Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: KINDRED by Octavia E Butler

 

"Butler is acclaimed ... not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

When in the early 1970s Octavia E. Butler was publishing her first short stories, the number of Black writers working in science fiction could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The number of women writers was not much higher. Butler is acclaimed now, however, not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her dazzling, disturbing time travel novel Kindred.

Time travel has served as a significant science fictional trope since the publication in 1895 of The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s frightening tale of class struggle and the end of times. Half a century later, SF writers such as Philip K Dick and Robert Heinlein were playing with the paradoxical consequences of time travel and exploring questions of causality, free will and determinism. In Kindred Butler uses a narrative of time travel to foreground political questions around race, sexuality and gender.

Kindred is a novel that confronts America’s history of slavery, and its legacy. It is concerned with the interrelationship of intimacy and oppression. Because it is about race and also about female sexuality, it necessarily explores the uses of violence and violent coercion.

A young Black writer called Dana (short for Edana) Franklin, married to Kevin, an older white writer and living with him in California in 1976, is suddenly and then repeatedly pulled back to the early 19th century to a plantation in Maryland, one of the slave states of the ante bellum South. She is being summoned back to the past, she discovers, in order to save the life of one of her ancestors and thus ensure her own future existence. Rufus Weylin, the man whose life she saves over and over, is a white man. He is the son of the owner of the plantation. During the course of the novel he inherits the plantation and all the enslaved people who live and work there, and fathers on Alice, initially a free woman but later a slave, the mixed-race child who will become Dana’s great-grandmother.

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947, into a society that she saw at an early age was profoundly racially divided. As a small child she would accompany her mother to the houses where she worked as a housemaid: the quiet, observant girl noticed that white people employed Black servants, and that those Black servants always came and went by the back door. She found her wider world through books in the public library, and knew early on that she wanted, and needed, to write. She was inspired to write science fiction while watching, when she was about 12, the British B-movie Devil Girl from Mars. She had a ‘series of revelations’: first, ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that!’, then, ‘Anybody can write a better story than that!’, and the clincher: ‘Somebody got paid for writing that story!’

Unlike other aspirational Black girls of her generation who saw training as a teacher or a nurse as a path to autonomy, Butler bravely chose to work at casual labouring jobs that would give her the freedom to think and to write. She gives this same choice to Dana in Kindred. Dana describes her work and her writing life: ‘You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote.’ Butler found her way on to writing courses (including the famous Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop), where she met and was encouraged by two older science fiction writers, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. In the novel, Dana is encouraged by her writer husband.

Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976, which is the year in Kindred when America’s history of slavery erupts into Dana’s life, an experience that she will transform into a first-person account, a memoir. Dana is the portrait of a writer-in-training.

Kindred opens with an image of bodily trauma. ‘I lost an arm on my last trip home,’ writes Dana. This opening statement hardly prepares the reader for the harrowing accounts of violence that will follow as Dana spends increasing amounts of time on the plantation in Maryland. On her second visit she witnesses a man being whipped: ‘I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.’ Black and female, Dana too becomes an object of the violence inflicted on slaves to keep them in line, even although she is not, herself, a slave. In the course of the novel she is beaten, punched, kicked in the face, whipped until she loses consciousness. She witnesses other forms of violence: sexual abuse, families broken up, children seized and sold to other slave owners. She comes to understand the power inherent in the threat of that violence. Her thoughts begin to whisper to her, ‘See how easily slaves are made?’

Dana’s journeys into the past raise questions about power and powerlessness, about the many forms oppression takes, and about the possibilities and the risks of resistance. Her close entanglement with Rufus the white slave owner – a life-and-death entanglement – affects not only her increasingly close relationships with the community of slaves and free Blacks on the plantation, but also casts its shadow into her present-day. ‘I began writing about power,’ Octavia Butler once explained, speaking of her whole oeuvre and not just this one novel, ‘because I had so little.’

In the best SF tradition, Kindred is a novel of ideas. It is simultaneously a powerfully moving story that interrogates the price paid by those struggling for freedom and agency. At the end, Dana’s own history is marked by the loss of her arm, but she has survived to write the story that is Kindred. A pioneer in science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, since her death in 2006 Butler has been acclaimed for her role in gaining recognition for science fiction as literature, and she is now celebrated for being a foremother of Afrofuturism.

Kindred is published by Headline. The cover shown above is for Headline's special hardback edition.

