Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: FOUND IN A BOOKSHOP by Stephanie Butland

 

"A diverse collection of characters ... running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world."

Yvonne Coppard is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and writer of fiction for children and adults. See more on her website.

When Covid lockdown is imposed, the owner of the Lost for Words bookshop in York faces up to the possibility that she and her staff may lose their livelihoods. Then an old customer asks for help in locating a book, which sparks the idea for remote selling with a twist. As well as ordering specific books, customers can call or email to ask staff to browse and select books for them. Connections are made between a community of people from different walks of life who take comfort and inspiration from books. This is the basic conceit that allows Butland to introduce a diverse collection of characters, weaving their back stories together and running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each character faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world. There are some heartrending moments but the book is, at heart, a joyous story.

For many of us, those long years of pandemic became a dark tunnel of loss and grief, lit by occasional beacons of hope as ordinary people stepped up to do extraordinary things for strangers they would never meet. The characters in Found in a Bookshop draw the reader into many of the experiences we recognise, in our own lives or the lives of those around us. New relationships begin, old ones strengthen or crumble. There is violence, and loss, and misunderstanding. But there is also humour, heroism and, above all, good old-fashioned kindness.

This is the only book I have read where Lockdown is part of the story. I found any creative attempt to analyse or absorb the events going on around me impossible. Found in a Bookshop is a book I will keep, as a story-snapshot album and aide-memoire of extraordinary times I hope never to see again.

Found in a Bookshop is published by Headline.

BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"There's resilience in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Best known for fiction for children and young adults, with titles including the Costa Category winner Set in Stone, she has also published one novel for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, and is currently working on another. Her latest title, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us, is a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults.

Burntcoat is the name of an abandoned industrial building in an unnamed northern town which becomes the home of sculptor Edith Harkness; also, it's the technique she learns from a Japanese master, almost destroying a piece of wood by burning, then scraping off charcoal to reveal the beauty of the grain beneath.

This is the third novel I've read recently that looks at the breakdown of daily life, and how humans survive when the support systems they depend on are abruptly removed. In Jessie Greengrass's The High House, climate change has led to drastically rising sea levels. In The Stranding, by Kate Sawyer, a presumed nuclear disaster has wiped out the northern hemisphere and much of the south, leaving few survivors. The main scenario in Burntcoat is both familiar and not-familiar: there's a pandemic, there's lockdown, there are fears, masks and empty streets, but this is not the pandemic we're living through now. The quickly-spreading disease is plague-like in its symptoms effects, and it lies dormant but menacing for years afterwards in 'carriers' like Edith, which is where we begin the story.

Celebrated for her work, Edith, aged 59 in the later parts of the novel, has completed a monumental piece which is to be a memorial to those who died, and is making preparations for a lonely death.  We piece her life together: her childhood, her art studies, her meeting with lover Halit shortly before lockdown restrictions were imposed, and something of the years between then and now.

The narrative is unusual in the brevity of its sections and its abrupt shifts back and forth in time, and also because it uses first/second-person, addressing a 'you' we can't at first identify. It takes a while to sort out the various characters, merely names dropped in at first. Dialogue is rendered in italics, without speech marks.

Later the 'you' becomes Halit, a Turkish immigrant working as a chef, with whom Edith has an intensely physical relationship, moving into lockdown with him at Burntcoat shortly after they meet. Although there's this interlude of love, trust and intimacy, Edith's life seems to have been shaped for hardship and loss, so that the austerity of Burntcoat - converted into a vast working space below, living quarters above - is a fitting home. "When I was eight, my mother left and Naomi arrived," she misleadingly tells us; her mother suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage from which she made a slow partial recovery, bringing up Edith alone. At art school Edith sets herself apart from fellow students, and wins a scholarship to Japan where she aims to "escape the corset of fine art".

The joyous physicality of sex is set against the decaying of bodies as they succumb to disease; but there's resilience too in the pervading metaphor of the burnt wood whose beauty is enhanced by its near-destruction. "A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held."

