Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE GO-BETWEEN by L P Hartley

 

"Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life ..."

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.

"I put a spell on you

Because you're mine ..." Nina Simone

"Once a go between never a go between." (The older Leo)

Towards the end of this outstanding novel, one of the principals, Marian, tells the narrator, Leo, returned to the village years after the book’s climactic end: ‘There are stuffy people, even in Norfolk’. I knew stuffy people in Norfolk. I arrived there immediately after the film of the book was shot but only now have I read it.

This novel tells a gripping story, a tense drama of sharply defined characters in another world, Hartley’s ‘foreign country’. Moreover, it’s not only the past that is a foreign country, so, too, is the present we enter as strangers. The language we use to explain the new experiences is tested, just as the shaping of the novel tests our sensibilities. The imagery is eloquent: Leo, the young boy invited by a school friend to the big house in the country, the wealthy, landed owners with their set ways and strict protocols of behaviour and dress, finds himself caught up in a bewildering game of intrigue, and stuffy manners, certain things that ‘are not done’ all strange to him. In soaring temperatures, the lad with a fixation about magic and making spells, through them hoping to manage circumstance otherwise beyond him to control, ironically is trussed up in a heavy Norfolk jacket. Add starched Eton collars – as stiff as the etiquette which governs his hosts, especially the horribly priggish Marcus, his school pal, and Hartley has cunningly outlined the central theme of Leo being used, as if he, too, were in a box, ready for wear, all analogous to the anxieties of the young boy which he never entirely shakes off.

At one point, Leo imagines himself proleptically, in conversation with his twelve year-old self: he’d been ‘flying too close to the sun’. Marian, whom he calls the Zodiac, a sort of immortal object, could he but put a name to his bewitched feelings, of his helpless schoolboy crush, uses the pretext of a visit to Norwich to meet her paramour, a secret concealed until later in the story, to go to a shop to buy Leo a suit of lighter clothes. First lie. The summer suit, in Lincoln green, evokes Robin Hood the outlaw, flaunter of repressive rules and regime.

Leo explores the deserted outhouses of the Hall, where in the tangle of weeds, the boy addicted to spells and curses, totems of his desire for otherness and escape, discovers deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna, whose juice is poisonous if drunk but squeezed as drops into the eyes, enlarges the pupils, hence the ‘beautiful lady’. A perfect symbolism. Even the contrast between the orderliness and formality of the house and the wild tangle of the outhouses – where the terrible climax of the novel explodes – is telling, the areas of life under constant surveillance and the neglected places where secrets flourish and are, eventually, catastrophically exposed. Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life, and, like a deadly leitmotif, the messages carried between Marian and Ted the local farmer – Beauty and the Beast…? – by their postman, Leo, the bewildered newcomer sucked into their conspiracy and ignorant about this mysterious practice of ‘spooning’ about which Ted, cleaning the shotgun – ominous portent – remains tight-lipped.

One of Marcus’s favourite words is cads - ‘only cads eat their porridge sitting down’. And into this strait-laced world comes the boy whose widowed mother cleaves to him almost as tightly as the Norfolk jacket and Hartley brilliantly shows us this new world through the child’s eyes; Leo wonders at the behaviour of the adults: ‘their worlds are private, even their games are mysterious’. Marian herself, affianced to the Viscount, is trapped, like a fieldmouse taking refuge in a stook of newly harvested wheat, caught between the heat of desire and the prickle of hidebound, emotionally shorn reserve. After the trauma of what he experienced at the Hall, Leo is, as Marian later tells the older man, ‘all dried up inside’. By contrast, the love that she and Ted Burgess shared was a ‘beautiful thing’, they were made for each other but social convention forbade that. The excruciating moral pressure arising from this denial lay heavily on Leo and crushed him forever, that and the sticky web of lies into which he’d blundered, forced to intrude upon an alien adult world of disappointment and misprision. All masterfully delineated by Hartley.

At the end, I cried.

The Go-Between is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Go-Between directed by Joseph Losey, 1971

The Go-Between directed by Pete Travis, 2015

More of Graeme's choices:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: ABSOLUTELY & FOREVER by Rose Tremain

 

"How to capture and lock away this feeling? She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh. Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since."

For Caroline Pitcher, writing is like living lots of lives. Mariana and the Merchild, written by Caroline and illustrated by Jackie Morris, is published by Otter-Barry books. Recently Graffeg have brought out new editions of Caroline's Lord of the Forest, illustrated by Jackie Morris and The Winter Dragon, illustrated by Sophy Williams. Now Caroline is dreaming further life stories from her favourite novel, Mine.