Note: The Headline paperback claims, incorrectly, that Kindred was first published in the UK by them in 2014. In fact it was first published in the UK quite a bit earlier - in 1988, by The Women’s Press, as part of their SF series. (I was an editor at The Women’s Press throughout the 1980s). Suzanne Perkins, Art Director at TWP from its beginnings in 1978, commissioned a painting by Rachel Ross for the cover.

The current Headline paperback cover

Octavia E Butler in 2005. Photograph by Nikolas Coukouma (Wikimedia Commons)

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WELL by Elizabeth Jolley

"Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

‘I don’t want other people coming here poking about in our lives. Kathy I want to tell you this so that we can go on the way we were.’

The 1980s were a fantastic time for Australian women writers. Interest was high: platforms to read and speak abounded in every state, awards and grants liberated authors from teaching loads and other work, colour supplements profiled their lives with each new book. There were even critical books and collections of essays devoted solely to women writers.

No wonder. The standard was dazzling, the personnel intriguingly diverse. There were younger writers like Helen Garner and Kate Grenville, writers embarking on the literary life in their 40s and 50s, like Marion Halligan and Olga Masters, and long-established writers being given new consideration, like Thea Astley, Jessica Anderson and Amy Witting.

Then there was Elizabeth Jolley, something of an outlier.

Jolley was born in Birmingham, in 1923, and migrated to Australia in 1959 with her academic husband and three children. (One of whom had been born within weeks of Mr Jolley’s first wife’s daughter’s birth …) Elizabeth Jolley had a trunkload of manuscripts on arrival which were relentlessly rejected by editors for 15 years until a local press snapped up a collection of short stories, and then another, and then a novel.

After which novels and short story collections poured forth, making her one of the most prolific of all Australian writers, which was a distorted picture as much of the work had been begun, and abandoned, and refashioned, before making it into print. She won award after award and attracted ravishing reviews, domestically and abroad – her books regularly appeared in the UK and America.

On panels, she cut a striking figure – with short, cropped grey hair, she had a clipped, almost girlish voice. She was very tall and habitually wore hippyish skirts and flat sandals. She peered out through squinty spectacles.

I read her stories avidly but if you’ve never encountered her work, here’s a list of reliable ingredients in a work by Elizabeth Jolley.

· Sexual obsession, especially between women

· Fathers and daughters

· Sexual abuse

· Leider music (Jolley’s mother was Viennese)

· The liberating sensation of dance

· Small-town oppression

· Nurses and patients

· Sexual repression, especially in prim, professional women

· The freedom and danger of frontier country

· A novelist’s obsession with their subject material (and its consumption of them)

You’ll find them all in her 1986 novel, The Well, one of Jolley’s best known works, and winner of Australia’s top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award.

Late in the book, Jolley rallies: ‘She had not come home, at sixteen, from boarding school, in the middle of a term, to keep house for her father, her grandmother having died suddenly, and not learned how to speak to the men.’

The woman in question is Hester Harper, middle-aged or older, fighting to keep control of the only person she has been allowed to love; a feckless, rather vapid social-climber called Kathy, who she takes in from an orphanage – or was it jail? – as a young teenager and with whom she cultivates a totally interdependent life in a remote country town.

But inevitably the outside world encroaches, perhaps most dangerously of all, a young man they strike down whilst driving at night. There are no witnesses, and they pitch the body into an abandoned well on their property. But it turns out he isn’t dead – he’s also a thief - and he joins a throng of men determined to destroy the women’s privacy.

‘She understood too, at once, that she needed to be looked after, cared for, more than ever. She had never felt so afraid and so alone.’

And so resourceful, determined Miss Hester Harper – despite her ailing physical and mental well-being – will stop at nothing to preserve her sanctuary – but at what cost?

Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic. I’m pleased it’s just been reissued by Virago for today’s readers to enjoy.

The Well is published by Virago Modern Classics.

More of Jon's recommendations:

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Special feature Q&A: John Ironmonger on THE ANGEL OF ST PIRAN

 

"Dr Kat Hoobaiter has documented a repertoire of around 80 distinct chimpanzee gestures, showing how apes use them intentionally. It isn’t a huge leap from here to the apes in The Angel of St Piran."

Stephen Joseph Photography

John Ironmonger was born and brought up in Kenya and took a degree in zoology, followed by a PhD on the ecology of freshwater leeches. His first novel, The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award in 2012. His novel Not Forgetting the Whale (also known as The Whale at the End of the World) was an international bestseller. His new novel, The Angel of St Piran, is published this week by Fly on the Wall Press.

John answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on the publication of The Angel of St Piran. I’ve read an advance copy – it’s based on a striking but certainly not implausible concept, that chimpanzees and humans can communicate verbally, and is very topical with its focus on trophy hunting, as well as being a gripping page-turner.

With your background in zoology, it’s not surprising that animals – and human interactions with animals – are the foundation of much of your fiction. Did you have a career in zoology before turning to writing fiction?

John: Ahh … only very briefly. I worked for three years as a research assistant in Liverpool looking at freshwater leeches, and afterwards I travelled with my wife Sue to Nigeria to lecture in zoology at a new university in the north of the country; but for a whole host of reasons the job didn’t work out and we came back to England. After that I went to work in the IT industry and there I stayed until I started to sell books.

Linda: You came relatively late to writing fiction – what prompted that?

John: I really didn’t come late to writing – I just came late to being published. I’ve been writing fiction since my teens, and over the years I wrote several novels and quite a few that were never finished. I never had much confidence in my skills as a writer, so no one ever read these early stories, and now all are lost forever; this is probably a good thing though because I’m sure they were terrible. But it was a good way to learn the craft.

Linda: Clearly the ground-breaking work of the late Jane Goodall, living and making relationships with chimpanzees, was one of the inspirations for your novel, as you acknowledge in the afternotes. I’ve read of other recent advances, too, in our understanding of how various animals communicate – whales, apes, birds. Is this a field you’ve worked in, professionally or otherwise?

John: As a teenager I worked one long vacation at a research station in Tsavo National Park, Kenya, on a project tracking family groups of elephants in the reserve. It wasn’t intentionally focussed on animal communication, but it was a fascinating introduction to fieldwork. We would often remark to each other that the elephants seemed to communicate. We simply didn’t know how. At university, Jane Goodall’s book ‘In the Shadow of Man,’ was one of our set books. I was gripped by it. I had seen chimps in Uganda, but I had never heard of a researcher living with the apes. It struck me then (and still does now) as an extraordinarily courageous and exciting thing to do. I often thought of it as potential material for a novel. Since Jane Goodall’s work other researchers have pushed forward our understanding of chimpanzee communication. Most recently Dr Kat Hoobaiter from Stirling University, working with chimpanzees in Uganda, has documented a repertoire of around 80 distinct chimpanzee gestures, showing how apes use them intentionally. It isn’t a huge leap from here to the apes in The Angel of St Piran.

Linda: Many of us are revolted by photographs of trophy-hunters posing with their kills, but often this is countered by the idea that managed trophy-hunting can benefit habitats, animal populations and local communities. What’s your view of this argument?

John: Any activity that revels in the killing of a wild animal is morally indefensible in my view. I know trophy hunters will claim to be conservationists, but I don’t accept this for one moment. It is a baseless smoke-screen for their blood lust. Local communities earn almost nothing from hunting, despite the high fees charged by operators. There is far more sustainable income from wildlife tourism. And trophy hunters shoot the largest, strongest, and most reproductively important animals. If trophy hunters were conservationists they would swap their rifles for cameras and become wildlife photographers. But they are too slow witted to handle a camera, and they are too vain to indulge in an activity where they don’t get to appear in the photograph.

Linda: Although the setting for this novel is mainly a Tanzanian island, some sections take place in Cornwall, and two earlier novels, Not Forgetting the Whale and The Wager and the Bear, are set there too. You live in Cheshire now, but do you have links to Cornwall?

John: My mother was Cornish. She grew up in the seaside village of Mevagissey. When I was 17 my parents decided to retire to Mevagissey from our home in Nairobi. They bought the village shop, and I found myself reluctantly dropped into this little isolated community far from anywhere. I hated it. But only for a very short while. Unexpectedly I grew to love it, and for years I wanted to write about it. The village of St Piran in my novels is loosely based on my memories of Mevagissey. It turns out to be a location full of interesting people, with fascinating stories to tell. I’ve used it in three novels so far. As for my links to Cornwall, I still have cousins there, and I still visit when I can. Never often enough, of course.

Linda: Fly on the Wall Press sounds like an interesting independent publisher. How did you come to be published by them – and are there plans for more books?

John: I don’t have a short answer to this question I’m afraid. Can I get away with saying that Orion Books and I parted company after a novel of mine failed to set the world alight. Which was a shame because it was my personal favourite. But it launched when the bookshops were closed during Covid, and big publishers have algorithms that don’t take account of these things. The up-side was that I discovered Fly on the Wall, a small indie with loads of energy that punches way above its weight, and this is where I want to stay. If they’ll have me.

