers refer to the paperback edition translated by Lionel and Doris Thomas and published by Alma Classics in 2024)

• "A house which, boasting a chimney and window panes rather larger than usual, testified to the pretensions of its builder, while its dilapidated state indicated the miserable circumstances of the present owner." (p 15)
• "an eerie fellow in whom pompous reserve often alternated with a candour just as affected." (p 25)
• "When children are small, they trample on our laps - when they are big, on our hearts!" (p 54)
• "As soon as anybody had a few shillings to spare, he wanted to have a wife as well who would help him eat well today and starve tomorrow." (p 64)
• "As she let everything given to her go to rack and ruin, the village people had soon tired of helping her, for it is natural to man to abandon those who are actually the most helpless." (p 87)
• "The fields were bare, the leaves began to fall, and many a consumptive felt the shears of fate at his life thread." (p 94)

April 2024; 99 pages

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

"The Fragile Land" by Simon Mundy

 This is a retelling of the story of 'King' Arthur. It draws on both the legends and the 'historical' sources: thus it includes the story of the sword in the stone, Arthur is not a 'King' but Overlord - Dux Bellorum, meaning Warlord in the sources - and the story culminates in the Battle of Mons Badonicus. It is set in the context of a Britain that has reverted to fragmented Celtic Kingdoms after the Romans have left and is being assailed by raiders and invaders: Hibernians from Ireland and Anglo-Saxons ('Barbarians') from across the North Sea.

It is divided into three books. Book One starts with a long scene-setting description like a Victorian novel and then seemed to morph into a retelling of The Sword in the Stone by T H White, as Geraint, a teenage princeling living in a tiny kingdom on the English-Welsh border is told by Myrddin (Merlin) that he is really Arthur and trained to become Overlord of Britannia. There was a clear 'Hero's Journey' moment when Geraint rejects the call but his rebellion seems to fizzle out before the next day dawns. Book Two, set sixteen years later, starts with a battle and then follows the twists and turns of Arthur's diplomatic attempts to create an effective unity amongst the discordant Britannian Kings, culminating in a conference around a Round Table. Book Three, set later that year, sees the climactic battle of Badon and sets off for the sequel as Medraut (Mordred) is introduced and Arthur plans to marry Gwynafir (Guinevere).

It's the sort of historical novel that uses huge amounts of detail to create verisimilitude. We know the details of Arthur's meals, his sleeping arrangements, the ebb and flow of the battles, and all the complexities of the negotiations with the Kings. Arthur crisscrosses the land and we learn of every town he passes through - each one referred to by its Roman name. There are over twenty kingdoms referred to by their Celtic tribal names. He meets a large number of characters (there were at least a dozen kings at the big conference). Despite repeatedly referring to a cast list and a list of all the towns and their modern equivalents and a map of all the Kingdoms, I was overwhelmed. How was I supposed to keep track and distinguish between Caldoros King of Dumnonia and Candidianos King of Dobunnia, or Cunorix King of Catuvellaunia and Cunegnus King of Cornovia? All this plethora of detail made it sound like an authentic history but it was exhausting.

The real danger with having a cast of thousands is being unable to create characters of sufficient depth and complexity. Most of the Kings were ciphers, either goodies (eg Candidianos) or baddies (eg Cunorix and Vortebelos). But the principals were nicely drawn. Arthur was an interesting Jekyll and Hyde character: one moment cultured, thoughtful and kind, the next a decisive and ruthless warrior. The rivalry between Gwenan his lover who wanted to be his queen and Modlen his tongueless scribe who wanted to be his mistress was nicely played. Myrrdin was, as usual, played for laughs: "the old advisor relished the company of a good-looking young woman who was intelligent enough to understand what he was talking about but couldn't interrupt him." (Ch 24)

There were some clever resonances drawn between Arthur's Britain and our own. The country is depicted as having been cut off from the continent by the withdrawal of the Romans (echoes of Brexit) and by the conservatism of some of the Kings who seek to return to the pre-Roman past. Like Arthur we live in a post-imperial past, forever confronted by reminders of ancient glories: "I just feel despair at living in such an inadequate generation." (Ch 5)  The hostility to the Hibernians and Anglo-Saxons had parallels with that directed to modern immigrants. The decay of their cities (in part caused by plague) seems to mirror those of our own, post-austerity post-Covid times: "these ancient ruins, so depressing in their dereliction - not because of how destroyed they were, but because of what they said about how the country had changed for the worse." (Ch 10)  There's even a nod to climate change: the Barbarians are, in part, being forced to leave their coastline "as water levels rose" (Ch 11)

These subtle connections enriched the narrative of this extraordinarily detailed historical novel.

