Monday, 3 February 2025

Guest review by Mary Hoffman: THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

 



"It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them."

Mary Hoffman’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 125 books, mainly for children and teenagers but also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. Mary’s books have been translated into 31 languages and have won prizes; she also runs the popular History Girls blog. Mary lives in West Oxfordshire with her husband. They are currently catless but not for long. In 2025 her big book for children about food, Food for All, is published by Otter-Barry Books and the new Writers Review Publishing is reissuing her adult novel, David: the Unauthorised Autobiography, the story of the model for Michelangelo’s famous statue in Florence.


The thing about Amor Towles is that, like so many excellent novelists writing currently, all his books are different. I came across him first when my Book Club chose his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) as its title for the month’s discussion. It was one of those rare novels which everyone in the group loved, including me.

I then sought out Rules of Civility (2011) which was unrecognisable as by the same author, even though it was good in a different way. Gentleman was the very unusual story of a Russian aristocrat five years after the 1917’s revolution who, as an alternative to execution, is confined to lifelong house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. He has lost his liberty but, thanks to some clever sleight of hand, not his fortune.

Civility has more of a Scott Fitzgerald feel, though set in the late ‘30s in Manhattan. And then, five years later, came The Lincoln Highway, quite different again.

The novel begins when Emmett Watson, aged eighteen is released from Salina, a work farm for juvenile offenders, after involuntarily causing the death of a contemporary who was taunting and provoking him. The Warden of the detention centre drives him “home” to his father’s farm in Nebraska. But what is home? Emmett’s mother disappeared years ago, his father has died and the bank is foreclosing on the farm.

What makes it home is Emmett’s little brother Billy, who has a plan for what they should do next – set off in Emmett’s car to drive to California and find their mother. We don’t know if this would have worked because it is disrupted before it begins. Two other inmates from Salina have stowed away in the Warden’s boot and these two complete the quartet that go on the weirdest road trip ever.

There is Duchess, a charming but unreliable teenager who turns out to have an alarming approach to restorative justice, and a very rich boy who has just reached his majority, who has problems concentrating. Together they, but mainly Duchess, persuade Emmett that they need to head east before they hit the Lincoln Highway west. Duchess has scores to settle and Woolly has an inheritance to collect.

The four boys don’t always stay together, largely due to the unpredictability and hazy morality of Duchess, whose approach to justice is somewhat haphazard. This gives Towles the opportunity to develop adventures which used to be called “picaresque.” A large cast of characters encounter our heroes together and severally. Emmett is completely focussed on getting his car, “borrowed” by Duchess, back, Billy keeps the main goal of finding their mother at the forefront of his mind but is distracted by comparing the people he meets with his Compendium of Heroes, a book he treasures in his backpack.

Duchess and Woolly are harder to read. They are both traumatised and we have to read on to find out how and why. The book is organised into ten sections, maddeningly beginning at 10 and counting down to 1, even though the story travels forward in a linear direction. In each section there are parts told from the points of view of the four main characters and some minor ones, though only Duchess’s are in the first person. Paradoxically, he is the character whose motives and actions are hardest to decipher.

He appears to be on a campaign of retribution, rather than justice, of which the confrontation with the father who abandoned him as a child should be the climax. But Towles swerves their actual meeting. We know it has happened and perhaps Emmett has guessed what form it took but a lot is left to the reader to infer.

At the end, the four boys are together again in Woolly’s family’s mansion by a lake in the Adirondacks. It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will want to race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them.

It is full of memorable characters, especially Duchess and Billy, though it feels sometimes as if the author is deliberately creating them to be idiosyncratic. That and what I can only feel is a plot hole at the end, in spite of several re-readings, make it not quite the masterpiece thar A Gentleman in Moscow is but I applaud Towles’ determination to write something completely different. By my reckoning the next novel should be out next year; I can’t wait.

The Lincoln Highway is published by Penguin.  

Mary has also reviewed A Gentleman in Moscow.

