SUMMER ROUND-UP by Adèle, Celia and Linda

Adèle Geras, Celia Rees and Linda Newbery are the hosts of Writers Review. Here we each share two books that have impressed us recently and one or more titles we're planning to read next. 

Linda's choices:

In The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy Shrubsole has almost single-handedly raised public awareness of the temperate rainforests we have in Britain – often in damp microclimates where a deep gorge creates the right conditions of moistness and protection from wind. He’s an engaging writer and the book ranges widely, recounting expeditions with his partner or friends to remote places in Wales or the West Country, describing in detail the species found in these ecosystems, and exploring references in poetry and folklore. We justifiably criticise other countries for destroying their rainforests, but Shrubsole points out that we're largely unaware of how much of our own has been lost. His campaign has resulted in government acknowledgment of these precious habitats and a commitment to protecting and restoring them. 

I went straight on to Guy Shrubsole's more recent The Lie of the Land (clever title) - an angrier but equally informative book that looks at who owns land in Britain (the wealthiest 1% owns 50% of it), what they do with it, and how they deny access to the rest of us. You won't be surprised to hear that Guy Shrubsole was a leading figure in the successful challenge to Dartmoor landowner Alexander Darwall when he attempted to ban wild camping. Shrubsole is outraged about the (mis)management of huge areas of moorland for grouse shooting, which includes practices such as burning moorland and the illegal slaughter of birds of prey, foxes and anything classed as 'vermin' which might reduce grouse numbers - all this subsidised by taxpayers. The mass release of pheasants each year, again in the interests of the shooting minority, receives equal condemnation - in what other circumstance would the widespread release of a non-native species into the countryside be considered acceptable, at a time when bird flu is rife and we're all aware of the risks of another pandemic? As recent parliamentary debates have shown, it's down to the lobbying power of those with vested interests in shooting estates. More optimistically, Shrubsole looks at instances of communal purchase of land for the benefit of all and for nature restoration. 

As for the books I'm looking forward to, I'm treating myself to a re-reading of Judith Allnatt's touching and beautifully-written The Poet's Wife, which tells the story of poet John Clare's descent into madness from the point of view of Patty, his wife. I first read this ten or more years ago and am now delighted to see it reissued in our own imprint, Writers Review Publishing. With wonderful evocations of the Northamptonshire countryside and rural life, it begins with Patty's deep concern when her husband John, who's walked eighty miles from a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, appears to believe that he's still married to his first love, Mary. How will Patty cope, as his behaviour becomes increasingly delusional?

I'm also tempted by Anna Hope's Albion, having been captivated by the abridged version as Radio 4's Book of the Week. With a funeral, a will, a privileged family, a big country house, complex relationships and a big surprise sprung on the gathered relatives, it has elements in common with my own novel, which Celia's kindly chosen below. Here, no spoilers, but the revelation brought by outsider Clara shocks the family out of its smugness and leaves them with a difficult dilemma to face.  

And I can't omit to mention that I'm currently in thrall to Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. It's been sitting on my reading pile for some time but now that I've started, I can't wait to get back to it - a marvellous and moving novel whether or not you're familiar with David Copperfield, which it cleverly shadows.

Celia's choices:

I have been reading…

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. The house of the title is in Elk Park, a prosperous suburb of Pennsylvania. It is A large mansion, built in the 1920s, with a glass frontage ‘as big as storefront windows’. The use of glass in the design makes it possible to see right through it, which cannot be said of the characters who come to live there. The house is more than a setting – it is a powerful and enduring presence in the novel with a deep and lasting effect on those who inhabit it. The characters change. The house does not. It is named, not for the design, but for the Van Hoebeeks, the originally owners. It is acquired in 1946 by Cyril Conroy, a real estate developer, who buys it and moves in with his wife and two children, Danny and Maeve. He leaves the contents intact including a library of Dutch books no-one can read and large portraits of the Van Hoebeeks. Nothing about the house changes. It is as if his family have no impact on it. The house affects them, however. The mother loathes it and leaves house, husband and children. Cyril quickly installs a young widow, Andrea, with two children of her own. Danny and Maeve are pushed out, underlining the book’s fairy tale quality. Told over five generations, Pratchett continually plays on fairy tale elements and archetypes: rags to riches, absent fathers, neglectful mothers, abandoned children, wicked stepmothers, faithful retainers but it is done with such skill and delivered with such laconic, casual insouciance by narrator, Danny, that it all seems completely natural.

