Guest review by Savita Kalhan: A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry

Photo: Mal Woodford

Savita Kalhan was born in India, but has lived in the UK most of her life. She got the writing bug when she was teaching in the Middle East, where she lived for several years. Now living in North London, she runs a teen reading group at her local library in Finchley, and writes for children.

Her debut novel, The Long Weekend, published by Andersen Press, is a tense thriller about two boys who are abducted after school. Her new book, The Girl in the Broken Mirror was published in May by Troika Books. ‘This is an unflinching, multi-layered exposition of male privilege, male abuses of women, and the clash of cultures. With hard-hitting clarity it also shows how girls are silenced, made to feel ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of wrongs done to them. Ultimately this is a poignant personal story of a girl’s fight to rebuild and re-connect with herself and those who love her after a truly harrowing experience.’ Love Reading 4 Kids

Some stories stay with you forever; they leave an indelible mark on you, leave you wanting for more, for the story to never end, for the writer to never stop writing. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is such a book for me.

It was also the work that had the most profound effect on me and my understanding of the country of my birth, its customs, traditions and people.

Mistry did not start writing until after he had left India with a degree in Maths and Economics from the University of Mumbai. He emigrated to Canada to work in a bank. It was some years later that he decided to pursue a degree in English and Philosophy, and it was then that he started writing stories. He won the Hart House literary short story prize two years consecutively. Tales of Firozsha Baag was a collection of short stories set in an apartment block in modern day Mumbai. Then came Such a Long Journey, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, and won many others. Later, after it was adopted as a University text in Mistry's old university, it was to come under attack by extremists and was withdrawn despite a huge outcry.

A Fine Balance is the book of his that I truly love. It stands the test of time. As a portrayal of life in Bombay in India during the 1970s, it is, for me, without comparison. I've lent out my hardback copy to friends, who, with the exception of one person, have absolutely loved it. The one exception's pronouncement on it was: 'Good melodrama' - which was tantamount to blasphemy in my eyes.

The sad fact of the matter is that the everyday lives of the characters may well have seemed like melodrama to him, as though the author had simply sensationalized the harshness of his characters' lives for the sole purpose of giving the reader something more than a portrayal of the humdrum nature of abject poverty. For all the harsh realism contained within its pages, and there is much, the novel is one of carefully, almost poetically, crafted prose, which forms a story that is memorable and harrowing. It is far removed from the magical realism of Salman Rushdie's work, also originally from Mumbai, yet there is something magical in each page of this book, and even the most minor character you stumble upon within its pages is treated to the magic of his penmanship.

A Fine Balance was shortlisted for the Booker prize, has won countless others, and even made it onto Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. It hasn't been to everyone's taste. Germaine Greer hated it and said it in no way resembled the India she had come to know after spending all of four months there. Others have criticized Mistry for appropriating a turbulent time in Indian politics to meet his own ends and the needs of his characters. Personally, I don't understand this criticism, unless such critics balk at the atrocities of those times coming under public scrutiny after such a long period. In A Fine Balance Mistry explores the inherent inequalities of the caste system, extreme poverty, high level corruption, and life during the turmoil of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, and the sterilization programme, and the 'Beautification' policies, which led to the forced removal of street-dwellers into indentured labour. His characters are drawn from many Indian communities including the Parsi, Hindu, Muslim communities; from Untouchables to Prime Minister, from beggars to thieves; but there are four central characters of different backgrounds and histories, and it is through their hearts and minds that the story is told.

It is a tale of a Parsi woman, Dina, two tailors and a student from the north, four disparate people whose lives, outlooks, preconceptions and prejudices are fundamentally changed over a period of time after their first meeting. Tragedy exists at the heart of each of their stories, it permeates each page, yet the resilience of their spirit sits right next to it, tempering it. 'You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair' - and quite simply, that is exactly what Rohinton Mistry does.

His work speaks to me as an Indian, but it is universal in scope and in its depiction of humanity. He is, above all, a writer who plunges you, heart and mind, deep into his stories, where you remain submerged until the final page has been turned and you come up, gasping for air.