Monday, 27 January 2025

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Màiri Kidd on her new novel THE SPECIMENS

 

"
"Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal."

Màiri Kidd is Director at the Saltire Society and was formerly Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. Mairi is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC. The Specimens is her first novel for adults.

Up the close and down the stair, meet the women of Burke and Hare ...

Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.

The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?

This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.

WR: Firstly, congratulations - this is a compelling read which I finished within three days. And the book is very handsomely produced by Black & White Publishing, with its striking cover. I certainly learned more about the exploits of Burke and Hare than I'd known previously, and looked up more details after finishing. You've written widely on folklore and feminism but I believe this is your first novel for adults. What was the impulsion behind it - was this something you'd been thinking about for some while?

MàiriThank you!

The motivation for writing about the Burke and Hare case was originally to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless. I have previously sought to do this by writing non-fiction and short fiction about Scotland’s ‘witches’, who have a lot in common with the Burke and Hare victims - mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and their bodies were destroyed after death. In both cases, also, there’s a general perception that the facts are well known and well understood whereas in truth, many people hold serious misconceptions about the witches and about Burke and Hare, and so there’s a lot to explore. I did flirt with the idea of working in short format and with non-fiction but Black and White encouraged me to write it as a novel and I’m glad they did.

WR: I was astonished to read in the Acknowledgments that you drafted the novel in just a few months, alongside your full-time job and a position on the board of MG Alba (the BBC's partner in delivering media services through Gaelic). Had you already done much of the plotting and research before that?

Màiri: First off, I should perhaps say I don’t recommend this as a way of working - there were various reasons behind the short turnaround, but of course it wasn’t ideal. Needs must, though, and I had to find a way to make it work to my benefit. I told myself if would be as though I were living the plot in real time – the killings happened over about a year – and the fact I was often working at night certainly helped with the dark atmosphere I wanted.

I hadn’t plotted the book at all before I began – all I had written was one of the victims’ narratives as a short story. I knew the basics of the story because I grew up here and it is very widely known, and I plotted it very strictly to help make best use of the writing time (I did deviate a bit from my outline in the end, but not much). In terms of research, I was lucky in that I wanted to know the facts but thereafter rather to avoid reading other people’s analyses of the whys and wherefores so I could make up my own mind. That saved some time…

WR: Your novel covers a span of nine years, not including the prologue and epilogue, and is told from the viewpoints of several characters - mainly Helen, the lover of William Burke, and Susan, the wife of anatomist Robert Knox. How did you decide on this structure? Was it difficult to contain so much information within the frame of the novel?

MàiriI am a big fan of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and wished that a treatment of that sort might be possible for the Burke and Hare crimes, but it just isn’t. The killings happened around sixty years earlier, before universal registration, the victims were often itinerant, and their remains were destroyed. It’s unlikely that we will ever know more than we do, and it’s not enough for a book. I hit, then, on the idea of writing about the women in Burke and Hare’s lives as a means of telling the story. Helen MacDougall immediately presented as a medium for the ‘action’, and as I began to read more about the case, I discovered that Knox the anatomist – Burke and Hare’s ‘client’ – had a wife no one knew existed because (as one of the few who knew her understood) she wasn’t of an appropriate social standing. From this I began to think in terms of a two-hander with victims’ stories interwoven throughout.

The greatest challenge I found I faced wasn’t the volume of information – the women don’t have all the information at any point in the book – but rather creating a twin plot. That took some tweaking of timelines so that the set pieces of Helen’s and Susan’s stories could work as one novel, and there were times I struggled with that. I had a lot of pieces of paper on my desk with dates and times for different happenings and I scratched my head a great deal.

WR: The selling of dead bodies will come as no surprise to the majority of readers, who will know what's going on behind the scenes at Tanners Close and Dr Knox's surgical theatre for some while before either of the women, Helen or Susan, begins to suspect. Yet there's still plenty of tension as events unfold - was this something you felt you needed to address?