Our own Linda Newbery also has an iconic house, Wildings, and more importantly an iconic and beautiful garden in her novel The One True Thing. The garden is created by Bridget, a renowned gardener, who is married to Anthony who owns the house. There are two narrators, Bridget herself and her daughter, Jane. With echoes of E.M Forster’s Howard’s End and Dickens' Bleak House, the novel revolves around a death and a quirky will which leaves the future of house (and garden) in doubt. Her mother having pre-deceased her father, daughter Jane is doubly bereaved. The garden and the idyllic rural surroundings are so beautifully described that the reader begins to feel the imminent loss as acutely as Jane does. She is forced to confront not only the threat to her home, but a complex set of revelations that strike at her core beliefs about her family. The skilfully handled dual narrative gradually reveals the lies, evasions and emotional complexities of the past, leading to a resolution where past and present can be reconciled.

Having recently read The Dalai Lama’s Cat by David Michie, I'm now looking forward to The Claw of Attraction by the same author. Plucked as a tiny, dying kitten from the streets of New Delhi by His Holiness The Dalai Llama (who just happens to be passing - not coincidence {obv.} but karma), the eponymous heroine re-counts her life as HHC: His Holiness's Cat. Her day to day encounters and challenges, from the temptations offered by over generous food providers (she is, after all, the Dalai Lama’s Cat) to the sudden arrival of a dog, an abandoned Lhasa Apso, serve as lessons in timeless Buddhist wisdom, compassion and the way to true contentment. As a cat owner and therefore lover, I found The Dalai Lama’s Cat utterly charming and deceptively wise. It would work for dog lovers, too. Don’t like animals? What’s wrong with you?

Adèle's choices:

This year, I have discovered a writer I'd never heard of before and I really want to introduce her to readers of this blog. Her name is Laurie Colwin and she died in 1992 at the age of 46. She was mainly known as a short story writer and especially a food writer during her lifetime but her novels are wonderful and deserve the attention of anyone who is interested in the texture of life and relationships, food and houses, animals and children .... I'm highlighting her last novel, which was published posthumously in 1993. It's called A Big Storm Knocked it Over and it's about a woman preparing for her own wedding, while also working at a publishing house where she is the editor in charge of illustrations in adult books. Her run ins with recaltricant writers who will not listen to her excellent advice, her beautifully depicted dealings with her fiancé and her friends and the toings and froings with regard to the wedding...everything takes you straight in, and you're part of the proceedings which are described with grace, humour and attention to detail. She's comparable to Anne Tyler in her ability to absorb you into what's happening on the page, seemingly without any effort. Her writing, sentence to sentence, is elegant and considered and engaging. Here is a tiny example, picked at random: "The enormous manuscript of In the Polar Regions by Hugh Oswald-Murphy, had been placed on Jane Louise's desk three times and taken back three times by Erna Hendershot. Then, just as Jane Louise felt she had a grip on what this thing should look like, Erna would appear in a tearing rush and inform her that the author had added to it or taken something away, or that most likely it had been pushed off the spring list or that he had decided that some Eskimo artist would do little line cuts to be scattered throughout, and furthermore that his photographs -still to come- would have to be keyed in.

I really loved this book and have also read Home Cooking and More Home Cooking which are superb and also contain recipes in plenty. She's a writer to take to your heart.

If you’ve not come across the four police procedural novels of Simon Mason (The Wilkins and Wilkins books) then I urge you to find them and read them in the right order. I don’t think nearly enough readers have discovered them and they’re very good indeed.

Even fewer readers will know about the Finder novellas. These are short, spare books in which a man, who calls himself The Finder, turns up in a place (in the case of The Woman Who Laughed it’s a rather drab suburb of Sheffield) and sets about finding someone who has disappeared. In Sheffield, a young sex worker who was murdered some time ago is seen on a bus…. Then she disappears again…. The Finder begins to follow threads which lead into many strange places.

He always takes a novel with him when he travels. In this book, it’s Persuasion by Jane Austen. His reflections on the novel add to this reader’s pleasure.

My advice? Read Simon Mason!

