Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: OLD BAGGAGE by Lissa Evans

"An absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about."

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, has just won this year’s Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This is an absolute joy of a book. I loved it so much on first reading that I deliberately slowed my pace in order to savour it. I then set it as my book group read choice, and every one of that opinionated and interesting group also loved it, which is a rarity! Everybody liking a book can sometimes kill off debate about it. But this book gave us much to discuss, especially since we are of a generation who remember from childhood the elderly spinster characters created by the First World War’s cull of young men, some of whom had notable political and social opinions.

Mattie, in her fifties, was a Suffragette, as was her lodger Florrie, ‘the Flea’, Lee and various other wonderfully individual characters in the book. But they are living in a Britain that feels it has moved on from that particular fight. Living on the edge of Hampstead Heath, Mattie decides to set up a club for girls, promoting political and social debate, good healthy exercise, games and competitions … and javelin throwing, which doesn’t go down well with her stuffy retired Major neighbour. Set in 1928, this is a story with heart, much historical interest, great wit and humour, and utterly brilliant writing. I’m not going to give away more of the plot because it’s a delight to discover for yourself, but there are certainly uncomfortable parallels between the time it depicts and our present time. Mattie has never had to work for her income, giving an uncomfortable edge to her strong ideas about how working class girls and women should behave. There is hypocrisy, but isn’t she still mostly right in what she thinks? Some in our reading group had fresh experience from the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, demanding government action to heal the climate, and yet these are people who frequently fly off on holiday, some have more than one home, and so on. Similarly, hypocrites, but right? On a different tack, there is talk of ‘laws upheld by those who were apparently beyond the reach of it themselves’. Much food for thought and discussion, but, first and foremost, an absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about.

Let me give you some small tasters of that brilliant writing. We get an instant feel for Mattie when, early on, she ‘swished past like a Daimler.’ How many of us recognise her problem of middle-aged eyesight when she tells her optician, ‘I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro.’ The Major next door ‘looks like a classical statue carved out of brisket.’ Florrie, in a sulk, ‘draped the oblong of pastry across the pie dish with the visage of someone easing a flag over a coffin.’ Teenage Inez, part of Mattie’s club, was ‘participating, though only in the way a stick participates when borne along by a stream.’ … And so much more. The period language is a delight too. ‘You don’t look quite the thing.’ ‘She is an absolute pill.’ Do read the book and find your own favourites!

For those who may have read other books by Lissa Evans (do try her children’s books as well as her adult ones), let me just place Old Baggage in book context. Evans’ The Crooked Heart was written and published before Old Baggage, but Old Baggage is a prequel to Crooked Heart, explaining the odd pairing of a couple of characters who nagged for further attention.

Old Baggage is published by Black Swan.

See also: Suffragettes in Fiction, a round-up by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Leslie Wilson: BABYLON BERLIN by Volker Kutscher, translated by Niall Sellar

"A cracking good read, brilliantly plotted..."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and two for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. Both deal with Nazi Germany. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany. She is currently working on a novel for adults, set in the very early nineteenth century.

My grandfather and his younger brother Erich Rösel were both German policemen; Uncle Erich was a member of the Kriminalpolizei (CID) in Berlin. Alas, I only met him once and I know nothing about his career except that, as a working class lad, he must have started at the bottom. But reading Babylon Berlin, I wonder how much the novel resembles the reality that Erich knew.

He’d have been one of the police constables that Gereon Rath and his superior officers deploy in the novel, on stakeouts, doing door to door investigations; footsloggers. Gereon Rath, by contrast, is a detective inspector, the son of a high-ranking Rhineland police officer. Unfortunately for him, an injudicious shooting in Cologne (he killed the trigger-happy son of a major newspaper publisher; in the line of duty, but a bad move) got him moved to Berlin. Now he’s in the Vice Squad instead of the Murder Squad, which feels like a punishment. Rath is ambitious, frustrated, under a slight cloud; not much of a team player, and with a troubled relationship with his distinguished father; all good stuff for a crime fiction hero.

It’s 1929, and Berlin is a hotbed of crime, corruption, and political conflict. Communists and Trotskyites are fomenting revolution in Germany; Nazis and other right-wingers, yearning to fight the Allies and defeat them this time, are acquiring arms and building up illegal armies. The Social Democratic city government is trying, sometimes brutally, to keep a lid on the boiling pot. It’s a city of savage contrasts; in poverty-stricken, left-wing Neukölln a gigantic Karstadt department store is being constructed (later, alas,destroyed by Allied bombs; it was an impressive building). Here Rath, fighting vertigo, and his Chief Inspector, Wolter, capture a fleeing porn actor on the top of the scaffolding.

It’s a city that anyone familiar with the literature and the media of the period will recognise. There are mafia-style organisations, tolerated by the police because they keep a kind of order among thieves. Fritz Lang portrayed these in his brilliant film M, where the gangs track down a child-murderer; I can’t help seeing Marlow, in the novel, as Gustav Gründgens,who played the gang boss in M. The porn actors are straight out of George Grosz; so are the women they screw for the camera.There are transvestites, there are dancing girls and drugs. (Rath himself snorts cocaine on occasion.)

