Category: Authors

Damien Broderick (ed.), Not the Only Planet (1998)

3rd March 2012 / / 9 Comments

I never had Lonely Planet down as a publisher of fiction, but here is an anthology of science fiction travel stories published by them. I bought it in a book sale some years ago, and recently came across it again on my shelves; I thought it would be fun to read as a story-by-story review project, so here’s what Damien Broderick selected:

Lisa Goldstein, ‘Tourists’

Greg Egan, ‘Yeyuka’

Brian W. Aldiss, ‘The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica’

Gene Wolfe, ‘Seven American Nights’

Stephen Dedman, ‘Tourist Trade’

John Varley, ‘In the Bowl’

Garry Kilworth, ‘Let’s Go to Golgotha!’

Joanna Russ, ‘Useful Phrases for the Tourist’

Robert Silverberg, ‘Trips’

Paul J. McAuley, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’

The titles above will become links to my review posts as we go on. Let the journey begin!

TV Book Club Best Reads 2012: Part 2

24th February 2012 / / 1 Comment

Time for a look at the next four books on this season’s TV Book Club list (my first post on this series is here); these novels are all debuts.

Elizabeth Haynes, Into the Darkest Corner (2011)

In 2003, Catherine Bailey is on a night out in Lancster when she meets the handsome and charming Lee Brightman, and quickly embarks on a relationship with him. Four years later, she is a shadow of her former self: living in London with OCD, her life ruined by Lee’s abuse; her new neighbour, Stuart Richardson, may represent a chance for Catherine to move on – but there’s a threat around the corner.

Elizabeth Haynes portrays the change in Catherine’s character particularly well, right down to a difference in name: the bright, vivacious Catherine becomes the timid Cathy; the contrast between her personality in the two time periods is striking, and great at drawing one into the tale. Perhaps the novel feels a little overlong as a whole, but Haynes shows vividly how Catherine becomes trapped by Lee even as she knows he’s dangerous, and how Lee charms his way into the affections of Catherine’s friends, turning them against her. In this, Into the Darkest Corner is a sharp examination of domestic violence.

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility (2011)

New Year’s Eve, 1937: Katey Kontent is out at a Greenwich Villagejazz bar with her roommate, Eve Ross, when in walks the dashing and wealthy Tinker Grey. They get talking, become friends – and all their lives change over the following year, but don’t necessarily stay in parallel.

I’m ambivalent about this book: there’s some lovely writing and observation (‘from this vantage point [a pier on the Hudson] Manhattanwas simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving’); but I can’t muster the same enthusiasm for the plot. As the title implies, we see various examples of characters’ doing what it takes to fit in to particular social circles, which is elegantly done; but, as a whole, Rules of Civility doesn’t quite do it for me.

Amor Towles’s website

Katie Ward, Girl Reading (2011)

I read (and really enjoyed) this last year, so I’ll reproduce here what I wrote then:

In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen –  a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.

The chapters of Girl Reading are not linked overtly (though some of the portraits do appear in later chapters, and it can be nicely disconcerting to see the gap between what later characters think of the subjects and what we’ve seen of them previously); it’s more that there are contrasts and connections in theme and content. For example, Ward shows the variety of functions which the portraits might fulfil – an expression of a political alliance, say, or a tangible reminder of what has been lost. Similarly, literacy represents different things to different characters; the act of creating each portrait has varying significance; and so on.Girl Reading is an intricate tapestry of a book, and one that leaves me with little notion of what Katie Ward may write next, though I do know that I’ll want to read it.

Jessica Francis Kane, The Report (2010)

The Report revolves around a real-life event from the Blitz: the night when 173 people died in a crush on the way into Bethnal Green tube station (which was being used as an air-raid shelter). Jessica Francis Kane imagines the inquiry into the disaster, undertaken by magistrate Laurence Dunne; and follows the lives of characters involved in the tragedy, such as Ada Barber and her surviving daughter Tilly (Ada’s younger daughter Emma having been killed in the crush). A parallel narrative concerns Dunne’s being interviewed thirty years on, by a documentary-maker with close ties to the Bethnal Green incident.

