The Fragility Of Identity

Set in the mid nineteen sixties this is the story of Charlotte a young, talented painter, struggling with the demands of motherhood and the pressures of surviving on the salary of her academic husband, Henry.

Deeply rooted in Cambridgeshire, she is nevertheless persuaded by Henry to emigrate to Australia in search of a better life; but the reality of their new environment is nothing like the brochures Henry has browsed.

In this new, alien country, Charlotte becomes entirely unmoored, while Henry, an Anglo-Indian who had not previously questioned his Britishness, finds himself confronted by an insidious barrier of covert racism.

Their marriage quickly starts to unravel and ultimately Charlotte begins to fall apart, unable to give herself to her children or her husband because she no longer possesses enough of herself to do so

Precise, unflinching, sometimes painfully sad but always beautifully-observed, The Other Side Of The World is an exploration of what we understand by the idea of home, and a study of the fragility of identity. A first-rate work of literary fiction

Trying To Be Clever

I loved The End Of Mr Y but Scarlett Thomas's latest novel has left me entirely cold. The story features a family of famous botanists, the older generation of which disappeared on a hunt for a miracle plant. The plot revolves around a series of moments in their lives after the death of the surviving family matriarch.

The trouble is, it's almost completely unreadable. There are umpteen characters and they're impossible to tell apart because they aren't properly described or differentiated. They're also deeply unpleasant and universally preoccupied with rather shabby sexual fantasies.

It's not a world I recognise or one I feel able to care about. None of these characters is even remotely like anyone I've ever met. They are, at best, ideas about people because this is, like all Scarlett Thomas's fiction, a novel about ideas – ideas about consciousness primarily.

I understand that Scarlett Thomas is trying to do something interesting with her writing and I applaud that. But, for me, there has to be something more to a book than verbal and conceptual experimentation.

There have to be characters who feel real; there has to be dialogue that is emotionally engaging; there has to be a plot that contains some element of drama. This book has none of that. It's trying way too hard to be clever.

The Terrible light Of Childhood

Discovered wandering and amnesiac when she was ten years old, Madeline, now in her mid-thirties, has been locked away in an asylum where she has become deeply institutionalized. However when a new doctor arrives he is determined to get her to recall the events of her childhood.

Aided by the diary she kept at the time, Madeline reluctantly sets out on a journey towards recollection, painfully reliving the claustrophobic experiences of a childhood dominated by the religious zeal of her father, a childhood in which she perceives the world with a hallucinogenic intensity:

All around me the garden rustles and sways. It watches, it tries to distract me. As I look at it, green becomes greener, the flowers glow like little lights...At night when I take off my clothes there are seeds in my socks, there are stains on my knees, my nails have soil beneath them and my hair smells of sky.

Struggling to make sense of what she sees, Madeline uses the only frame of reference she knows - the stories of the bible. The result is a vivid and passionate confusion in which poverty, isolation, and a passionate response to the natural world are all mixed up with her understanding of the personality of God.

But when sexuality begins to dawn, Madeline comes to believe she is responsible for the financial mire into which the family is steadily sinking. She has sinned and the only way out, she decides, is sacrifice.

Brimming over with the dazzling and terrible light of childhood, this is a courageous and compelling study of innocence and misplaced spirituality.

Deconstructing Innocence

Set in the nineteen fifties and inspired by real events, this is the story of a community devastated by a series of terrible plane crashes. The narrative perspective is shared by a large cast of characters but at the centre of the book is fifteen year old Miri, a girl coming of age at a time when the certainties of small town life are disintegrating all around her.

The America of the nineteen fifties, comprehensively evoked in the carefully crafted vignettes that make up this novel, is a country in which masculine authority is at its most confident; but in that very assurance lie the seeds of its own undoing. The great victory of World War Two is in the past, the messy compromise of Korea is beginning to become evident. This is a world in which promises are going to be broken, above all the promise of safety.

Judy Blume is most famous for children's fiction and her insight into the difficulties of adolescence, and at times this feels a bit like a Young Adult novel that has outgrown the limitations of its genre. However, it soon becomes clear that this is not writing for children; it is writing about childhood. Intelligent, compassionate and moving, In The Unlikely Event is a meticulous examination of the way society constructs and dismantles notions of innocence and responsibility.

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