Linda: Your first published book was a non-fiction title, The Good Zoo Guide, published in 1994. Have you any plans to update it? Since writing it, have your views on keeping animals in captivity changed at all? Do you think public attitudes to captive animals, not just in zoos but in dolphinariums and other tourist attractions, are changing?

John: The thought of updating The Good Zoo Guide gives me heart palpitations. It was so much work. I had to visit around 150 zoos, aquariums, bird gardens, safari parks and some grim menageries, and once done, I re-visited the top fifty … twice. It was exhausting. After the book was published it was about ten years before I went back to a zoo. I don’t disapprove of zoos. I would say instead that I really like good zoos and I hate bad ones. There are some animals that, in my view, should never be kept in captivity - like dolphins, polar bears, and whales … but there are many others that can be kept in high welfare habitats, and there are plenty of species that actively need a reservoir of individuals in safe captive conditions because they really aren’t safe in the wild. Public attitudes have certainly changed. The small cages and the city zoos that were popular fifty years ago have almost all been replaced by spacious, out-of-town zoos and specialist collections. And that’s a good thing. So now I visit zoos occasionally. But I’m particular about the zoos I visit.

Linda: Two of your titles, The Year of the Dugong and The Wager and the Bear, could be described as ‘cli-fi’. When writing about animals in particular, the impacts of climate change and nature loss are hard to ignore. Do you think fiction can help to raise awareness and inspire change?

John: I hope fiction can change minds, but I worry that the impact is only marginal. The scale of the climate threat is far beyond any crisis that mankind has ever faced. The changes we are making to our climate are irreversible, and catastrophic. I don’t know how we convince a sceptical political class and an apathetic electorate that we need to act decisively and massively if we are to slow down and maybe halt the damage we are doing. But fiction is all I know, so it is my way of railing against fossil fuel apologists and the forces of climate denial.

Linda: Your books have had impressive reach, being recognised in awards and translated into fifteen languages. Has this, and your zoological background, led to opportunities to take part in animal advocacy?

John: I am very lucky to have been able to reach a wide audience, and I am so grateful to all those publishers around the world who have believed in my books. To be honest it hasn’t led to any particular advocacy opportunities, although I know from my email inbox that readers have been inspired by the stories.

Linda: It’s easy to feel despair when we read about the sheer scale of animal cruelty, on farms, in laboratories, in wildlife crime and in entertainment. But do you see hope for a more compassionate future, and if so, where?

John: Without a doubt we are all much more aware of animal cruelty now than we ever were. Public attitudes have undergone a generational shift. Across the world, people now speak openly about animal sentience, suffering, and rights in a way that would have been fringe even 20 years ago. Factory farming is increasingly seen as ethically indefensible. Cosmetic testing on animals has become socially unacceptable. Circuses no longer keep elephants or lions. No one goes to bull fights when they visit Spain. Catwalk models no longer wear furs. So I do see good reasons for hope. And I applaud people who name and shame trophy hunters online. It is one of the last bastions of animal cruelty.

Linda: Finally, can you give us some recommendations – either of cli-fi novels, or of books that increase our understanding of animals?

John: I’m going to recommend two books that I read this year, although I realise as I say this that both deal with animal extinction. Beasts of the Sea by Ida Turpeinen is a novel that traces the discovery, exploitation, and eventual extinction of a marine mammal known as ‘Steller’s Sea Cow.’ It is a beautiful, lyrical book – translated from Finnish, and it has profound lessons for us on the way we treat the natural world. Today, I’m halfway through reading The Last of its Kind, by Gisli Palsson – a nonfiction book and an impressive piece of scholarship, about the search for the Great Auk – a bird they used to call the ‘northern penguin,’ and how the disappearance of this bird led to the first awakening in the public mind of the reality and finality of extinction.

Linda: Thank you, John. We at Writers Review wish you every success for The Angel of St Piran.  

The Angel of St Piran is published by Fly on the Wall Press

Guest review by Peter Crawley: THE JOURNAL OF HÉLÈNE BERR: a Young Jewish Woman's Life in Occupied Paris, translated from French by David Bellos

 

"The beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil."

