Ancient Drama, Modern Blood

Published with an endorsement on the cover from S J Watson, The Amber Fury is being billed as a 'thriller' and a 'page-turner'. This seems to me to be an example of what happens when the marketing department is allowed too much influence in a book's categorisation. Yes, there is murder here - two murders in fact - but Natalie Haynes' fictional debut is really a novel of ideas.

Alex, a promising young theatre director, whose boyfriend was killed while intervening to protect a woman in a street brawl, moves to Edinburgh to start a new life and takes on a job teaching in a unit for children expelled from the regular state system.

She decides to teach her class of problematic fifteen-year-olds about Greek drama and in a series of distinctly improbable conversations that takes up most of the first hundred pages, they discuss plays plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.

The effect of considering all this heavyweight dramatic material laden with explosive themes such as guilt and sacrifice , destiny and revenge is that one of her dysfunctional students becomes obsessed with the tragedy that overtook Alex before her arrival in Edinburgh and decides to intervene in her life, with dreadful consequences.

This is really interesting and thought-provoking premise. I enjoyed reading the novel greatly and it certainly fulfilled one of the author's intentions in that it made me want to go back and re-read those Greek tragedies. I just think that to label it as a thriller does the author no favours whatsoever.

An Authentic Voice From The English Civil War

The English Civil War is so often portrayed as a conflict between the royalists and the puritans that one forgets it began as a conflict between the king and parliament. So it is interesting to read a novel set during this initial period before the whole edifice of English society had been overturned but when, nevertheless, structures were beginning to crumble.

Cleverly dovetailed into history, with its spurious but convincing provenance and its cast of real and invented characters, The Last Roundhead is the story of Blandford Candy, who is obliged to join the parliamentary army to avoid a scandal at home.

It's a period of political and military uncertainty. Both sides are at war but both sides are also involved in a protracted series of negotiations. Many of the parliamentarians still feel a good deal of loyalty towards their king and although attitudes are hardening , there is still room for sympathies to change. It is in this environment that Blandford finds his true vocation. He becomes a Scout, a spy for the parliamentary party with a licence to unravel the enemy's machinations.

To his own surprise, he proves successful at espionage but everything else in his life goes awry. His friends are killed; he loses the woman he loves; and his two brothers, who have joined the royalist party, are determined to see him dead. Finally, he becomes the target of an a determined assassination plot.

Laced with disenchantment at the incompetence of powerful men, the novel pulls off that difficult trick of seeming entirely authentic while simultaneously resonating with a contemporary sensibility. When I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the history books and find out more about the characters who flitted in and out of its pages.

Original post: briankeaney.booklikes.com/post/1185386/an-authentic-voice-from-tAn Authentic Voice From The English Civil Warhe-english-civil-war

A Land Fit For Misfits

Set during the Second World War, Crooked Heart is the story of two complete misfits: ten year old Noel, a precociously intelligent but socially inept orphan who lives in Hampstead with his ex-suffragette godmother; and thirty-six year old Vera, an uneducated widow living in St Albans whose life has been a shabby catalogue of failures and whose energies are devoted to a series of semi-criminal money-making schemes

The two are thrown together when Noel's godmother loses first her sanity and then her life, and he is evacuated. Vera volunteers to take him in solely for the allowance that comes with him, in the mistaken belief that he will be easy to manipulate.

Despite his age, Noel turns out to be a great deal better at scheming than Vera and soon the pair of them are working as a team, posing as charity collectors and pocketing the takings. Then, just when things seem to be going well for them, Vera's feckless son, Donald, throws a spanner in the works: all their ill-gotten wealth is lost and they are suddenly homeless.

Lissa Evans is a wonderfully witty author, her writing sprinkled with nicely-turned phrases. Anxious Vera is compared to a 'magpie hanging around a picnic'. Always intimidated by authority, she worries that Noel's teacher will 'pick the truth out of her like a splinter'.

This is not the picture of wartime Britain with which we are normally presented. It is much less monolithic and altogether more quirky. And these are not the wartime heroes one has come to expect. They are too flawed, too anti-social. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel I found it difficult to empathize with them; but by the end as they discovered in each other a refuge from the world and a kind of redemption, I was cheering them on.

Original post: briankeaney.booklikes.com/post/1184376/a-land-fit-for-misfits

Rebellion In The Hive

A sanitation worker, a member of the lowest and most disregarded caste, it's obvious from the moment she emerges from her cell that Flora 717 is different to her kin. She's bigger, more alert, more articulate and more able to question her environment. She's going to be trouble, both to herself and to the community of bees into which she has been born.

Needless to say, Flora 717's unique qualities are not looked upon favourably by the hive's ruling caste and it's only a matter of time before she finds herself alienated from the Hive Mind as she struggles to hide her rebellious thoughts and treacherous behaviour.

The Bees has been described as Watership down for the Hunger Games generation. It has also been compared to The Handmaid's Tale and there is definitely an interesting commentary on gender roles and society being sketched out here.

