Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah

 

‘People made us think we had done something wrong, the women especially.’

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

On the train home from Norfolk recently, I observed a man reading a book whose title, about spies, intrigued me; also a woman reading this book. I noted both and bought them. The spies thing was a dud and I gave it to the charity bookshop. The Hannah, however, captivated me. Its subject is the women who volunteered as nurses to work in the evacuation hospitals in Vietnam during that other misguided conflict. The experiences she describes – all derived from very broad research, cited at the back of the book - are breathtaking, terrible, near unimaginable.

Whilst this is cast as a novel and therefore at its core an imagined story with relationships lost, broken, betrayed, held to, its fiction follows the best example of show not tell: auditory, visual and emotional encounter, sensory in all aspects – you can smell it, too, the hospital, the clothes they wear, their kitbags - fill out a narrative of soul-searching depth. I cried.

To be remembered, also – and Hannah sheds vital light on this – back in America, a society forever torn by its own inner conflicts, was further assaulted by a new age of self-expression, hippies growing their hair and dropping out…anti-war protest marches, the Gay Liberation movement, Civil Rights…

The chaos and urgency of a Big Push in the hospital when casualties flooded in, brought by Dust-Offs, helicopters, the injuries, the incessant calls of work work work, with little respite, the agonies of death, a nurse holding a dying man’s hand…

The central character, at first a barely trained nurse, is flung into action with a terse ‘you can do this’ from a surgeon who doesn’t want dither, he wants determination, and help right now and the novel draws in stark detail the process through which a tiro becomes an expert often through the sheer propulsion of expectation. There is no time for hesitation, never any time, for, just as on the battlefield some kilometres away, the bullets fly without delay from the pressure on a trigger, so the injury, very often mortal, nevertheless has to be seen to immediately. As a catalogue of how the human heart and moral power are strengthened by this intensely stressful experience, I have read few novels which do it more poignantly. As Hannah shows: torment can lead to compassion, a strength we may not have known lay inside us.

There are lies, misunderstandings, misreports of death and the anguish of love found and snatched away by the imperatives of war and its terrible repercussions – not only on the soldiers of the army, navy and air force, but on the civilians, women and children, the horror of Agent Orange and indiscriminate bombing … the cruelties perpetrated by men dehumanised by conflict.

There is, too, and powerfully exposed, the generation gap and the mutual incomprehension. Thus the father to his volunteer nurse daughter: ‘Your generation, the need to talk, talk, talk…’

Gone the days of put up and shut up. Hannah makes no judgement – that is for the reader. She does lapse occasionally and when a mother makes an emergency call to see her son in hospital, do we really need to know exactly what she is wearing? But it’s s small flaw. Everyone wants a best seller and one thing which is evident in best sellers is the writer’s obsession with detail, detail, detail. Hannah avoids that. She knows her own heart and that emotional sensibility is evident on every page, without show or personal reflection and intervention. She sees, she hears, she brings it all to life, even life teetering on the edge of death.

I have asked American friends about this and their reaction varies, depending on what neighbourhood they live in, but Hannah brings to the surface the way in which returning veterans were reviled, even spat at, called unpatriotic. But veterans were only ever seen as the men. Groups of veterans gathering in therapeutic sessions to talk about the way their psyche unravelled on their return home - nightmares, broken relationships, alienation – were male clubs, women disbarred. As the returning nurse says to one Marine: ‘If you didn’t see a woman in Vietnam, you were lucky because it means you didn’t end up in hospital.’

The Women is published by Macmillan

Guest review by Penny Dolan: HORSE by Geraldine Brooks

 

"Her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. As well as being a regular reviewer here, she posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.


Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer winning novelist, appeared on my book group’s reading list. Its nomination by a member who, to our surprise, is a part-owner of a racehorse, gave Horse strong equestrian support. Additionally, when our local library supplied not four but eight new hardback copies, it was clear that somewhere in the county was a librarian who thought the novel worth purchasing. But was it worth reading? Here are my thoughts.

Brooks’ wide-ranging novel is spread between three American centuries, being a narrative about the early growth of horse-racing and about the meanings within that word “race”. Horse revolves around three specific ideas: a bay foal that became a prize-winning stallion, a lost equine portrait and a skeleton stored within the Smithsonian Museum.

The cover design gives a glimpse at an old painting which reveals a formally dressed black groom holding the rein of a tall brown horse and a black jockey in the coloured silks of the 1850s. Both men appear wary about being “uncovered”. This groom and the bay horse form the core of Brooks’ novel.

When the reader first meets Jarrett, he is an enslaved boy, working beside his father in the stables of a rich Kentucky landowner. After forming a deep bond with the new-born foal named Darley, Jarrett stays close to the creature during its early years. When the colt, re-named Lexington, passes to another landowner, Jarrett follows.

We see that his life is clearly easier than that of black slaves out in the fields. Jarrett is clothed, fed and treated well, principally because of his value to Lexington. Yet both are at the mercy of the wealth, whims and promises of their owners. For example, although gambler and race-course owner Ten Broek had given his word that Lexington would never be whipped, as soon as he has starts promoting timed, high-stakes races on his track, that promise gets forgotten:

Jarrett ‘could see the horse’s flanks heaving in obvious distress. He turned on (the jockey) Meichon. “What were you rowling him for?” he cried. “You could see it wasn’t in him.”

Meichon looked defiant. “Marse Ten Broek say I ‘ave to ride ‘ard. I think – they say – he ‘as bet against us so ‘e want no person to say he cheat.”

Jarrett threw his head back and cursed the sky.’

Even as Jarrett curses, he knows that challenging the master’s actions could mean being sent out to work in the fields or sold.

Moreover, throughout the book, Brooks emphasises his situation as evident in her chapter headings: at first he is Warfield’s Jarrett, then Ten Broek’s Jarrett and finally Alexander’s Jarrett. He is a man without independence.

Around this historical core, Brooks wraps a contemporary tale about two academics meeting in Washington in 2019. Jess, an Australian, and interested in bones since childhood, is an anthropologist and Smithsonian scholar. who starts to study a forgotten equine skeleton to discover more about the horse’s identity and power of endurance. Theo, an Afro-American art historian, is studying the role of Black men during the early years of horse-racing. When an energetic dog brings the pair together, their quest leads them through all the hidden archives of the Institute. However, their deepening relationship also emphasises social pressures within modern America and the insidious influence of prejudice.

