A Dysfunctional Family In The Process Of Kealing.

Carys Bray writes literary fiction about the kind of people that literary fiction often ignores. Her first novel featured a Mormon family falling apart at the seams; The Museum Of You is about twelve year old Clover who lives with her under-achieving father, a man who has been in emotional limbo since his wife, Becky, was killed in a road accident a few weeks after Clover’s birth.

Clover spends a lot of time with the elderly woman next door or down on her father’s allotment. Then a school visit to a museum and a chance encounter with a curator gives her the idea of creating a museum to her dead mother out of artefacts rescued from the vast pile of junk from her parents’ married life that her father has not got round to sorting out.

The trouble is, in the absence of any meaningful conversation with her father about what Becky was really like, Clover gets it all wrong and when she finally presents the resultant installation her father, it is a long way from being the nice surprise she had envisaged.

Perhaps that makes this book sound like a sombre read. Actually it’s more wistful than anything else, sometimes very funny, and ultimately uplifting. But what really makes the book work and what gives it the ring of truth is the relationship between Clover and her father. Carys Bray understands parenthood intimately, its joys and sorrows, its rewards and compromises. That knowledge finds its way into every page of this book and the result is a compelling portrait of a dysfunctional family in the process of healing.

An Uninhibited Investigation Of The Nature Of Evil

Set in an alternative nineteenth century England where there seems to have been no Restoration after the Civil War and Puritanism is triumphant, Vyleta’s novel depicts a highly-constrained society in which any kind of sin, whether actual or mental, creates physical smoke that pours forth from people’s bodies, betraying their inner motives.

It’s a divided world: the aristocracy do not smoke, and this is the justification for their right to rule. By contrast the lower classes live in a constant miasma of filth. Of course the real reason for the aristocracy’s lack of smoke has nothing to do with virtue and the truth begins to emerge when the protagonists, two teenage boys, boarders at an elite boarding school, and the daughter of an aristocrat with liberal leanings, become unwittingly involved in a revolutionary plot

This is a dense and dark novel that owes much to Philip Pullman though its a over-arching narrative is both more coherent than Pullman’s and altogether less joyful. It’s a novel of ideas above all else, studded with references to philosophy and history, sometimes venturing into territory which its target Young Adult audience might find challenging, particularly when the personality of the villain who is by now in thrall to a drug compounded of soot from the darkest and most heinous of sins, begins to disintegrate completely and his thoughts descend into a Joycean stream-of-consciousness:

A tremendous tour-de-force, Smoke is a brave and uninhibited investigation of the nature of evil, and an extraordinarily powerful work of the imagination. Vyleta has announced himself as a writer of exceptional talent. I just wonder who exactly is his intended audience.

Mapping The Margins Of Consciousness

A young woman is released from hospital after suffering an episode of mental illness. She becomes involved in a series of emotionally inarticulate relationships and is befriended by an older woman, also with a history of mental illness, and it is this older woman who relates the protagonist’s story.

It should be clear from this summary that The Storyteller is not a plot-driven book. Rather, it is an attempt to express the intense, disassociated and sometimes kaleidoscopic thoughts of an individual trying to re-make herself after the fabric of her personality has been shattered.

What makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose, which is compelling, often disturbingly so, as the author seeks to map out the margins of consciousness. Here, for example, is the protagonist sitting on the top deck of a bus:

“The glass of the window by your face thins and then dissolves. The woman, the cars, the litter, the patches in the pavement merge into one and instantly you are above it all. You see that the town is the wormy flesh of a brain. The traffic and its lights are the electric pulses, the transmitters that absorb and release charge, that create the regulation on which the world depends.”

Kate Armstrong’s ability to range from tiny and absorbing details to great sweeping patterns of significance as her central character struggles to assemble meaning out of the welter of sense-impressions that constitutes the everyday world recalls the writing of Virginia Woolf.

This is one of those novels that reminds you of the fragility of our humanity and of its preciousness.