EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Simon Mason on THE BROKEN SHORE and TRUTH by Peter Temple

"As rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror ..."

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate as his own children, and now he is back writing books for adults again.

His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.

Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.

The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.

Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.

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. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). 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?

Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.

It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.

The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.

See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

Guest review by Annie Garthwaite: GLORIOUS EXPLOITS by Ferdia Lennon

 

"If you read one book set in the classical world this year, make sure it's this one."

Annie Garthwaite grew up in a working-class community in the North East of England. She studied English at the University of Wales before embarking on a thirty-year international business career. In 2017 she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Warwich University and during two years of study, wrote her debut novel Cecily which was published by Penguin in 2021.

Cecily was named a Top Pick by the Times and the Sunday Times, a Best Book of 2021 by independent bookshops and Waterstones and has recently been optioned for television. Annie's second novel, The King's Mother, will be published by Penguin this month. 

If you read one book set in the classical world this year, make sure it's this one. Smart, pitch perfect and darly, darkly funny. Ferdia Lennon writes characters you'll love and despair over - and dialogue that cracks like a whip.

There's been no shortage of classically-set novels in recent years. Most, written by female authors, have retold the stories of great women of myth and history who have been sidelined or vilified by a patriarchal agenda. It's a rich and worthwhile vein within publishing that I happily celebrate. But I can't tell you the sense of refreshment and enjoyment I felt when I read Ferdia Lennon's remarkable debut! Lennon's heroes are male and anything but heroic. Lampo and Galen are, in fact, the Likely Lads of the ancient world: two hapless, hopeless unemployed potters who share little other than a lack of direction and a love of verse - of Euripedes mostly.

But Euripides, of course, is the poet of their enemies - of Athens. Get ready, here comes the history bit.

Glorious Exploits is set in the Sicilian city of Syracuse in the fifth century BC. The Peloponnesian Wars are raging and for the moment at least, Athens is down and Syracuse up. After a failed invasion, the Syracusans have inprisoned dozens of Athenian soldiers in the disused limestone quarries on the edge of the city and left them to starve their way through a Mediterranean summer. Enter Lampo and Gelon, whose hunger for poetry is matched only by their fecklessness.

So Gelon says to me, 'Let's go down and feed the Athenians. The weather's perfect for feeding Athenians.'

And so the novel begins - with an exchange of bread and cheese, a few olives, for snatches of Euripides, morsels of the poetic beauty Gelon craves. Lampo - our narrator and Gelon's rogueish sidekick - is along for the ride. They are the perfect comic duo, and the humour is dark as pitch. It would, after all, be hard for it to be otherwise when men are starving, or when other Syracusans -more hungry for vengeance than verse - visit the quarries of an afternoon for the sheer satisfaction of beating men's brains out.

Eventually, Lampo and Gelon extend their ambition to a full production of Medea, along with Euripides' newest tragedy, The Trojan Women, a story of unremitting misery that speaks of the aftermath of Troy's destruction by the Athenians and the massacre of its men. By choosing this play, Lennon is able to investigate compelling ideas about power reversal and the questionable benefits of empire building. In short, he gives us the Athenians, once great conquerors themselves, as helpless captives, made to play versions of their own victims for an audience of their own conquerors. Life doesn't get much bleaker. Back to the history for a moment: the imprisonment of the Athenians in the Syracusan quarries is recorded by the historian Plutarch, who tells us that some of the captives survived and made it home. They report that they were fed, and eventually freed, in exchange for verses - for rehearsing what they remembered of Euripides' works.

This historical nugget, Lennon reveals, was the inspiration and starting point for his novel. Until he happened upon it, he'd been planning a sprawling epic retelling the whole of the Peloponnesian Wars with a cast of thousands, but he suddenly found himself asking, 'Who were these Sicilians who were so obsessed with the Athenian playwright that they wold feed their enemy to hear his poetry?I couldn't stop thinking about it, so one day I found myself writing: So Gelon says to me...But who was Gelon, and who, for that matter was even speaking? I hadn't a clue, but I was certain of one thing. I was going to find out.'

Glorious Exploits is published in hardback by Fig Tree. The paperback will be published in January 2025.

Annie Garthwaite's Cecily is published by Penguin and The King's Mother by Viking.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Susan Elkin on her reading retrospective, ALL BOOKED UP

 

"I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly three volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022) and All Booked Up (2024); she has her own weekly blog, Susan's Bookshelvesnull, where she reviews music and drama as well as books. She lives in South London.