'... his sentences poured out like perfect seams, holding the garment of his story together without drawing attention to the stitches' - this is a line spoken by one of Mistry's characters, and perhaps best describes the mastery and craft of Rohinton Mistry himself.

In A Fine Balance he has created a complex and tightly-woven tapestry of humanity at its best and at its worst. For me the book is a literary masterpiece. It is a story you will never forget. His most recent novel Family Matters was published in 2002, but I am sure that I am not alone when I say that I am still waiting for Mistry’s next story.

A Fine Balance is published by Faber.

Guest review by Anne Fine: WILD ABANDON by Joe Dunthorne

Anne Fine writes for adults and children. She has twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, as well as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, two Smarties Prizes and other regional and foreign awards.

She was twice voted Children’s Author of the Year and was Children’s Laureate from 2001-3, when she set up My Home Library, a website that still offers freshly designed and freely downloadable modern bookplates to encourage young readers to form their own home libraries from the second hand books around them. She's published three anthologies of poetry for different ages called A Shame to Miss 1, 2 & 3. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded an OBE and her work is translated into over forty languages. Anne has two daughters and lives in County Durham.

I came to Wild Abandon, by Joe Dunthorne, partly by accident. I'd been reading a heap of those wonderful women writers whose work had been either so neglected or so unpuffed that I'd only recently caught up with some of them. (You know: Dorothy Whipple, Jennifer Johnston, Elizabeth Harrower, Rosamund Lehman, Emily Eden, Mollie Panter-Downes, Madeleine St John, etc etc etc).

And suddenly I thought, if I don't read something male and modern, I'll go mad. The first to be recommended to me by my ace metropolitan reader was London and the South-East, by David Szalay, and that was so much fun, and so insightful and funny about the life of an ad salesman, that I'm not surprised it won the Betty Trask Prize. Metropolitan Reader's next suggestion was Wild Abandon, which I have enjoyed so much I've chosen it for book group (who have also been busy over the last months catching up with some not quite so neglected or unpuffed women writers like Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Gardam and Vita Sackville-West etc etc etc).

Do 'em all good, I thought.

It will, too. Dunthorne tells the story of a ghastly sounding but well-meaning commune in wettest Wales. (This book will put anyone off the idea of roughing it in the countryside for ever.) Young Kate and Albert have grown up there, and, frankly, Kate is now growing out of the whole boiling, while Albert grieves (in an entirely mad but somehow credible way) because he senses his beloved sister will soon be off. (It's no accident that he's currently obsessed with The End of the World.) The marriage of their parents, the essentially kind and sympathetic - but no longer suited - Don and Freya, is steadily falling apart, the number of communards is dwindling, and a life's work and commitment is on the brink.

Everyone in the novel is strange or dopey/doped or downright weird, but every last one is believable. Dunthorne shows clearly both their outer faces and their vulnerable inner lives. He also copes brilliantly with his varied cast and impressively unravelling tale. The book is fast-paced, and entirely emotionally convincing with a genuine warmth and understanding shining through the comedy.


Wild Abandon is published by Penguin.

Guest review by Victor Watson: SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

Victor Watson began to write children's fiction after a long career as a teacher, both in schools and at Homerton College, Cambridge. He was involved in the setting up of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle.

He has edited many critical works on children's fiction, including the Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP 2001) He is the author of the Paradise Barn quartet and his latest novel is called Operation Blackout. All his fiction is published by Catnip Press. See more at Victor's dedicated website for the Paradise Barn books.

I’d known about South Riding since my undergraduate days, but I didn’t get round to reading it until earlier this year, when I spotted a compact 1949 hardback edition in a charity shop. I bought it – and was immediately hooked. The story unfolds in such a measured and unhurried way that I was able to savour the reading of it over many days. It has a wide cast of characters from all levels of society, the landscape is vividly evoked, and the narrative voice is both compassionate and uncompromising. The dialogue is good too.