Peter studied social, political and economic geography, and later languages at The Goethe Institut in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. Having written aural histories, obituaries and magazine articles throughout his life, in 2011 he returned to writing full-time. His first published novel, Mazzeri, about the shaman of Corsica, was published by Troubador in 2013. Subsequent works include Ontreto (Lipari, Sicily), Boarding House Reach (Norfolk), The Wind Between Two Worlds (London), The Truth in Fiction (short stories), What you Don’t Know About Me (a novella), and Constant Tides (Messina, Sicily), which has been translated into Italian. Theo’s Voice, a story of aphasia, is his latest work. Peter’s interests include listening to and researching personal histories and landscapes, believing that both our epoch and our surroundings shape us as much as our DNA. He lives in Midhurst, West Sussex, with his wife, Carol, and is currently writing a second novel set in Lipari, Sicily.

These days, if one was to lose an hour or two to the second-hand bookstalls of the Left Bank, or an afternoon to the gentle majesty of the Jardins de Tuileries, one might be forgiven for thinking le vieux Paris was forever thus – light of heart, perhaps even carefree. Yet the city was not always so.

In June 1940, Hélène Berr was nineteen when the German Army marched down the Champs-Élysées; she was studying English language and literature at the Sorbonne where, later, she was awarded the coveted Diplôme d’Études Supérieures for her thesis on ‘Shakespeare’s Interpretation of Roman History’. Born into a middle-class, secular Jewish family, Hélène was what some would have called strong-willed and others independent. Her father, a former artillery lieutenant wounded in the First World War, was deputy chairman of a major chemical and industrial group, and, as such, Raymond Berr was deemed by the Nazis to be a person of use, which meant his family were afforded protected status; a status that endured only until they were deported on the 27th of March 1944, Hélène’s twenty-third birthday. Two years earlier, the young woman had begun a diary, in which she recorded the passage of twists and turns that led her to that wretched day; a diary she deposited, often only pages at a time, with Andrée Bardieu, the cook who had remained in her father’s employ for more than half a century.

The first page of Hélène’s Journal, as it has become known in David Bellos’ brilliantly empathic translation, finds her wandering down the Avenue Victor Hugo, her thoughts consumed with the challenges of falling out of love with Gérard and in love with Jean, both of whom subsequently fled the country to join Free French Forces and in doing so survived the war. What these entries don’t tell us, however, is that by this time Hélène was working for the L’Entraide Temporaire, a clandestine organization committed to saving Jewish children from deportation. A letter to her sister, written on the day Hélène was arrested, reveals her use of codewords – Henri for her father; Minnie for her mother, Gaston Bébert for police station, Marcel for the police – and many of the entries describe her shepherding orphaned children to safety, while disguising their true destination. The narrative is almost poetic in its flow and the writing of the highest quality, yet the beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil, both foreign and domestic.

Some would call Hélène’s Journal a rite of passage through a dystopian landscape in which Jewish adults, adolescents and children were considered less than human and therefore treated inhumanely; I would call it an awakening, if not a clarion call. And to those who turn a tin ear to the Holocaust, I would say read this story of a young woman’s resistance – a resistance both physical and intellectual – and rage that one so talented, so compassionate and courageous, should be taken from the world before her time.

Much of her Journal is given over to philosophy and reflection, to the agonies and ecstasies of adolescence, and to the price one pays for being both ordinary and otherwise. Hélène understood her life was soon to end, and in one passage reasons that after death one lives on, if only in the memory of those still living. Now, because of her Journal, the name Hélène Berr will live on and remind us how truly fortunate we are to be light of heart and carefree.

There are three other exceptional books that deserve mention: the first is Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), a fascinating and meticulously researched account of how the women of the city ‘lived, loved and died’ through the occupation; the second is Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Vintage) which, although classified as fiction, provides a stark reminder of what it took to survive; and the third is A Life In Secrets (Abacus), Sarah Helm’s exceptional history of ‘Vera Atkins and the lost agents of the Special Operations Executive’, in which we come to know the women, and some of the men, parachuted into France during the Second World War, the majority of whom were never to return. Neither Irène Némirovsky nor Hélène Berr lived to see the war’s end; both were murdered, brutally, by the Nazis.

Like so many, their names must never be forgotten.

The Journal of Hélène Berr is published by MacLehose Press. The French edition is published by Tallandier.

Peter's latest novel, Theo's Voice, is published by Troubador

Special feature Q&A: Jane Dalton on her first novel THE SECOND LIFE OF ANTHONY B

 

Is someone playing a cruel trick, or is the impossible really happening?