Writers Review: You've written widely about inspiring a love of reading in children. What are the best ways to encourage a love of reading? What is the situation now in schools and how would you like to see it change?

Susan Elkin: Enthusiasm is key. It's vital to communicate a love of books. So share books, talk about books and - vitally - whether you're a teacher or a parent, for goodness sake let children see you reading for pleasure. If you don't, they get the message that reading is a childish thing which you stop doing when you're grown up. I have never forgiven Tony Blair, early in his premiership, for visiting a primary school and, when the children asked him what his favourite book was telling them that he was too busy to read.

In schools. teachers are very good at teaching phonics and so on as they are now required to do. Decoding the squiggles. though, is the easy bit. It's developing and encouraging reading after that which is the challenge and it's where many schools fall down, not least because there are so many banal, dull hoops the curriculum requires them to jump through in terms of, for example, very formulaic comprehension exercises. I think every class at every level should have a block of independent reading time every day - in silence, read anything you like and the teacher reads too. We used to call this USSR (Uninterrupted, sustained silent reading) or ERIC (Everyone reads in class) and I think it should be a key part of the curriculum ... but I'm not holding my breath.

WR: What are your thoughts on the prevalence of celebrities now writing children’s books?

Susan: Well, I suppose it depends who they are and how good they are. David Walliams is, in my view, outstanding. His books are very funny and he has developed a real love of reading in many children - just as Roald Dahl and JK Rowling did. Richard Coles's crime novels are quite fun and well enough written. And of course there are others.

On the other hand an awful lot of it is the literary equivalent of junk food and often turned out by ghost writers with publishers simply grabbing names that will sell books. And often, I suspect, this is instead of excellent writers whose names are not (yet) well known. On the day I'm writing this, it has just been announced that Jeremy Vine has secured a two book deal. Well, he's not a bad radio presenter but that doesn't mean he can write decent fiction. But I'll reserve judgement until I've seen what he (or his ghost writer) produces.

WR: You've had wide experience of reviewing books for young people, eg. for The School Librarian. Were you ever tempted to write children’s fiction yourself?

Susan:  No. I have no talent for fiction although I'm very much a fiction junkie and read vast quantities of it . It's a strange thing. I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth. I'm so conditioned to this that I find it impossible to make things up! It's probably why I can do memoir, though, because I'm describing what actually happened - at least as I remember or percieve it.

WR: I'm impressed by the range of your publications, the hard work that went into establishing yourself and how well it paid off in terms of opportunities coming your way. How would you advise other writers to get into freelance journalism?

Susan: Probably through a good degree in whatever interests you (English, history, politics, maths etc) and then looking for some kind of work experience placement. Very few successful journalists did “media studies” or anything similar so don’t bother with that. Write as much as you can wherever you are – community newsletters, student magazines and so on so that you build experience and a portfolio. My own experience is not typical – I gradually moved into journalism from teaching from about 1990 at a time when all the broadsheet newspapers had a whole page devoted to education every week. I started by sending on-spec opinion pieces to editors. Sadly, that would never work now.

WR: Writing The Alzheimer's Diaries must have felt very different from your other writing. Did you begin writing it for yourself rather than for publication?

Susan:  Not really, although – with hindsight – it probably helped me to deal with, and process, a pretty grim situation. I am programmed to write about almost everything which happens to me so when my husband, Nick, was first diagnosed it seemed the obvious thing to do – once he’d given me his approval, of course. At first I thought I’d do it as a newspaper column but none of my contacts wanted it. I did eventually get a version of the opening blog into Daily Telegraph, though. I wrote it as a weekly blog as we went along over the 28 months between Nick’s diagnosis and death in 2019. By then it was a pretty substantial block of work – and writer that I am – I couldn’t bear the idea of not taking it further. The book came out in 2022. It’s not gloomy – just truthful and, many people have told me, often funny. I regard it as a sort of memorial to Nick and I think he’d be pretty pleased with it.

WR: You’ve written a lot about music and drama and the lack of opportunities for young people. What would you like a new Minister for Culture to do?