The Report is very effective at portraying the disaster itself: in the scenes set during the crush, it’s impossible to gain a full picture of what is happening – yet these scenes, and Dunne’s subsequent questioning of those involved, bring home the horror of the event. But Kane also examines issues of truth, and how lasting knowledge of events can be constructed after the fact; Dunne’s attempts to give a particular impression to the people he’s interviewing for the inquiry slide into questions of what should by reported, and how – and there are no simple answers.

Book notes: Cossé, Levine, Unsworth

18th February 2012 / / 4 Comments

Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore (2009/10)

A Novel Bookstore is the ninth novel by French writer Laurence Cossé (the translaltion is by Alison Anderson); one of the launch titles for the UK imprint of Europa Editions; and a celebration of literature. Ivan Georg is a bookseller who has reached his forties mostly drifting through life; but that all changes when he meets Francesca Aldo-Valbelli, a fellow-lover of literature, with the wealth to turn a vision into reality – and the particular vision which the pair has is a bookstore which will stock only good novels, as selected by a secret committee of writers. The Good Novel bookstore duly opens inParis, and is a great success; but there are those who seek to discredit this well-intentioned enterprise – even to the point of physically attacking its committee members.

Though Cossé’s novel is framed as a mystery, its structure (with a lengthy detour in the middle detailing the history of The Good Novel) – and, indeed, the very resolution of the mystery – suggests that this element is not the main point of A Novel Bookstore; rather, it’s about the value of literature itself. There are direct statements of what good novels can do – literature ‘prepares you for life’ (p. 150), it ‘bring[s] like-minded people together and get[s] them talking’ (p. 81) – but we also see how literature has enriched the lives of the characters who write and read it in the book.

There are aspects of A Novel Bookstore which seem less disruptive here than I’d usually find them in a novel – such as the passages where Ivan and Francesca discuss books, passages which are detailed but don’t drag – and I’m not sure whether I am just cutting the book more slack because I share its enthusiasm for literature, and it imagines a place where I’d love to shop. Well, if that’s the case, so be it; for today, the celebration is enough.

Reviews elsewhere: A Common Reader; Of Books and Reading; Books are My Boyfriends; Nonsuch Book.

Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!! (2012)

Sara Levine’s debut novel (another Europa UK launch title) also revolves around the transforming power of literature, though here it’s one work in particular, and the result is perhaps not as positive. Levine’s (unnamed) narrator is a twenty-something graduate with a penchant for the easy (one might say lazy) option, until reading Treasure Island inspires her to be more like Jim Hawkins, and be bold and adventurous in her life. So she takes money from the Pet Library where she works in order to buy a parrot (which does not go down well with her boss), and goes on from there.

The crux of Treasure Island!!! for me is the narrator’s lack of self-awareness: her inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the negative effects her actions have on others; to recognise that the changes she’s making in her life are not as daring as she thinks; to countenance that other people might have aspirations and lives as complex and important as her own. The protagonist’s narrative voice veers between wry and snarky, which adds to the portrayal of someone who is unsympathetic, but not entirely alienating. One’s reaction to her is held in tension to the very end, where there’s a suggestion that the narrator may finally be finding her way, despite everything.

Reviews elsewhere: Bluestalking; The Well-Read Wife; Muse at Highway Speeds; Em and Emm.

Simon Kurt Unsworth, Rough Music (2012)

Now a new chapbook from Spectral Press, this time by the ever-reliable Simon Unsworth. It’s the tale of a man named Cornish, who’s been hiding an affair from his wife Andrea, and is now having to cope with a bunch of masked figures making a racket and acting out some strange performance beneath his bedroom window every night – though nobody else seems to notice them. From the start, Cornish is not exactly a sympathetic character; but Unsworth gradually and effectively reveals just how cold and calculating the protagonist is, which makes his inevitable comeuppance all the more satisfying. The ‘rough music’ outside also works well, as it shifts back and forth between having a metaphorical function and driving forward changes in the story. All in all, nicely done.