Fifteen-year-old Marianne falls for eighteen-year-old Simon with his dark flop of hair, with the kind of love that Simone de Beauvoir says `takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical.’ Certainly it dominates Marianne’s life `absolutely & forever.’

I have read many moving, lyrical and beautiful novels by Rose Tremain and loved them all, especially The Road Home, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, and Merivel (which has possibly the filthiest scene I’ve read in any novel.) She writes about different times, settings and characters, usually at a good length. This is where Absolutely & Forever is different. It is short. On holiday, how would I cope, without one of her beautifully written worlds waiting for me for more than one day?

Well, Absolutely & Forever is a mesmerising coming-of-age story that stayed in my thoughts for the remainder of the stay, and beyond. It is set among the upper-middle classes `when England was still known as England and not as the You Kay.’ Disgrace afflicts families who fear losing their apparent status. Marianne sounds isolated, with little connection with Mummy (Lavender) or Daddy. Daddy’s face quite puce and stupid-looking from the gin and Mummy complaining that the lumpy grass hurt her ankles. Her boarding school was no retreat. Each morning a thermometer, tasting of disgusting Dettol, was shoved into your mouth by one of the three matrons. The girls sniff yesterday’s knickers before putting them on. Her friend says that parents hate their children because they know that they’re the past and we’re the future.

Marianne’s self-esteem is low, yet her narrative voice is ironic and witty. I had much sympathy for her and enjoyed the spot-on timely settings, of the King’s Road, brimful of creatures in tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and lone guys like gazelles in velvet trews and snakeskin boots. Marianne never quite fits in, despite eating a lot of spaghetti Milanese, getting fat and acne-ridden, drinking red wine and sleeping with well-known photographer Julius Templeman, who humiliates her, saying, `I never told you before, Marianne, but you are actually a lousy fuck.’

Her focussed friend Pet, too blunt and Scottish for Marianne’s parents, is at the brand-new University of Essex in a high grey tower, taking a course which is a `Study of Everything.’ I enjoyed these scenes, especially as I studied at the new University of Warwick a while later. Does this count as historical fiction?

There are excellent characters, such as freckled orange-haired Hugo Forster-Pellisier, his parents Jocelyn and Felicity, as I remembered I had to call them, in their Station Wagon. Hugo is funny and kind and Marianne likes his comforting todger, but she still dreams of Simon. She sees the future as `a life of boredom and shame.’

We read vivid accounts of Paris, a department store in Newbury, a wedding, working as an agony aunt on a magazine, horses, and the beginnings of a writer’s life. No more from me now, except to say that secrets affect the story in a big way. Perhaps nowadays these secrets would be less kept, not hidden, especially between the generations.

Let’s hope so.

Marianne does come to realise, however, that she loves the English countryside with oak trees and hedgerows and narrow English lanes threading towards hills and tumps.

Absolutely & Forever is both amusing and piercing as Marianne tries to find herself in spite of everything, with little encouragement from those around her. "Daddy’s glittery eye blinked and his head jerked upward and he said, Nobody should put their hopes in stories, Mops." It’s not all gloom. When Marianne pauses in reading her story to her mother, Mummy was staring at me. `Go on,’ she said.

Some years before this novel, Rose Tremain published a memoir Rosie – Scenes from a vanished life. It is dedicated to `Nan’ (who showed Rose her how to love) and Rose’s beloved grandchildren. Rose writes of her mother, Jane had no schooling in love…This was the tragedy of her existence. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair.

When she is ten, Rose loses her father, her home and welcoming school to a cold boarding school in Hertfordshire. Like Marianne, she feels stifled and yet finds her way out. She longs to be destined to be something, and fortunately has a memorable moment, a summertime epiphany when she was thirteen or fourteen, a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience. It slips away, leaving desolation. How to capture and lock away this feeling?

She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh.

Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since.

Absolutely & Forever is published by Vintage.  

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 Jon Appleton: LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Philip Gabriel

 

"Originally published in Japan in 2017 where it won prizes and became a bestseller. Its prize-worthiness isn’t in question as you read..."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

A number of reviewers of this parish have connections to the children’s book world but we don’t generally review books for young readers here. Today I’m reviewing a novel about children.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror was originally published in Japan in 2017 where it won prizes and became a bestseller. Its prize-worthiness isn’t in question as you read but perhaps it’s only when you reach the poignant Publisher’s Note, written for the English-language translation, at the very end that its popularity is explained.