Susan:  Fund music education for every child so that there is an entitlement to learn a musical instrument or sing in a choir. At the same time wouldn’t it be great if they learned to read music at the same time as they learned to read words? Of course they aren’t all going to take to it but I’d like every single child to have the chance. Drama is easier because it’s cheaper – train teachers both in initial training and CPD to build drama and drama games into their teaching. And what about grants for school productions to encourage schools to stage them? Perhaps, more radically, the minister could liaise with the new Secretary of State for Education and look for ways of changing the culture in schools so that head teachers are less focused on “results” and better able to see how holistic education benefits every child and raises standards. Abolishing SATS (standard attainment tests) would be a good start.

WR: What will you write next?

Susan: Well in addition to all the routine work – reviewing shows and concerts, writing arts features for magazines and my weekly Susan’s Bookshelves blog - I’ve just started work on a new book. Memoir style again, this time it’s about writing. I’ve met some extraordinary people and been in some pretty unlikely situations during the last 30 years (visiting a primary school in Orkney, interviewing June Whitfield, writing about hedge trimming, attending vespers at Ampleforth, crying with a mother in a children’s hospice and an awful lot more) and I think there’s a story to tell. At present I’m going though old diaries and files and making a lot of preparatory notes.

WR: Thanks, Susan - hope you enjoy this preparatory stage and we'll look forward to seeing what it leads to!

All Booked Up is published by The Book Guild.

See also Susan's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: OLD GOD'S TIME by Sebastian Barry

 

"For me, and hopefully for Tom Kettle, redemption and love triumph in this extraordinary story."

Photo: W W Winter

For Caroline Pitcher, writing is like living lots of lives. Mariana and the Merchild, written by Caroline and illustrated by Jackie Morris, will have a new edition published by Otter-Barry books on July 4th.

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.

Sebastian Barry’s most recent novel is Old God’s Time. It has stayed with me long after reading it, and I shall read it again.

What kind of novel is it? One in which currents of love, grief and heartache, whirl in the mind of retired Irish policeman,Tom Kettle. He distances himself from his past, as if holding off a great weight.

Tom has moved to a lean-to, annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish sea, with cormorants on the flourish of black rocks. He sees few people, just a couple of eccentric neighbours, one with a gun-rest on the balcony, another an anxious young woman.

There’s a knock at the door. The knocking becomes merciless. There’s a ringing of the bell. Mormons, maybe? Tom pulls his bulky form from his sun-faded wicker chair and sees through the glass door the outlines of two men, though the daylight is `losing its grip on things anyway.’

Two polite young detectives stand there. They defer to Tom, who wonders about the state of his trousers. They say they are investigating a cold case involving two priests, one murdered, one moved on. So, is this book a who-dunnit?

With a strange surge of reluctance and even dread – deep, deep down - Tom busies himself making tea and Welsh rabbit on the damp, evil grotto of his grill. (Afterwards, Detective O’Casey spends half an hour groaning in the jacks.) The wind makes its roistering way across the waters and throws buckets, water tanks, reservoirs of salty water. The detectives stay over. When they leave early, Tom misses them like his own children, and worries, Have they an umbrella?

The past and the present moment wander in and out of each other. In the far shadows of the story hover the shameful abuse of children, including that of orphan Tom and his adored wife June. The abuse suffered by children from priests is never told salaciously. It’s all the more shocking for being so spare. I had to put the book down more than once.

The impact and trauma of the past upon Tom’s beloved family, his wife, son and daughter, has been disastrous. His story flows on, a stream of consciousness, elegiac and soulful, into a whirlpool of memories and emotions. It’s scrambled, occasionally humorous, unreliable, hallucinogenic, suicidal even. Does he face up to his distant or recent past? Is he in the late stages of dementia? Does he go somewhere beyond memory? The power of the writing made me not care to stop and decide.

For me, and hopefully for Tom Kettle, redemption and love triumph in this extraordinary story.

"…could any man have crossed the channel like he had just done….The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it."

Old God's Time is published by Faber.

CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O'Hagan, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"Gossipy, sharp, sad, upsetting, and involving. I loved it."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

From the moment I first read about Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan I knew it was my kind of novel, just up my street etc. If I’m honest, my street includes a great variety of novels and the only sorts of book you won’t find there are SF, fantasy, or the further shores of Literary Fiction. I have been reading for 76 years or so, and generally I’m easy to please.