Two books I’m looking forward to:

I’ve just downloaded Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. His name seems to suit the subject very well. It’s about fungi which have complicated networks of communication and which behave in all kinds of very fascinating ways. I love books that open up a whole new world and I am looking forward greatly to learning much more about mushrooms than the fact that they’re delicious when they’re not poisonous.

And I’m about to start on a new novel by Stephen King. It’s called Never Flinch and is a follow up to a terrific and very gory thriller starring the private detective Holly Gibney. That’s called Holly. This story involves a murderer who embarks on a plan to kill 12 innocent people, to avenge the death of a prisoner who has just been stabbed to death in gaol…. but who was falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.

One thing is sure: never a dull moment in a King book, and this one looks terrific!

Happy reading and have a great summer….

A VOICE IN THE NIGHT by Simon Mason, reviewed by Adèle Geras

" ... a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

For anyone who does not know him, Simon Mason is, as well as a wonderful writer, a friend of this blog. He was our special guest recently and we are fans of his work.

On one level, Mason might be said to write quite a traditional sort of crime story. His Wilkins and Wilkins series (I'm calling them that. I haven't seen them described so in newspapers) contains two cops, contrasted in many ways, solving crimes in a particular area. There are the accustomed wisecracks, of course, but in addition this pair share both a surname and initials. They started work on the same day but the differences between them couldn't be greater. Of course, these lead to much comedy along the way but also create a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching. On the cover of A Voice in the Night, Mick Herron calls them "crime fiction's most entertaining double act in decades" and he's right.

Ray Wilkins is very handsome, Black, sharply dressed and a graduate. Ryan Wilkins is skinny as a rake, wears dreadful clothes (a lime green puffa jacket features in this book) and comes from a decaying estate. His father was abusive. His late wife died of a drug overdose. He's no beauty but has a fine line in repartee and huge charm, at least for me. He's what would definitely be called "poor white trash" in the USA. But he has a superb instinct for people, and can deal with them in a way most other policemen cannot. He lives with his sister, Jade, who works at the Co-op. Most importantly of all, he's father to little Ryan who is easily the most wonderful toddler I can remember in recent fiction. The relationship between father and son is what lifts these novels up out of the general run of crime books. It's movingly described and often provides another dimension to whatever is going on in the police action.

This novel is the fourth in the series. I am a believer in starting series with Book 1, but it's not strictly necessary. What you miss starting with Book 4 is the history: what's gone on between Ryan and his son, between Ryan and Ray, between Ryan and his police chiefs, between the police and a nice assortment of low-life living and committing crime around Oxford. My advice: you ought to buy all four books at once ...

This one is terrific. The body of a linguistics professor is found still dressed in his pyjamas, dripping wet and lying on the lawn in front of a hotel. There's also been a security guard stabbed to death during an armed robbery. On top of all that, there's a new female officer in charge of things at the station and charged with clearing up these matters. DCS Wainwright is much more than she at first appears, and very interesting.

Meanwhile, back home, Jade and little Ryan are threatened by a gang whom Ryan has met before. Michael, the chief young yobbo, is superbly described. Even villains in Mason's book are portrayed in a three-dimensional way.

Just over half way through the book, something happens that was like a sledgehammer to the heart. I'm not saying another word. But be assured, in the end we reach a solution. Mason even manages to pull off that wonderful trick of a surprise as the last thing we read ... a rare event in fiction. I hope lots of people get to know Ray and Ryan before the inevitable TV adaptation, because (and I am not sure why I've left this till the end) one of the glories of these novels is the way they're written. Oxford and the countryside around it come subtly to life and every sentence is elegant and perfectly judged. Mason's prose is not show-offish or mannered but simply elegant and suited in every way to the story he's telling.

A Voice in the Night is published by riverrun.

Simon Mason's feature for our 8th birthday last July: on the crime fiction of Peter Temple.

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Simon Mason on THE BROKEN SHORE and TRUTH by Peter Temple

"As rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror ..."

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate as his own children, and now he is back writing books for adults again.

His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.

Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.

The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.

Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.

Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?

Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.

It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.

The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.

See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman

Lockdown Sunday extra: DAEMON VOICES by Philip Pullman, edited by Simon Mason

"In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others."