On the dustwrapper the author is quoted: ‘there is one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spritis; we are members one of another.’ It’s one thing to say that, and quite another matter to demonstrate it. But that ‘membership one of another’ is what South Riding creates and acts out – in a rural community, set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire, during the depression of the 1930s. Many stories form part of the bigger story, all told with a direct and un-showy realism, effortlessly intertwined in an entirely convincing world. Here, there is no artificial thematic tidiness: people’s lives are muddled and imperfect, randomly affected by their siblings, their love affairs, their weaknesses, their neighbours, their rivals, their own hidden motivation. And – since this is also a novel about local government – the characters’ lives are also shaped by decisions made in council meetings and planning committees about housing conditions and scholarships.

The characterisation is brilliant, from the scheming Alderman Snaith to poor Lily Sawdon dying of cancer; the clever working-class Lydia Holly, whose future life will be shaped by whether or not her social and family situation will allow her to take up the scholarship she’s been awarded; the unhappy Robert Carne, whose daughter is lonely and miserable and whose wife is in a mental home, and whose life-values are as threatened and uncertain as his estate is crumbling. The main character is Miss Sarah Burton who, in chapter 2, is appointed headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School, and who encounters setbacks, faces all manner of frustrations, and experiences a bitter and triumphant love. She almost gives up on her conviction that an unmarried woman in her forties can have a fulfilled and fulfilling professional life within and for the sake of the community. But not quite. ‘I was born to be a spinster,’ she tells herself, ‘and by God, I’m going to spin.’

I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy. It has a hugeness of scope and conception, inviting comparisons with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It reminded me how far most modern fiction has moved from such imaginative spaciousness. I estimate that South Riding is about 176,000 words long – but it had to be a long novel because it seeks to convey a comprehensive understanding of an entire community. It is a socialist view, as you would expect from an author who was for most of her life a close friend of Vera Brittain. I felt as I read it a determined writerly thrust, a brilliant craftswoman’s purposeful and unhurried faith in her narrative vision, and her belief that – in spite of muddles and failures, setbacks and bad fortune, wickedness and greed – communities are capable of edging imperfectly and cautiously forward to improve the lives of individuals.

That’s what Winifred Holtby believed herself to be, a craftswoman. ‘I have no illusions about my work,’ she wrote. ‘I am primarily a useful, versatile, sensible and fairly careful artisan.’ Perhaps – but South Riding is an intelligent and absorbing novel, in its values, in its style, and in its conception. I loved it.

And it’s written in proper sentences!

South Riding is published by Virago.

TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU by Patrick Gale, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is now working on her second novel for adults.

Patrick Gale's most recent book, A Place Called Winter, was set mainly in Canada in the early 1900s, drawing on the experience of his great-grandfather, a pioneer farmer in the prairies. His new novel marks a return to more familiar territory - boyhood and adolescence in the West Country, music, the complexities of love, sexuality and relationships.

Take Nothing With You sounds like a foreboding of death, but although the threat of death is always present - central character Eustace's parents run a retirement home, where any reference to 'change' in the resident population is euphemistic - the novel is ultimately about survival and the renewal of hope. Our first encounter with Eustace is as a man in his fifties, recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and about to experience radioactive treatment. Having lost one lover to AIDS and another to mutual indifference, he's been alone for some while, but has recently fallen in love, long-distance, with a much younger man, Theo. They are soon to meet in person for the first time, but although they've shared confidences via Skype he has yet to tell Theo of his cancer treatment, fearing that such news would end the relationship before it's properly begun.

In the lead-lined room in which Eustace receives his treatment, everything he wears or touches must be discarded afterwards, so he must take nothing he wants to keep - a warning which give the novel its title. But the main part of the story concerns itself with his boyhood in Weston-super-Mare and the growing importance of music in his life. An unsporty misfit at his fee-paying school, he finds purpose and expression in playing the cello, taught by the flamboyant Carla Gold. Through her, he enters "a world in which art, headily, was everything" and meets pianist Ebrahim and painter Louis, with the revelation that two grown men can live openly as a couple. Relationships, however, prove fickle for all the adults in Eustace's life. Like L P Hartley's The Go Between, this novel of emerging sexuality and self-awareness allows the reader to see tensions in adult interactions over the head, as it were, of the viewpoint character. The marriage of Eustace's parents undergoes a cataclysm, the remnants of which we partially assemble from the present-day episodes.