Photograph by Sarah Widdowson

Jane Dalton is a journalist at The Independent, where she writes about animal welfare as well as general news. She previously worked for The Sunday Times, where she was Regional Editor and an occasional book reviewer. She began her career at the Dover Express, where she launched a high-profile campaign against live exports. You can find out more from Jane's website, and read an interview about Jane’s animal activism and reporting here. 

The Second Life of Anthony B is her first novel.

What if the person you loved most sent you one final email?

Eight months after his wife Maggie dies, widower Anthony Bothwell switches on his computer and discovers an email—from her.

The message is so personal it could only have come from Maggie. And its warning is terrifying.

Is someone playing a cruel trick, or is the impossible really happening?

The emails from maggie.bothwell@theafterlife.org.uk keep coming.

As Anthony's certainty about life, death and everything in between begins to crumble, he replies. Their conversations become tender, funny and deeply moving.

But when a long-buried family secret is uncovered, grief turns to betrayal, and Anthony is forced to question everything he thought he knew about the woman he loved.

Then he meets Brooke, a fellow widow who offers him the chance to begin again.

Can Anthony uncover the truth behind the impossible emails—and find the courage to embrace a second chance?

Jane answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your debut novel! You’ve worked for years as a journalist for The Independent – is writing fiction something you’ve always wanted to do?

Jane: Thank you so much. Yes, I started writing my first novel when I was eight. It took me a few more decades to finish writing one, though. After a tumultuous journey to publication (more of that later) I was very lucky that my manuscript was picked up by Poolbeg Books, the Irish publisher that first discovered Maeve Binchy. Not that The Second Life of Anthony B is anything like her novels – it’s much weirder than that.

Linda: The novel is based around the striking premise that Anthony receives emails from his dead wife. Did the novel begin with this idea, or did you begin with the intention of writing a novel about bereavement before settling on this device?

Jane: It began with Maggie, an outspoken woman who’s also great fun. That blended with the idea of emails from beyond the grave, because wouldn’t everyone who’s lost someone very suddenly love to be able to have one final conversation with them? I wrote it for everyone who has ever wondered what happens to us after we die and whether any form of consciousness, such as the soul, survives. I also wrote it for anyone who’s ever wondered how their life would have been had they taken a different path; and for anyone who loves garden birds.

Linda: You’ve written a page-turning mystery which is often amusing, sometimes even farcical, and equally often moving, as we experience Anthony’s deep sense of loss alongside his questioning of how well he knew Maggie. Was this a difficult balance to achieve?

Jane: Funnily enough, it wasn’t difficult. The novel is partly about how couples communicate – or fail to, and Maggie and Anthony’s turbulent relationship allowed both the humour and the sorrow to emerge naturally. That’s how it ended up with depth and bittersweet.

Linda: Did the voice of Maggie (forthright, teasing, assertive) come to you immediately? Our sense of Maggie comes mainly through her emails.

Jane: Yes, it did. She was partly based on a former news editor I had who was a veteran tabloid journalist and who had a long-standing challenge for all reporters to find a “naughty vicar”. I exaggerated Maggie a bit to make her more outrageous – but not much more. On the surface Maggie is flamboyant and larger than life, but deep down she’s extremely vulnerable and sensitive. Anthony is quite different – much more grounded, but also sensitive. Each of them is lovable in their own way.

Linda: Anthony is a thoroughly sympathetic character, and I know that readers who’ve been bereaved, or who are close to someone who’s experienced a loss, will find much that resonates. How and why did you decide that your viewpoint character would be a man in his sixties?

Jane: I’m not entirely sure, but just before writing it I’d been reading a lot of high-quality literature that happened to have male lead characters, such as novels by Ian McEwan, David Mitchell and John Updike. I didn’t want to write another popular women’s novel with the tired trope of a young woman and her boyfriend troubles. I wanted to write something non-formulaic, unpredictable and without cliche. And I forced Anthony to question his assumptions about a lot of things, such as whether people have a soul, that life is short and that the course of life after 50 is fixed.

Linda: Anthony investigates the subject of communications from the dead as the novel progresses – was this part of your own research for the novel?

Jane: To some extent, but I wanted the focus of the narrative to be more on the effect on Anthony of receiving the emails, and how they change him as a person, from being a grumpy sceptic convinced his life is over to someone open-minded to new ideas and able to start afresh. Communicating with Maggie forces him to confront things he’s never admitted before and enables him to move on in life.

Linda: Did you have the whole plot mapped out before you began, or did the novel grow in ways that surprised you?