Reviews elsewhere: HellBound Times; The Ginger Nuts of Horror.

TV Book Club 2012 Best Reads: Part 1

10th February 2012 / / 6 Comments

The new series of The TV Book Club is underway, which means there’s another selection of ten ‘Best Reads’. Here’s my look at the first three.

S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep (2011)

The TV Book Club list begins with one of the breakout hits of last year, the debut from Steve Watson. It’s the story of Christine Lucas, who has an unusual form of amnesia which causes her to lose her memory every 24 hours. As the novel begins, Christine wakes up and, as ever, must discover that she is older than she thinks, and meet her husband Ben for the first time. Later that day – and unbeknownst to Ben – she is contacted by and goes to see a Dr Nash, who gives Christine a journal she has been keeping, which will allow her to unravel what led to her present situation.

When I started Watson’s book, I was concerned that narrative momentum might be compromised by the protagonist’s having to start from scratch each day. Well, the journal format takes care of that, as Christine can take what she’s already written into account, which smoothes out the flow. But, more than this, Watson uses the structure to create tension: even as Christine is reading her journal and discovering the truth, we’re aware that it won’t be an end to her problems (and I’m not talking about her amnesia). I also appreciate the way that Watson takes a fairly ‘high concept’ idea but grounds the action in a domestic reality. All in all, a fine thriller.

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (2011)

From a big seller to a Booker nominee. Patrick deWitt’s second novel is an introspective take on the Western: in 1851, hired killers Eli and Charlie are sent from Oregon City to San Francisco by the Commodore, to do away with one Hermann Kermit Warm, a prospector who has stolen something from him. Eli, our narrator, has been pondering whether he wants to carry on in this business, and the current job will bring matters to a head.

On the very first page of The Sisters Brothers, Eli describes the death of his old horse (and his subsequent visions thereof) in a cool, collected fashion; thus establishing what, for me, is the most effective aspect of the book – the contrast between the innate violence of the brothers’ world and the measured elegance of deWitt’s prose. The latter has a distancing effect, and as a result it comes as quite a jolt when brutal action irrupts into the narrative, particularly when it’s perpetrated by Eli, about whose capacity for violence it is deceptively easy to forget (because one has built up a certain amount of empathy for him). There’s also a strong sense in the novel of a world whose formation is in progress: in the lawless country through which the brothers travel, yes; but also in the mannered dialogue, and the half-sketched-in feel of the setting. It’s as though the world is being remade alongside Eli’s character.

Essie Fox, The Somnambulist (2011)

The East End of London, 1881: when her beloved aunt Cissy, a music-hall singer, dies, it becomes increasingly difficult for Pheobe Turner and her mother Maud to make ends meet. A way forward comes in the form of Nathaniel Samuels, an old acquaintance of Cissy’s, offers Phoebe a job as companion to his wife at the Samuels’ Herefordshire house – but the girl has no idea what secrets are set to be revealed.

I’m ambivalent about The Somnambulist. On the one hand, Phoebe’s narrative voice is great at bringing her character to life and driving the novel forward; and Essie Fox weaves historical detail in skilfully. On the other hand, the secondary characterisation feels a little broad-brush; the short third-person chapters from Samuels’s viewpoint slot in awkwardly; and the plot doesn’t sparkle for me in the same way as the narration.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

8th February 2012 / / 5 Comments

The narrator of Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a chorus: the disembodied ‘we’ of a cohort of Japanese women who travel to the United States at the start of the twentieth century as picture brides; the book follows them from their initial sea voyage through to their being sent away to internment during the Second World War. A quotation from the first chapter illustrates Otsuka’s general approach:

On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.

This is the language of The Buddha in the Attic: individual details and experiences, blended and distilled into a rhythmic composite. That quotation also hints at the hope which their husbands-to-be and journey to America represent to these women – a hope soon tarnished when they discover that the photographs they were given are twenty years old, and that their new husbands are not the well-off professionals which the women were led to believe, but farm-workers and servants. This is the first example in the novel of the American dream not living up to its promise for the women.