The story is told mostly from the perspective of Year 8 student Kokoro, whom we learn early is bullied so relentlessly at school that she stops going, even finding herself unable to begin again at the new school her sympathetic parents and former teacher have found her. She is confined to spending the hours of 9 to 5 each weekday alone trapped in her bedroom.

That is until a strange effect in her bedroom mirror transports her to another dimension, into a many-roomed castle where she meets six other children – of course there are seven children altogether; all the tropes of traditional tales were here – who have also found formal education untenable. They are set a year-long challenge by the sinister girl in a wolf mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen.

‘You are all lost Little Red Riding Hoods,’ the Wolf Queen said. ‘From now until next March, you will need to search for the key that will unlock the Wishing Room. The person who finds it will have the right to enter and their wish will be granted.’

But this privilege comes at the expense of others’ ambition and safety. And in other ways, too, the world of the castle is no more kind or democratic than life in the classroom. There are rules to obey – and rules that unexpectedly change – and soon routines form. The children can enter and leave the castle as long as they do so within the hours of 9 to 5. But they can’t abandon the tensions and rivalries of adolescence. You might think they’ve forfeited one classroom for another.

Allusions to children’s literature abound – from Hans Christian Andersen to anime, via Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia – which give the story a kind of timelessness, but this is not a dreamy, reflective novel. Each chapter spans a month in the characters’ year-long challenge and I felt propelled through the story by a kind of bruising inertia. However, its intricate plotting and attention to detail give the novel a necessary tenderness too. The depiction of Japanese society, its culture and philosophies add huge interest for those of us reading the attentive translation.

A new novel that reminded me of I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill and Penelope Farmer’s A Castle of Bone, Lonely Castle in the Sky will no doubt conjure other novels in readers’ mind but will be memorable for its own unsettling power.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is published by Doubleday.

Jon is a regular reviewer here with a knack for finding great new reads as well as older publications you may have missed. Here are more of his pieces:

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Biscuit Factory Girls by Elsie Mason

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Carnivore by Jonathan Lyon

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

- and Jon's own novel, Ready to Love, is reviewed here by Sophie Masson:

Easter Saturday extra: guest feature by Paul Dowswell. RETURN TO SENDER - A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG CLOT

 

"Imagine my surprise when I was sacked at the end of the week..."

When there’s not a pandemic going on, Paul Dowswell writes historical fiction and is a frequent visitor to schools, both home and abroad, where he talks about his books and takes creative writing classes. His novels Eleven Eleven and Sektion 20 won the Historical Association Young Quills Award and Ausländer won the Hamelin Associazione Culturale Book Prize and the Trinity Schools Book Award. Recently he has become increasingly concerned about how deranged he looks in Zoom calls.

Readers of  Writers Review will no doubt be familiar with the joke about the rabbit who goes into the butchers and asks ‘Got any carrots?’ The butcher tells him he doesn’t sell carrots. But following four days of the same repeated request from the rabbit the butcher loses his temper and says ‘If you EVER ask me for carrots again, I’m going to nail your ears to the floor.’

The rabbit comes back the next days and says ‘Got any nails?’

The butcher looks perplexed and shakes his head.

‘Got any carrots?’ asks the rabbit.

Reader, as a young man, I was that rabbit.

And evidence of that rabbithood is everywhere in a bundle of my letters home from the age of 13 to 23, which I found whilst recently clearing out my mum’s house.

The early 70s found me incarcerated in a horrible little boarding school in the depths of Shropshire, where, unlike Byron at Harrow, I didn’t spend my pre-University years translating The Iliad from the original Greek into Latin. I was an academic mediocrity. I did write a lot of letters home though. And here, in defiance of the widely held view that texts and emails have destroyed the traditional art of letter writing, I present an extract from my letter home from November 27, 1972:

On Thursday there was the House Music competition. We came 4th. (Woe!) On a happy note I’ve had dioreaha (or however you spell it) recently.’

‘That’s nice, dear,’ I can hear my mum saying.

Having cocked up my A Levels I got into Goldsmiths’ in 1975 via the clearing system and read History – a subject I wasn’t terribly interested in at the time. Not a lot of work was done. On Nov 3, 1977 I wrote home ‘As for me, I’m ill at the moment – it’s sort of bronchitis and Flu and I don’t feel so good. However I’m taking good care of myself and getting lots of sleep.’

I obviously had no understanding of the laws of cause and effect, for in the very next paragraph I write: ‘John and Johnny P. (my brother and his best friend) came down this last weekend… we played a ridiculous game of spin the knife the low/high point of which was me having to take a paddle in the birdbath, John whipping himself around the garden, and Johnny having to squirt lemon juice down his throat (blaaaaghhh). We got utterly wrecked on Saturday night and all ended up sprawled on the floor playing I-spy and with Johnny P. drinking Italian plonk from his boot.’