My Kindle is crowded with Free Samples. As soon as I read about something appealing, I’ll download one. With Caledonian Road, I knew as soon as I opened it that this was a novel I’d like. It has a list of characters, right up front and I saw from perusing this that the panoramic view of present day life in London would take in rich and poor, crooked and honest, educated and uneducated, aristocrats, Russian oligarchs, immigrants, actors, academics … it was going to be an All Human Life is There kind book.

The links between the characters, how they mesh and interact with one another, fire up the turning engines of the plot. This is complicated without ever becoming unclear, and can be summed up in John Donne's words: No man is an island

The denizens of Caledonian Road who populate the novel are many and various, but at their heart is our hero, Campbell Flynn, an art historian and celebrity academic. His wife Elizabeth is a psychiatrist, his sister Moira is a politician.

In the basement of their lovely house is a sitting tenant, Mrs Voyles. Her name is very close to Vile, and she’s a very important character too.

Campbell becomes involved with a student called Milo and a whole landscape of hellish possibilities opens up before us and we explore very many of these, our jaws quite often dropping in horror or amazement.

I’m not going to give away any more of the plot. It’s brilliantly worked out. It’s exciting, and sad and sometimes very funny and you will be swept along.

The book has had almost universal acclaim from the critics, but I did have lunch recently with someone who was complaining that she didn’t like the characters. She has, however, not given up reading the book. I never mind about likeability. If a character is interesting and comes alive on the page, that’s all I need, and there are lots of fascinating creatures skewered in these pages.

“Could you believe in an art historian who wrote for Vogue and knew about perfume?” said my doubting friend. I certainly could and did and absolutely loved the perfume /fashion references. They’ll surely turn this novel into a series of some kind for TV so I urge you to get to it before that happens. If you’re a Kindle lover, I’d say this was a terrific book to take on holiday. But it’s long and the hardback will use up a lot of suitcase space, so read it at home. But do read it … it’s gossipy, sharp, sad, upsetting, and involving. I loved it. Also, it’s most beautifully written. O’Hagan describes someone as “narrowing their face for a selfie.” We all know precisely what he means. Dazzling stuff.

Caledonian Road is published by Faber & Faber.  

Guest review by Graeme Fife: EVEREST 1953 by Mick Conefrey

 

"The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill"

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 latest publication, Memory's Ransom, is published by Conrad Press.

British rock climbers pioneered the craze for Alpine exploration in the early nineteenth century, followed by nationals of those countries which might have laid a more immediate claim to proprietorship of the great alpine peaks in their country. Perhaps it may be put down to a Victorian thrust for exploration and conquest riding the crest of imperial expansion. The often incomprehensible obsession with ice and adversity – the polar expeditions – ensued. They formed a part, we may say, of the similar preoccupation with heroic failure which began with the Charge of the Light Brigade, the spilling of blood on foreign sand, a calamity puffed by Sir Henry Newbolt’s jingoist doggerel, Invictus, and finally belittled by the heroic triumph of the Battle of Britain. The fascination of ice perhaps began with Cabot’s search for the North-West Passage and underpins the drive to ‘conquer’ Everest – named for a Surveyor General of India; local names were rejected because of native hesitation about allowing foreigners entry. The Tibetan name, Qomolangma, means Holy Mother, and it must be clarified, mountains are never conquered; they may be climbed but remain a challenge forthwith.

Edward Whymper laid the benchmark. An English illustrator, born in 1861, he was sent to the Pennine Alps to make drawings and, fascinated by the daunting sight of the Matterhorn ‘peak of the Meadows’ near Zermatt, a mighty wind-whipped, partly snowbound pyramid of rock, a giant of those mountains, he determined to climb it. At 5.30 am on 13th July 1865, he and four other Britons with two Zermatt guides set off from Chamonix, bivouacked overnight and, at dawn next day began their assault. At 1.40 pm, Whymper and another climber ‘skipped up the final slope’ to the summit. (The word had not yet been debased as a verb – Americans again.) Descending, one man, roped to three others, slipped: fatally, all fell.

The triumph is reckoned by some to mark the end of the Golden Age of Alpine first assaults. Whymper is honoured with a statue in Chamonix.

In the 1920s, the outstanding climber George Mallory led three expeditions on Everest, the first two times eschewing oxygen - considered infra dig, albeit they happily used stimulants and other drugs. Two failures preceded their final attempt in 1924 when the climbers did use oxygen to combat the debilitating effect of perilously thin air. Mallory and his companion may have reached the top; nobody knows. but both men died and Mallory’s body was not found until 1999. He is alleged to have answered the question ‘Why try to climb it?’ with ‘Because it’s there.’