Once their new lives in America begin, the women’s experiences are varied, but most find themselves marginalised or ignored. This is where Otsuka’s main technique comes into its own, as the author creates a broad, sweeping portrait of many lives which can at once move out to reveal common themes and move in to focus on individuals.

When the women come to have children, The Buddha in the Attic gains a new layer in the ways that the new generation’s lives reflect and differ from those of their mothers. Where the women once imagined whatAmerica might be like, now their children have notions of the outside world based on hearsay, which may or may not be accurate (“Beyond the farm, they’d heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home”). As life goes on, some of the children get a taste of the American dream which was denied their mothers – but not necessarily as the women may have wished, because the children tend to reject or forget their Japanese names and traditions.

Life turns again with the advent of Pearl Harbor, as the women now find themselves and their families regarded with suspicion. Hearsay returns again in the form of a ‘list’ of people to be taken away, about which nothing is known for sure (including whether or not it actually exists), but much supposed. Otsuka builds tension effectively in this section, as the details which have so far formed the basis of the women’s experiences give way to questions and rumours.

Otsuka’s first-person-plural narrative voice may speak for all the women at once, but, to an extent, it also speaks for none of them, as we hear no direct individual testimony. There are occasional references to characters by name throughout the novel, but it’s not until towards the end that we get to perceive them as individuals en masse, as it were – but, by then, the Japanese are leaving their communities, and soon all that will remain of them are vague memories, and the odd physical trace like the brass Buddha which one woman leaves behind. The voice of the chorus falls silent, but the music of Otsuka’s writing rings on beyond the final page.

Robert Shearman, Everyone’s Just So So Special (2011)

3rd February 2012 / / 8 Comments

Robert Shearman returns with the follow-up to his British Fantasy Award-winning collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, and once again, he’s put together a superb volume of stories. As before, he’s adept at combining the outlandishly fantastical with the minutiae of everyday life and relationships; but, whereas the main theme of his previous collection was love, here Shearman is broadly concerned with the relationship between individuals and the grand sweep of history.

Separating the main stories is a chart of dates, a “history of mediocrity, and futility, and human error”, to quote its unnamed compiler in one of his asides. The reasons behind this chronicle’s existence are revealed only gradually, as Shearman depicts a man who has been burnt by life, found that even the history he loved as a child now seems hollow, and he and his family have paid a heavy price. For this narrator, history has become nothing but “memories [and] interpretations”; a similar view is expressed by the protagonist of ‘A History of Broken Things’, who intersperses recollections of his past with reflections on his mother’s decline from dementia, whether history is nothing but our memories, and what that means if we forget or are forgotten.

One could take from this the view that individuals are insignificant in the face of history and loss, but that’s not the impression I gain from Everyone’s Just So So Special – at least, not entirely. It seems to me that individuals are central to many of these stories, even in some cases warping reality around themselves. For example, ‘Coming in to Land’ is presented as a flight attendant’s address to her passengers, insisting that they have to believe in Paris for it to be there when they land’; but it’s clear by story’s end that this is all about the attendant and her ex-lover. In ‘This Far, and No Further’, time literally stops from the strength of Polly’s desire to find her missing daughter – but there are a number of perceptual shifts which poignantly reveal her true state of mind.

Several other pieces in the collection also use a strange situation to illuminate character traits. The story ‘Dirt’ is a particularly striking example: Duncan Brown is a university lecturer having an affair with a student from another faculty, who calls herself Natasha and is obsessed with Russia (or her mental image of the place), and even keeps a bag of Russian soil under her pillow. Natasha’s fascination comes across as the rather eccentric fad of a teenager still shaping her own identity; it only takes the innocent action ofDuncansending her a postcard fromRussiato undermine what the country represents to her. But a neat narrative move at the end gives cause to question whether it’s Natasha or Duncan who has the more tenuous hold on reality.