Edith's character blends defiance and acceptance, her story told with measured calmness. I'm full of admiration for Sarah Hall's boldness and range, and her ability to move easily from close-range to detached observation and back again. Although Burntcoat is a relatively short novel it feels big and expansive. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't appear on awards shortlists this year. 

Burntcoat is published by Faber.

Sarah Hall's The Wolf Border is reviewed here by Cindy Jefferies.

Linda Newbery's This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us is published by Pavilion.

WAYS OF SPEECH by Ann Pilling, reviewed by Adèle Geras

 

"She’s very good at leaving spaces around her words for the emotions to rise and swirl..."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which is Dangerous Women, a historical novel published under the pseudonym Hope Adams. She lives in Cambridge. 

Ann Pilling is a very good friend of mine. I’m making the disclosure as I do each time I review a book by someone I know.

When I read something I love, I want to tell other people about it. When I don’t like a book, I stop reading it. I’m afraid that this makes all my reviews favourable.

For a long time, Ann Pilling wrote for children. Her novel Henry’s Leg won the Guardian children’s book prize in 1986 and was made into a TV series.

She’s written books for adults too, like Considering Helen, but for the last few years, she’s been concentrating her considerable intelligence and skill on poetry.

I should say something here about my own tastes in poetry. I often need persuading that a great deal of what I’m reading isn’t prose cut up into short lines. I like scansion and rhythm and musicality. I like rhyme when it’s well done. I like (as Coleridge said) “the best possible words in the best possible order.” I like both simplicity and decoration. I love poems that move me or raise goose flesh on my arms. I enjoy recognising something I’ve experienced or felt myself. As Alexander Pope put it: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”.

Ann Pilling has published three collections of poetry before Ways of Speech. It’s a good title for this book, because many of the poems are about communication: how impossible it sometimes is, how a mere glance can convey the absence or withdrawal of love and how the most devastating news can be conveyed in the most ordinary of words. Here is the last verse of a poem called Today’s Paper, written the day after the Grenfell Tower disaster:

Money keeps pouring in, nappies and blankets,

‘No more donations please, we have no storage,
it will all rot when it rains,’ but everyone prays
in their own way. I sit here on scorched grass
not writing about the fire.

Ann Pilling lives in North Yorkshire and its landscapes are celebrated in her work.

Wind had smoothed the drifts into long garments
carefully laid down and the horizon
was lined out with a scarf of thinnest blue.

She’s very good at leaving spaces around her words for the emotions to rise and swirl.

But you can’t practise for someone you love dying.
I’m glad I’m awake. My dreams last night
Were too filled with people crying.

She’s also terrific on domestic scenes, pets, gardens, and there’s a lovely sequence of poems about lockdown.

There’s a strong Christian sensibility in Ann Pilling’s work, alongside a sense of humour and an awareness of what’s going on in the world.

I’m going to end by quoting the whole of one poem, to give readers of Writers Review an idea of the shapeliness of these words, their music and their powerful emotional punch. Read it aloud. You’ll understand then what I mean about the unflashy but powerful impact of these verses.

After the Funeral

After the funeral we walked on the headland
In unfierce end of summer sun
where butterflies were,

where caterpillars tigered black and gold
threaded the grass, where bees
found the last sea pinks unerringly and fed.

Three heads in a line
a man, and his daughters, faces
twisted like roots against grief.

The sea was a ridged silver, the blue air
scored white with wings. Friend of our life,
if this is all there is then it is beautiful,

the earth is beautiful, if this is all there is.



Ways of Seeing is published by Shoestring Press

See more about Ann Pilling on her website.

See also: 

Driving South to Inverness by Phoebe Caldwell, reviewed by Ann Pilling

The Craft of Poetry - a Primer in Verse by Lucy Newlyn, reviewed by Jonty Driver

Guest review by Elen Caldecott: HIDDEN NATURE by Alys Fowler

"It is the story of someone yearning for adventure, yearning for the feeling of being alive and active, but doing so within five miles of their own home."

Elen Caldecott is a writer for young people. She also teaches creative writing in university and community settings. Her latest book, The Short Knife, is an historical drama set during the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain. It will be published in July 2020 by Andersen Press.