Màiri: I think that was my greatest concern as I worked – how can one sustain tension when the ‘end’ is known to almost every reader? My ‘solution’ was to try to use that foreknowledge to create a sense of dread in Susan and Helen’s stories as the reader knows more than they do. In the stories of the victims, I wanted to focus on their lives, so their ends arrive very quickly and aren’t really the point at all. That was my tribute to The Five.

WR: As we enter into the relationship between Helen MacDougal and William Burke, Helen having been treated with horrible brutality by her late husband, we see that William can be kind, tender, considerate and even conscience-stricken, and sense that his fate could have turned out very differently. Did this come from your research, or was it your wish to differentiate between him and the apparently far more callous William Hare?

Màiri: This is something a lot of readers have asked me about – they struggle with the idea that Burke might have been likeable at times. I think he must have been, because he was able to earn the trust of some of the victims, and indeed one poor woman was handed into his care by a policeman, presumably on the understanding she’d sleep off the alcohol she’d drunk in the lodging house. His relationship with Helen was of long standing and seems to have held some level of genuine affection.

Fundamentally, I understood Burke as weak, uncontrolled, violent, self-pitying but broadly ‘normal’ – he wasn’t a psychopath, he felt remorse as far as we can tell, being dependent on alcohol and opium to sleep during the killings. The motivations of people without empathy don’t interest me, but the actions of people who should know better do.

Perhaps, too, there is some bias in me – when we learned the story as children, of course we learned that Hare turned on Burke in the end, and got off Scot free. That has rankled ever after in the Scottish mind, I think!

WR: The reader is encouraged to sympathise with Helen, who wants to see the best in her lover - but do you think she is too forgiving, to the point of complicity?

Màiri: I think ‘my’ Helen does something many of us will recognise – put kindly, seeing the best in people, or less kindly, turning a blind eye to significant concerns. People are terribly torn in their loyalties when loved ones do awful things – just look at the partners of perpetrators in the Pélicot case in France who have refused to accept the wrongdoing of their partners.

The level to which the real Helen was complicit is unclear and I had to make a call on that for the book. In my early reading around the case, I was struck by the fact that the Hares wanted William Burke to kill Helen, and Burke took Helen out of Edinburgh for a time, presumably to keep her safe. They seem to have left the Hares’ house thereafter. That doesn’t really speak to me of a fully complicit member of the ‘gang’. Again, though, I recognise my own biases! Helen was described by one commentator as a female ‘of the degraded sort’ and that perhaps made me pity her. Society definitely viewed people in that way, had no ambition for them and accordingly offered no safety net, creating the conditions for people without a strong moral compass to be motivated and able to do awful things, or to turn a blind eye.

WR: Susan, Dr Knox's (supposed) wife, is largely your own creation, and in her way she is just as much a 'specimen' as the bodies procured by Burke and Hare - kept in close confinement, repeatedly pregnant and used shockingly as the object of observation and experimentation. You cleverly use the device of the dolls' house and its miniatures both to emphasise her infantilisation by Knox and to link her story with Helen's, and later to reach a kind of resolution. How did this idea come to you?

Màiri: The idea of miniatures came to me in part because the plot links to a set of miniature coffins found on Edinburgh’s city centre volcano Arthur’s Seat in the early 1830s and which are traditionally associated with the killings. Recent research has suggested that the coffins were made with cobblers’ tools and that suggested a plot thread to me.

More broadly, the idea of collecting is key to the novel. During the period in which it is set, the real-life Knox manoeuvred his way into a role as curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum where – much later – Burke’s own skeleton would join the collection. The ethics of retention and display of medical specimens are the crux of the case and remain controversial into the present day. Interestingly, there is a tendency today to view the Burke and Hare story as though it was all about ‘medical progress’, whereas doctors like Knox were in it as much for profit and social advancement as the good of humanity.

Outside museums, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were all the rage at the time, and the feminine equivalent was the baby house. I didn’t see Susan’s house as being infantilising – these were costly women’s treasures – but she does see it as a symbol of her imprisonment, only gradually realising she can use it to form a new allegiance.