Jane: I didn’t map it out – I wrote it instinctively, and a great many things in it surprised me. Which is appropriate for the story, because I think the same things will surprise readers, too. I never imagined I’d write a creepy psychological suspense story or one about the afterlife or how it’s never too late for fresh starts.

Linda: I know that The Second Life of Anthony B has had a difficult path to publication – through no fault of yours! Can you tell us about that?

Jane: Getting to publication itself was a drama! My first publisher, Neem Tree Press, a lovely women-only company, was taken over by Unbound, a crowd-funding publisher, which, it transpired, was in difficulty, and the new company collapsed into administration just as my novel was due to be published. I was devastated, because I’d put everything I had into writing it.

Linda: At The Independent you specialise in covering issues of animal welfare / exploitation. Do you think this will feature in future novels? Is a second novel under way?

Jane: They say novelists should not write to champion a cause but I am thinking about it. How can I not? Much animal cruelty is so extreme that it needs tackling. In this novel, writing about the symbolism of birds and caring for them was a bonus. I have already drafted a second novel, albeit not part of my three-book contract with Poolbeg, so I have two more to go.

Linda: Thank you, Jane - I'm sure your novel will be much enjoyed by its readers!

The Second Life of Anthony B is published by Poolbeg.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THE NEEDLE'S EYE by Margaret Drabble

 

"A master of her craft."

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 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

I admired Margaret Drabble’s work so much that I read each of her novels, one after the other, through my late teenage years. Eventually, in 1972, the year The Needle’s Eye was first published, her sixth novel, I married and took myself off to the West Coast of Scotland, burying myself in the Highlands while I raised twins. I don’t think I have read anything from her since then. Then, last year on my birthday, one of those twins, my daughter, gave me The Needle’s Eye as a present. It took a while to reach the top of my reading pile but eventually it got there and I devoured it!

Reading her for the first time in fifty-odd years I was struck how different her writing is from my memory of it. In the 70’s I read each novel almost as a thriller. I couldn’t put them down. I had totally forgotten the reflective pace of her work, the many words used to set the scene. But then, this novel is a world away from our shiny, frenetic pace of life today. It is the world of my youth, of draughts, knitting children’s jumpers, coal dust, washing up at the sink, not possessing a car. It was a world where sexual equality was a toddler, constantly falling over. It was also a world where I was thirsty for literature.

Fifty years on, it took me a few pages to get into The Needle’s Eye. I found myself impatient for ‘something to happen’. Had I really galloped through her books in my twenties? If so, what a lot I had missed, and yet, I remember stopping to read a word, a phrase, a sentence several times, sometimes aloud to savour the taste of it, thrilled to read a master at work. The truth is, half a century on, one is not the same person. I couldn’t possibly read it as if I were twenty. But then I relaxed and decided to read with no prior expectations, as if I’d never read any of Margaret Drabble’s work. And the miracle happened. The long, slow unwinding of the plot that demands you attend to the depth of her writing. There it is, and it felt like coming home.

Rose marries against her parents wishes and renounces her inheritance. Her marriage is difficult and she eventually separates from Christopher. When she meets Simon, an unhappily married barrister, they become friends and he is able to give her legal advice. He can’t understand why she insists on living in a run down street. Is she simply stubborn? As he gets to know her better he admires her more. She fights for her children, distraught that she might lose them. She wishes to live a real life, as other people do, not a life of privilege. Her family and estranged husband might view her intransigence as stubborn foolishness but Simon eventually sees the real depth of her character.

Margaret Drabble is a master of her craft. I love the way she can paint a brief picture of something that will have little effect on the story but which lives with me, long after I have finished the book. The woman in a shop, telling of the pram cover she was knitting, rather than getting on with the purchase. The boat, seen out at sea, then glanced at again, closer in, and then, when only the author is left to see, it disembarks several disorientated men who scuttle away. We are left to wonder whether they are perhaps refugees, or illegal migrants of one sort or another. They are part of a different story, one that has not been told, at least not in this book. Each time, these glimpses of other lives enrich the novel, giving it a depth that remains unexpected, every time it happens.

In contrast, we get enough detail about Simon and Rose to feel we know them very well from their thoughts as well as their decisions, although there will always be things about them we will never know, things maybe they don’t know themselves.

There are a few later novels from this writer that I have never read. I now want to revisit The Millstone, one I have read before, but also I will find one that I can come to honestly fresh. Thank you, lovely daughter, for reintroducing me to a writer I didn’t know how much I had missed!