From that final effort, somehow, the British thought of Everest as ‘their’mountain and Edmund Hillary, a bee-keeper from New Zealand, exceptional Himalyan climber, took part in several exploratory expeditions mounted by British teams from the 1930s on.

The Swiss mounted their own attempts – all dependent on permission from the Nepalese government - and, in 1952, came very close, even as the organisation of another British expedition team proceeded, headed by Colonel John Hunt, a first-rate mountaineer. Nepalese Sherpas were routinely called upon to act as guides, porters and support climbers; one, Tensing Norgay, an exceptional mountaineer, climbed with the Swiss and, warming to their amiable attitude, found the more militaristic hauteur of the British far from conducive. Luckily, Hunt was no martinet but that rare species among miltary men, a fine, sympathetic leader with none of that egotism characteristic of so many British officers. Tensing’s inclusion in the 1953 team was fortuitous. Not only did he prove himself a priceless asset as a climber but he bonded closely with the highly experienced Hillary, another ‘outsider’ like him, to form an indelible partnership.

The politics, tensions, rivalries, accommodations of assembling the team, martialling the complicated manner of approach, preparation and final assault – who was to be chosen? – are skilfully narrated, without bias, even the drama of getting the news to London for Coronation Day in 1953, itself a mini epic; all described with meticulous detail and understanding. The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill, the outcome being known.

As to the shabby behaviour and misreporting of clamouring newshounds after the climb, this forms a sorry footnote to a wonderful exploit, rightly celebrated as a British triumph, albeit the two men who stood on the top of the world had citizenship by right of inclusion as men of the colonial governance. No matter. Their achievement does not wait on partisan claim. They did something none else had ever done; their bravery and fortitude are for all humanity. If their success inevitably overshadows the work of their companions, without that superlative support they might have failed.

Everest 1953 is published by Oneworld.

 More reviews by Graeme:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

ENGLISH PASTORAL by James Rebanks and THE FARMER'S WIFE by Helen Rebanks, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review and was a Costa prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her recent publication This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us looks at our daily choices - what we eat, wear, buy, use, waste and throw away - and how we can choose better for animals and the environment.

James and Helen Rebanks, husband and wife, have each written about the experiences that led them to the small mixed farm close to Ullswater, formerly managed by James's grandfather, where they now live with their four children. James's 2020 book, English Pastoral - an inheritance, which details his conversion to the nature-friendly farming they now practise, deservedly won the Wainwright Prize and was the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year; Helen has followed with The Farmer's Wife - my life in days. James's book had been on my pile for some time, so when The Farmer's Wife was a reading group choice, I read both.

James's book invites comparison with Isabella Tree's Wilding, and he acknowledges the influence of her project with Charlie Burrell at the Knepp Castle estate in Sussex. As a young man he travelled to Australia, where he saw very different large-scale land management; swayed by the drive to modernise and increase food production, he began to see his grandfather's ways as antiquated. Gradually, though, he saw that this race to higher productivity drastically harms nature while doing farmers no good, either - pushing small farmers off their land and lowering food prices so that producers have to strive harder and harder to make any profit. 

Reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, while living on his father's rented farm, was a catalyst for James. He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods. Mowing grass meadows for silage, rather than later in the summer for hay, deals death to curlew chicks and other ground-nesting birds; removing hedgerows takes away valuable habitat, shelter and food; endless application of fertilisers exhausts the soil, and spraying pesticides causes the wide-ranging losses of which Rachel Carson warned. "This was business-school thinking applied to the land, with issues of ethics and nature shunted off to the margins of consciousness." 

He set himself the task of farming in a way that was not only nature-friendly but that would restore much of what had been lost. He sought the help of specialists, notably Lucy Butler of Eden Rivers Trust who showed him and his father that allowing streams to meander and form pools and wetlands would amply benefit wildlife and flood prevention (as described in Wildings, too). "I've come to realise that we need a small army of naturalists to help us play our part in the restoration of the countryside. There is more to understand about the ecology of a farm than any farmer can reasonably be expected to know." 

Returning to slow, traditional ways has its cost, and for years James took outside employment to support his family. "I'm not sure I'm much good at being a farmer," he writes. "It is overwhelming. I can't get everything done, let alone done well ... Often I get things wrong. The farm makes almost no money, and whatever money it does make, it devours." He readily acknowledges how much he owes to his wife Helen, and to women in general, who do much of the work that keeps a farm and family functioning.