One of the hallmarks of Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical for me was the way that Shearman often used the fantastic to facilitate equally satisfying literal and metaphorical readings of his stories. We can see a similar approach in some of the tales in the current volume. ‘Inkblots’, for example, quickly skates over the implausibility of there being such a thing as a “hospital tattooist” to produce a poignant reflection on declaring one’s feelings when they might change. Sam’s father and terminally-ill mother decide it’s time to get tattoos of each other’s names, and would like Sam to have one with both of their names; but he’s not keen on the permanence of a tattoo. Then Sam’s mother doesn’t die after all, and his parents drift apart; Shearman explores the ramifications of such a development in a situation where a tattoo effectively represents a declaration of undying love. In tandem with this, we see Sam’s own unease with the idea of love and commitment, represented by his squeamishness around tattoos.

However, it seems to me that the richest stories in Everyone’s Just So So Special go beyond straightforwardly metaphorical readings, into the deeper heart of fantasy. The protagonist of ‘Times Table’ literally sheds her skin with each new birthday, but the remains hang around as living puppets. The story portrays the protagonist at various stages in her life, from the fourteen-year-old girl taking her teenage insecurities out on the younger self who wasn’t the girl she now wishes she could have been; to the old, old woman surrounded by the ghosts of her past. To an extent, ‘Times Table’ is about who we are as people, and the changing nature of self; but the sheer range that it encompasses makes the story greater than the sum of its parts.

In ‘Restoration’, a figure known only as “the Curator” has conquered the universe, and each year of history is now a mural in his vast gallery. Andy gets a job at the gallery, and is particularly taken with both 1574 and his boss, Miriam – that’s the name she takes, anyway; she’s forgotten her own. And Miriam is not the forgetful one, as Andy too sometimes finds her slipping from his memory; but a new directive from the Curator forces the two of them to take drastic action. ‘Restoration’ is a slice of beautiful strangeness that works by remaining focused on the characters at its heart; even when the world we know has been utterly swept away, we can recognise the people.

So who actually is special, in the face of all that was, is, or might be? Perhaps the story ‘Acronyms’ offers a clue in its portraits of interlocking (though separate) lives, beginning with a café-owner who makes the finest BLT sandwich and heading towards an outlandish tale of spying. Everyone is special in their own stories, but those stories may be only tangential to each other. Shearman’s collection, however, certainly is special.

(This review also appears in issue 269 of Vector.)

Henry Green, Loving (1945)

28th January 2012 / / 4 Comments

Writing is all just words, isn’t it? After all, differences in language notwithstanding, each writer uses essentially the same building blocks. Well, there’s nothing like reading a book where an author writes about a relatively unremarkable situation in an apparently ordinary way – yet still produces something utterly distinctive – to demonstrate that there’s so much more at play than only words. Henry Green’s Loving concerns the lives of the servants and masters of an Irish country house during World War Two, is told largely through dialogue – on the surface, nothing too unusual; but the way Green approaches his material turns it into something more.

Reading the dialogue of Green’s characters is rather like eavesdropping on them: sometimes we join them ‘in the middle’ of a discussion, and there’s often a sense of details remaining unsaid, as of course happens in real conversation. Come to that, there’s a naturalistic feel in general to the structures and rhythms of Green’s dialogue; that, and other techniques such as shifting between separate conversations without a scene-break, encourage a slow, concentrated approach to reading, which suits a book that reveals its details gradually and obliquely.

What emerges within the pages of Loving is a portrait ofKinaltyCastle as a building of contested space: the different servants have their own areas, and for one to enter another’s domain has political meaning. Charley Raunce, the head footman, seizes the opportunity to move up in the hierarchy when the old butler dies; but his wish for one of the maids (rather than his own pantry boy) to bring his tea in the morning becomes a bone of contention because of the shift in power it would represent. Even the manner in which one addresses another is important for the relationship it indicates; Agatha Burch, the head housemaid, tells Raunce: ‘you’ll never get a Mr out of me not ever, even if there is a war on.’