April 2024; 398 pages

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

"The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" by M John Harrison

What brilliant writing. Winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 'fiction at its most novel' in 2020.

This was a fascinating book. Although it has been characterised as fantasy, because the author has written works of fantasy and scifi before, it is embedded so deeply in gritty reality that I think its genre is more magical realism. 

There is an element of fantasy in it. There are repeated references to water and both the major characters have experiences of strange green creatures associated with the water. This is flagged up in some folklore and urban myths, such as the tale of a seventy-year-old man who believed there were things alive in his toilet bowl: "Everywhere Patrick Reed passed water, green children grew." (Ch 5) with the suggestion that these creatures, like aphids, can photosynthesise.

The watery theme runs through the book. Every chapter has some reference to water, or fish, or something aqueous. Many of the characters have names that link to something aquatic, such as Pearl, or Reed, or Shaw {Shore}. The townsfolk where Victoria lives seem to be fascinated by The Water Babies. Shaw lives in Wharf Terrace and works on a barge. Victoria's favourite cafe turns into an aquarium shop. 

It shares a feeling that the characters a deeply embedded in their locations, much like the novels of John Burnside (for example Glister and The Devil's Footprints). In chapter three, Shaw, one of the two protagonists, tells Victoria, the other one, that he is "making his way dérive by dérive up the Brent river." I had to look up the meaning of 'dérive'. It is a French word, translated as drift, and refers to an unplanned journey through an urban landscape; it was coined in 1956 by an avant garde intellectual and can be used to analyse the 'psychogeography' of a situation. This, I think, is a clue to the book. The characters more or less meander through their urban environments, Shaw in riverside London, Victoria is a Midlands town on the Severn. Neither of them have definite directions, both are drifting. There is some sort of plot underlying it all, I think, but there seemed to me to be a number of loose ends and neither protagonist nor myself really understood what was going on. Nevertheless, I found it compelling reading.

In the sense that the characters wander through a landscape, it is very like Ulysses by James Joyce, or Hunger by Knut Hamsun, or Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and it made me wonder whether all stream-of-consciousness books are essentially dérives. But this novel is not stream of consciousness. It is told in the third person and it feels more like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, another dérive with elements of fantasy, which in turn has been compared with Kafka.

The style of the prose, and this is definitely one of those books you read for the prose, reminded by of the work of Tony Hanania such as Homesick and Eros Island. It seems characterised by original descriptions and closely observed behaviours. One of the hallmarks is the non-sequitur: "The wind rose a little, bringing smells of fried food and the faint sounds of jackdaws keeping watch from the ruins of Geoffrey de Lacy's keep. To get some idea of its own strength, perhaps, it rustled about in the dry-cleaner's bag on Pearl's arm. She looked down absently and then away again." (Ch 7). That final sentence is unmoored from what went before and what comes after. In chapter 12, Shaw critiques the logic of Tim's beliefs and book: "None of it made any sense to Shaw. When he said so, Time nodded wisely, as if a careful academic point had been made. 'What haunts me is exactly that! In the end, is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?' ... Stories reproduced from every type of science periodical appeared cheek-by-jowl with listicle and urban myth. These essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means to produce apparently causal relationships. Perfectly sound pivots, such as 'however' or 'while it remains true that' connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content." (Ch 12) I felt that the author was being, to some extent, self-referential, mirroring this sort of prose to give his narrative an eerie sense of unreality whilst using descriptions to boost verisimilitude, creating a sense of contradiction.

Much of the dialogue has the feel of snippets of overheard conversation, squashed together. Of Victoria's emails, it is said: "They were less like emails than the sound of a cheerful but indistinct radio programme coming from an open window a little way down the street." (Ch 12) The dialogue is like that, less for communication than to flesh out the ambience of a situation. 

I loved it!

Selected quotes:

• "The tea had a metallic taste, as if it was dissolving a spoon." (Ch 2)
• "The woods were soft. Sluggish brooks dissected them at random. Beneath sphagnum and hart's tongue and crusts of dead leaves over black mud lay the contorted and paradoxical strata from which, for almost a thousand years, the local profits had been gouged." (Ch 7) This is a book founded on 'contorted and paradoxical strata'. 
• "Early afternoon had fixed the old man and his daughter like figures in a symbolic painting, the one hunched eternally over his meal, the debris of which had spread to the table around the plate; the other behind the counter, with her damp cloth, her still life of cupcakes under glass and her long-distance stare." (Ch 7)
• "His eyes were the oldest, most used-up part of him." (Ch 7)
• "The scaffolding had already come down, across a morning, pole after pole ringing on the bed of the waiting lorry like the parts of an experimental xylophone." (Ch 7)
• "They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go." (Ch 8)
• "He was staring into the display window of an estate agent, one of the crocodile of a dozen or so that slithered its way up the high street from the river." (Ch 13). Why is it that estate agents always hunt in packs?
• "In repose their faces had the raw look of people who have become, too early in life, estate agents or wellness coordinators." (Ch 14)
• "It had started to rain. The quenched air outside the window smelled autumnal - rubbish bins, diesel particulates, something unidentifiable from the river." (Ch 15)
• "The air was dark and rain-stained." (Ch 16)
• "People assume they have a swim bladder ... some basic assumption - less about themselves than about their world - that keeps them, upright and afloat." (Ch 16)

