Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: FOUND IN A BOOKSHOP by Stephanie Butland

 

"A diverse collection of characters ... running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world."

Yvonne Coppard is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and writer of fiction for children and adults. See more on her website.

When Covid lockdown is imposed, the owner of the Lost for Words bookshop in York faces up to the possibility that she and her staff may lose their livelihoods. Then an old customer asks for help in locating a book, which sparks the idea for remote selling with a twist. As well as ordering specific books, customers can call or email to ask staff to browse and select books for them. Connections are made between a community of people from different walks of life who take comfort and inspiration from books. This is the basic conceit that allows Butland to introduce a diverse collection of characters, weaving their back stories together and running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each character faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world. There are some heartrending moments but the book is, at heart, a joyous story.

For many of us, those long years of pandemic became a dark tunnel of loss and grief, lit by occasional beacons of hope as ordinary people stepped up to do extraordinary things for strangers they would never meet. The characters in Found in a Bookshop draw the reader into many of the experiences we recognise, in our own lives or the lives of those around us. New relationships begin, old ones strengthen or crumble. There is violence, and loss, and misunderstanding. But there is also humour, heroism and, above all, good old-fashioned kindness.

This is the only book I have read where Lockdown is part of the story. I found any creative attempt to analyse or absorb the events going on around me impossible. Found in a Bookshop is a book I will keep, as a story-snapshot album and aide-memoire of extraordinary times I hope never to see again.

Found in a Bookshop is published by Headline.

BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"There's resilience in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Best known for fiction for children and young adults, with titles including the Costa Category winner Set in Stone, she has also published one novel for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, and is currently working on another. Her latest title, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us, is a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

Burntcoat is the name of an abandoned industrial building in an unnamed northern town which becomes the home of sculptor Edith Harkness; also, it's the technique she learns from a Japanese master, almost destroying a piece of wood by burning, then scraping off charcoal to reveal the beauty of the grain beneath.

This is the third novel I've read recently that looks at the breakdown of daily life, and how humans survive when the support systems they depend on are abruptly removed. In Jessie Greengrass's The High House, climate change has led to drastically rising sea levels. In The Stranding, by Kate Sawyer, a presumed nuclear disaster has wiped out the northern hemisphere and much of the south, leaving few survivors. The main scenario in Burntcoat is both familiar and not-familiar: there's a pandemic, there's lockdown, there are fears, masks and empty streets, but this is not the pandemic we're living through now. The quickly-spreading disease is plague-like in its symptoms effects, and it lies dormant but menacing for years afterwards in 'carriers' like Edith, which is where we begin the story.

Celebrated for her work, Edith, aged 59 in the later parts of the novel, has completed a monumental piece which is to be a memorial to those who died, and is making preparations for a lonely death.  We piece her life together: her childhood, her art studies, her meeting with lover Halit shortly before lockdown restrictions were imposed, and something of the years between then and now.

The narrative is unusual in the brevity of its sections and its abrupt shifts back and forth in time, and also because it uses first/second-person, addressing a 'you' we can't at first identify. It takes a while to sort out the various characters, merely names dropped in at first. Dialogue is rendered in italics, without speech marks.

Later the 'you' becomes Halit, a Turkish immigrant working as a chef, with whom Edith has an intensely physical relationship, moving into lockdown with him at Burntcoat shortly after they meet. Although there's this interlude of love, trust and intimacy, Edith's life seems to have been shaped for hardship and loss, so that the austerity of Burntcoat - converted into a vast working space below, living quarters above - is a fitting home. "When I was eight, my mother left and Naomi arrived," she misleadingly tells us; her mother suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage from which she made a slow partial recovery, bringing up Edith alone. At art school Edith sets herself apart from fellow students, and wins a scholarship to Japan where she aims to "escape the corset of fine art".

The joyous physicality of sex is set against the decaying of bodies as they succumb to disease; but there's resilience too in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction. "A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held."