WR: I found that one of the most moving chapters was the one from Abigail's point of view - a fictional character we accompany through a hard but successful day of trading that ends in her fateful encounter with Margaret and William Hare. These details of working life lived on the edge of poverty give the novel such colour and texture. The story of Burke and Hare has been recounted many times, but is yours the first to tell it entirely from the point of view of women?

Màiri: Generally the focus is on the murderers although I understand that one Victorian melodrama focused on one of the known victims - Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error by David Pae, originally serialised in the Dundee Courier. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought much about Susan, who really fascinated me. How could a man have a secret wife and seven children in a small place like Edinburgh?

WR: Having worked as publisher and editor, how did it feel to be sitting on the other side of the desk as an author?

Màiri: It is quite strange but I am lucky in that my publishers are very understanding and let me be involved in things like the briefs for covers. I hope that having experience on both sides of the desk means that I am not too hard to work with from my publishers’ perspective! I have of course learned immense amounts from working with so many authors I admire over the years (including one Linda Newbery – I think back very fondly on working with your books for Barrington Stoke, including the unusual experience of commissioning an embroidery for the book jacket of Tilly’s Promise!)

WR: (Ah, thank you ... I was so delighted with that cover!) What has been the response to the novel so far? It would make an excellent TV drama or film ... 

Màiri: The response has been very kind. It has been reviewed very positively in the most amazing places, and the Scottish press and booksellers in particular have been really generous. Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal. I am also enough of a publisher to know that books must be positioned and its beautiful jacket says ‘women’s fiction’ to me, so I have been especially pleased when it has been reviewed by male readers like Teddy Jamieson in The Herald who have said it spoke to them too.

WR: Finally - will you be writing more historical fiction?

Màiri: I am just finishing the first draft of my next book and yes, it is historical. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say an awful lot except that it is about a group of people who are generally incredibly well documented, but not for the period about which I am writing. It is set largely north of the Border but links to an iconic work of literature most people do not associate with Scotland at all…

WR: Well, that's an intriguing note to end on! Thanks so much, Màiri, for answering our questions and we hope The Specimens will reach many more appreciative readers.

The Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing.

Monday, 20 January 2025

Guest review by Laura Parker: THE PLACE OF TIDES by James Rebanks

 



"This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style."

Photograph: Kitty Parker
Laura Parker
is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s
The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

James Rebanks made his name with two books: one about his life as a shepherd in Cumbria (A Shepherd’s Life) and the other on the changing face of agriculture over three generations (English Pastoral). So he was right to warn his 150,000 X-followers that his next book would be different.

The Place of Tides takes him to Fjaerøy, a Norwegian island just below the Arctic Circle where he sheds his modern existence: no internet, barely any phone, limited power, no running water. For seventy days.

It is his account of ten weeks spent in the company of Anna, a woman of seventy determined to continue an age-old way of existence that she herself took up only later in life. Anna harvests down from eider ducks, gathering a material used for centuries for luxurious warmth, and continuing a tradition which has provided a living for the women of this fishing community since Viking times. It is a way of life that is dying out, not just because of cheaper and more abundant alternatives, but because the ducks themselves are getting scarcer.

Highlighting the fine balance between human intervention and nature, the ‘duck women’ build shelters for the birds as they come ashore to lay their eggs, and protect them from predators such as sea eagles and mink (the latter introduced by humans). In earning the trust of the ducks, their protectors take their reward at the end of the season by gathering the down the birds use to line the nests.

Rebanks discovers there is more to his stay than deploying his farming skills through raking seaweed or repairing shelters. Bewildered, he struggles to contain his impatience as the two women (Anna has brought a friend, Imogen) settle down indoors to knit for their first two weeks on the island. Rebanks is left unmoored, reflecting on the frenetic existence he has left behind, along with his wife and four children. He resolves to be a better husband and father. There are still eight weeks to go.