I had decided to write about Hidden Nature before Covid and our state of suspended animation which came with it. But, on re-reading it for this blog, I was struck by its relevance, especially as lockdown lifts and we take small steps towards imagining what normal life might be.

Is this memoir, Alys Fowler writes of her decision to paddle Birmingham’s canal-ways in an inflatable dinghy. She does this in small bursts, over evenings and weekends, catching the bus, or cycling to the next stage of the journey. It is the story of someone yearning for adventure, yearning for the feeling of being alive and active, but doing so within five miles of their own home. It is a memoir in which the plants and animals of the canals and towpaths are companions and friends. They offer reassurance and familiarity to Fowler at a time in her own life when she is coming to terms with her own ‘hidden nature’ as she questions, and finally acts upon, her own sexuality. She emerges from her own state of suspended animation and she does so by meticulous exploration of her own back yard.

I was initially drawn to the memoir as Birmingham is close to my heart. I was an undergraduate there an eternity ago. Local lore had it that Birmingham has more canals than Venice and, while I was a student, many of the canals were undergoing gentrification, acquiring bars and restaurants where there had formally been abandoned warehouses and small-scale industries.

Fowler, who many will know as a gardening writer for broadsheet newspapers, took me on a tour of those familiar paths, but also gave me an education. She is so knowledgeable about the plants and wildlife she sees, and she shares this knowledge in the way friends might share gossip. Buddleia, for example, gets its own few pages. It was, Fowler tells us, an ornamental introduction to the UK that broke free of its garden confines after the Second World War. The urban bomb-sites replicated the exposed limestone of its natural habitat, and the slipstreams of railway embankments encouraged its dispersal until it became ubiquitous. She passes so many of these common, weed-ish, plants as she paddles her dinghy – first ineptly, later with a bit more ept – and she has something wonderful to tell us about each one.

Meanwhile, in the background, her life is quietly imploding. We hear about her husband, his long-term illness and the vicissitudes of caring for him. We hear about the worry of work and moving to a new city. We hear about a growing friendship with someone who will come to be crucial. But none of these threads are the point of this book. Rather, the book shows rather than tells us how the natural world can help to make the Big Problems of Life become a little smaller, a little more manageable.

There is a degree of tension in her descriptions of the people she meets, as opposed to the non-human canal life. Many of the people fishing, barbecuing, smoking, lollygagging about in the liminal spaces of the city waterways, are drawn with a very broad brush. There are some assumptions made about their lives, which aren’t really justified by the brief conversations she reports having with them. But, when Fowler speaks about the joy, the peace and the wisdom to be had by looking for small adventures, close to home, this book is superb.

Hidden Nature is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Lockdown Sunday extra: Ann Turnbull chooses THE ANCHORESS by Robyn Cadwallader

"engrossing ... brought to life in an imaginatively convincing way."

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

This compelling novel tells the story of a young woman in medieval England who becomes the anchoress in a rural church. Her difficulties in settling to a life of prayer and contemplation have been brought to life in an imaginatively convincing way. The anchorhold is minutely described. Sarah measures it out: nine paces long by seven paces wide. There are two small windows into outer rooms, one for her servant to use, the other for visitors. She is also provided with a squint into the body of the church, which gives her a view into part of its interior - but the squint is angled so that she has no direct view and cannot be seen. A large crucifix dominates her cell, and a small window high up lets in a little light.The door is bolted. Under the stone floor are the bones of one of the two previous anchoresses. In this damp, cold place she prepares to spend the rest of her life.

Sarah is attended by a servant and a young girl who are there to make her life run smoothly and give her time for reading, prayer and contemplation. But she is an object of much interest to the women of the surrounding villages, who call in, one by one, to see her and talk to her. They don't come in need of spiritual help so much as information about her and to chat about the life of the village. One of the women says she thought she'd pop in just to be friendly, because "don't you long for a good natter sometimes, Sister?" The villagers are fascinated by the anchoress, and as they talk about their own lives the story expands to include the entire community.