This is the last of our Lockdown Sunday extras. From now on we will return to our weekly Monday posts.

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

"I find Post-It notes indispensable. They really came into their own when I was preparing to write about this book. The pages of my paperback copy bristle with so many little yellow stickers that its thickness is almost doubled, and it wasn't a slender book to start with." Philip Pullman says this of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, and I could say exactly the same of Daemon Voices, except that this is a handsome hardback. In every chapter there are things I want to store away, remember and use to encourage myself and others.

Full of delights and insights, this is a compilation of various lectures, essays, introductions, conference speeches and articles written over thirty years and for various audiences including the Children's Book Circle, the Sea of Faith Conference, the Richard Hillary Lecture and the Finnconn Science-Fiction Convention. Collectively they cover a wide range of subjects to do with writing, storytelling and the imagination. If you've heard Philip Pullman speak, you will hear his voice, clearly, as you read.

I'd intended to dip in and out of this collection while reading something else alongside, but on finishing each piece I was eager for the next, and the other book had to wait.  Among my favourites are those in which Pullman comments on paintings and illustrations, in which he has a keen interest (his own drawings are used as chapter heads in the His Dark Materials  trilogy). I've never before studied  Walter Trier's line drawings for Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives as closely as when directed to them by Pullman, though they come instantly to mind when I think of the book; now I see their clarity of line and their compositional skill. How inextricably stories and illustrations are linked in books for both children and adults! It's impossible to think of Swallows and Amazons without Arthur Ransome's own drawings (which is why, perhaps, TV dramatisations often disappoint - the borderland of that magical combination of words and images is destroyed by realism). Who shares my nostalgia for the Rupert Bear stories and annuals, written and illustrated by Alfred Bestall? His name meant nothing to me as a child, but the world (or worlds) he created were fantastical in his own distinctive style. "Bestall was full of fancy," writes Pullman; "I'm sure that's the right word for the special quality of lightness, delicacy, charm that his landscapes, his stories, embody." This is in a chapter called Reading in the Borderland - Reading, Books and Pictures, in which Pullman looks at where we go when we read, and how personal and private it is: "We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we're engaged with. True, we can come back and talk about it, and if we talk well and truthfully and interestingly enough we might entice other readers into it, and they too will explore it - but they too will be alone there until they in turn come back and tell us what they found there ... "

Another great pleasure of these pieces is the close attention and respect Pullman gives to writers he admires. Awarded the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' for Northern Lights he said that the honour had been given to "the wrong PP", and that it should have gone to Philippa Pearce for Tom's Midnight Garden, which is the focus of a chapter called Narrative Tact and Other Classical Virtues. Here Pullman looks at the currently prevalent use of first-person present tense. (I have my own reservations about that, too. I've used both present tense and first person, but never together; when they're combined I find myself wondering why this character is earnestly telling me everything she does, thinks and sees, recording every bodily reaction, all as it happens and supposedly unmediated.) Pullman contrasts "what we often get now, the immediate, the up-close, the hectic of the incessant present tense, and what I might call the classical style of Pearce's writing, which has a great deal to do with how the narrator does her work." Particularly he examines the subtle ways in which the narrative handles time, in a novel which is of course all about shifts in time; and (with diversions to Emma and Vanity Fair) the flexibility of the free indirect style. "And this is where it gets really interesting, because if it's done well we hardly notice the moments when the point of view shifts from outside Tom to inside Tom, from Tom then to Tom now, from Tom him to Tom us. The movement is performed so swiftly and lightly that it seems the most natural thing in the world, even though really it's a complicated psychological manouevre." But then, who is the narrator? Philippa Pearce, surely? But no ... the narrator is the invention of the author just as surely as the characters are, "and every time I read a book where the author is so miraculously in charge of this ghostly being, ... so uncanny in its knowledge and so swift and sprite-like in its movement, I feel a delight in possiblity and mystery and make-believe."

Then there's the bit about his reaction to first reading Blake's poems: "I knew they were true in the way I knew that I was alive... " and the several times when he tells us he doesn't like fantasy, and a most intriguing question he poses towards the end, in a piece on The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ ... But I'll have to stop quoting; this is getting ridiculous. You'll just have to read the book for yourself, and see what you find there.

Daemon Voices is published by David Fickling Books.