Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE SCENT OF DRIED ROSES by Tim Lott

 "I have, so to speak, just been turned inside out by a book."

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.

I have, so to speak, just been turned inside out by a book. We all know the injunctions: the Delphic Oracle – know thyself, echoed by Polonius; Socrates – the unexamined life is not worth living – Sophocles – what is neglected runs away from us. However paled into cliché the familiar axiom may become, its truth still holds. Tim Lott’s The Scent of Dried Roses – an intriguing title whose disclosure I leave to him – offers a salutary lesson in the essential value of self-scrutiny. His writing is merciless in its pursuit of detail and causation. He lets nothing slip. Not only does he bring to light with merciless resolve the various conflicting influences, bodily and mental, that test us, the vicissitudes which unsettle and undermine us. He also, as if inadvertently, uncovers how the patterns and habits of life in this country altered so radically after the Second World War. It’s an important element in understanding who we are, where we are now. Post-war austerity, the emergence of a different class, the rise of an entirely new human species, hitherto unclassified and uncatalogued, the teenager, with all the accretions of teenage culture and shifted values, disturbing the accepted continuum, life as she has always been lived. No longer. The resultant rage in the enquiry: ‘What is going on? What has happened to us?’ Empire, colonies, British hegemony, all gone or given away, the very fabric of life in this throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle shredded. A queen, even? Queenies still did the knees-up in Bethnal Green but Southall, where Lott grew up, saw a new influx, from abroad, a place we’d rarely had to go because we were already here. No longer. Changes altered the scenery, just as the knowns of childhood distintegrate in adulthood.

With the shifts in life and its acquisitions – all, to those of us growing up through the grey into technicolour, as medical science confronted a new phenomenon, depression – everything changed. How? We’d always had nutters and loony bins but now? Unhappy and a bit worse? Here’s a pill.

Well, Lott’s story is more complex than that, of course but it’s a story that need to be told and Lott tells it marvellously well, with one proviso: in a striking image he exposes the perils of belief, often desperate, in fixity. The painting which seems so ordered, locked in a frame, a moment fastened for all time, the permanence of our viewing, is never more than a construct, a seemingly motionless truth pinned down like a dead butterfly in the flux of reality.

Lott explores that flux, the watching eye unblinking, the listening ear pricked and the colour of the detail he registers is staggering in its range. I admit that the immediate resonances prejudice me a little – the fact (eg) that we both learnt Marian Richardson handwriting at primary school, a dullness soon ditched. Ditched, the very word is like a bell … you know the rest. We look and often do not see, listen but don’t hear, forgetting that both might lead to a sort of conclusion. It may be a paradox that one conclusion is the need to discard the quest for certainty, fixity, the definite, like an anchor. A useful, I’d say essential, paradox. And Lott calls it ‘the awesome responsibility that accepting uncertainty and insignificance entails’. [p 267]

Above all, this troublesome truth is what emerges most forcefully and altogether welcome, from this very often painful, always exhilarating, if difficult, memoir which, presented as personal, reaches out to a wider humanity in a way that only unflinchingly honest introspection can. Honesty can be overused in critique, a slick judgement of writing about self when that writing purports to be record, the untailored result of what is there, palpably there: us, our very self. Does that make fiction dishonest, then? Of course not. In books is found knowledge, even if, as the preacher warns, knowledge leads to sorrow. The vale of tears? Hmm. I once undertook a job of interpreting for a French street theatre group, because the organiser told me that, at the end of the show, ‘grown men cry’. And so they should.

You know what purgative means. Lott has, in this restlessly managed careful exposé, made forensic pathology of the heart and mind a kindly operation. Forensic is the adjective for forum where, in ancient Rome the law courts were sited. I use forensic because in writing of the hurts and desires, the tribulation of heart and soul, a certain legalistic dispassion does not go amiss. Reporting on the fevered heat takes a cool head. There is that here.

The Scent of Dried Roses is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Guest review by Ann Turnbull: THE STORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES IN 100 PLACES by Neil Oliver

'The author declares, "This is my love letter to the British Isles." It's this emotional response that makes the book such an engaging read.' 

Ann Turnbull has been writing stories for young people of all ages since 1974. Her most recent book is In That Time of Secrets, a young adult novel about the persecution of Catholics in 1605, set in the Black Country. Find out more at www.annturnbull.com

I've long been a fan of Neil Oliver's archaeology programmes on TV, but had not read any of his books until I was given this one for Christmas. 