Edith's character blends defiance and acceptance, her story told with measured calmness. I'm full of admiration for Sarah Hall's boldness and range, and her ability to move easily from close-range to detached observation and back again. Although Burntcoat is a relatively short novel it feels big and expansive. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't appear on awards shortlists this year. 

Burntcoat is published by Faber.

Sarah Hall's The Wolf Border is reviewed here by Cindy Jefferies.

Linda Newbery's This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us is published by Pavilion.

Lockdown Sunday extra: REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD - reading Anne Tyler in Lockdown, by Paul Magrs

"Four novels in five years from her. That's amazing, and I'm so grateful for that quiet, calm, sane voice still being here."

Paul Magrs brought out his first novel in 1995. Last year he published his book on writing, The Novel Inside You. This year Snow Books are republishing his Brenda and Effie Mystery series of novels. He lives and writes in Manchester with Jeremy and Bernard Socks.

Easter Weekend, 2020

Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life in lockdown. Many readers and writers I know secretly hanker to live like this. It must be why I’ve always been drawn to the novels of Anne Tyler, these past thirty years, since I discovered her. Tyler heroes tend to hanker for locked down lives, and they spend their days quietly aghast at the way everyone else goes flitting and changing about.

Up much of the night worrying and lying awake, fretting about Bernard Socks not being indoors, even though I know he's all right really. These are warm, moony nights for cats to go crazy in. At three I put on my slippers and take my keys to have a look at the bottom of the garden and of course, there he is, sleeping in the Beach House chair. I carry him indoors and he indulges me, running straight back out once I’m in bed.

This morning is beautiful. The sun so strong and the cherry blossom like great cumbersome sleeves on the branches outside my study window. The petals are starting to fly off already. There's just a few days of this.

Jeremy gets up saying, ‘It's like waking up each day and thinking that you've gone deaf. There's no city noise at all.’

A thousand people dead each and every day. Our rates are worse than anywhere in Europe. After us looking at Italy and Spain in horror for those weeks, it turns out those were the precise weeks our government should have been taking action, when they were simply telling us to wash our hands and to carry on as normal.

My treat to myself is the new Anne Tyler, which arrived the other day. It was on order for months. I take the parcel and open it and immediately wash my hands. Does cardboard carry the virus? Was the postman wearing gloves?

I've read her for thirty years and now she's writing characters slightly younger than me: characters who are already middle-aged, faded and disappointed. Characters who've missed out somehow. Taciturn, diffident characters who we meet on the very day that they try to catch hold of their lives again.

I always love her characters. They’re kind and they've usually lost out and, if it's through fault of their own, it's not a bad fault. Not usually. It's to do with a one-time hesitation, a fatal stepping back in order to let other, more pushy people dart forward. Her characters let others get on with being self-centred and ruthless and unkind.

Straight away I'm thinking of people who have leapfrogged their way onto and then over me in the past. It’s the same in Micah’s backstory here, when we learn a little from his college years. He stood by and let himself be robbed. There was a rich boy who simply took the patent for a software programme away from him. You’ve had comparable situations in the past, when you let people get away with stuff. And, like Micah, all you think you can do in these situations is pity the thief. Yes, I guess I might have been daft, letting them get away with it, but really… don't they have any ideas of their own? No talents? How desperate must they be to steal ideas, or to use up and exploit people and then move on past them?

I've been unlucky and foolish in the past. Hapless as an Anne Tyler character. I'm thinking of people I thought were friends and, looking back, realizing that there was always something smarmy about them. I look back at particular ones and think, Yes, the way they grinned was just like the Blue Meanie in the Yellow Submarine cartoon and that should have been a danger sign.

At the moment I'm feeling sadder and more demoralised about my own work than I even realised. I took the week off to read and do very little work. I learned a bit more about painting with gouache and I gloried in 1970s Jackie Collins and that really was about it for me, this week. But I was also reading Anne Tyler and she put me into a kind of reflective, mopey mood. I love to read her but she makes me feel terrible, too, when I realise, like many of her characters, that I might have done my life wrong. I start to suspect I ought to have had harder edges, maybe… or fewer mixed feelings.