Mesmerisingly well-written. April 2024; 254 pages

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

 

"Grey Bees" by Andrey Kurkov

Sergeyich lives with his six bee hives in a small village in the no-man's-land between the Ukrainian army and the Russian-backed separatists of the Donblas region. Only one other person lives in the village: Pashka, his friend whom Sergeyich has disliked since school. There is no electric power, so the TV doesn't work and Sergeyich can't even charge his mobile. During the long cold days of winter, the boredom is broken only by the sound of artillery overhead, Sergeyich's scheme to rename the villages two roads, the arrival of the post during a truce and the occasional visitor. There is a dead man in the field behind the house and a sniper somewhere in the village. 

The first half of the book describes how Sergeyich endures. It reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In the second half, Sergeyich spends summer in his beaten-up old Lada, seeking an orchard where his bees can find pollen and make honey while he lives with them in tent, occasionally making forays to town. His first stop, an idyll with a lady shopkeeper, comes to an end when the hostility and suspicion he faces boils over into violence. So he travels to Russian-held Crimea where he meets a family of Tartars. 

In the blurb, the Telegraph reviewer describes the author as a "post-Soviet Kafka". I looked up 'Kafkaesque' in as thesaurus and discovered synonyms such as nightmarish, surreal, phantasmagoric and illusory, all words which I would associate with Ishiguro's The Unconsoled but not this novel. There are similarities with Kafka. When Sergeyich confronts the state, usually in the form of law enforcement or the military, he is baffled by it but often it treats him well, letting him pass through borders with ease; in my experience it can be more difficult gaining access to the USA. Another similarity to Kafka's prose (and Solzhenitsyn's) is the deadpan delivery. Sergeyich does this and thinks that: there is no melodrama here, even though he confronts life or death situations.  But I wouldn't call this book Kafkaesque.

It reminded me more of a picaresque in which the lovable rogue is replaced as protagonist by a lovable innocent. In some ways Sergeyich is the holy fool found in Russian literature such as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. His adventures reminded me of Candide in Voltaire's Candide or the hero of The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek (although I read that a long time ago and it is rather hazy in my memory). 

But he wasn't particularly innocent. He tells Petro, the Ukrainian soldier, where the sniper's hideout is and shortly afterwards the sniper is blown to bits by a land mine placed under his lair. Clearly Sergeyich is responsible for this death. You can forgive this. The man was a sniper; he probably killed the man Sergeyich sees lying dead at the start of the book. But you can't describe Sergeyich as innocent.

The foreword, which refers to the Russo-Ukrainian war, suggests that the author intends this book to convey a message, although what that message is rather bewilders me. Is it that a holy fool, clumsy in the way he interacts with other people (though invariably getting away with it) can, by his meddling, cause harm? Or is it simply to show how an ordinary man, bumbling through live without ever taking sides, can survive when the rest of the world is riven by conflict?

Why is everyone so nice to Sergeyich, starting with Petro but continuing with ex-wife Vitalina, occasional girlfriend Galya and beekeeper Bekir? Almost everyone, including border guards, help and support Sergeyich; some journalists even hold a whip-round to pay for the damage to his car. There are a couple of villains, but even they aren't very effective.

The characters are fascinatingly under-drawn. Precisely what is Pashka's relationship with the separatists; is it sinister or is it no different to Sergeyich's relationship with the Ukranian soldier Petro who, for some reason I didn't understand, repeatedly risks his life to service Sergeyich's smallest whims? Perhaps the fuzzy drawing of the other characters reflects Sergeyich's own lack of interest in other people. He's only really interested in his bees.

This is the second 'beekeeper' book I have read recently, the first being The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri in which the hero is a refugee from the Syrian civil conflict. Perhaps there is a cultural meme which uses beekeeping as a shorthand for 'innocent fleeing war'. Although the hero of TBoA isn't an innocent either; he also causes a bad man to be killed.