The third thread in the novel lies in that mysterious painting partly seen on the cover. An early character, Thomas J. Scott, is a racing journalist and a hopeful equine portraitist. As he paints Dr Warfield’s horses, he notices how helpful and sensitive the boy is, and does something kind.

“I remembered I’d promised him a painting . . . and as sometimes happens when the stakes are small, the painting came together with an uncommon felicity. I captured the light on that rich bay coat and the intelligent look in the eye. I considered keeping the piece myself. I was glad in the end that I did not, when I saw the look of joy on the boy’s face. It occurred to me then his condition afforded him few possessions he might claim as his own.”

Scott’s painting passes through Jarrett’s family until, in 1954 it becomes the property of Martha Jackson, a New York gallery owner who exhibits bold modern paintings. She has her own secret reason for keeping the small portrait which, in due time, will unlock the equine mystery for Jess and Theo, and act as part of the powerful ending.

Knowing little about gambling or horse racing before reading Horse, I had not realised that equine paintings, such as Stubbs' famous “Whistlejacket”, are an aspect of the business of horse-breeding and were adverts promoting the best bloodlines.

Perhaps, because there are more passionate and personal novels that give a voice to the life on the plantations, Horse does not attempt to offer the reader a close inner experience. Brooks, as a white woman novelist, writes with a distanced third person narrative voice which allows her to expand her themes and also allows her concluding chapters to stand out clearly. In addition, her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war. I appreciated the contrast between Jarrett’s time, the easy academic life within the museums and galleries and the edgy emotions within Jackson Pollock and the art scene of 50’s New York.

While I did not entirely love Horse, I did love Jarrett as a character, and I enjoyed the care and balance within Brook’s storytelling. I welcomed the world that the novel introduced me to, and the strength of its still-relevant messages. Yes: well worth the read.

Horse is published by Little, Brown.

Guest review by John Case: I AM NOT RAYMOND WALLACE by Sam Kenyon

 

"Sam Kenyon's stunning debut novel ... a beautifully written story of love, loss and redemption; a tale of the emotional costs we can so often suffer for failing to be true to our true selves ..."

Training initially as an actor, John Case spent his early 20s working in theatre in the UK, before moving into the Arts and Heritage Sector, working as a senior manager with Surrey County Council’s Cultural Service Department, covering Performing Arts, Libraries and Heritage. Since 2020 John has been the Festival Director of the Rye Arts Festival, one of the South-East’s largest multi-arts festival, held every September since 1971. John is now working on the establishment of an exciting new project - The Rye Bay Book Festival, which he hopes to launch in 2024.

‘It is Monday October 14th, 1963, Raymond is twenty-one years old, and by the time he leaves Manhattan a mere three months later, on January 8th, 1964, he will have made the greatest mistake of his life.’

So ends the first paragraph of Sam Kenyon’s stunning debut novel, spanning a 30 year period from Manhattan in the winter of 1963, a month before President Kennedy is assassinated, to Paris in 2003. It is a beautifully written story of love, loss and redemption; a tale of the emotional costs we can so often suffer for failing to be true to our true selves; of the role that parental pressure can exert throughout our lives, but it’s also a snapshot of the wider intolerance that existed in 1960s America towards homosexuality; a time when homosexuality was still considered by many to be a ‘disease’ that could, at best, be cured by the psychiatrist or by religious correction. A time when gay men were forced into a dangerous illicit underworld, where to gain entry to gay bars and clubs meant knowing that particular secret ‘knock’ on the door to gain entry, and where the danger of arrest or attack was ever present. It was also a time when the The New York Times could actively publish scaremongering articles about an homosexual epidemic spreading across America - ‘They’re sick, you know? The result of inadequate parenting; absent or detached fathers, overbearing mothers; lack of significant masculine figure in the household…”

Into this 1960s world comes Raymond Wallace, a virginal 21 year old, newly minted from Cambridge University, to work at the offices of  The New York Times on a three-month bursary, where he is assigned to work with top journalist Robert C. Doty (a real life figure, but in Kenyon’s novel Doty is fictionalised) to undertake research for a leading article about the ‘growth of overt homosexuality’ in New York city. Remember we are still four years away from the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in the UK which permitted homosexual acts between two consenting adults over the age of 21, and even further away from legalisation in the United States.

Raymond, encouraged by Doty to venture into the hidden underworld of the gay bars of Manhattan, meets the charismatic Joey Maniscalco, and quickly begins an intense relationship, a relationship that will last physically for a mere three months, but one that will resonate across a generation for the next thirty years.

The relationship between Raymond and Joey is liberating, joyful, loving and beautifully brought to life by Kenyon. Even the intimate sex scenes, which can so often be the downfall of many a writer, work well here, blending perfectly within the main narrative. Both these men will, in time, become famous - Joey, a free spirt, confident in his own sexuality, supported by his beloved Papa, possesses a rare singing talent, whilst Raymond, the ironic observer, the recorder of stories, will find fame as a writer. Kenyon is adept at creating fascinating believable characters - Joey’s relationship with his loving Papa contrasts with the intense controlling relationship Raymond himself has with his own mother, desperate to see her son live a stiflingly conventional life, and who is instrumental in Raymond’s decision to walk away from Joey and return to England, eventually marrying and having a son of his own called Joe.

The novel is divided into three parts - the first covers the intense relationship of Raymond and Joey over that winter of 1963/4, the second, epistolic in form, taking place 20 years later, are letters sent by Joey’s Papa to Raymond, and unsent letters by Raymond to Joey,. The third part, set in Paris, see’s Raymond’s son, Joe, seek out Joey, who has now become a world famous classical singer. The three separate parts and the range of characters and timescales demand a deft, accomplished writing style and Kenyon pulls this off admirably.

It is difficult to write about this book without giving too much away, and I don’t want to spoil the final part, so do grab a copy and read it. I’m pleased to say that despite a significant sadness that takes place, Kenyon does give us, and his characters, a happy ending, and happy endings are something that we all need, particularly right now!

Full praise to Nathan Evans and Justin David from that wonderful independent publisher, Inkandescent, for giving us Sam Kenyon’s novel. This book deserves a very wide audience, as its themes are universal, irrespective of sexuality.

I am not Raymond Wallace is published by Inkandescent.

Sam Kenyon is a writer, composer, performer and teacher. His most recent theatre work is Miss Littlewood exploring the life of Joan Littlewood, which opened at the RSC in 2018. Find out more from his website.