It's a large, heavy hardback of over four hundred pages. I read it slowly, a chapter a day, looking up map references and photographs, and feeling frankly astonished that there were so many places in Britain that I'd never visited, and some I'd never even heard of. This is not a travel guide, although it will inspire readers to visit many of these places. It is very much Neil Oliver's personal response to the wonders of the British Isles.

He describes how all the islands were once part of a great land mass that later separated from continental Europe. The book is arranged chronologically, and the first chapter takes us to Happisburgh in Norfolk where, in 2013, archaeologists found the footprints of five people - two adults and three children - who were walking there in the mud some 950,000 years ago. I remember seeing a reconstruction of these footprints in an exhibition at the British Museum - the adults moving forward, the children criss-crossing as they scampered about. When the people (who were not Homo Sapiens) walked here, these islands were still joined to continental Europe. Aeons had passed before the events in the next story, the cave burial of the so-called 'Red Lady' of Paviland - a young man who died about 34,000 years ago.

The story progresses through time, between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Here are rock carvings, axes, henges, ships, castles, bridges, churches, battlefields, an ancient tree, and even a chapter about an unknown place: the site of the Battle of Brunanburh - a critical battle, which ensured the permanent divide between Scotland and England. The people of Britain are here too: Captain Cook, Mary Anning, King Alfred, the Brontes, Robert Burns, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Penlee lifeboatmen, and many more.

The book ends at Dungeness on the Kent coast - a final chapter drawing the threads together, in which the author declares, "This is my love letter to the British Isles." It's this emotional response that makes the book such an engaging read.

The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places is published by Bantam Press.

Guest review by Marianne Kavanagh: AUTUMN by Ali Smith

"Funny, sad, affectionate and warm-hearted – a genuine joy to read."

Marianne Kavanagh is an author and journalist. Her third novel Should You Ask Me, and her latest novel Disturbance, are both published by Hodder & Stoughton. More details on her website.

I’ve been aware of Ali Smith for a while. I know she was shortlisted for the Booker in 2014 with How to Be Both, a book in two halves (and printed with either half first, because the order doesn’t matter). But I hadn’t read this, or any of her short stories, or any of her other well-known novels like The Accidental. I started reading Autumn, the first of her quartet of novels about the seasons, quite by chance. And now I’m hooked, I’m hooked, and have no choice but to go back and read everything she’s ever written.

As readers, we’re all very different. We read some books and think, ‘Meh.’ We read others and think, ‘Competent, yes, but where’s its heart?’ And then we get talking to our friends and discover they loved the ones we hated and wept over the ones that left us cold. So Autumn may not be the novel for you. But it’s very rare for me to find a book that overwhelms me quite like this, that leaves me spellbound and happy, the world changed, the future full of hope. Ali Smith passes on her love of language – imagery, wordplay, puns. Her sentences – Penelope Fitzgerald does this for me, too – make you look up and think, re-read, look up again. But there’s a plot pushing the novel forwards, too, and delicious passages that make you laugh (everything to do with rules and regulations), and characters you care about, and a whole back story about the Profumo affair, and women and Pop Art in the 1960s. It’s all set against a background of barbed wire and division, and the kind of rigid, angry place Britain has recently become, which somehow makes the novel both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Smith published Autumn in 2016 just after the referendum, and this is the backdrop to everything. As Elisabeth Demand (one of the central characters) says: ‘It’s like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue.’

Dialogue, though, is central to the book. Daniel meets Elisabeth when she’s eight years old (there are 70 years between them). Right from the beginning, he teaches her to question her assumptions with a liveliness and logic that shape her thinking for the rest of her life. I love their discussions, particularly the one about the morality of lying (‘The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless’) and the whole sequence about making up stories, which has Daniel – to Elisabeth’s fury – suggesting that Goldilocks might have been a vandal who spray painted her name on the walls of the bears’ house (‘That’s not in the story,’ Elisabeth says. Daniel replies, ‘Who says?’). Maybe it’s because I’m reading Autumn in September 2019 with Trump being impeached and Johnson found guilty by the Supreme Court, but when Daniel says, ‘Whoever makes up the story makes up the world’ I find myself wincing.