What is most interesting about this novel for me, however, is the alien nature of the environment and of the characters who populate it. This is a world in which the most important sense is smell. It's a world in which individual thought is over-ruled by the imperatives of the Hive Mind and the good of the community is far more important than the survival of the individual. Laline Paull succeeds remarkably well in bringing that world to life and making it convincing. The result is an unusual and very enjoyable read.

The Gravitational Pull Of Sentimentality

A forty-two year old man is lying in a hospice bed, dying of liver failure. To occupy his mind he engages in a game that involves thinking of a part of the body for every letter of the alphabet. In so doing he conjures a series of memories and anecdotes.

From these disordered fragments the unhappy story of his life begins to emerge and as they do so, we begin to understand the weaknesses in his character - his inability to understand what was really important to him, the series of bad choices he made, the catastrophic effect these had upon him and the terrible resentment and guilt with which he has lived.

There is a good deal of very acute observation here which really lifts this book at in places. For me, however, the main weakness is that there is not enough plot. This a study in regret experienced from a sick bed and there's only one place for the story to go. Ultimately the gravitational pull of sentimentality is inescapable.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

It's 1958. A female student has just had a puncture on her way to a lecture in Cambridge. A male student stops to help her. It's the beginning of a love story. However, from this point on we see three different versions of their story play out. Significant moments in the characters' lives diverge: a small hesitation, a loss of confidence and everything is changed.

In none of the version do things work out perfectly for the lovers but some outcomes are definitely better than others. What Laura Barnett demonstrates through these alternative scenarios is how we are both the sum of our decisions and also more than them.

This is a remarkably well written book. The competing narratives could very easily undermine each other. In fact, the reverse is true: the characters are so completely believable and the minutiae of their emotional lives so authentically detailed that the branching plotlines are self-reinforcing, making the characters seem even more solid.

Admittedly, it's a demanding read. You have to remember which version of the story you're following at any one time: who is married to whom, who is divorced from whom and what the other family members are up to. But's it's a thoroughly enjoyable challenge.

A Face In A Crowd

Academy Street is the story of Tess, an Irish immigrant in America and a single mother, who works as a nurse, often on night-shifts, enduring loneliness and isolation and unable to really fit in with either the society she has left behind or the one into which she has entered.

There's a lambent quality to the writing which is both the novel's strength in that the central character seems to be lit up from within, and also its weakness in that the novel feels rather one-paced, almost like a short-story that has outgrown its form.

Starting with the death of her mother, an event that Tess was barely old enough to understand, and ending in the fall-out from a contemporary terrorist incident, the novel tells the story of a character who often seems helpless against the tide of events, unable to fully understand her own distress or to escape from the consequences of her upbringing.

But it also depicts the small victories contained within her struggle, the love she feels for her child, the pleasure she discovers in discovering literature. In doing so it succeeds in bringing into the spotlight an individual who might otherwise me little more that a face in a crowd.

So Much More Than A Disaster Story

The premise of Station Eleven is that a new strain of flu has wiped out over ninety percent of the Earth's population and civilization has collapsed. The era of electricity is over and humanity is limited to a string of small settlements camping amid the ruins of the old world. A group of musicians and actors calling itself The Travelling Symphony journeys between those settlements in a collection of horse-drawn vehicles, putting on performances of King Lear and Beethoven.

It sounds like a fairly routine disaster story but actually this is much more than that. The storyline weaves back and forth between the past and the present as the characters come to terms with memory and loss and try to make sense of the new world and the changed expectations in which they find themselves dwelling.

This is primarily a study in characters rather than a plot-based novel. It's about the effect we have on each other, the overwhelming compulsion to find significance and the power of art to crystallise experience.

Entertaining, thought-provoking and improbably satisfying, Station Eleven is so much more than just a disaster story.

Shadowy Lives...Desperate Longings

Set just after the First World War, The paying Guests is the story of Frances, a young woman living with her mother in genteel poverty in South East London. Her father, now deceased, lost all his money in a series of unwise investments and her two brothers were killed in the war. Much to her mother's distaste, Frances has resorted to taking in lodgers to pay the bills.

At first glance this seems to be a novel about the social upheaval that followed the Great War. However, this being Sarah Waters, it's also an exploration of what that felt like for a woman who, on account of her sexuality, is not able to meet the expectations of the times. Frances has already had one abortive affair with another woman but her mother's disapproval, her own sense of obligation and perhaps also a lack of courage caused it to fall apart.

When Lillian and her husband move in, Frances's first feelings are all to do with the difficulty of adjusting to her lodgers' rather brash, working-class ways. However, it isn't long before an attraction begins to develop between Frances and Lillian and it is what that attraction leads to that forms the core of this book and turns it into an absolutely gripping thriller.

