Unheard Voices, Unseen Lives

Set initially in London at the beginning of the twentieth century, A Place Called Winter is the story of Harry Cane, a conventional married man, quite unaware of his true nature until a chance encounter with an actor makes him aware that he is homosexual.

When Harry's affair is discovered, he is disgraced. Forced to leave his wife and family, he sets off to make a new life in Canada where he falls prey to an entrepreneur called Troels Munck, a predatory, controlling individual who comes to dominate Harry's life to such an extent that their relationship culminates in dreadful violence.

Harry ends up in an asylum from which he is eventually rescued by a progressive doctor who has set up a pioneering therapeutic community. Here he is befriended by a bisexual Cree Indian, an individual who thinks of himself as having two souls but who is tortured by guilt acquired during a Christian education.

A Place Called Winter is at its best when describing the furtive intimacy between men at a time when homosexuality was considered a monstrous perversion, and also when depicting the stark grandeur of the Canadian prairie. I was less taken with the chapters set in the therapeutic community. Characters were less clearly drawn and the life of the community only sketchily evoked. It felt almost like another novel in embryo.

Nonetheless, this is a vivid and compelling depiction of an individual who finds himself at odds with the world in which he has grown up and an important testimony to the lives of characters whose stories conventional society has often preferred to ignore.

Harry Potter With Flair

thirteen year old boy discovers he has special powers and is recruited into a hidden order of knights who protect the world from chaotic forces. A routine fantasy premise certainly, but there is nothing routine about the panache with which Dave Rudden writes. His prose sparkles with arresting images, his characters leap off the page, and his plot twists and turns like a technicolour eel.

He is, in short, a first class storyteller. You can positively feel his enjoyment in creating and layering the narrative, playing with the reader’s expectations, then pulling the rug from under them, and that enjoyment is infectious. As a result, reading Knights Of The Borrowed Dark is enormous fun. It’s like Harry Potter with flair.

Sleep-Walking In Bangladesh

Just before she is due to set off for a dig in Pakistan, Zubaida, a Bangladeshi woman studying palaeontology in America, falls in love with a young American man she meets by chance at a concert. They spend almost every minute of those last few days together; then Zubaida sets off for Pakistan and gradually her life begins to unravel.

When the dig is closed down by the army she goes home to Bangladesh, to the parents who adopted her when she was a baby. In a vulnerable state she sleep-walks into the marriage her family have always planned for her. Unhappy and confused, she becomes obsessed with trying to trace her birth mother, a quest that sees her ill-fated marriage collapse as she struggles to re-make her identity.

There is some exquisite observational writing here that often forced me to slow down and take note. However, the effect of this is offset by the tone which is declamatory and sometimes feels over-blown, and by the looseness of the structure: there are so many different plot-strands that, at times, it feels like two or three novels bundled together.

Nevertheless, The Bones Of Grace is an intriguing novel, not least because it offers a glimpse into a world and an experience that is hugely under-represented. It’s the kind of novel that Reading Groups would enjoy. There is so much to talk about.