Selected quotes:

• "You live somewhere long enough, and you'll have more family in the ground there than above it." (Ch 4)
• "He listened to himself coughing as if were outside his body, as if he had been split in two: the patient-self and the healer-self." (Ch 10)
• "The sun appeared to be weakening, as if its voltage had dropped." (Ch 16)
• "Sergeyich missed work ... Not the kind you have to travel to in packed minibuses, but the kind your hands itch to get done. Labour like that can distract you from idle sadness, and can even bring you joy, if it has an immediate goal - like the removal of snow, for example." (Ch 21)
• "Smoking kills - vodka thrills." (Ch 24)
• "He wouldn't always show up drunk, of course; sometimes he wouldn't show up at all." (Ch 25)
• "It's better to talk when you're with a person - when their voice isn't torn loose from their body, when you can see them." (Ch 38)
• "He found himself in a fairy tale, where nature not only serves people but dotes upon them." (Ch 46)

April 2024; 349 pages

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

"The New Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan

 A sort of economic history of the future world, this book considers the shift in global economic power from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in particular considering the economic rise of China whose GDP on a “purchasing power parity” basis has risen from 39% of the US in 2001 to 114% in 2016. This phenomenal growth has been achieved by investing in infrastructure, particularly energy and transport. And this is a story seen in other nations too, for example in India. But not in the West. Frankopan states that according to the OECD “not one of the ten fastest-growing economies of 2017 is located in the western hemisphere, nor has one been for the last decade.” (The Roads to the East)

Now China is seeking to export its economics to the world. To safeguard its growing demand for food, it is purchasing food producers in other Asian countries and in Africa and Australia. And it is investing over a trillion US dollars, again principally in transportation and energy production, in over 80 countries in central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Their shipping initiatives alone could reduce shipment times by an average of 12% and trading costs by 10%. 

There are downsides and not just the environmental impact. The China investment programme risks feeding corrupt elites and saddling poor countries with unsustainable debts (which have led to the Chinese seizing control of national assets including territory). And many of the countries “have poor records on human rights, limited freedom of expression in matters of faith, conscience and sexuality, and control their media.” (The Roads to the Future) But when the West's response to, for example, human rights violations is to wield the big stick and impose sanctions, the Chinese are poised to offer help, increasing their economic power and weakening that of the West.

Indeed, the West is shown to be almost totally outplayed in this game. Sometimes they don't even realise what is happening. “The relentless focus on the White House, on Brexit and on the day's latest breaking news ... means there is limited focus on what is going on elsewhere in the world.” (The Roads to the Heart of the World) When they do react it is often to shoot themselves in the foot. Trump's sanctioning of Iran and attempts to sanction those who traded with Iran pushed a number of countries including Russia and Turkey towards China. The UK concern over immigration has meant that “More anglophone students from across Africa now take courses in China than they do in either the UK or the US.” (The Roads to Beijing) “Compared with the Silk Roads and Asia, Europe is not so much moving at a different speed as in a different direction. Where the story in Asia is about increasing connections, improving collaboration and deepening co-operation, in Europe the story is about separation, the re-erection of barriers and ‘taking back control’.” (The Roads to the Future) Profound Eurocentrism betrays a lack of historical perspective and is “symptomatic of the melancholy that accompanies the setting of the sun in a part of the world that has enjoyed the benefits of centuries basking in its warm rays.” (The Roads to the Future)

Already much of the world view the West with deep suspicion. The US, for example, is viewed as responsible for the instability in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They are seen as wanting to prevent the change that is lifting so many out of poverty. “Those most incentivized to apply the brakes are those with the most to lose - namely the west, which having been asleep at the wheel now wants to return to ‘ normal’ and expects the newcomers to resume their old positions in the world order.” (The Roads to the Future) As a consequence of these perceptions, they are losing friends. “It is striking to note just how few true allies the US has around the world, and how even long-term partners question it's basic reliability.” (The Roads to the Future)

As someone who values liberal democracy and the right to free speech, not to mention my comfortable way of life, this book made me profoundly fearful for the future. But it is cogently argued and the conclusions seem inescapable. “As new connections forge and old links are renewed ... the west is in danger of becoming less and less relevant. When the west does engage in playing a role, it is invariably to intervene or interfere in ways that create more problems than they solve - or to place obstacles and restrictions in place that limit the growth and prospects of others.” (The Roads to the Future)

The only thing that makes sense is for us to play the same game as the Chinese. We need to invest in infrastructure, especially transport links and renewable energy. We need to invest in making friends (and trading partners) around the world instead of becoming defensive and pulling up the drawbridge. We even have to accept that our own lifestyles must be sustainable and on the basis of equality with others around the world. As Chinese president Xi Jinping says, "
the real enemy 'is not the neighboring country; it is hunger, poverty, ignorance, superstition and prejudice’.” (The Roads to the Future)

An eye-opening book. April 2024; 289 pages

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