A tough day, feeling claustrophobic indoors. The only place I can sit is my study and that is wholly infused with the idea and atmosphere of work. I'd love to be able to spend the day in the garden. I think how lovely it used to be in the Beach House. I go out to take a look and the garden is so neglected. The Beach House is damaged and crammed with furniture we don't want and can't fit indoors. It's impossible to sit out here.

Jeremy started work in the garden, putting it all back together at the end of February. And I thought: maybe this year he'll sort it again. Then he found all those bones under the fallen tree at the far end and we had to get the police and CSI round, and that was a whole drama for a day. A ridiculous drama – soon resolved. (‘My money is on the remains of a badger,’ said the woman from CID.) The next day we visited my family in Trimdon and it was on the drive back we listened to the news and realised how close the pandemic was coming. We suddenly understood we were all going to be locked in for months, likely as not. So here we are.

Jeremy sits for two hours each day, transcribing the government broadcasts, decoding and fact-checking and commenting on them. Then he posts them online. The local groups are full of people he argues about politics with and they barely acknowledge the work he puts into this and other community initiatives.

I can hear the reasonable, doom-laden voice of the minister and the health experts playing through his laptop in the garden under my window. I want to tear out my hair. I did actually cut my own hair this morning. We’ll all be doing it before long.

I've been sleeping so badly. Lying awake worrying about Jeremy and our parents and Socks and everyone. Lying awake, too hot and thinking: a thousand dead every day. In hospitals I read that they have to turn everyone over and over again. It's best when they lie you face down: best for the lungs and the fluid on them. This image of passivity is horrifying in a way, so that everyone looks like giant babies, being turned over, helplessly.

Finishing the new Anne Tyler this morning, Easter Sunday. Jeremy and Socks have just got up and gone back into the garden. Reading and thinking, that's four novels in five years from her. That's amazing, and I'm so grateful for that quiet, calm, sane voice still being here. Telling us that it's okay to be wrong, imperfect, messy, timewasting… and it's never too late to go back and to make a change. Maybe.

And the theme of quietness! I just read a review of the new one on Amazon where someone says that when they give friends Tyler's books they complain about nothing happening! I think you might as well say that about your own life. (Well, perhaps some people do.) There's absolutely everything happening in her novels, I think. It's all there.

Oh, remember, when you wrote your little play about going to see your granda at the end of his life and you'd been chatting with a very famous producer friend and he said send it to so-and-so at such-and-such productions, his great supporter, all these years. Well, you had the assistant put onto you, of course, and you explained (modestly, stupidly) that perhaps the script was a bit quiet and a bit small scale for them. Then, of course, the assistant gave it a day or so before writing back, and telling you she found it a bit quiet and a bit small scale for them.

Oh well, it doesn't matter. Do you remember your first agent and how she used to say that you had to find something ‘high concept’ to hang all that ‘beautiful writing’ on, or else no one will care, because nothing really happens?

They only notice Anne Tyler now because they've been told to. All these years, and she's finally caught on. Thirty years ago I was lying in the park in Lancaster after my second year at University. That summer I read fifty novels in an empty house and wrote one of my own. I was living in lockdown back then, without even knowing it. All I did was read and write and venture out once a day to the park. Just the same as now.

And just like in an Anne Tyler novel, those thirty years went by and, though all the changes seemed very dramatic at the time, I’m doing all the same stuff as ever. I’m happy to, with the world around me in such constant disarray.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is published by Chatto and Windus

Lockdown Sunday extra: STATION ELEVEN by Emily St John Mandel, reviewed by Cindy Jefferies

"It is an odd thing, to read a dystopian novel while living in a somewhat dystopian world ..."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. Her second title The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne came out in November 2019 and is set during the English Civil Wars.