Although Carla quickly sees Eustace's talent, this isn't a tale of a prodigious performer who soars to the heights against all odds. There are practical difficulties: although Eustace secures a place at music school, his parents can't afford the fees. His potential is seen by Jean Curwen, another charismatic teacher who runs a summer school, and although she seems to offer a solution there are plenty of other talented players who deserve her attention. And a family crisis, combined with a change of school, pushes Eustace's cello-playing into the background for a while. 

The Ancrum summer school section is particularly intense, with the hothouse atmosphere of living with strangers and the potential for friendships and sexual encounters. Eustace has a hurtful skirmish with a handsome older boy, but also forms a lasting and important bond with fellow cellist Naomi, who plays a significant role in the present-day scenes. And Patrick Gale excels when writing about the music - which is notoriously difficult, but these sections sing from the page. A cellist himself, he give enough but not too much technical detail, alongside a sense of how it feels to play in a group, the lines interweaving to powerful, poignant or playful effect. "Ralph played a hesitant sort of interrupted monologue on the violin to which Eustace's cello responded with a sequence of pizzicato phrases while the other three players sustained harmonies that shifted so slowly the changes in tonality were barely detectable. It was like watching a square of moonlight move across a floor." Eustace gradually appreciates that "it was chamber music, the creation of music with others, not pyrotechnic solo playing, that was the benchmark of true musicianship." 

Reading this, those of us who aren't musicians will wish that we were able to take part in this most exhilarating form of communion. "Music knits," Jean tells her students. "It heals. It is balm to the soul but is also the refiner's fire. It requires rigour and application." (Like writing.) The sureness, eloquence, humour and hope of this novel will endear it both to Patrick Gale's many fans and to those coming to his work for the first time. 

Take Nothing With You is published by Tinder Press.

Guest review by Sally Prue: THE DEAN'S WATCH by Elizabeth Goudge

Sally Prue is a writer for children of all ages, from picture books up to Young Adult fiction. Her novel Cold Tom won the Branford Boase Prize and the Smarties Silver Award, and Song Hunter won the Historical Society’s Young Quills Award. Her other jobs have included being a Time and Motion clerk, an accompanist, and a piano and recorder teacher. Sally is married, has two grown up daughters, and lives on the edge of a small but very beautiful wood in Hertfordshire, England. She blogs at The Word Den. She is also to be found on her website and on Twitter: @sally_prue.

At a young age, disorientated by a relentless barrage of pop music, I decided that life was too short for the blazingly new. Far better, I thought, to ignore books and music for their first decade or so, by which time most of the rubbish was likely to have been discarded.

Art, it seemed to me, was more like gold than milk: the best was all too often buried under the worst.

The pace of life has increased since then, and this time-scale has shortened; but, although I’m far, far less serious and sensible nowadays than I was when I was young, I’m not sure that I’ve essentially changed my mind. For this reason the current craze among publishers for reissues of old books is very welcome, and I’ve seized upon Hodder & Stoughton’s new editions of Elizabeth Goudge’s books with greedy delight.

The Dean’s Watch, as I discovered when I picked it up, I’d read long ago, though I had only the haziest recollection of the plot. It’s the sort of book that would be hard to get published as a new book today, both because most of the main characters are in their declining years (though there is one touching and unusual story of young love) and also because the theme is one of faith – and not only that, but some of the faith is religious, at that.

Less fashionable still, it’s a story which, while it features fear and frustration and misunderstanding, also embraces kindness and beauty and generosity. It even shines an affectionate and respectful light on obscurity, poverty, mental illness, and even ignorance.

The book begins with the epitaph of one George Routledge, watchmaker, which is to be found in Lydford churchyard:

Integrity was his mainspring and prudence the regulator of all the actions of his life; humane, generous and liberal,

His hand never stopped till he had relieved distress.

