Guest review by Lissa Evans: THE SHIPPING NEWS by Annie Proulx

"A nest of narratives – stories within stories, a structure dense enough to mean that, looking back from the end, it’s impossible to see the whole of the road that took you there."

Lissa Evans is the author of five novels for adults, including Their Finest Hour and a Half (filmed in 2017 as Their Finest, starring Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton), and Old Baggage which tells the story of a former suffragette who is not yet willing to give up the fight. She has also written three books for children, two of which (Small Change for Stuart and Wed Wabbit) were shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Before becoming a writer, Lissa initially studied medicine, but later worked in radio and television comedy, where she produced and directed numerous series, including Room 101 and Father Ted.  She lives in London with her dog and her family. Her hobby is reading. 

There’s a shelf in my bedroom where the re-reads sit: old friends, always ready for another visit, the pages freckled with the odd coffee-stain, the spines lacking in …well, backbone : most are books that I tend to dip into, each falling open at favourite passages, but a small number I re-read from start to finish, among them The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s melancholy and fascinating ramble through Suffolk , Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a near-perfect, mult-layered story about a boy growing up surrounded by ghosts, Sure of You, the sixth of Maupin’s Tales from the City series, a little darker, a little more real than the others and Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, a book that combines a love-letter to chemistry with the story of a complex childhood. They’re a disparate bunch, these total re-reads; what they have in common, I realised recently, is that each possesses a nest of narratives – stories within stories, a structure dense enough to mean that, looking back from the end, it’s impossible to see the whole of the road that took you there. A second read still springs surprises ; the pleasures are still unworn after being encountered for a third or fourth time. 

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx is also on that shelf, an edition with a cover showing a pounding green sea under a louring sky. I must have first read it not too long after it came out in 1993.

Chapter 1. Quoyle.

Quoyle: a coil of rope

Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

The opening chapter is a jolting read for a first-timer – a rapid run through Quoyle’s early life, short sentences like slaps in the face, half-phrases and broken clauses like missing steps, together building a vivid picture of a man who cannot find a place in life, who is forever standing awkwardly on the margins.

Quoyle has a ‘great damp loaf of a body. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips.’ He’s awkward and unhappy and exploited by everyone he meets, culminating in a terrible marriage to Petal, who despises him while he worships her. When she dies, leaving him with two small children, he takes the initiative for the first time in his life, and moves his family a thousand miles to Newfoundland, the home of his forebears - a lump of rock in a hissing sea, the harshest of environments, but a place where, to his surprise, he seems to fit. He is accompanied by one of the most magnificent female characters in twentieth century fiction: The Aunt – dry, fierce and practical, a woman who has fought back against an unspeakable childhood to find life and love, and is now returning to exorcise old memories. But besides this central hinge, there’s so much else in the book - it’s stuffed with characters and interlinking stories, with the problems and practicalities of Quoyle’s domestic life, with the office politics of the terrible local newspaper that employs him, with sea-lore and history, crime and intrigue, with the crash and roar of waves, and a vocabulary that leaves a salt-lick on the tongue. It’s also, often, very funny.

And there’s an extra reason for my affinity with this book. My mother was a voracious reader, largely of history and fiction (she loved detective stories so much that she used to give them up for Lent). She adored The Shipping News and read it once a year and now, when it’s my turn for a re-read, it's like having a conversation with her:

Me: Oh, I love those ponderous fast-food restaurant reviews in Quoyle's newspaper.

Mum: Oh yes, they make me howl. And the part where Quoyle buys a terrible boat and refuses to admit that it's no good, and nearly drowns. That's exactly what your father would have done.

Me: I know.

Mum: There are always bits I forget. I think I’m going to read it again before Christmas.

Me: Me too, Mum.

The Shipping News is published by Fourth Estate.

Lissa Evans' Old Baggage is reviewed here by Pippa Goodhart.

PICK OF THE YEAR by Celia Rees

Today is the Solstice. The shortest day. 'The year's midnight'. A time to look back over the year departing: where we've been, what we've seen, what we've done. Today, my fellow Writer Reviewers Linda Newbery, Adèle Geras and I will be sharing what we have been reading in 2016. In the spirit of the blog, the books we've chosen certainly weren't all published this year. These are our personal choices. Feel free to comment, quarrel or proffer your own. We'd love to know what you would have picked.
I've been reading a lot of non fiction this year. One of the books that impressed me most was Philippe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.