The Needle's Eye is published by Canongate.

More reviews by Cindy:

The Master by Colm Toibin  

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

Guest review by Jude Hayland: THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett

 

"A masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion."

Initially a short story writer for women’s magazines, Jude Hayland was published extensively both in the UK and internationally for many years. After completing an M.A. with distinction in Creative and Critical Writing, she switched to writing full length fiction and has now written four novels with a fifth close to completion. Her genre is best described as book group fiction, concerned with the complexities of families and relationships, although her fifth is something of a departure with a setting in London during WW2. She also blogs on all matters writerly, runs creative writing workshops and particularly enjoys sharing her near lifelong reading and writing experiences through talks to U3a and similar groups.

No wonder Arnold Bennett despised the literati of his day and avoided their company - a victim of their snobbery and Virginia Woolf’s outright mockery of his writing, he remained disdainful his whole life of the elitism he found amongst his contemporaries.

Yet he was extremely successful financially and extraordinarily prolific. Between 1892 and 1931, he wrote 34 novels, endless articles and reviews, short stories, plays and wrote a daily journal. He also spent some years as an editor at Woman Magazine which, he claimed, helped him to learn a great deal about the secret nature of women as well as about ‘frocks and household management.’

I agree with him. Bennett’s ability to explore the emotions and complexities of his female characters, to portray them with acute sensitivity and insight is, for me, one of the highlights of his novels.

The Old Wives’ Tale was published in 1908 and I first read it at the age of 20, prescribed reading for the Modern Fiction course of my English Lit degree. I loved it then – for its narrative, spanning the second half of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th, the carefully evoked settings of provincial Bursley in the Potteries and Paris, and the host of vividly and sympathetically drawn characters.

But coming back to the novel, decades later, is to find, of course, so very much more.

Bennett sets his protagonists against the backdrop of key social and political moments in both Bursley and Paris and such events certainly play an overarching role. But it is really the effect of time itself upon human lives that is his subject, the inevitable yet bewildering rapid passing of time – something that was of no particular interest when I read the novel at the age of 20 but decades on, resounds starkly.

Constance and Sophia Baines, sisters appropriately defined by their names, grow up in the family drapers’ shop in the square in Bursley with conflicting desires for their lives. Constance, biddable, acquiescent, anticipates a predicable path whilst Sophia, restless, rebellious, seeks something far beyond such a prescribed existence. Rashly eloping with the handsome travelling salesman, Gerald Scales, she is soon living with him somewhat precariously in Paris.

Bennett himself was living in Paris when he wrote the novel which was inspired, as he states in his journal, by an encounter with a solitary middle-aged woman, inordinately stout and with pendent cheeks in a Parisian restaurant. Initially repulsed by her, he consequently became curious about what lay in her past to bring her to that moment – she was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful …her case is a tragedy.

The novel is structured in four parts, namely Mrs Baines, Constance, Sophia, whilst the fourth entitled What Life Is reunites the sisters towards the end of their lives after many years estranged and is intensely poignant as the two women confront the disparity between their adolescent hopes and the realities that time has wrought. ‘And what have I lived for? What is the meaning of it?’ The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow, Bennett tells us of the once impulsive and ardent Sophia.

To me, The Old Wives’ Tale is a masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion. Yet it tells the story of two women (three including the matriarchal Mrs Baines) who discover their own strength and resilience when the lives they had anticipated take very different turns, a theme as relevant now as when the novel was published in 1908. Both sisters find themselves victims of circumstance, of domestic as well as political change and twists of fate. Sophia does more than simply survive the Siege of Paris and the Commune of 1870 and prospers, discovering a stalwart, astute mentality to replace her youthful fecklessness whilst Constance, wishing only for the predictability of Bursley and the drapers’ shop, is forced to confront events that threaten such prosaic stability.

But then this is a realist novel. Bennett believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and the concerns of his novels are the concerns of ordinary lives perpetually shadowed by the extraordinary. As Sophia observes towards the end of her life, humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses and The Old Wives’ Tale catches this very simple yet startling truth.

The literary cliques and elites that Bennett so despised might have scorned his concern with the mundane and commonplace, but, like the greatest and most enduring of writers, his strength lies in his ability to portray such lives with empathy and conviction.

The Old Wives’ Tale is a memorable and masterful example of his craft.

The Old Wives' Tale is published by Penguin Classics. 

The Legacy of Mr Jarvis by Jude Hayland is published by Matador.