Inkandescent Publishers: website

Rye Arts Festival website

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"In spite of the grimness and its foundation in reality, The Nickel Boys somehow isn't an overwhelmingly bleak read."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her latest publication is This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

There's something so mesmerising about Colson Whitehead's writing. I wondered what he'd do to follow his harrowing epic of slavery, The Underground Railroad, and this is it - a shorter, slimmer novel than its predecessor. (He's since written another, during lockdown - Harlem Shuffle). Both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead the fourth American writer to win this prestigious award twice.

While The Underground Railroad employs magical realism in its portrayal of the escape routes for slaves in the southern states, imagining an actual secret underground rail network with tunnels, stations, sidings and escape hatches to the surface, we're in realistic territory here. The story is simpler, yet every bit as gripping. 

We follow the fortunes of Elwood Curtis, a bright African-American boy brought up in Florida by his grandmother, "a slight humming-bird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose", to be serious, responsible and ambitious. It's the 1960s, when segregation under the Jim Crow laws has only recently ended, not yet to much effect. Scholarly, teaching himself from the single volume of an encyclopaedia that comes his way by chance, and inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, which he plays repeatedly from the single record he owns, Elwood vows always to follow the great man's guidance. Once, attending a demonstration for which he's later punished by his grandmother, he "felt closer to himself for a moment". Helped by a teacher who sees his intelligence and ambition, he wins a scholarship to a college founded to help young people from poor backgrounds. But his ambition is immediately thwarted when, hitching a lift for his first journey to the college, he's unfairly implicated in car theft and with no more than minimal investigation sent to a harsh reform school, Nickel.

Endearingly idealistic, Elwood vows even here to make the best of his situation, earn points for good conduct and to be released as early as possible. But the school's promises are hollow ones. The story's split structure moves us forward to the nineteen-eighties, where we learn that excavations of the school's old site prior to the construction of an office park and lunch plaza have revealed not only graves marked perfunctorily by crosses but other human bodies as well. "Even in death, the boys were trouble." Elwood, apparently, has weathered his ordeal, building a new life and a successful business, yet the scars remain. The discovery of the bodies prompts a small group of former inmates either to hide or excavate their own archaeology. 

Moving back and forth in time, we experience daily life at Nickel - the meagre rations, the punishments and other abuses, the hard labour and the trips 'out back' from which some boys never return. Supposedly a school, it offers little educational stimulus to a bright and inquisitive boy like Elwood, and there is racial segregation here, as in the world outside - the new black arrivals are given clothing that's already threadbare. Of Elwood's friendship with the more cynical Jack Turner, Whitehead has said that these characters represent two different sides of his own personality: Elwood Curtis is "the optimistic or hopeful part of me that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it", while Jack Turner represents "the cynical side that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder and slavery, and it will always be that way." A long-kept secret about the escape from Nickel packs a powerful punch at the end.

The Nickel Boys is based on a real reform school run by the state of Florida, the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys, subject to a similar investigation after the discovery of bodies, amounting now to some 81. My reading took place against a background of disturbing news from America: the overturning of abortion rights in some states, more mass shootings alongside plans to extend rights to gun ownership, while the hearing was in progress to investigate Trump's incitement of supporters to storm the Capitol. Sometimes the era of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan doesn't seem all that long ago; in fact the KKK still exists, and the ugly, misogynist, white supremacist side of America is all too visible. 

In spite of the grimness and its foundation in reality, The Nickel Boys somehow isn't an overwhelmingly bleak read - I think because of the hope, dignity and perseverance Elwood somehow manages to maintain, our total immersion in his world and our belief that he'll come through.

I'll certainly read more of Colson Whitehead. Next will be his latest, Harlem Shuffle.

The Nickel Boys is published by Doubleday.

More of Linda's recent choices:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf

Guest review by Jane Russ: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, revisited

 

 "The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th..."

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

 I asked if I could review an old book, something well loved and read by millions. A book that most readers would know but which has come sharply into focus since 25 May 2020: the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird at school in about 1967 when I was fifteen. The story gripped me and, I am ashamed to admit, I still have my original (stolen) school copy beside me as I write! I was older than the narrator Scout Finch but not so much older that the antics of her day to day life failed to resonated with me, in all their glorious detail.

It was another fifty years before I read it again. I have occasionally been disappointed on re-reading a book I loved the first time around: not so with this one. This second reading threw up all the touch points of my own lived experience and I found I loved it even more. I was shocked by the nuance I missed originally, but what fifteen-year-old knows about nuance? Then I read it a third time in February this year; to see if there were things I had forgotten that could help me understand the horrors going on in America today. Not just the George Floyd murder but the insurrection too.

The novel at its simplest is a tale of two children growing up in the deeply segregated world of Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1930s. The narrator is a young adult looking back on her childhood. Scout is six when the story begins and her elder brother Jem is ten. Their mother died four years before and Scout and Jem are devoted to their father Atticus, the town’s attorney. Atticus believes in never talking down to children and always answering every question: helping them to understand the world around them. The mother figure in the story is Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, who loves the children as her own and has high standards of behaviour, which Scout and Jem work diligently to ignore. The third child we come to know and love is Dill, who comes every summer to stay with his aunt in the house next door. A fatherless, slightly old-fashioned, only child from Meridian, Mississippi, Dill is the catalyst the other two need for all that follows.

Written with a flowing natural style that effortlessly draws you into Scout’s world, it deals with major issues of the day in a clear gritty way and it is also very funny. In the final storyline, it seems perfectly natural that Scout, dressed as a ham, should be walking home in the dark with Jem after a school event. The ham plays an important role in the end-game. In fact, it could be said that without the ham she would be dead.

Whilst encircled by sharply-observed descriptions of their neighbours and Dill’s obsession with trying to get the recluse Boo Radley to come out of his house, the book has at its core Atticus’ defence of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Bob Ewell, a poor white farmer living with his large brood of children in virtual destitution on the outskirts of the town, accuses his black neighbour Tom Robinson of raping his eldest daughter Mayella. By the time the trial starts, Atticus has already saved Tom from a lynching by a crowd of men who turn up at the jail where he is being held. Scout, Jem and Dill sneak out at night and arrive just before the men. Scout unknowingly defuses the anger in the men when she spots the father of a classmate and speaks to him about his son. Her innocence and kindness prompt Mr. Cunningham to tell the other men to go home. This scene is the start of Scout’s understanding that nothing is fair for black people. (NB: The book was written only five years after the well-publicised lynching of teenager Emmett Till in 1955.)