So far, so satisfying to a nature book reader: being taken to a remote frontier world, guided to closely examine a new habitat – there are many intricate observations of the wildlife and weather on the island – and to be made aware of a diminishing natural resource.

Unexpectedly, it is the deepening human relationships that become the heart of this book. Anna turns out to be different from Rebanks’s first arresting sight of her, a tiny but fierce ‘half-wild’ woman standing proud on the shoreline. She is older, frailer, at first unable to work. Constantly trying to be respectful of her world, Rebanks is frequently unsure how to proceed, a Gulliver in a strange land.

“I had sensed I ought to make myself much smaller, working to their commands, relinquishing responsibility.”

He realises, for the first time in his life, that he is in a place entirely run by women. By ‘paying attention’, he begins to see how men treat women, and he cringes. He also learns a great deal from Anna’s attitude to her work.

“Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment .. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind and tides.”

Amid the poignancy – this is Anna’s last season – there are lessons for him, and for us.

“In this radically pared-back life she had found peace and meaning. She was the waves, the light, and the terns rising and falling on the bay. She was the guardian of this place … powerless against the scale of the natural forces at work and against the issues affecting the oceans, yet fierce in her determination to try.”

This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style.

Rebanks and the women leave the island with a harvest amounting to 2kg of down, which must then be painstakingly cleaned. It is barely enough to make two quilts. But both he and his readers have gleaned so much more about our threatened world.

The Place of Tides is published by Allen Lane.

See also: James Rebanks' English Pastoral reviewed by Judith Allnatt


Monday, 13 January 2025

Guest review by Graeme Fife: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE by Dr Benji Waterhouse





"Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read." 

Graeme Fife
 is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 


He gave the little wealth he had
To build a House for Fools and Mad:
And shew’d by one satyric Touch,
No nation wanted it so much.
On the death of Dr Swift, by Jonathan Swift

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.
King Lear

The old word for mental hospital was asylum (Latin form of the Greek for ‘refuge, safe haven’) and ‘loonies’ came from lunatics, those deluded people who raked at the moon’s reflection in a pond hoping to dredge up some silver, otherwise ‘moonrakers’. ‘Mentally disturbed’ is more sensitive if not so catchy.

Some time in 1903, a visitor arrived at an asylum in London and asked the official at the front desk if the clock on the wall was right. A man sweeping the floor of the entrance hall intervened: ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be in here if it was right.’ That man was Dan Leno, celebrated music hall comedian and pantomime dame, known as ‘the King’s jester’ who had recently suffered a breakdown and was, temporarily, confined in an institution also known as a ‘bedlam’ that contraction of the Bethlehem named for St Mary near Elephant and Castle, a mental institution which charged visitors a fee to come in to watch the antics of the poor deranged inmates.

A young woman I knew in my teens used to say ‘I’m mad,’ giggling at some unconventional, frivolous, even childish thing she had just done. We may know what she meant but it’s not what she said and madness is no laughing matter. Somehow the apparent absurdity of reviewing a book, even so good a book as this, about mentally unbalanced people is a touch daft but, curiously, when I had been through a particularly stressful period for reasons needless to dilate on, reading this book uplifted me because Waterhouse is honest, compassionate and understanding and (I find) very funny. Not about the patients, no no, but in making jokes at his own expense, his failures and misreadings, and the sheer craziness of the system in which he and many others have to operate, the pressures and the impediments to efficiency, the lack of funds and facilities merely to take care of the very ill and needy.

The very words loony – which he clinically disavows – and concomitant loony bin betray our own reserve and shying away from mental illness and it’s an affliction which should give us all pause, every one of us. For that reason alone, read this book. I resist anyone telling me ‘this is funny’ because tastes differ. However, what Waterhouse does and with singular good humour – who knows how, given what his working life demands of him? -is to lay bare the plight of the many people whose reason fragments leaving them adrift and deluded by crazy ideas and with some difficulty I hold off from mentioning even one; better no spoilers, though some of the predicaments he describes stretch credibility taut to breaking.

