Guest review by Jane Russ: WIDOWLAND by C J Carey

"Widowland asks you to reconsider your life and where you would fit into this nightmare."

 

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

A dystopic, feminist tale chillingly told.

It is 1953, Hitler won the war thirteen years ago and Edward and Wallis are within weeks of being crowned. England is a rundown outpost of Europe, with anything worth having being sent to the mainland. There is an overall feel of the shabby and the rundown.

In the early days after the war, the general populace do not take the ‘take-over’ lying down but the new regime is quick to establish that all transgressions will be dealt with promptly and firmly. If you are caught pulling down an Alliance flag, you will be hanged from the flagpole. Gilead reimagined in the UK.

A rigid individual classification code is in place. Created in Germany this caste system is imposed on the female population in all the subjugated lands of the Empire. At fourteen, all females are called for classification, with ‘Nordic type’ being the highest caste - ASA Female Class I (a). Naturally as time passes, the official titles are overtaken by the shorthand used in everyday life. All the names came from the Leader’s (Fuhrer's) female family members: Gelis are the top, the most perfect specimens. Klaras are fertile women, Lenis are professional women, Paulas are teachers, nurses and carers. Magdas are factory and shop workers, whilst Gretls are domestic and kitchen staff. At the very bottom of this female pyramid are Friedas, the widows and spinsters, over 50, without children and without a man to serve. There is nobody below a Frieda, they are literally the lowest of the low.

Naturally women moved around in these classifications as their fortunes ebbed and flowed. This ebb and flow showed in their general health and well-being too as benefits like better food and clothing were based on the caste classification. Where each group could shop, what they could wear, what rations they were allocated, every last thing was designated and administered by the Woman’s Service throughout the country. A Geli, whose work and general quality of life put her at the top of the ladder, had all the best of what was available and even, depending on who she knew, sometimes more than that.

The heroine of Widowland is Rose, a Geli. The state has decreed that any hint that the past was better than where you are now is to be outlawed. To this end Rose has the unenviable job of editing women of distinction, determination and strength out of books like Jane Eyre and even fairytales. Whilst this is of itself a vile thought, it is not what this book is about. (We should note here that some American states are, as we speak, outlawing books that do not fit their ultra-Conservative, ultra male dominated, racist, anti-Semitic take on what America should be. A vile thought indeed.)

Widowland asks you to reconsider your life and where you would fit into this nightmare, I have found it has really stayed with me as a concept. It is also about the awakening of the understanding that however much one is indoctrinated, the core human concept of right and wrong is much harder to eradicate. The populace are kept ignorant of the lives of other classifications. Everyone can spy on everyone and a Geli will not have a friend who is a Leni and certainly not a Gretl, and as far as Friedas are concerned, they know only other Friedas and are not considered as worthwhile by any other level of female.

Rose gets pulled into a secret assignment to find out who is writing graffiti on important buildings such as the British Museum and others across the country, all near libraries. The graffiti reads, Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it and there will be an end to the blind obedience. This is a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft, (never shy and retiring in her attitude to the position of woman in society) and Rose recognises it. The only lead on who is perpetrating this heretical street painting spreading across the country, is that it is coming from the Widowlands, the derelict and tumbledown areas of large conurbations where the Friedas live. There have been several incidents in Oxford so Rose is tasked with infiltrating the Widowlands there. The Alliance Leader is due to arrive from Germany in two weeks for the coronation and this has to be a thing of the past by then.

Rose’s cover is that she is gleaning information for a book being written by the Protector of Britain about the Folklore and family history of the indigenous peoples. On her trip to Oxford she is confronted with a world so outside her lived experience that she finds it hard to interview the Friedas she has been sent to meet. The house they live in is a broken slum, with no saving graces, except that Rose recognises that they have made it seem like a home. After about an hour and without preamble three men enter and, as if it were possible, wreck the tiny house even more from top to bottom. Every piece of repaired china is smashed, every sagging chair is slashed and, even though recognised as a Geli, Rose is powerfully manhandled and slammed against the wall. Having completed their destruction in a few short minutes, they leave without explaining or commenting.

This event starts the chain of events that will lead to the exhilarating climax of the novel. Several interesting and well drawn characters fill out the story on the way and we are drawn along in a whirlwind of emotions.

If you are female, the lives of the women in this book will ask questions of your understanding of what it takes to be one. If you are male it will show you where male supremacy could lead (and where America is heading at the moment?) Widowland is the heart of darkness in this all too believable tale of female segregation and subordination. Although set in 1953, this is a novel that deals with issues very relevant to the life of woman today.

Widowland is published by Quercus. C J Carey is the pseudonym of Jane Thynne.

Guest review by Jane Russ: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, revisited

 

 "The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th..."