Some of the chapters switch to the point of view of Father Ranaulf, a priest at the priory. Ranaulf has been appointed Sarah's confessor and visits her regularly, advising her on her reading and how to practise her calling. From Ranaulf's chapters we get a sense of the wider context of the anchoress's life and how it is overseen.

Two dark events haunt Sarah. One is the memory of how the lord of the manor had pursued and tried to force her, and how he remains a danger to young women. The other is the death in childbirth of her beloved sister, Emma. Sex and childbirth and the danger and grief they present for women are at the heart of this story. There have been two previous anchoresses, one of whom is buried beneath the floor of the cell and causes Sarah fear in her darker moments. The story of the other one is gradually revealed. Sarah struggles to subdue hunger and cold and to keep up with her spiritual reading. At first she is too hard on herself and is embroiled in outside events, but in the end a way forward becomes clear.

This is an engrossing book, which brings to imagined life the experience of becoming an anchoress. The style is not at all archaic, even though Sarah's lifestyle seems so alien now. And I found the ending very satisfying.

The Anchoress is published by Faber.

Lockdown Sunday extra: REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD - reading Anne Tyler in Lockdown, by Paul Magrs

"Four novels in five years from her. That's amazing, and I'm so grateful for that quiet, calm, sane voice still being here."

Paul Magrs brought out his first novel in 1995. Last year he published his book on writing, The Novel Inside You. This year Snow Books are republishing his Brenda and Effie Mystery series of novels. He lives and writes in Manchester with Jeremy and Bernard Socks.

Easter Weekend, 2020

Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life in lockdown. Many readers and writers I know secretly hanker to live like this. It must be why I’ve always been drawn to the novels of Anne Tyler, these past thirty years, since I discovered her. Tyler heroes tend to hanker for locked down lives, and they spend their days quietly aghast at the way everyone else goes flitting and changing about.

Up much of the night worrying and lying awake, fretting about Bernard Socks not being indoors, even though I know he's all right really. These are warm, moony nights for cats to go crazy in. At three I put on my slippers and take my keys to have a look at the bottom of the garden and of course, there he is, sleeping in the Beach House chair. I carry him indoors and he indulges me, running straight back out once I’m in bed.

This morning is beautiful. The sun so strong and the cherry blossom like great cumbersome sleeves on the branches outside my study window. The petals are starting to fly off already. There's just a few days of this.

Jeremy gets up saying, ‘It's like waking up each day and thinking that you've gone deaf. There's no city noise at all.’

A thousand people dead each and every day. Our rates are worse than anywhere in Europe. After us looking at Italy and Spain in horror for those weeks, it turns out those were the precise weeks our government should have been taking action, when they were simply telling us to wash our hands and to carry on as normal.

My treat to myself is the new Anne Tyler, which arrived the other day. It was on order for months. I take the parcel and open it and immediately wash my hands. Does cardboard carry the virus? Was the postman wearing gloves?

I've read her for thirty years and now she's writing characters slightly younger than me: characters who are already middle-aged, faded and disappointed. Characters who've missed out somehow. Taciturn, diffident characters who we meet on the very day that they try to catch hold of their lives again.

I always love her characters. They’re kind and they've usually lost out and, if it's through fault of their own, it's not a bad fault. Not usually. It's to do with a one-time hesitation, a fatal stepping back in order to let other, more pushy people dart forward. Her characters let others get on with being self-centred and ruthless and unkind.

Straight away I'm thinking of people who have leapfrogged their way onto and then over me in the past. It’s the same in Micah’s backstory here, when we learn a little from his college years. He stood by and let himself be robbed. There was a rich boy who simply took the patent for a software programme away from him. You’ve had comparable situations in the past, when you let people get away with stuff. And, like Micah, all you think you can do in these situations is pity the thief. Yes, I guess I might have been daft, letting them get away with it, but really… don't they have any ideas of their own? No talents? How desperate must they be to steal ideas, or to use up and exploit people and then move on past them?

I've been unlucky and foolish in the past. Hapless as an Anne Tyler character. I'm thinking of people I thought were friends and, looking back, realizing that there was always something smarmy about them. I look back at particular ones and think, Yes, the way they grinned was just like the Blue Meanie in the Yellow Submarine cartoon and that should have been a danger sign.