I first came across Station Eleven in a bookshop on Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto. Having asked for advice on what Canadian fiction to read I came away with Alistair MacLeod, Hugh MacLennan and Emily St John Mandel. All were second hand because I was short of cash. I was amused to see that Station Eleven was an English edition, with the pencilled second-hand price in English money. How easy it is, I idly thought, to fly thousands of miles only to find a several times bought and sold book written on one continent, published in another and to have found its way to its author’s home town. And then I put it in my bag and flew back with it to the UK.

Since reading, I have thought several times of reviewing the book. It is a curiously uplifting dystopian novel, which charts several people through the utterly life changing experience of surviving a catastrophic virus. When Covid-19 happened I thought it would not be a review anyone would want to read, but now I’m not so sure. In common with the novel Earth Abides by the academic and names expert, George R Stewart which, published in 1950 also follows survivors of a virus which decimates the human race, it holds up a mirror to ourselves. In fact they both force us to consider. How would we react? Where would we go? What would we want to keep and what would suddenly have no importance for us?

There are many differences between those novels and our situation today. Both of the fictional viruses wipe out the majority of the population in a matter of hours or days. No daily briefing, organised food supplies or help for the most vulnerable. The heroic work to keep as many safe as possible, to manage the virus, to keep civilisation ticking along is perhaps not the stuff of enjoyable fiction. Far better to get almost straight on to afterwards, when individuals have to utterly take responsibility for their own lives.

Station Eleven moves from before to after and back again as it explores various characters. There are several motifs, which crop up from time to time. A comic book, a paperweight, an unusually named dog, and running throughout is an examination of fake and real. Before the pandemic, Clark, the business consultant suddenly understands that some people don’t even realise that they don’t enjoy their jobs, which makes him want to weep. Afterwards, an actor’s life has meaning for one girl in spite of him dying before the virus hits.

One striking thing about both novels is that they see their worlds recovering from man’s dominance in a way that is beautiful and terrible. As the years pass, how useful is it to teach children about before, when light appeared when a switch was touched, when people could speak to others many miles away, when cars moved and aeroplanes flew and when we knew what was happening across the oceans? For the people who were old enough to remember it is best in the early days not to think of lost friends and family. “Hell is the absence of the people you yearn for.”

It is an odd thing, to read a dystopian novel while living in a somewhat dystopian world. What makes both these novels acceptable to me in these perilous days is the kindness and grace within them. There is some violence, but it is never gratuitous. Both books are too intelligent to go far down that road. Station Eleven is in many ways a book about travel but the most important are the internal journeys Mandel’s characters take. Clark, one of the passengers from a last incoming flight, holes up in the airport with nowhere to go. He beds down by a departure gate. “It will be hard to come back from this,” he thinks, not yet able to understand that there is no coming back at all in his lifetime. In our own, slower pandemic we are in Clark’s middle ground between before and after. A month ago all the talk was of getting back to normal, now it’s more nuanced. We are realising as Clark did that it may not be as simple as that.

I have been struck recently at how my thoughts in some ways echo the thoughts of characters in the books. A survey just out shows that people are seeing some of the advantages to the way our lives have changed since the lockdown, in spite of the terrible cost of lives. Our air is cleaner, noises are more often birds singing than machines working. The frustration of rush hour traffic, while now many office workers are finding that home working is possible. What is normal? Why would we want to return to the hell we have created on earth for so many of its species, including many of ourselves? Have we lived through ‘before’ and will ‘after’ be radically different for us?

What would you want to save? In Station Eleven, the Travelling Symphony has a Star Trek quote as its motto… Survival is insufficient. For Kirsten it is music and Shakespeare. In Earth Abides, Ish feels that the great library needs preserving. Sitting here, in isolation, I would want to preserve memory and the verbal sharing of it with others: the beginnings maybe of a new folk memory and a new mythology.

Station Eleven is published by Picador