Bob Ewell, in the eyes of the town is the lowest of the low but inherent racism tops even this and Tom Robinson in the ‘court’ of Maycomb is guilty before the trial starts. The judge sets Atticus to defend Tom as he knows Atticus to be an honest man who will not just put on a show of defence but the real thing; that is exactly what Atticus does. Scout, Jem and Dill, unbeknownst to Atticus, watch the whole trial from the ‘coloured gallery’, where they are brought to the front, known as they are to be Calpurnia’s charges and Atticus’ children. One thing that shocks white sensibilities at the trial is that Tom admits he felt sorry for Mayella being forced to look after her many siblings and her unpleasant father when her mother dies. In a segregated world how dare a black man have the temerity to feel sorry for a white man; even a Ewell. Even though it becomes obvious that Tom was physically incapable of giving Mayella the beating she received (he has a withered arm) the jury, after a very long deliberation, still finds him guilty.

As the story progresses there are things we discover and consider. This is where reading this book as an adult gives you a different perspective; the lessons are the same, just in sharper focus.

Prejudice of all kinds, be it based on religion, skin colour, age or anything else, is abhorrent.

This is something left for the reader to infer from the many characters in the book. As Miss Maudie says “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Atticus, when discussing the court-room verdict, says to Jem. “The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be he any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.’

The majority of people are good at heart. As Scout says to Atticus after realising that Arthur Radley saved her. “Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

There are so many things to take from this book. Not least the realisation that although laws may change, attitudes passed from generation to generation of people needing to find a scapegoat for their own failings, will be hard to change. The end of the Civil War and the American government’s inability to deal with the problem of how to integrate slaves into society, is a harvest still being reaped to this day. ‘Forty Acres and A Mule’ for liberated slaves, meant that someone somewhere, felt aggrieved that they were not included, particularly poor whites. The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th and it is no coincidence that the Confederate flag was much in evidence on that day.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an easy read, just right for a teenage mind needing a story that pulls you along but it is of course so much more than that. I hope I have inspired you to get back to it and give it another viewing; you will not be disappointed.

To Kill a Mockingbird is published by Cornerstone.

By Jane Russ:

Guest review by John Bowers: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED by John Bolton

                                           

"This is a President truly addicted to chaos ... ”

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

John Bolton is a polarising but significant figure. One suspects he could achieve an argument in a paper bag. He is a significant player in the Trump Circus because he was originally lauded by him as a great cold warrior who would make America’s enemies quake (having seen him as a regular commentator on Fox News). Gradually in office, Bolton became disillusioned with surely the most eccentric if not dangerous Commander in Chief in US history. He lasted as National Security Advisor only from 2018 to 2019. He resigned but the President, who is not one to allow people to leave with dignity, claimed that he had dismissed him, ostensibly for being too much of a war-monger. 

A great feature of the book is Bolton’s ability to contrast this Administration with that of George W Bush, where he held the post of US Ambassador to the UN; he had also served Bush Senior and Reagan. Unlike them, this is a President who has no sense of history, does not read much and does little to prepare for significant summit meetings. One does not sleep easily with him as Leader of the Free World. 

The book is the first insider’s account of Trump’s love in with the North Korean dictator. Trump adored a letter written apparently by Kim Jong Un. In fact it was Bolton says written by his underlings “as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self esteem”. Trump clearly wanted to meet Kim for the photo-op but did not read his briefings and was bested by Kim even though Kim had less cards to play and a smaller nuclear button (as Trump had once pointed out). This is at one with a disturbing kow-towing to other dictators or authoritarian figures whether they be Putin, Xi or Erdogan.

Trump’s ignorance as revealed by Bolton is truly extraordinary. As examples he thought Finland was part of Russia and he had no idea that the UK was a nuclear power. It is Trump’s attitude to Russia which is the most troubling, perplexing and difficult to explain. It is hard to understand why he would want to ensure that all but interpreters were absent from a meeting he insisted be held with Putin. As Bolton says “I was not looking forward to leaving him in a room alone with Trump”. Trump’s desire to see everything in terms of his own interest, especially his desire for re election but also commercial, is very worrying.

Bolton’s description of a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China is a classic. Xi read arduously note cards hashed out in advance while Trump ad libbed “with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next”. Xi ingratiated himself with Trump by saying he looked forward to working with him for another six years, at which point Trump said people were saying the two-term limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Trump then asked Xi to help him win the next election by alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns. Of course relations have now taken a turn for the worse with mutual allegations now filling the air.

The book also covers in detail the coup to topple Maduro in Venezuela which never quite happened. Iran, the Taliban, G7 meetings and getting Europeans to pay more for their defence are other themes which run through the work. Bolton provides some rare insights such as that he recalls that “Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals” in particular those of Barbara Bush and John McCain, with whom he continued his petty squabble well after his death.

Bolton also sheds some light into the naked and ruthless media management of the Trump team. For example, he rushed out a statement on Saudi Arabia because this will “divert from Ivanka” who had been accused of using her personal e mail for government business.

This is a President truly “addicted to chaos” as the book blurb states. This is a truly dysfunctional White House and it is difficult to see why any rational person would want to work there. The book richly demonstrates how the daily tweets get in the way of developing rational foreign policy. 

The Democrats wanted to call Bolton to appear in the impeachment process. He does not quite deal with why he did not agree to testify and instead saved up his revelations for this no doubt lucrative book although he does aim probably merited criticism at the way the process was handled.

Bolton has few good words to say about anyone and has contempt for the idea that Trump was originally surrounded by an “axis of adults”. He takes aim at the inadequacies as he saw them of Mattis, Pompeo and Tillerson and is scathing about Nicky Haley, the Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton has a racy style and his insight into foreign policy in the past is illuminating. His overall verdict on Trump is “he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the federal government”. It is hard not to agree and the evidence is clearly presented in the book’s 577 pages.

The Room Where It Happened is published by Simon and Schuster.

See also: John Bowers' review of Tribes by David Lammy.

Guest review by Wes Magee: BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

"It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. McCarthy makes it work, seamlessly."

Wes Magee is a former headteacher who has been a full-time author since 1990. He has published more than a hundred books for children - poetry, fiction, plays, and picture books - and seven collections of poems for adults.

No Man’s Land (Blackstaff) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Very Best of Wes Magee (Macmillan) won The Children’s Poetry Bookshelf Award.

Towards the end of the most recent ice age, between 15,000 and 10,000 years BC, a land bridge existed between north-east Asia and Alaska. The bridge, which now lies beneath the Bering Strait, probably facilitated the slow migration of nomadic hunter-gatherers into the American continent, people eventually spreading down the eastern seaboard as far as the southern tip of Chile. Others spread east, possibly joining with Europeans who had trekked over the extended Arctic ice shelf.