Sands is a Human Rights lawyer. His maternal grandfather was Jewish, from the city of Lviv, now in Western Ukraine. By tracing his grandfather's escape from that city,  which would see the annihilation the rest of his family, Sands offers a highly unusual and deeply personal view of the Holocaust. He also follows the lives of Nuremberg prosecutors, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who were also Jewish and lost their families in Nazi held Lviv. It was through their efforts that the terms 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide' were included in the Nuremburg judgement. Across the court from them sat the defendant, Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Poland and who set up his headquarters in the city that connects them all. I found this clever book utterly absorbing and profoundly moving. It begins in Nuremberg and ends in a quiet woodland glade where the remains of three thousand five hundred Jewish men, women and children still lie, some of them relatives of Sands, Lauterpacht and Lemkin, all of them victims of Frank who would hang for his crimes. 

I read John Lanchester's Capital after watching the serialisation of the book on TV. Lancaster focuses his attention on the people who live in one street in a South London suburb, the value of their houses rising by thousands every week. The street  reflects the mix of multicultural London: pensioners, bankers, Pakistani shopkeepers, Polish builders, Eastern European au pairs, African asylum seekers. An immensely clever satire on property values and a sharp examination of the way we live now. One book leads to another and I went on to read John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour, set in Hong Kong. This ambitious and cleverly constructed novel follows the lives of several different characters and spans a period from the 1930s to the present day and all the changes that the former British colony has seen along the way. 

I re-read War and Peace while in bed with a bout of flu, my interest re-awakened by Andrew Davies' wonderful BBC adaptation. It took me a week to read but it was a week well spent. Some critics think War and Peace the greatest novel ever written. I'm inclined to agree. Another novel on an epic scale is Annie Proulx's Barkskins. I'm a great admirer of Annie Proulx. She's one of my writing heroes. She has the rare ability to be able to write about the intimate and small, in her wonderful short stories and shorter novels, and then to write something with enormous, sweeping ambition. In Barkskins, she follows two colonial dynasties across continents and centuries, never losing sight of her characters, never losing track of their stories. Through this, she reveals the appalling ecological destruction of North America's magnificent and irreplaceable primordial forests and the parallel degradation of the continent's Native Peoples. 

No Woman's World sums up what the female journalists and photographers who reported on the Second World War were told time and again.

Iris Carpenter was one of this courageous band of women who did it anyway. She covered the latter stages of the war in Europe, arriving four days after the D-Day landings, travelling across France with the advancing American Forces and ending up in Berlin. William Boyd's Amory Clay could have been one of this intrepid bunch. Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay follows the life of the eponymous fictional photographer through the 20th Century in a panoramic sweep reminiscent of Boyd's 'Any Human Heart'. Amory begins her career as a society photographer in the '20s but she is soon exploring Weimar Berlin, Jazz Age America and Blackshirts on the streets of London. She goes on to record the Second World War and Vietnam. Amory is British but it is possible to see fascinating traces of Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn, Iris Carpenter, Margaret Bourke-White and others in her fictional life. The text is punctuated by actual photographs - a nice touch!

I've always been a fan of the Gothic and two novels this year, The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley and The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, have fed my appetite. Both were published to high and deserved acclaim. The Gothic is a difficult genre to do well but both these novels, seemingly very different, one modern, one historical, one set in the north, the other in the south, capture the sense of strangeness and 'the other' lurking just below ordinary life. They both inhabit a similar landscape: drab estuarine borderlands of salt marsh and mud flats with treacherous weather, dangerous tides and unpredictable currents moving under the surface and use it to great effect. They also have that haunting quality common to all good Gothic. They stay in the mind long after the last word is read.

Finally, I've been reading a lot of spy fiction over the last couple of years for reasons that I trust will one day be clear. I end with The Human Factor by Graham Greene, the spy novel of spy novels by the master the genre. Another tricky one to do well. Many try but few succeed. Forget James Bond, even George Smiley. This is what being a spy is really like.   

[Some of these reviews appeared in my History Girls Blog for December]

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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