Loving begins with ‘Once upon a day…’ and ends with ‘…happily ever after’, though it’s clear enough that conventional fairytale happiness will not be easy for the characters to achieve. Yet there is something of the fantastical edifice about Kinalty: its inhabitants are so isolated from the war and the outside that the castle effectively becomes a threshold between worlds; the vivid imagery Green often uses to describe Kinalty only adds to the atmosphere of intrigue.

Then, as the novel’s title suggests, there is love. From the complex dance of attraction between Raunce and the maid Edith, to Violet Tennant’s (daughter-in-law of the household) dealing with the absence of her soldier husband Jack – and beyond – love manifests itself in various ways as part of the novel’s web. I don’t think I’ve come across a novel quite like Loving before, and would certainly be intrigued to read Green again.

Thanks to Stu from Winstonsdad’s Blog for hosting Henry Green Week, which was what led me to read this book.

Sunday Salon: Thirty Years of Adrian Mole

22nd January 2012 / / 3 Comments

Thirty years ago this month, Sue Townsend published The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, which makes the series a little younger than me, though Mole himself is a good dozen years older. Perhaps the latter is why I never got around to reading The Secret Diary as a teenager myself; I was in my mid-twenties when I finally did – but I probably got more out of the book than I would have if I’d read it a few years earlier, and certainly enjoyed it enough to read the other books in the series (two further volumes have been published since) over the subsequent months.

Penguin have reissued all eight Adrian Mole books in new editions to mark the anniversary, and it has been interesting to revisit some of them. Certainly The Secret Diary remains a beautifully-crafted comic gem, and its 1984 sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (which begins the day after the first novel ends), is much the same. Through the pages of his diary, we meet Adrian Mole: convinced he is an intellectual, obsessed over the spot on his chin, with a crush on the lovely Pandora Braithwaite; yet unaware of how bad his poetry is, and oblivious to the signs of his parents’ marital turmoil.

What I really appreciate on this re-reading is just how well-constructed Townsend’s humour is, both in terms of its one-liners (‘I am reading The Mill on the Floss, by a bloke called George Eliot’), and the broader structural jokes which help establish Adrian’s character: intelligent (albeit perhaps not as much as he thinks he is, or would like to be), but not self-aware, nor adept at picking up the emotional cues of others. Yet, although we are often laughing at Adrian’s misfortune, we still root for him – there is a sense that ultimately he means well, and deserves more than he gets.

In some ways, the first two Mole novels stand apart from the others, because they are a little lighter in tone, and focus on Adrian as a teenager. Subsequent volumes revisit Mole’s life as an adult: in The Wilderness Years (1993), he is twenty-four, and less endearing because some of the traits that could be explained away as teenage foibles – his pedantry, pomposity, and self-obsession – are harder to take in a grown man; when Adrian is dwelling on his lack of success and action with the opposite sex, for example, it’s not so easy to be sympathetic, as one can see quite clearly why his personality and behaviour may be unattractive (there is a woman who likes him, but naturally Mole doesn’t take her hints). Yet Townsend’s humour remains, and one is back on Adrian’s side by novel’s (rather uplifting) end.

In 2009’s The Prostrate Years, Adrian Mole is thirty-nine; living with his wife and young daughter, in a converted pigsty next door to his parents – though his marriage is under strain, and the future of the second-hand bookshop where Adrian works is uncertain. His key character traits are the same as ever, but there’s a bitter sting in that, now, Adrian is trying his best to ignore the signs of prostate cancer. He’s a sympathetic character once again, because of the sense that he is trying to hold on to himself and his life in the face of all that’s happening; the single word ‘treatment’ in many entries gains its force from how much is obviously being left unsaid by this character who has always been so open. The dramatic irony of Mole’s asides carries more bite here than in the earliest books (‘It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there’), and it serves as a reminder that none of us knows what may be around the corner.

Why do the Adrian Mole books remain so fresh after all these years? Partly because they’re very funny, of course; but I also wonder if Sue Townsend didn’t tap into something fundamental – maybe there’s something of Mole in all of us. Leaving aside his pedantry, for me Adrian represents ultimately represents thwarted ambition: wanting to be or achieve more, but not knowing how to do so. And Adrian is all the more frustrated because there are people in his life who have done what they wanted; it’s surely no coincidence that the lifelong object of Mole’s infatuation – Oxford-educated MP Pandora – is the character who has achieved her ambitions more than any other.