In 1492 AD Christopher Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic made landfall at a Caribbean island. Thinking he had discovered a west route to the East Indies, Columbus named the tribal people he encountered ‘Indians’ (Spanish: indios). The name stuck. More than a century on, European travellers, often fleeing religious persecution at home, established settlements in The New World at Jamestown in 1607, and later at Plymouth - the Pilgrim Fathers. From the start there was serious conflict with the indigenous ‘Indians’. Two very different cultures were on collision course.

So began more than two centuries of war-like strife between the technologically advanced white settlers (they had guns) and the Native Americans who relied on the bow and arrow, lance and knife: a long-lasting clash between Christians and what were perceived as heathens. The conflict deepened as a growing tide of European immigrants moved further and further west, grabbing land for cattle rearing, and farming, discovering oil, and seeking gold. The Wild West was created, and with it the literature of the western.

As a boy in the 1940s and 50s I devoured the cheap, luridly illustrated, pulp fiction paperbacks telling tales of tough cowboys battling against uncivilised Indians. Hollywood jumped aboard the bandwagon and the western movie became an industry in its own right. Roy Rogers and Trigger ruled the range.

Attitudes to this conflict were slow to change. Novels from Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee  (1970) and through to Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping (2016) set out to depict the history and the destruction of an indigenous culture from the Indian point of view, and how remorseless white expansionism amounted to nothing less than genocide. The celebrated American novelist Cormac MaCarthy (b. 1933) exemplifies this change of viewpoint, adding significantly to the western genre in a series of outstanding novels, of which Blood Meridian is the strongest.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, is a tumultuous fiction set around the emerging lawless townships, the stakeholders, and the isolated sod-buster homesteads of western Texas and the Mexican border region in the 1840s. Based on an actual body of disparate, desperate men who terrorised the area, the violent Glanton gang, McCarthy depicts the characters with a Dickens-like gift for their grubbiness and greed, their sleaze. We have Toadville (fugitive, branded face, no ears), Judge Holden (educated, completely hairless, given to philosophical utterances such as ‘War is God’), John Joel Glanton (criminal, gang leader), Grannyrat (criminal), Tobin (ex-priest), and principally an unnamed runaway child known through the book as the boy, then the kid, and finally the man. (The author used a similar literary device in his apocalyptic novel The Road where the main characters are the boy and the man.)

In Blood Meridian the boy escapes a squalid, poverty-stricken, abusive, violent background to become a homeless vagrant in the semi-lawless townships of west Texas where he falls in with the Glanton gang of criminals and fugitives. They earn a living by roving the country seeking out and attacking bands of marauding, vengeful Indians who have pillaged and fired homesteads, murdered, raped and kidnapped. The novel recounts numerous expeditions as the Glantons scour desert, plain, forest, and mountains, hunting Indians (often wearing stolen clothing as trophies) and engaging them in brutal, vicious fighting. The gang then scalp the dead, returning to the townships with the proof of their victories over the ‘savages’. Grateful townspeople welcome them as heroes and pay them in gold. There were then wild days when the drunken Glantons went crazy with debauchery and the smashing-up of property. Anti-social behaviour to the power of 10.

The vivid depiction of man’s violent inhumanity and degradation is but part of the story: Cormac McCarthy gives the reader a marvellous counterpoint through his stunning descriptions of landscape, weather, the night sky, sunrise and sunset. A high-quality lyrical creation of ‘place’. And running throughout, like a motif, are the descriptions of the country’s flora and fauna. It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. The author makes it work, seamlessly.

In the end most of the Glanton gang suffer more than wounds from arrow and axe: comeuppance will out. Some die violently: others are hanged in public.

Cormac McCarthy has gifted a powerful and memorable book to the world. The book’s brief epilogue ends with the words ‘Then they all move on again’. It appears to indicate a continuum: and in the same way the townships continued to ‘move on’, to develop and expand long after the infamous Glantons had gone. Townships became cities. And while the Indian tribes and nations continued the fight to hold their lands and preserve their way of life they were eventually defeated at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. It brought to a close the long-running Indian Wars. A culture that had developed from the days when those primitive hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge while the ice still held its grip, came to an abrupt halt. Its people were confined to designated Indian reservations. The warrior, the bow and arrow, the buffalo were gone. Scalping was over.

Blood Meridian is published by Picador.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THIRTEEN MOONS by Charles Frazier

"So lyrically written that I was quite bereft when I got to the end..."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books. They obtained 19 foreign rights deals and are still in print in the UK. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. It comes out in paperback in August 2019. At present she is working on another title for adults.

Charles Frazier’s first book, Cold Mountain, was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. His second, Thirteen Moons, came nine years later, and it shows. I have enormous respect for writers who take their time against exhortations by publishers, booksellers and readers. A novel takes its own time, or it should, but everyone needs to make a living, and that can work against our best endeavours. I have no idea precisely why Thirteen Moons took nine years, but I like to think that at least one of the reasons might be because he refused to be rushed.

The title refers to the way the First Nations people in the novel trace their seasons. Frazier educates us as to where we are in the year by way of these thirteen named moons. They quietly pace his novel, the life story of Will Cooper told in the first person. He is a bound boy at the start, a twelve year old orphan, sent alone to the edge of the Cherokee Nation to run a trading post.

For anyone who loves to read of the natural world this is a delight, and also a sadness, especially now, as we appreciate just how much damage we continue to do to the world.

In this wonderful novel we get vivid images of how people think about the land and its inhabitants. The buffalo and elk for example are long gone from the mountains and valleys, and the deer are far fewer, but none of the Cherokee in this novel speak of the numbers of skins they traded being a reason for the animals' demise, just of their vanishment, as if they have simply moved on. That made me think a lot about the balance of nature, and how outside forces offering manufactured goods to make life easier can make change almost impossible to resist.

The Cherokee are a huge influence on Will Cooper, and as a white man he works hard in many ways to protect their land and their way of life. The fate of the First Nations is a matter of history, and shame, and so of course he does not have a quiet life, but even during the worst of times, when violence comes, his story is told reflectively, in the voice of an old man thinking about the past. That voice is so persuasive I could almost believe I was sitting by the fire, listening to him in person.

I was completely captivated by Will Cooper. His loves, his behaviour good and bad, his humour, and wonderful descriptions of riding through the country in good weather and bad. He describes deep snow, thrashing rainstorms and hot sun. The names of places are wonderful, and the way the flora and fauna were used to support life is fascinating. In addition, it is all so lyrically written that I was quite bereft when I got to the end.