I don’t know a lot about visual art. I always feel lost in galleries. But Smith makes Daniel’s passion for painting, which he passes on to Elisabeth, so vivid that I feel I can understand the power of colour and collage. There’s a passage describing a painter at work (‘it was really terribly alone’) that makes me think about the madness of writing novels – the kind of horrible, exhausting struggle that George Orwell described.

Autumn is, I think, a novel of ideas. But it’s securely rooted in everyday British life – daytime TV, family relationships, austerity, overblown officialdom. It’s funny, sad, affectionate and warm-hearted – a genuine joy to read.

Also, Elisabeth Demand would be proud of me. I took Autumn on a week’s holiday to a blustery Greek island. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. One afternoon, we went down to the hotel pool which, because of the weather, was completely deserted. I asked the manager if she could turn off the loud dance music echoing round the concrete slabs and palm trees so that I could read my book in peace. ‘But it’s a public area,’ she said. I looked round at the empty sun loungers, the closed umbrellas, the wind rippling the surface of the water. I looked back at the manager. ‘But I am the public,’ I said.

This is what happens with books like this. They teach revolution.

Autumn is published by Penguin. 

Guest review by Linda Sargent: THE BURIED GIANT by Kazuo Ishiguro

Linda Sargent is a writer who works as a publisher’s reader (David Fickling Books since 2002). She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website.

Recently we saw the theatrical version of La Strada, based on the film by Fellini who is quoted as saying that, “the best cinema (has) the language of dreams, everything you see there has meaning, but the meaning is not always literal or easily understandable”. This surely applies to all great art, and certainly to Ishiguro’s powerful and hypnotic book, The Buried Giant. Anyone, picking it up and imagining they’re embarking on another foray into a Game of Thrones’ world is likely to be disappointed, and yet the fundamentals are there, but mystical rather than literal. Similarly, there are the echoes of one of my favourite childhood authors, Rosemary Sutcliff, in her vivid recreations of Roman and post-Roman Britain. This, though, is a Britain of bogs and forests where ogres lurk, stark mountains and rivers sprinkled with sprites and pixies, a Britain of meandering and uncharted paths and all shrouded in a memory-hazing mist, emanating from the dragon, Querig, as she slumbers under an enchantment cast by the now dead, Merlin. A Britain that, for me, evoked reminders of more recent wars too, such as those in the Balkans.

In this story Arthur is dead and his one remaining knight, an ancient (almost Pythonesque) Sir Gawain, wanders the land on his faithful horse, Horace, feeling it must be he who is tasked with Querig’s end. It is on Horace that the book’s two main characters, the elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice finally reach their destination of the river and its waiting boatman.

 

The story begins with Beatrice and Axl preparing to leave their communal, but not especially friendly, Hobbit-like burrow; they set off to find their son, absent for some years, planning to travel on foot to his village, despite the hazards of the wild landscape. Essentially, it is an archetypal journey story, fraught with both helpers and hinderers. They and everyone they meet, carry an unsettlingly vague notion of the past that both inhibits and protects them in their present life. Beatrice is nursing a pain that she tries to hide from Axl, but it is clear to him, and to the reader, that it is no trivial matter and at one point, en route, the two elderly Britons seek out a monastery where a monk may be able to offer help to Beatrice, but where other dangers await. Meanwhile, they have met with Sir Gawain, Wistan, a Saxon warrior on his own quest and also his Saxon boy companion, Edwin, rescued from ostracism in his village because of a wound (apparently caused by an ogre) and also on a personal mission, to find his mother. The four of them come together, encounter dangers and frights, are separated and re-united; however, the binding thread running through the story is the abiding power of love between Axl and Beatrice. Throughout, Axl tenderly refers to his wife as “princess” as he encourages and nurtures her during their exhausting and challenging journey. And it is this love, with all of its past imperfections, that mirrors the buried anger and resentment of the people in this mist-covered land. What is raised here is the question of the seductive enticement of repressing memories of past violence (of burying the giant) and how, once uncovered, the dangers implicit in lifting the lid on possible revenge and retribution. Near the end of the book as memories begin to clear, there’s a moving plea from the elderly Axl to the young, newly fired-up, Edwin: “Master Edwin! We beg this of you. In the days to come, remember us. Remember us and this friendship when you were still a boy”.

With so much upheaval, displacement and distrust caused by ongoing conflict in our current world this is indeed a story for our times: a story for all time and one that demands many readings. I loved it.