Some of the police are historical figures; particularly Superintendant Ernst Gennat, a noted eccentric, addicted to cake and thus known as ‘the fat man of the murder squad.’ His office was said to contain sagging velvet armchairs, an axe used by a murderer, and the head of a woman that was once fished, wrapped in paper, from the river Spree. (I can’t understand why Kutscher doesn’t mention these details.) Gennat’s intelligence and sophistication as a police investigator certainly feature in the plot. Incidentally, it was Gennat who coined the expression ‘serial killer.’

Babylon Berlin is a cracking good read, with its own mutilated body fished from the Spree, and brilliantly plotted; it keeps you guessing, which is what any keen crime reader wants. There’s a love interest, too; Rath develops a troubled relationship with the lovely Charlotte, a stenographer in the Murder Squad who aspires to become a police officer herself. I can’t help sympathising with her when she calls him an arsehole. At least he recognises the fact - but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry him.

What gripped me was the complex and convincing portrayal of the city: I’ve already got the second novel in the series. I read it in German first; what I did miss in the (competent, occasionally sloppy) translation was the complexity of language and a lot of the irony, which Berliners do so well. Some texture is lost thereby.

I know from experience that it’s near-impossible to render Berlin dialect into English. I would have liked to see the army officer-jargon of the police brought into the English version, for that demonstrates how military an institution the 1920s German police were. But then, I suppose there are layers of meaning in the Montalbano books that are lost to me, because I can only enjoy them in translation.

Babylon Berlin is published by Sandstone Press. Original title: Der nasse Fisch, Gereon Rath’s Erster Fall.

THE CRIMSON ROOMS by Katharine McMahon, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"While the plot becomes increasingly gripping, the novel never loses sight of its main theme – the pity of war, and the profound effects of loss." 

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is now working on her second adult novel.

Set in 1924, The Crimson Rooms is very much concerned with the aftermath of the First World War, with the distinction of featuring a young female lawyer – one of the first of her kind – as its viewpoint character. Evelyn Gifford, at thirty, shares the view of many women of her generation that she is unlikely to marry, and looks to her work for a sense of purpose and the chance to bring about change. She is assistant at the law firm of Breen and Balcombe, where the eponymous Breen is known by reputation as a champion of the poor, and – unlike many of his peers – willing to take on a capable, newly-qualified young woman. Evelyn’s work involves her in two court cases which form the background to the novel.

Since the death in the trenches of Evelyn’s younger brother James, the household in Maida Vale has been exclusively female: Evelyn and her fussy mother, a grandmother and great-aunt. Within the opening pages there are new arrivals: Meredith, a former nurse, and the young boy she introduces as James’ son, of whom Evelyn – but not her mother – has been quite unaware. Although the family’s finances are already stretched, the newcomers must be accommodated; the charmingly capricious Meredith proves to be demanding and unproductive, leaving the boy to be looked after while she attends art classes with new friends from the Slade. To Evelyn, the boy brings touching reminders of her lost brother, and must be cherished. She also sees Meredith as a source of information about James’ last days, as the family has had only sketchy details; but when Meredith eventually does confide in Evelyn, a new shock must be absorbed.

Katharine McMahon's writing gives readers the confidence that we won't be let down. Her portrayals of domestic life (tepid celery soup, lavender and mothballs, limited clothing), class and attitudes are convincing without ever being overdone, and Evelyn is believably a product of her time: intelligent, observant, ambitious but wary, slowly learning to make her way against male intransigence and prejudice. As McMahon points out in an afterword, Evelyn was ‘on the horns of a terrible dilemma – her aspiration to be a lawyer must be at the cost of her clients, who in court would be disadvantaged by the sex of their advocate’. The patronising remarks Evelyn receives from judges and magistrates (addressing the bench, she is asked whether the court "is so lowly that it can be used as the playground in which ladies may conduct a flirtation with the law") would be outrageous today, yet she must weather them and prove herself through doggedness and by trusting her insights. Even so, others in her group of women lawyers challenge her for focusing on the saving of individuals, rather than more riskily making them test cases to bring about policy change.

Evelyn’s two cases are of equal interest. In one, she learns that children placed in care institutions are routinely shipped out to Canada, where (in the guise of ‘home children’) some are treated in effect as slave workers. She is determined that Leah Marchant, convicted of abducting her own baby, should be reunited with her two young daughters before this fate befalls them. Seeds are well-planted for this case to be linked to the other: that of an ex-soldier accused of murdering his flirtatious young wife. Evelyn’s instinct tells her that he cannot be guilty, and it’s she who finds and interprets two crucial pieces of evidence; but McMahon subverts the conventions of murder mystery and courtroom drama with a poignant twist which feels exactly right for the character and situation. Evelyn’s emotions are also engaged by Nicholas Thorne, a young barrister with whom she finds herself falling in love – until she has reason to suspect his motives.

The Crimson Rooms is thoroughly engaging (though the echo of Wilfred Owen’s poem The Kind Ghosts strikes a rare false note, in a letter from James to Evelyn). McMahon seems completely at home in this period – attitudes, even Evelyn’s own at one point, towards rape and shell-shock are very much in keeping – and has created a strong but fallible character with whom readers can readily identify. While the plot becomes increasingly gripping towards the end, the novel never loses sight of its main theme – the pity of war, and the profound effects of loss on survivors and relatives.

The Crimson Rooms is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

See also My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young