Thirteen Moons is published by Sceptre. 

Guest review by Anna Wilson: UNSHELTERED by Barbara Kingsolver

Anna Wilson started out as a picture book editor at Macmillan Children’s Books and went on to be an editor at HarperCollins. She has also freelanced for several years as a fiction editor for Bloomsbury, Puffin and Hachette children’s book publishers. Her writing career began twenty years ago with a picture book, published for very young children. Since then Anna has published over 38 books for children and young teens including picture books, short stories, poems and fiction series. Her books have been chosen for World Book Day and been shortlisted for the Hull Libraries Award and the Lancashire Book of the Year Award. Anna’s recent young fiction series Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire is published by Stripes. Her memoir Missing the Boat is her first adult book.

Anna also gives talks, runs writing workshops in schools and teaches at Bath Spa University on the BA and MA creative writing courses and is a tutor for the Arvon Foundation.

Unsheltered contains two interlinking stories, both set in and around the same house in Vineland, New Jersey and both containing elements taken from real life events. One storyline takes place in 2016 as Trump (referenced as ‘The Bullhorn’ rather than by name) is banging his fist on the campaign-trail podium; the other unfolds in 1871 when Vineland was a community conceived as a Christian utopia by the landowner Charles Landis to give shelter to citizens shaken by the aftermath of the civil war. Kingsolver skilfully interweaves these stories, using the house as a metaphor for ideas built on shaky foundations and for the collapse of ideals and mores taken for granted in both the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries. If this makes the novel sound dry, there are far more ingredients to whet the appetite. This is, at heart, a story of two individuals struggling against similar themes in eras which turn out to be not so different from one another as they might at first appear.

The novel starts in 2016 with Willa Knox. Willa is a woman with more than her fair share of problems: she has inherited a house which, we learn in the first line of the novel, is in such poor shape, ‘The simplest thing would be to tear it down.’ Not only this, but her academic husband Iano has recently lost tenure, forcing the family to move into the ‘shambles’ of a house, her heartbroken adult daughter has come back from Cuba in need of shelter and Willa’s son’s wife has committed suicide, leaving a new born baby in need of love and care. Willa is also caring for her ailing and cantankerous father-in-law. Willa and Iano have worked hard all their lives to provide for their family, but this is not enough. As Willa says, ‘It’s like the rules don’t apply anymore’. But she is strong (at times, perhaps, unbelievably so) and manages to keep her head while all about her, including, one could argue, the house, are losing theirs. She is a journalist and puts her powers of investigation to good use in digging into the archives to find out if the house can benefit from a preservation grant to stop it falling down.

Back in 1871, science teacher Thatcher Greenwood has moved into the house with his new bride and has taken up a post at the local school. He soon runs into problems when he dares to mention Darwin’s theory of evolution in class – something which goes very much against the accepted orthodoxy of the Christian community. He finds solace in friendship with his neighbour, the ‘amateur’ naturalist Mary Treat. Treat, like Landis and his Vineland community, really did exist in 1870s New Jersey and Kingsolver had the benefit of sifting through an incredible amount of correspondence between Treat and Darwin when writing her novel. Nineteenth century Vineland’s blinkered reactions to advances in science versus the accepted status quo tally well with the backdrop to a twenty-first century America which lauds a man who could ‘stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him’. Indeed, this comment is mirrored by the storyline that unfolds around the real-life murder from which Landis escaped conviction in 1871.

Sometimes split narratives can be unsatisfactory: readers can find themselves preferring one over the other and skipping ahead to get to the story that holds their attention more. I didn’t feel this way, as both Thatcher and Willa held me captive. My only criticism would be that Kingsolver likes to push a point home and sometimes uses her characters as speechifiers, allowing them to stand on their soap boxes for a beat too long. I felt this particularly in the conversations between Willa’s son and daughter who have chosen opposing routes in life: the one as a capitalist wealth-maker, the other as a hippy dreadlock-wearing drop-out. However, the novel ends on a gentle, hopeful note and I was sad to say goodbye to both strands of the story and the engaging characters that people it.

Unsheltered is published by Faber & Faber.

OUR HUNDREDTH POST! Guest review by Graeme Fife: ZEKE AND NED by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

"A captivating writer, a weaver of stories out of a tradition of campfire yarn-spinning which evokes Homer’s epic poems." 

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts. He is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

Larry McMurtry is a captivating writer, a weaver of stories out of a tradition of campfire yarn-spinning which evokes Homer’s epic poems. McMurtry’s fictional landscape is that of the borderlands and open territories of the old West, the lands overrun in the great expansion of America by the settlers which led to the eviction of the peoples who’d lived on their ancestral lands for millenia. They spoke of borrowing land, the pioneers demanded ownership.

McMurtry has collaborated with Ossana on books and screenplays – their adaptation of Brokeback Mountain won an Oscar in 2005 – and in Zeke and Ned they explore a particularly fraught passage of late nineteenth century history in the forging of the Union which resonates powerfully in what is happening to that Union today. Even as I read the novel, it occurred to me that it goes some way to illuminate why the NRA exerts such a powerful influence in American politics, not only with its strident claim to the right to bear arms apparently enshrined in the Constitution, but to the visceral desire of its vociferous members to embody the freewheeling spirit of the frontiersmen, "a manz gotta do wotta …" blah blah.

Zeke and Ned is loosely based on the life of Ned Christie, a Cherokee, who, as a child, walked what the dislocated tribes called The Trail of Tears, the long, punitive march from their homelands in the south-eastern states to lands west of the Mississippi, under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The novel explores the anguish and heartbreak of the clash between the displaced peoples and the relentless onslaught of ‘white law’, administered by often ill-paid and harassed judges in small town outposts and enforced in hot lead by US Marshalls, many of them post-bellum bandits, criminals, thugs and murderers, who could no more fire a pistol accurately than they could read. The terror of such application of notional justice is apparent in Ned’s summation of his plight, accused of murder, in hiding: ‘The one thing he could count on about the white law…was that sooner or later, day or night, winter or summer, they would come’.

The novel ends with chapters loosely based on the historical fact of Ned Christie’s War, when Ned fights off a succession of villainous white posses sent to root him out of the fort he’d constructed for his young wife – recently brutalised by one posse - and himself in the woods on the uplands of Shady Mountain in Oklahoma.