I want to finish with a quotation from The Prostrate Years which, to me, sums up the character of Adrian Mole. His marriage has broken down, and he’s reflecting on the absence of his daughter, Gracie:

I miss the physical presence of that indomitable little girl, trying to make her mark on the world. The feeling of those small strong arms around my neck. I miss the made-up songs she used to sing in the bath, I miss the certainty of her world. She knows nothing of nuclear proliferation or the misery that comes from loving somebody too much.

The comment on nuclear proliferation illustrates Mole’s tendency to dwell on issues at less-than-appropriate times; it might puncture the mood of the rest, but does not destroy that mood, because Adrian means everything sincerely. Those last few words – ‘loving somebody too much’ – are Adrian Mole all over; they show that, beneath the pretension and everything else, there’s a real human heart. That’s why Mole is such a great and enduring character.

Simon Lelic, The Child Who (2012)

12th January 2012 / / 4 Comments

Simon Lelic is developing a track record as a novelist who approaches his subject matter from interesting angles and explores thorny moral issues, notably in his 2010 debut Rupture, a multi-viewpoint examination of what drove a teacher to open fire in a school assembly. Lelic turned the conspiracy thriller inside-out in last year’s The Facility; now he has returned to contemporary crime with The Child Who. This new novel concerns the case of a twelve-year-old boy who killed a girl at his school; though Lelic’s main focus is neither victim nor murderer, but the boy’s lawyer.

Leo Curtice is the solicitor who takes the call and ends up representing Daniel Blake, in what becomesExeter’s most attention-grabbing trial in years. From the beginning, Lelic makes clear what a double-edged sword this assignment is for Leo: on the one hand, such a high-profile case is an opportunity that comes around very rarely; on the other, the job is repugnant, because there is no doubt of the boy’s guilt. Leo isn’t entirely comfortable with viewing the case as an ‘opportunity’, and struggles to justify his involvement to himself and others; his purpose seems nebulous even when he discusses it with Daniel Blake, and reveals that it’s not so much a matter of defending the boy as presenting his culpability in the least worst light.

The Child Who builds into a study of a man under emotional pressure from all sides (we learn relatively early on that Leo’s involvement in the case rips his family apart).

Leo deals with negative reactions by focusing in on his work, and there’s a strong sense that he is using the formal words of his profession as a shield; when Leo tries to explain to his daughter Ellie why he’s representing Blake, all his talk of habeus corpus does not satisfy her when she just wants to know why it’s he in particular who has the case. And Leo is still falling into the same pattern of behaviour when his wife Megan is about to leave him:

‘I need a break. From the house as much as anything. And it’s clear you need to focus. If you really feel you need to do this, it would be better, for your sake, if you did it without any more . . . distractions.’

Leo nodded – not conceding the point, just bobbing past it. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I was looking at some recent cases. At the coverage in the press once things actually got underway. And what happens is, when a trial begins, there’s actually less attention in a way because of all the restric . . .’

Leo stopped himself. From the look on Megan’s face, the coverage was not the point.

‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Let me know when you’re ready.’

For all that Leo acts in this way, he finds it no easier to deal with being on the receiving end of similar behaviour; he is himself frustrated by the rhetorical fencing of Ellie’s headteacher. This is one of the most interesting things Lelic does in The Child Who: to gradually place Leo in the same position as the parents of Felicity Forbes (the girl killed by Blake), and examine his response. Leo begins to receive threatening notes, then Ellie disappears; and his feelings towards the anonymous culprit are no less hostile than others’ have been towards Daniel Blake.