No wonder that doctors resort to gallows humour, as do soldiers faced with imminent threat of death. Sometimes patients, too. Consider the poet Christopher Smart’s unwitting humour in the poem Jubilate Deo, possibly written inside Saint Luke’s asylum:

I will now consider my cat Jeffrey.

Waterhouse reins in, reserving his humour as a softer cushion for his continuing anguish, transferred from those he has to treat; the threat – sometimes carried out - of violence, the self-defence training which has to be part of his capabilities.

Even the Old Testament, not an obvious source of material for a stand-up comedian chimes in with the notion, in Proverbs, chapter 17, v 22: ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ So there.

Care, consideration, cash…no such thing as a nostrum but these would all help and Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read. We of sound mind need it and should be thankful. The weird jump-cut cinema of dreams is the most imbalance that most of us have to contend with.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here is published by Penguin.

More of Graeme's choices:







Monday, 6 January 2025

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: ABSOLUTELY & FOREVER by Rose Tremain

 

"How to capture and lock away this feeling? She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh. Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since."

For Caroline Pitcher, writing is like living lots of lives. Mariana and the Merchild, written by Caroline and illustrated by Jackie Morris, is published by Otter-Barry books. Recently Graffeg have brought out new editions of Caroline's Lord of the Forest, illustrated by Jackie Morris and The Winter Dragon, illustrated by Sophy Williams. Now Caroline is dreaming further life stories from her favourite novel, Mine.

Fifteen-year-old Marianne falls for eighteen-year-old Simon with his dark flop of hair, with the kind of love that Simone de Beauvoir says `takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical.’ Certainly it dominates Marianne’s life `absolutely & forever.’

I have read many moving, lyrical and beautiful novels by Rose Tremain and loved them all, especially The Road Home, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, and Merivel (which has possibly the filthiest scene I’ve read in any novel.) She writes about different times, settings and characters, usually at a good length. This is where Absolutely & Forever is different. It is short. On holiday, how would I cope, without one of her beautifully written worlds waiting for me for more than one day?

Well, Absolutely & Forever is a mesmerising coming-of-age story that stayed in my thoughts for the remainder of the stay, and beyond. It is set among the upper-middle classes `when England was still known as England and not as the You Kay.’ Disgrace afflicts families who fear losing their apparent status. Marianne sounds isolated, with little connection with Mummy (Lavender) or Daddy. Daddy’s face quite puce and stupid-looking from the gin and Mummy complaining that the lumpy grass hurt her ankles. Her boarding school was no retreat. Each morning a thermometer, tasting of disgusting Dettol, was shoved into your mouth by one of the three matrons. The girls sniff yesterday’s knickers before putting them on. Her friend says that parents hate their children because they know that they’re the past and we’re the future.

Marianne’s self-esteem is low, yet her narrative voice is ironic and witty. I had much sympathy for her and enjoyed the spot-on timely settings, of the King’s Road, brimful of creatures in tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and lone guys like gazelles in velvet trews and snakeskin boots. Marianne never quite fits in, despite eating a lot of spaghetti Milanese, getting fat and acne-ridden, drinking red wine and sleeping with well-known photographer Julius Templeman, who humiliates her, saying, `I never told you before, Marianne, but you are actually a lousy fuck.’

Her focussed friend Pet, too blunt and Scottish for Marianne’s parents, is at the brand-new University of Essex in a high grey tower, taking a course which is a `Study of Everything.’ I enjoyed these scenes, especially as I studied at the new University of Warwick a while later. Does this count as historical fiction?

There are excellent characters, such as freckled orange-haired Hugo Forster-Pellisier, his parents Jocelyn and Felicity, as I remembered I had to call them, in their Station Wagon. Hugo is funny and kind and Marianne likes his comforting todger, but she still dreams of Simon. She sees the future as `a life of boredom and shame.’