In these days where truth has taken on a Humpty Dumptyish aspect and facts are, it seems, manipulable, it’s interesting to ponder the matter of a novel’s truth – a resonance in our understanding of human relationships – and its bending, or ditching of facts in deference to narrative propulsion, a hallmark of McMurtry’s writing. Does that vitiate the history? I don’t believe so. As someone once remarked about the historian Tacitus: ‘He may have got his facts wrong, but he told the truth.’ For the novel admits to fiction as a means of exploring the jeopardies of the people caught up in its own construct of dramatic facts.

The imitation of serious events, the hero destroyed by excess of virtues, the explosion and, thereby, catharsis of passions, a scenario that stirs pity and fear…all make Zeke and Ned a compelling American tragedy. A similar tragedy may, surely and grimly, be seen to resurface in Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas…too many others.

A while ago, I noted the sign above a gun shop in north-west America: Blessed are the Piece Makers, this at a time when protesters at the closure of the pits were parading with placards declaring: God, Guns and Coal made America Great.

Hiding behind the insistence that guns are a right and hunting an integral part of American manhood, the clamour of the NRA has a rocky logic: bad man with gun is stopped by good man with gun. Really?

Zeke and Ned concludes, in poignant reminiscence of Ned’s marksmanship as a squirrel hunter: ‘…there would be the shot; bark would fly from the limb the squirrel was on; then Mr Squirrel would come sailing down. He made it seem as easy as whistling, Ned. Easy as whistling, was how Ned made it seem…’

McMurtry’s prolific output includes a masterly series of novels, both comic and sorrowful, and unfailingly sympathetic, centred on small town Texas, beginning with The Last Picture Show…a continuum of America’s contemporary history.

Zeke and Ned is published by Simon and Schuster

Guest review by Graeme Fife: MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts.

At this teeming novel’s heart lie both the essential impulse that sustains human endeavour – above all love, and in this case, the sodality of men in extremis – and the tragedies which compromise the search for answer, survival, triumph, endeavour. Ahab’s monomanic obsession with the whale, symbolised by the artificial leg carved from its bone, a doom-laden clumping along the hollow deck keeping the men below awake, epitomises the folly of human struggle when it’s driven by a narrowness of ego, bereft of fellow-feeling. Ahab has married late in life, he has a little boy whom his mother will carry ‘to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail’. When the mate Stubb pleads with him to abandon his insane pursuit of the creature, Ahab declares, like the enraged prophet before the priests of Baal: ‘Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.’ The ‘divinity which shapes our ends,’ no less. He even baptises his harpoon ‘in the name of the Devil’, fully aware that, in Melville’s words, ‘the infernal nature has a valor often denied to innocence.’ For the challenge of courage underpins the epic chase of the White Whale, incarnation of Nature’s elemental powers: we either ride out life’s climactic storms, by fortitude, or succumb by moral failure, knowing fear and overcoming it. ‘I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of the whale,’ declares Starbuck, ship’s mate.

The innocence reflects that of the America in which Melville was formed, in its infancy as an independent unity of states – just as the ship comprises many parts, its crew a unity of disparate individuals. Like young Ishmael, face to face with a new world of dangers, callow America needed to wise up, toughen up, embrace the pioneer spirit, as on land, so on the sea.

Bulkington, ‘six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer dam,’ strides briefly into the narrative, a man who, ‘by deep, earnest thinking,’ goes to sea, rejecting the pull of the land, precisely because ‘in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God’. The highest knowledge is, surely, self-knowledge.

Two things bind the crew of the Pequod (named for an Algonquian tribe): the thrill - and danger – of the chase, and the intimacy of friendship. The bond between the novice whaler, Ishmael, and Queequeg, master harpooneer, is a friendship which Melville characterises as closer than marriage perhaps because (though he does not say so) it eschews sex. It is of the higher union, the spiritual. Not the love that dare not speak its name, rather the greater love, expressed in laying down one’s life, thus Queequeg, leaping into a turbulent sea to save a crew member who’d fallen overboard.

Early in the book, Melville warns the reader against becoming snared in the digressions about whales – their place and representation in culture, history, art – and about whaling per se. Eschew them, if you will, these treatises on an animal which inhabits the profundity of the ocean yet must rise to the surface, periodically, to fill its lung with air. A creature of two worlds: the mortal and the mysterious. Does chasing and killing it, draining its flesh for oil to fill the lamps which light the world, spooning out the ambergris to supply perfume to scent the rooms lit by those lamps, condemn or ennoble the men who go out in the oared boats, facing the possibility of catastrophe when the Leviathan is speared and held tight on the rope till it tires and dies? That is the nub of Melville’s tragic crux, the clash at the heart of his poetic drama, wherein ‘man’s insanity is heaven’s sense’.

Poetic? Why, yes. I think of Whitman’s poetry, in its search for a diverse new language to fund the examination of this burgeoning America. Melville’s sonorous writing shows many influences - Bible, homily, Shakespeare - maybe not to every taste, memorable, nevertheless.

Melville unfurls a compelling story pitched on ‘the great shroud of the sea [which] rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’. It is part of Melville’s own meditation on America in the heave and swell of its gestation: what is this vast land? What tribulation and beauty does it contain? Who people it? How is it theirs? How do they live? In what and of what is their being?

Guest review by Graeme Fife: WEST OF SUNSET by Stewart O'Nan

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts.

Stewart O’Nan’s multi-layered novel, West of Sunset, weaves a compelling story of many strands. Set in the Hollywood of the late 1930s its cast list features gilded names from the Golden Age of movies – the stars, Bogart, Joan Crawford, Garbo, the studios who made them stars, MGM, Metro, and the writers who wrote the scripts, among them Scott Fitzgerald, in the dying years of his life, contending, through an alcoholic haze, with the cruelties of the movie industry and his wife, Zelda’s, mental illness. She committed to a clinic/asylum, he ricocheting from one ungrateful writing job to the next, ‘as adaptable as a hermit crab’, their hapless daughter, Scottie, without any permanent or secure base – boarding school, her grandmother’s, visits to the clinic, hotel rooms in Hollywood.

It’s a nightmareish world, an existence which parallels the fake dreamscapes of the movies themselves. And west of sunset might be that murky penumbra left when the light fades from the screen and the never-never land of make-believe hits the hard rails of the reality: writers discarded mid-script with neither reason nor apology, the unforgiving demands of the writers’ building - the Iron Lung - the seedy apartment where Fitzgerald works, his neighbours ‘starlets and grips hoping to do better [and] an obese woman who sold her screams to the movies and treated them to free samples, rehearsing at all hours’.