From which it might be inferred that the hero of this novel is not the dean himself, but the maker of his watch; but in fact the dean and the watchmaker are twin heroes: one famous, powerful and feted, one poor, bullied and obscure, each fearful in his own way, both crippled by shyness, and both revolving around the huge brooding cathedral which strikes such awe of different kinds into them both.

The Dean’s Watch is the story of how, through what might be called a friendship, they both find freedom.

It was written fifty eight years ago.

And, like the Dean’s Watch, its gold is still shining.

The Dean's Watch: The Cathedral Trilogy is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Guest review by Judith Allnatt: THE LOST GARDEN by Helen Humphreys

Judith Allnatt writes short stories and novels for adults. Her novels have been variously shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature, the East Midlands Book Award and featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month. Short stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Judith’s latest novel, The Silk Factory, is an eerie story of love and memory drawing on both the Luddite weavers’ rebellions in the nineteenth century and a modern day haunting. She has lectured widely on Creative Writing for over two decades and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She lives with her family in Northamptonshire and is working on her fifth novel. For more information and blog posts see Judith’s website.Twitter: @judithallnatt

The Lost Garden may, at first glance, seem to be about small things but don’t be misled. Love and loss are explored with insight and sensitivity in this beautifully written novel.

In 1941, Gwen Davis, bereaved and lonely, leaves London and the Blitz for Devon, to supervise a team of Land Girls in turning the gardens of the estate of Mosel over to food production. For the last few years, Gwen, who remembers having been touched only three times in her life and who is plain, pernickety and reclusive, has been hiding away in a research role at the Royal Horticultural Society. Her erudite knowledge of parsnip canker is, unsurprisingly, of no use at all in managing a group of lively girls who are already mixing happily with the Canadian soldiers billeted at the main house.

Here she meets first Raley, an officer who is tensely waiting to be posted with his men and then Jane, the unofficial leader of the girls, whose fiancé is missing in action and whose mental state is dangerously fragile. All of the main characters are suffering losses and are trying to find a way to live in the face of war’s ‘brutal change’ and struggling to reconcile themselves to its ‘useless random death’. Raley drinks. Jane, anorexic and diagnosed as ‘in distress’, decides to ‘tend the animals’. Gwen, who sometimes lies under her heavy volumes of ‘The Genus Rosa’ and imagines the weight of a man, waits for love.

There are mysteries. What caused the smell of fire in Gwen’s room? Who or what is the white ghost that the girls say they’ve seen at twilight? What is the meaning of the lost garden that Gwen finds, with its words inscribed on stones? There is also humour. The novel is narrated in the first person and Gwen is given a dry, quirky wit. About the removal of signposts throughout rural England and children schooled to refuse to give directions, she marvels: ‘No one seemed to have considered that a spy might come equipped with a map.’ Whimsically, she names the girls in her care after types of potato: ‘Golden Wonder’, ‘British Queen’ and, more generically, ‘The Lumper’; ‘Vittelette Noir’, who moves jobs from farm labourer to cook is immediately rechristened ‘Victualette Noir’.

The contrast between Gwen’s yearning but timid approach to love and life and Jane’s fierceness is touchingly rendered and is used to make each woman’s dilemma more poignant. Jane says of her missing fiancé, ‘I cannot falter or he won’t come back’ and in her fragile state she is given to insomnia, night rides across the fields and impulsively giving away her possessions, even her clothes. Cautious Gwen, observing from the sidelines thinks ‘There is no protection in the world for someone who loves like that’.

It was no surprise after having read this gem of a novel to learn that Helen Humphreys is also a poet. I’ve noticed before the close observation, striking images and nuanced language used by other poets-turned- fiction-writers: Owen Shears, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood for instance. Yes, this novel has engaging characters, a plot with unexpected twists and an interesting setting, but it is the writing itself, the texture if you like, rather than the pattern of the cloth, that I most enjoyed and so greatly admire.

The Lost Garden is published by Bloomsbury.