At the moment I'm feeling sadder and more demoralised about my own work than I even realised. I took the week off to read and do very little work. I learned a bit more about painting with gouache and I gloried in 1970s Jackie Collins and that really was about it for me, this week. But I was also reading Anne Tyler and she put me into a kind of reflective, mopey mood. I love to read her but she makes me feel terrible, too, when I realise, like many of her characters, that I might have done my life wrong. I start to suspect I ought to have had harder edges, maybe… or fewer mixed feelings.

A tough day, feeling claustrophobic indoors. The only place I can sit is my study and that is wholly infused with the idea and atmosphere of work. I'd love to be able to spend the day in the garden. I think how lovely it used to be in the Beach House. I go out to take a look and the garden is so neglected. The Beach House is damaged and crammed with furniture we don't want and can't fit indoors. It's impossible to sit out here.

Jeremy started work in the garden, putting it all back together at the end of February. And I thought: maybe this year he'll sort it again. Then he found all those bones under the fallen tree at the far end and we had to get the police and CSI round, and that was a whole drama for a day. A ridiculous drama – soon resolved. (‘My money is on the remains of a badger,’ said the woman from CID.) The next day we visited my family in Trimdon and it was on the drive back we listened to the news and realised how close the pandemic was coming. We suddenly understood we were all going to be locked in for months, likely as not. So here we are.

Jeremy sits for two hours each day, transcribing the government broadcasts, decoding and fact-checking and commenting on them. Then he posts them online. The local groups are full of people he argues about politics with and they barely acknowledge the work he puts into this and other community initiatives.

I can hear the reasonable, doom-laden voice of the minister and the health experts playing through his laptop in the garden under my window. I want to tear out my hair. I did actually cut my own hair this morning. We’ll all be doing it before long.

I've been sleeping so badly. Lying awake worrying about Jeremy and our parents and Socks and everyone. Lying awake, too hot and thinking: a thousand dead every day. In hospitals I read that they have to turn everyone over and over again. It's best when they lie you face down: best for the lungs and the fluid on them. This image of passivity is horrifying in a way, so that everyone looks like giant babies, being turned over, helplessly.

Finishing the new Anne Tyler this morning, Easter Sunday. Jeremy and Socks have just got up and gone back into the garden. Reading and thinking, that's four novels in five years from her. That's amazing, and I'm so grateful for that quiet, calm, sane voice still being here. Telling us that it's okay to be wrong, imperfect, messy, timewasting… and it's never too late to go back and to make a change. Maybe.

And the theme of quietness! I just read a review of the new one on Amazon where someone says that when they give friends Tyler's books they complain about nothing happening! I think you might as well say that about your own life. (Well, perhaps some people do.) There's absolutely everything happening in her novels, I think. It's all there.

Oh, remember, when you wrote your little play about going to see your granda at the end of his life and you'd been chatting with a very famous producer friend and he said send it to so-and-so at such-and-such productions, his great supporter, all these years. Well, you had the assistant put onto you, of course, and you explained (modestly, stupidly) that perhaps the script was a bit quiet and a bit small scale for them. Then, of course, the assistant gave it a day or so before writing back, and telling you she found it a bit quiet and a bit small scale for them.

Oh well, it doesn't matter. Do you remember your first agent and how she used to say that you had to find something ‘high concept’ to hang all that ‘beautiful writing’ on, or else no one will care, because nothing really happens?

They only notice Anne Tyler now because they've been told to. All these years, and she's finally caught on. Thirty years ago I was lying in the park in Lancaster after my second year at University. That summer I read fifty novels in an empty house and wrote one of my own. I was living in lockdown back then, without even knowing it. All I did was read and write and venture out once a day to the park. Just the same as now.

And just like in an Anne Tyler novel, those thirty years went by and, though all the changes seemed very dramatic at the time, I’m doing all the same stuff as ever. I’m happy to, with the world around me in such constant disarray.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is published by Chatto and Windus