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

 I asked if I could review an old book, something well loved and read by millions. A book that most readers would know but which has come sharply into focus since 25 May 2020: the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird at school in about 1967 when I was fifteen. The story gripped me and, I am ashamed to admit, I still have my original (stolen) school copy beside me as I write! I was older than the narrator Scout Finch but not so much older that the antics of her day to day life failed to resonated with me, in all their glorious detail.

It was another fifty years before I read it again. I have occasionally been disappointed on re-reading a book I loved the first time around: not so with this one. This second reading threw up all the touch points of my own lived experience and I found I loved it even more. I was shocked by the nuance I missed originally, but what fifteen-year-old knows about nuance? Then I read it a third time in February this year; to see if there were things I had forgotten that could help me understand the horrors going on in America today. Not just the George Floyd murder but the insurrection too.

The novel at its simplest is a tale of two children growing up in the deeply segregated world of Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1930s. The narrator is a young adult looking back on her childhood. Scout is six when the story begins and her elder brother Jem is ten. Their mother died four years before and Scout and Jem are devoted to their father Atticus, the town’s attorney. Atticus believes in never talking down to children and always answering every question: helping them to understand the world around them. The mother figure in the story is Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, who loves the children as her own and has high standards of behaviour, which Scout and Jem work diligently to ignore. The third child we come to know and love is Dill, who comes every summer to stay with his aunt in the house next door. A fatherless, slightly old-fashioned, only child from Meridian, Mississippi, Dill is the catalyst the other two need for all that follows.

Written with a flowing natural style that effortlessly draws you into Scout’s world, it deals with major issues of the day in a clear gritty way and it is also very funny. In the final storyline, it seems perfectly natural that Scout, dressed as a ham, should be walking home in the dark with Jem after a school event. The ham plays an important role in the end-game. In fact, it could be said that without the ham she would be dead.

Whilst encircled by sharply-observed descriptions of their neighbours and Dill’s obsession with trying to get the recluse Boo Radley to come out of his house, the book has at its core Atticus’ defence of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Bob Ewell, a poor white farmer living with his large brood of children in virtual destitution on the outskirts of the town, accuses his black neighbour Tom Robinson of raping his eldest daughter Mayella. By the time the trial starts, Atticus has already saved Tom from a lynching by a crowd of men who turn up at the jail where he is being held. Scout, Jem and Dill sneak out at night and arrive just before the men. Scout unknowingly defuses the anger in the men when she spots the father of a classmate and speaks to him about his son. Her innocence and kindness prompt Mr. Cunningham to tell the other men to go home. This scene is the start of Scout’s understanding that nothing is fair for black people. (NB: The book was written only five years after the well-publicised lynching of teenager Emmett Till in 1955.)

Bob Ewell, in the eyes of the town is the lowest of the low but inherent racism tops even this and Tom Robinson in the ‘court’ of Maycomb is guilty before the trial starts. The judge sets Atticus to defend Tom as he knows Atticus to be an honest man who will not just put on a show of defence but the real thing; that is exactly what Atticus does. Scout, Jem and Dill, unbeknownst to Atticus, watch the whole trial from the ‘coloured gallery’, where they are brought to the front, known as they are to be Calpurnia’s charges and Atticus’ children. One thing that shocks white sensibilities at the trial is that Tom admits he felt sorry for Mayella being forced to look after her many siblings and her unpleasant father when her mother dies. In a segregated world how dare a black man have the temerity to feel sorry for a white man; even a Ewell. Even though it becomes obvious that Tom was physically incapable of giving Mayella the beating she received (he has a withered arm) the jury, after a very long deliberation, still finds him guilty.

As the story progresses there are things we discover and consider. This is where reading this book as an adult gives you a different perspective; the lessons are the same, just in sharper focus.

Prejudice of all kinds, be it based on religion, skin colour, age or anything else, is abhorrent.

This is something left for the reader to infer from the many characters in the book. As Miss Maudie says “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Atticus, when discussing the court-room verdict, says to Jem. “The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be he any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.’

The majority of people are good at heart. As Scout says to Atticus after realising that Arthur Radley saved her. “Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

There are so many things to take from this book. Not least the realisation that although laws may change, attitudes passed from generation to generation of people needing to find a scapegoat for their own failings, will be hard to change. The end of the Civil War and the American government’s inability to deal with the problem of how to integrate slaves into society, is a harvest still being reaped to this day. ‘Forty Acres and A Mule’ for liberated slaves, meant that someone somewhere, felt aggrieved that they were not included, particularly poor whites. The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th and it is no coincidence that the Confederate flag was much in evidence on that day.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an easy read, just right for a teenage mind needing a story that pulls you along but it is of course so much more than that. I hope I have inspired you to get back to it and give it another viewing; you will not be disappointed.

To Kill a Mockingbird is published by Cornerstone.

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