Sarah Waters writes about lesbian characters and there is lots of sex between the two women but it never seems gratuitous. It always feels extremely real and an important part of the story. Equally real is the anguish they go through when everything goes horribly wrong and they find themselves part of a police investigation. Their relationship, always precarious, is placed under enormous pressure and Sarah Waters is unflinching in her depiction of what this does to them both as individuals and as a couple.

For me, Waters' great achievement is that she gives voice to some of those characters who inhabit the background of history. She makes you feel that you are living their shadowy lives and suffering the thousand small agonies they endure. You are drawn into their nightmare and turn every page with a desperate longing to discover whether they will survive the ordeal and how it will have transformed them.

Delightfully-Handled Ensemble Writing

A Spool Of Blue Thread is a portrait of the complicated web of idiosyncrasies, expectations, disappointments and duties that make up the life of an extended family. There are a great many characters but they are all beautifully observed and their well-meaning but hopelessly near-sighted struggle to deal with the decline of their aging parents feels somehow emblematic of American society.

There is a great deal of delightfully-handled ensemble writing here. The dialogue switches back and forth between the characters with all the rapidity and apparent randomness of real life but each individual's conversation is carefully built up out of habits of speech, patterns of behaviour, conscious or unconscious role-playing.

So that when those roles finally begin to break down under the stress of a death in the family, it comes as quite a shock. It also feels very real. Here are people who have grown tired of personalities they have created for themselves in response to the behaviour of their family and who suddenly feel the need to re-evaluate themselves.

As with the rest of Anne Tyler's oeuvre, that need to understand yourself both within and outside your family lies at the heart of the work and in this novel she has perhaps explored it at least as well, if not better, than in any other. Her vision of individuals as both endearing and irritating feels entirely true to experience. For me, what this books displays, most of all, is Anne Tyler's consummate craftsmanship and her abiding humanity.

The Fascination Of The Powerless

A debut novel that has been appearing on lists of the year's best fiction, The Night Visitor is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow living alone by the sea and suffering from dementia.

Ruth's world is transformed by the arrival on her doorstep one morning of a woman who declares herself to be a new carer and who promptly takes over the entire management of Ruth's life. Unfortunately, as the narrative develops it becomes increasingly clear that this cheerful visitor is not all that she seems.

It's a powerful piece of writing but one that I found extremely difficult to read. Not because it was badly written. On the contrary. The detail is carefully observed and the writing is informed throughout by a poetic sensibility. Reading Fiona McFarlane's prose is a sensual pleasure.

What makes this novel so hard to confront is the content .The narrative is recounted from Ruth's point of view and in the confused logic of her vision time has become unmoored, memories drift in and out of consciousness and thoughts are indistinguishable from concrete reality. It's an entirely convincing depiction of dementia.

Consequently, the authenticity with which we witness the accumulating evidence of Ruth's abuse and her powerlessness in the face of it makes this novel so disturbing and so unsettling that I could only inch my way through it with a kind of pained fascination.

An Incandescent Work Of Literature

A story about a writer living in the West of Ireland mourning the death of his wife and struggling to deal with its impact on his children, Niall Williams' intensely poetic novel is almost unbearably moving:

The children are home from school I hear them moving about restless with the empty time. Hannah comes and asks me when will I be going to the village. She needs shampoo. Ten minutes later Jack who was eight years old two days ago stands at the doorway and asks why we do not live in America. They have better television in America, he says. I want to tell him that television is not important. I want to take him inside my arms and hold him here beside me and say I know how things are for you. I know the harrowing the world has already made in the soft places of your spirit. I know your fears and pains and because I am your father I cannot know them for an instant without wanting to make them pass.

But the words, or perhaps the means to say them, seem stolen from me, and instead I say I will try and get better stations on the television.

In flashbacks to the writer's own childhood, this novel is also a glorious celebration of the transformative power of literature and the importance of storytelling in all our lives. The young boy's attempt to find a place for himself in the world of the imagination and his struggle to understand and appreciate the real world all around him has a wonderful intensity that will be painfully familiar to many a bookish adult.

Running alongside the narrator's intensely realised inner world is the constant presence of the Irish countryside brought powerfully to life by Williams' evocative prose:

Autumn progresses. The rain is ceaseless now, and yet seems hardly to fall, a soft grey wrapped like a shroud about all west of the Shannon. Leaves of sycamore blacken and curl their edges. When the wind picks up the rain, they come slanting across the cottage window in stricken flight. All the last blossoms are faded now, and crimson geraniums are stalks of brown seed and yellowed leaves. Everywhere the countryside is tattered, wind-wild. You can feel that somewhere in the deeps of the earth something is slowly souring which once was sweetening. Across the valley small herds of cattle move and stand and move again for shelter. Between the showers huge blackbirds come and alight in your garden. I raise my hand from the table and they do not fly off. They wait there, as though burdened with some significance, when I know they have none.

Out of this interplay of interior and exterior worlds, and out of the conflict between the reality that cannot be faced and the memories that cannot be escaped, Williams has created an incandescent work of literature as well as an intriguing investigation into the process of writing itself.