There are several striking scenes in which Lelic presents emotionally-charged events from a distance, because of Leo’s perspective. There’s a violent protest when Daniel is driven to court for the first time, but we experience it all from inside his police van, where it becomes particularly abstract and menacing for Leo. Felicity Forbes’s funeral is a national event, but, seen on television (and as the only glimpse we get of Felicity’s family), it could as well be happening in a different reality. In keeping with the idea of Leo’s personal life and work mirroring each other, it might be considered that eventually he becomes as distanced from his family as he was from external views of the case. In its complex portrait of the protagonist and his situation, The Child Who might just be Lelic’s most effective novel yet.

Elsewhere
Scotsman interview with Simon Lelic
Some other reviews of The Child Who: Reader Dad; Julie Martis for Bookgeeks; Mean Streets.

Book notes: Harris, Dafydd, Clare

8th January 2012 / / 3 Comments

Shelley Harris, Jubilee (2011)

Satish Patel was a boy at the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the son of an immigrant Ugandan family in an otherwise all-white Buckinghamshire village; he was a key figure in a photograph taken of the village’s Jubilee celebrations, an image which became iconic. Thirty years on, Satish is a successful cardiologist with a habit of helping himself to diazepam from the medicine cabinet; he receives a call from an old friend, telling him of plans to stage a reconstruction of the photo – but Satish is reluctant to take part.

Shelley Harris’s debut novel unpicks its central situation carefully, revealing the tensions beneath the apparent harmony shown in the photograph, and the secrets hidden by Satish and his friends and neighbours. If the ending feels to jump the gap of years a little too quickly in terms of how it deals with the issues between characters, the journey up to that point is engaging – with the writing of Satish’s addiction particularly sharp – and the book as a whole represents a promising start to Harris’s career as a novelist.

Fflur Dafydd, The White Trail (2011)

Time for a look at the latest in Seren’s series of books reworking tales from the Mabinogion. Fflur Dafydd’s contribution is based on the myth of ‘How Culhwch Won Olwen’; but, rather than a straightforward modern retelling, the author sends her story off in a different direction grown out of filling in gaps in the beginning of the original tale. Dafydd’s protagonist is Cilydd, who’s searching for his missing pregnant wife when he finds evidence that she is dead and the baby has been stolen. Cilydd becomes involved with a missing persons charity, and is settling into a new relationship, when his son Culhwch reappears, with the story of his strange upbringing, and the desire to rescue a beautiful girl named Olwen from the father who keeps her prisoner.

The White Trail examines what drives Cilydd to go on as he does, how far it’s  genuine concern and compassion, and how far the need to fill holes in his life. The book also explores the rights and wrongs of looking for people who may not want to be found, and this is where Dafydd uses the fantastic to great effect. The opening section on Cilydd’s life is firmly grounded in the reality of contemporary Wales, but the novel slides towards fantasy when Culhwch appears on the scene; this is imagined so convincingly that it’s a quite a jolt to be pulled back into quotidian reality at the end – and that jolt represents the way that characters’ actions and motivations which seemed reasonable to us at the time suddenly appear less so when the circumstances change. It’s a wonderful moment in a fine piece of work.

Horatio Clare, The Prince’s Pen (2011)

The Mabinogion story of ‘Lludd and Llevelys’ forms the inspiration for Horatio Clare’s novel, and his reinterpretation is less oblique than Dafydd’s: the myth tells of three ‘plagues’ which befall Britain (an invasion by a seemingly omniscient people; the maddening screams of two dragons; and the disappearantce of food from the king’s larders); Clare translates these threats into the context of a near future where only remnants of England lie above sea-level, and Wales is one of the last outposts of the free world. The volume we hold is the story of the Welsh bandit kings Ludo and Levello and their battle against the Invaders, as told by Clip, trusted associate (and amanuensis) of the illiterate Ludo.

Perhaps more so than with Dafydd’s story, The Prince’s Pen gains effect from comparison with the source tale; Clare’s updating of the ‘plagues’ is smart and speaks firmly to contemporary concerns. The book faltered a little for me as a narrative at the beginning, in that the battle scenes didn’t feel to have as strong an anchoring in reality as they might. But The Prince’s Pen works well as a portrait of the complexities faced by rulers trying to stick to their principles in time of war.

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