The pressure to deliver is unrelenting – deadlines, endless pots of coffee, working into the small hours, ‘restaging the French revolution as a tragic love story for Garbo’, accommodating the imperious warning of the fading star in need of a hit after a flop: ‘I never die, I never ever lose my man’. This is Crawford, and O’Nan observes that as a star got older, the range of parts got narrower, and so the forlorn urgency to reclaim the glittering heights grew ever more insistent. But, when pretence rules, what certainty is there, can there be? Of his own tortured feelings about Zelda, the beautiful, funny, dazzling creature he married and still cherishes, declined into a woman oscillating between unpredictable states of tenuous reason and incomprehension, her body either haggard or bloated, yet still capable intermittently of thrashing him on the tennis court and swimming like the lithe nymph she’d once been, he reflects: ‘they’d been so miserable together that he’d never invented a happy ending for them’. Is this Fitzgerald or O’Nan? It doesn’t matter. So fully does O’Nan explore the spectral vision of pretence – that’s what they were all engaged in, after all, pretending – that the resonances are painful and telling. It was an environment of bad faith and worse taste. The author, praised lavishly by the producer, goes to the movie screening and sees what he wrote mangled, changed, lost, trashed.

Through all this, Fitzgerald still tries to answer the drive to write another novel, to do once more what he’d done best. And so, the feverish clutching at time, the chasing of scraps of money to keep going, despite promises and offers broken and reneged on, the constant battle with Goldwyn and Mayer ‘and whatever third head of Cerberus guards the gate’. But there is an unlikely redemption.

In Hollywood, Fitzgerald meets and falls in love with the English journalist Sheila Graham - inscrutable, self-possessed, sane, who, in looks, ‘might have been Zelda’s twin’. Their ardent relationship runs like a parallel life, a kind of stability to offset the chaos of his tormented marriage. Graham rebukes his drinking, he reforms, and, in a poignant conclusion to one chapter: ‘Whoever she was, he wanted her, as he wanted these peaceful days to last, and this new life, impossibly, to be his’. Oh, the latent force in that ‘impossibly’.
O’Nan is a writer of quite extraordinary range, author of a corpus of novels which embrace widely diverse styles, scenarios, bases of character and story. His work is infallibly wise, compassionate, fearless in its description of the darker margins of human existence, enthralling, always. West of Sunset is, in my view, one of his finest achievements – and I’ve read all his work – beautifully shaped writing, an unerring pulse of drama, a captivating story, full of pathos, wicked humour and indelible portraits drawn, as it were, from vibrant life. Here’s poor Zelda, in her delirium: ‘Maybe I was never meant to be a salamander, just this poor thing they wrap in sheets and feed when the bell rings. I’m sorry I cost you all those cities all those perfect boulevards with their lights burning down around us in the night.’

Graeme Fife                   
West of Sunset is published by Allen and Unwin, 2015.

Guest review by Berlie Doherty: THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd

Berlie Doherty writes novels, plays, stories and poetry for all ages, and is

translated into over twenty languages. She has written over 60 books, several

of which have been dramatised for radio, television and the stage. She has won

many awards around the world, including the Carnegie Medal twice (for

Dear Nobody andGranny was a Buffer Girl). Her subjects cover many different

genres, from folk and fairy tales and historical fiction to enduring contemporary

novels. Her most recent children's novel is Far From Home, a companion book

to Street Child. Her adult novel Requiem was recently re-published by

Cybermouse Books.

www.berliedoherty.com

I picked up the book because the title intrigued me. The fact that it

was published 15 years ago, and had been on the New York Times
best-seller list despite being a debut novel, won awards and had been
made into a major film had completely passed me by, maybe because
there are simply so many excellent and award-winning books around.
We can't read them all, never mind giving ourselves the luxury of
loving them. I read this book quickly and compulsively, enjoying the
rare condition of having become completely absorbed in a novel.
It doesn't happen so often these days. I think my delight in the book
has as much to do with the beguiling voice of the narrator as with
the plot itself, which is both harrowing and uplifting. When I tell
people about the best books I've read this year, and many of them 
very powerful and memorable pieces of writing, this is the one I want
to hug.

In many ways The Secret Life of Bees affected me as much as To Kill
a Mocking Bird did many years ago, though it is less ambitious and
distressing in its political message. It is set in South Carolina in 1964,
the year of the American Civil Rights Act.  The 14 year old white central
character, Lily Owens, is told by her abusive father, T-Ray, that she fatally
shot her mother when she was four years old. This is the central motivation
of the plot, which takes Lily on a personal mission away from her home
to try to discover the truth.  She has in her possession a photograph of
her mother and a picture of a black Madonna. Hitch-hiking with her is
the family's black maid, Rosaleen, who had been arrested and attacked
for spoiling a white man's shoes on her way to registering to vote for the
very first time. Lily rescues her from hospital, sure in herself that the only
hope for either of them is in leaving her father and the home-town of
Sylvan. The honey-farm in Tiburon where they end up is run by the black
Boatwright sisters, and it is here that Lily begins to find peace and a
knowledge of self-value. It is a coming-of-age novel in which we share the
experience and personal journey of a teenage girl who has seen and
experienced violence, death, grief, loss and love. I have no intention of
plot-spoiling by telling any more of what happens.

So what about this intriguing title? The story begins when Lily is woken up
by a swarm of bees in her room. When she drags T-Ray in to help her get
rid of them, the bees have gone. Her totem, hidden in a box that is buried
in her garden, is a picture of a black Madonna, with Tiburon written on the
back, and it is only when she arrives in that town that she discovers the same
label on a jar of honey. When she is given shelter by the Boatwright sisters,
she helps with the tending of the hives and the harvesting of honey. Every
chapter begins with a fascinating little piece about the behaviour of bees,
and the metaphor of the beehive is realised in the Boatwright household,
the symbol of companionship, community, busyness, female power
and ultimate reward.

I have recently seen the film, and was relieved to see that it is a very faithful
portrayal of the novel, at times deeply moving, and with some beautiful
performances. Visually of course the film gives us a much stronger impression
of the period; in the novel the characters are timeless, especially Lily and the
Boatwright sisters, and it comes as quite a surprise to see them dressed in
sixties clothes and enjoying sixties music. The film gives a vivid visual reminder
of racial hatred and ignorance which is extremely painful to watch. But then,
of course, it goes for a slightly softer ending, with just a few more
heart-warming tweaks than the novelist imagined.