We read vivid accounts of Paris, a department store in Newbury, a wedding, working as an agony aunt on a magazine, horses, and the beginnings of a writer’s life. No more from me now, except to say that secrets affect the story in a big way. Perhaps nowadays these secrets would be less kept, not hidden, especially between the generations.

Let’s hope so.

Marianne does come to realise, however, that she loves the English countryside with oak trees and hedgerows and narrow English lanes threading towards hills and tumps.

Absolutely & Forever is both amusing and piercing as Marianne tries to find herself in spite of everything, with little encouragement from those around her. "Daddy’s glittery eye blinked and his head jerked upward and he said, Nobody should put their hopes in stories, Mops." It’s not all gloom. When Marianne pauses in reading her story to her mother, Mummy was staring at me. `Go on,’ she said.

Some years before this novel, Rose Tremain published a memoir Rosie – Scenes from a vanished life. It is dedicated to `Nan’ (who showed Rose her how to love) and Rose’s beloved grandchildren. Rose writes of her mother, Jane had no schooling in love…This was the tragedy of her existence. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair.

When she is ten, Rose loses her father, her home and welcoming school to a cold boarding school in Hertfordshire. Like Marianne, she feels stifled and yet finds her way out. She longs to be destined to be something, and fortunately has a memorable moment, a summertime epiphany when she was thirteen or fourteen, a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience. It slips away, leaving desolation. How to capture and lock away this feeling?

She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh.

Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since.

Absolutely & Forever is published by Vintage.  


Wednesday, 25 December 2024

Advent Books part 3 - and that's a wrap! Festive greetings to all our followers!

 


The final days of Advent bring us more great recommendations. Christmas greetings to all our contributors and followers!

Which have you read? Please tell us in the comments!


Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "In 2012, Hassan Akkad was a refugee from Syria, where he had been imprisoned and tortured for protesting against the regime. His story, including the perilous journey across Europe in 2015, as borders began to close, was told in the BBC series Exodus, our journey to Europe, some of which he filmed himself. The programmes won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 2017, by which time he had settled in London, spending a while with a family who hosted refugees through the charity Refugees At Home ... His excellent English meant that he was able to travel around the country, speaking about his experiences. Now he has put all this down, and more, in this challenging and moving book. It is a story that needed to be told."



Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "The book started life as four lectures presented at the University of Chicago, and it retains the lean essay structure, with each part pursuing a specific line of argument as to why humanity has failed to engage with the climate emergency. He calls that inability ‘the great derangement’. Why do we continue to live as if the earth’s resources are infinite? Why do we burn coal, drive petrol cars, take flights, drill for oil, heat our homes with gas and destroy trees across the world, from the Brazilian rainforest to the ancient English woodlands being felled for HS2? We know these activities will cause catastrophe for our grandchildren. What is wrong with us?"



Reviewed by Simon Mason: "Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger."Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?"




Reviewed by Philip Womack: "One of the worries many authors have about the increasing professionalisation of the writing life - creative writing courses, residencies, prizes, university posts and so forth - is that everything will shape into a corporate blandness. Writers are becoming a kind of bureaucrat, efficient administrators, reliable colleagues to the Academy. Workshops hone away rough edges and controversial ideas in prose and poetry; large publishers, worried about reputational consequences, discourage eccentricity.

Plug is a delicious, delirious antidote to all that. There is something impish about him, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane. His optimism in the face of disaster is a tonic."


Reviewed by Celia Rees: In recollection, it seems a much longer novel, so much is contained within it and much of that actually goes on within the reader’s own head. The elliptical style, the sudden changes, the refusal to provide any easy explanations mark it as a true Young Adult novel defined, not by content, but by narrative sophistication. There is nothing easy about it but it is utterly compelling. Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again.


Reviewed by Sara Collins: What really sets Goon Squad apart for me is the shape-shifting quality of its prose. From powerfully lyrical (Egan describes Sasha’s urge to pilfer an unattended wallet as feeling herself “contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite”) to character conjuring (“I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery”) to sucker punching (“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?").