Over to Helen's own book for more of this, with an emphasis on food; she prides herself on providing her family with wholesome, nourishing meals and includes recipes, many of them traditional, in her memoir. There's a lot (too much) about combining the demands of farm admin and domestic tasks with the care of small children: detailed episodes about looking in the fridge for something to cook, tidying toys and negotiating a supermarket with toddlers in tow soon become tedious. But a section on the 'Beast from the East' vividly describes the urgency of caring for animals and keeping the family warm and fed in an isolated, snowbound building, without electricity. When the worst is over and they venture down snow-banked lanes to the main road three miles away, the traffic is flowing freely, making their ordeal seem part of a different world. 

The Farmer's Wife goes back and forth in time, from childhood, through the couple's residence in Oxford while James was studying history there, Helen trying various ways of making a career for herself after finishing an art degree, and renovating a house. Far from giving an idyllic picture of farming life she is frank about rifts and tensions between James and herself at tough times, and writes of the devastation to both their families at the time of the foot-and-mouth pandemic. From Oxford, Helen "could only watch and listen to it all unfold from afar. After a couple of weeks she (her mother) told me the news we'd all feared: there was a contaminated farm nearby, and all our sheep and newborn lambs had to be slaughtered. Dad was busy helping sheep give birth, knowing that they were all destined to be culled and burned or buried soon ... Men that you'd never normally see showing emotion were now filmed with red blotchy faces, trying to hold back the tears for the BBC." In Oxford, "people around me seemed oblivious to it all."

Both authors have much to say about how dissociated most people have become from the food they buy and eat, and the importance of understanding the connections between our choices, farming and the natural world. "We need to be highly suspicious of food that seems too cheap to be true," Helen writes, "because somewhere a field, an animal, a farmer or a worker is paying the price for that." But neither pursues the connections between animal agriculture, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Although James has much to say about the industrialisation of agriculture he only briefly suggests that eating less meat would reduce the environmental impact of food. Helen is disparaging about plant-based eating and seems proud of her children when they argue with a teacher about the school's introduction of Meat Free Monday. One paragraph particularly annoyed me: 

"The worst farming on earth is acres and acres of wheat, soy and maize grown by ploughing, which creates whole landscapes devoid of nature. These crops are wholly dependent upon synthetic chemicals - pesticides, herbicides and fossil-fuelled fertilisers that are disastrous for the soil, rivers, oceans, insects and birds. Eating 'plant-based' products supports these systems." (My emphasis). 

 

I felt like throwing the book across the floor at that point. Helen Rebanks must surely know, even if her editors don't, that most arable crops are grown to feed farmed animals, not humans directly. Not everyone who wants to eat meat has access to pasture-fed local produce; most meat bought and consumed in the UK is reared in intensive systems and fed on precisely the kind of crops she deplores. Reducing meat consumption is the best and only way to reduce the need for arable farming on such a vast and unsustainable scale. It's exasperating to see such a staggering piece of misinformation in a book designed for popular appeal, where many readers won't question its logic.

 

Because of this and other irritations I found English Pastoral by far the more rewarding of the two books, with its lyrical glimpses of landscape, weather and wildlife. "In the biggest darkest pool, clouds of minnows, little trout, swirl around erratically, their bodies scratching scribbles on the skin of the water"; "at dawn and dusk the valley bottom feels a little primeval, with the cattle and roe deer often grazing in a sea of mist"; "the air is heavy with mint, trampled by sheep feet".

One question that goes unanswered is how either James or Helen can possibly find time for writing and all that goes with publication, amidst the constant, pressing demands of farm and family. But both conclude their books with quiet contentment and appreciation of the life they have made. 

James: "The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly may be a virtue." 

Helen: "Caring roles in our society are all too often invisible, ignored in the crazy 'look at me' world we live in ... Learning that the word 'mundane' has its roots in the Latin word 'mundanus', of the world, made me see everything through a different lens. To me, caring for my family is, and always has been, the most important work in the world."

English Pastoral: an inheritance is published by Allen Lane

The Farmer's Wife: my life in days is published by Faber

Read Linda's review of Wilding by Isabella Tree

and of Sixty Harvests Left by Philip Lymbery

This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us is published by Farshore.