Guest review by Jenny Alexander: WRITERS DREAMING by Naomi Epel and WHY WE WRITE ABOUT OURSELVES, edited by Meredith Maran

Jenny Alexander has written many children’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, and three books for writers covering different stages in the writing process. Writing in the House of Dreams: Unlock the power of your unconscious mind is about finding inspiration; Happy Writing: Beat your blocks, be published and find your flow is about keeping going with a long project or indeed a long career, and Free-Range Writing: 75 forays for the wild writer’s soul is about extending your range and just having fun with it.

Jenny teaches a wide variety of workshops, both independently and for major organisations such as The Society of Authors, Lapidus and The Arvon Foundation. Her articles about writing have appeared in Mslexia, Writers’ Forum, The Author and Writing Magazine, where she currently has a monthly column, Free-Range Writing Through the Year. Her books are currently their sign-up offer for new subscribers.

As a writer and teacher of writing, I’ve always been interested in the psychology of creativity so I love reading other writers’ reflections on their personal process, and these two books are full of fascinating interviews. 

I was a dreamer before I was a writer, and my dream life has always been closely connected with my writing - the first book I wrote for writers was called Writing in the House of Dreams. So I was delighted to chance upon this collection of interviews with authors in talking about the relationship between their dreams and writing.

Probably my favourite interview is with Sue Grafton, because she captures the edgy nature of dreams and creative work, the ‘sense of jeopardy’ that comes with handing yourself over completely to the inner world of imagination. She describes the feeling of something mystical powering the writing process. Like me, she does not believe that all dreams have psychological meaning, but engages with them as pure imaginal substance.

I love the way Stephen King compares his writing process with dreaming. He talks about his preparations for writing being like a bedtime ritual; entering into writing feels like falling asleep to the world, and finishing feels like emerging from the dream state in the morning.

Maya Angelou talks about the small mind and the large mind, which is very much my experience of dreaming and writing. They both take you into worlds without limits, and add a new dimension to waking life that makes it feel much bigger.

The whole book is full of great writerly chat, and it’s one you can dip in and out of if you’re busy, though I have to say I was so gripped I read it all in one go on a sunny day in London, sitting on park benches and in cafes. 

I love reading memoirs but one of the things that holds me back from writing one that doesn’t strictly stick to a theme, like I do in Writing in the House of Dreams, is the problem of the ‘and others’ in Meredith Maran's subtitle.

Most of these thoughtful essays address the problem specifically, with many of the authors saying they send the relevant pages to anyone mentioned by name before they go to publication.

Several say that if the person had any objection to being named they would either disguise their identity or omit the passages concerned altogether. Others say they make the judgement on a case-by-case basis.

I like this approach from Sue Monk Kidd:

'Whenever I use someone’s name or reference them, I send them the relevant page or pages of the manuscript before turning the book in. They are usually close friends or family members. I tell them, ‘This is what I’m saying; if you have problems with it, let’s talk about it. I won’t necessarily change the content, but I’ll change your name.'

I think a definite upside to sending the manuscript to anyone you’ve mentioned would be that there wouldn’t be any surprises – you’d have had the discussion before you decide how to proceed. No surprises for the person who is mentioned and none for the author either: several of these essays mention the experience of expecting someone to find a particular thing intrusive and finding they’re fine with that, but have taken serious umbrage about something else the memoirist never dreamed might be problematic.

Related to the question of whether it’s OK to expose other people in telling your own story is the question of why we want to write the memoir at all. The point is made that since memoirs pretty much always risk hurting people, what could make that a risk worth taking?

The most common reason the writers here give is the desire to help or inspire other people who may be experiencing something similar to what they have lived through.

'How can I make my writing better, deeper, truer? Is it true to my voice and my vision? Questions like that often consumed me. They were vital; they still are. But as I got older, the point was not only how I served my work; it was about what my work served.' Sue Monk Kidd

Those are my big takeaways from this book, but there’s so much in it that I’m sure anyone who’s thinking about writing memoir will find the answers to their own questions here.

Writers Dreaming is published by Vintage Books.

Why We Write About Ourselves is published by Plume Books.