Reviewed by Hazel Gaynor: "Part murder-mystery, part publishing industry satire, Yellowface is a clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days. I’m a very slow reader so this is a very good sign.

Through her two brilliant protagonists, Athena Liu and June Hayward, Kuang not only navigates the moral conundrum of plagiarism, but also addresses complex issues of toxic friendships, cancel culture, and the highly topical question of cultural appropriation that has been raised many times in the publishing industry in recent years."

 

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about indigenous people. Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly, thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is unlovable ..."



Reviewed by Paula Knight: "Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me."


And finally: our joint tribute to the much-loved, much-missed Helen Dunmore. Celia: "Helen Dunmore was one of those writers who could do everything, seemingly effortlessly. As well as her prize-winning adult fiction, she wrote for children and young adults and she wrote poetry. It seems wrong to be writing about her in the past tense. She was the kind of writer you thought would always be there to show the rest of us how it is done ... 

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We hope you've enjoyed revisiting our Advent Books. Follow us for more great recommendations in 2025!

Monday, 16 December 2024

ADVENT BOOKS week 2 - revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years


Which have you read? Tell us in the comments!

Advent Books Week 2 brings more of our favourite books and reviews. Several of our regular contributors appear here - huge thanks to them and to everyone who sends us their recommendations. There are certainly some great reads here - which have you read, and what's your view? Tell us in the comments!

 


Reviewed by Rachel Morris: "Beautifully written, moves at pace, surges with a bitter poignancy and is laced with a very particular kind of magical realism. It is also strangely defiant and often very funny ... Gardam’s dialogue is to die for – supple, expressive, often startling. She can turn the direction of a story on a sixpence. (Oh, you think quite suddenly, so that’s where this is going.) She has a transfiguring talent, can flood a scene with an ecstatic strangeness, can turn the ordinary world momentarily into something glorious."



Reviewed by Judith Allnatt: "One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. As did Trespass, The Road Home and The Gustav Sonata, this novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant."



Reviewed by Jon Appleton: "You could say the book is about Danny Conroy, a man who knowingly allows himself to become the ‘project’ of two strong-willed, passionate women – first of all Maeve and later his wife Celeste. Who, if anyone, is at fault in such a scenario when things don’t work out? (That’s not much of a spoiler, I promise you) ... It’s perhaps her best book but quite likely only till the next one. She’s that kind of writer." (Tom Lake has followed ... also reviewed by Jon.)



Reviewed by Katherine Langrish: "As I reached the end I realised that the writer with whose work I’m most drawn to compare The Golden Rule is Daphne du Maurier. She too told strong stories with strong characters in strong, often Cornish settings: her books live and are loved. Du Maurier has sometimes been belittled as a Gothic novelist, though why ‘Gothic’ should be regarded as in any way derogatory I do not know: frankly what was good enough for Charlotte and Emily Bronte ought to be good enough for anyone. Richly textured, modern, contemporary, literary, The Golden Rule  treads confidently in their footsteps."


Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "So who is the master here? Both men inhabit these pages. Characters, whether real or imagined must dance to the writer’s tune. James was a man of the mind, and Tóibín inhabits that mind to stunning effect. No one can truly know what thoughts inhabit the corners of another’s brain, but Tóibín is impressive at conjuring what might have been there."



Reviewed by Penny Dolan: "I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days."



Reviewed by Anne Cassidy: "Maggie O’Farrell weaves such a wonderful story from these scant facts that I ended up feeling that I definitely knew more about Shakespeare than I had at the beginning. I wanted his life to have been like this. But while O’Farrell’s plot is convincing it’s the language she uses that sets her work above the ordinary. Of the tutor’s lesson and his two unwilling students she says, “They look towards him, plants turning to the sun. He smiles at their soft, unformed faces, pale as unrisen dough in the light from the window.” A wonderful book which I have thought about over and over since reading it."