I finished with the reassuring words ‘p.s. am taking approx. 5,000 pills a day so don’t worry.’

Other letters from university are full of ramblings about the travails of my rotten band. My dear dad, who hated rock music, wouldn’t have been remotely interested. ‘We did two gigs this week – One on Tuesday at a Psychology society Party at College + the other at some Greenwich rowing club on Friday. The psychology one was alright – only trouble was **** broke a lead, thus we balled up things a bit. The one on Friday was a disaster. **** broke a string and we lost the attention of what little audience we had.’

A pattern was emerging.

The band broke up shortly after, although **** is still a good pal. (Hence the *s.)

I graduated in 1978, and moved to a grisly bedsit in New Cross Gate. (‘Paul’s room is not so bad,’ wrote my girlfriend to my parents, ‘just a bit scabby – but there aren’t any cockroaches or rats.’) Eventually I found work at a market research company, where I collated surveys on fork-lift truck lubricating oil. Desperate to escape, and still not really having A CLUE what to do, I enrolled on a teacher training course back at Goldsmiths’ College. Nowadays, my respect for the teaching profession knows no bounds, but back in 1979 I wasn’t so sure. My course, I wrote to my mum, herself a teacher, ’… contains a million bossy girls/women all called SUSAN (no Sue, Suzie, Suzanne etc just SUSAN) who have been nursing a burning desire to teach since they lined their dollies up at the age of three and told them off for not doing their homework.‘

Mea Maxima Culpa, teacher chums. And friends called Susan.

The autumn of 1980 found me on the dole (again) and subject to the whims of the job centre, who sent me to Woolworths head office on Marylebone Road to act as a security guard in their impressive glass and marble foyer. ‘It’s crushingly boring beyond belief and only suitable for the lobotomised and those in a deep opium trance,’ I wrote home. ‘I try and keep myself amused by seeing which hurts the most when I bang my head on it, (Of Marble, Glass, Plaster and Plastic, Marble is by far the worst), and breathing on the main glass door and drawing Anarchy signs in the condensation.’

Imagine my surprise when I was sacked at the end of the week.

But other more exciting opportunities in the world of work were presenting themselves. One, in particular, promised a life-changing turn in the road. At 22/23 I was desperate to work for the BBC and understood the important thing was to get in, doing anything, and then apply for the more interesting jobs from the inside. With that in mind I wrote home in June 1981 ‘The BBC have been in touch. I had an interview yesterday for a job in the outside broadcasting dept – v. boring – costing transmissions via the G.P.O. (British Telecom)…’

With mounting excitement I relayed the news that ‘the bloke rang that afternoon and told me I didn’t get the job BUT………..

1. They were very impressed (repeated 9 times)

2. The job was ‘way below my capabilities anyway.’

3. He would be in touch with the right people and they would be looking out for a suitable post and I would hear from them shortly.’

40 years later, whenever the phone rings, I still hope that it’ll be them.

See also: I NEVER READ MY REVIEWS, by Paul

Guest review by Rosemary Hayes: THE SHEPHERD'S HUT by Tim Winton

"A wonderful, acutely observed, tautly-written book from a master storyteller set in a landscape he knows intimately."

Rosemary Hayes' first novel for children, Race Against Time (Penguin) won a national award. Since then she has written over forty books for children in a variety of genres but she particularly enjoys writing both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. Forgotten Footprints and The Blue Eyed Aborigine are among her recent historical novels and The Mark, Taken, Loose Connections and Payback are stories set in the here and now. She is currently working on a fantasy trilogy for a 9+ readership.

Rosemary worked for Cambridge University Press and then for some years ran her own company, Anglia Young Books, which produced curriculum-related historical stories for primary schools. Now, as well as writing for children, she also runs creative writing courses for adults. She is Patron of Reading at Saffron Walden County High School. See more on her website.

The last few lines of the prologue to this book read: ‘For the first time in my life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. … but it wasn’t always like this. I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way.’

My first reaction as I began reading this book was that it would probably be loved and hated in equal measure and, indeed, there have been a few (a very few) reviews where readers couldn’t get past the bad language of the narrator, a brutalised teenager called Jaxie Clackton, even though his language has a unique rhythm and authenticity. How else would this boy speak, after all? He’s uneducated, his mother has recently died from cancer and his drunken, abusive and sadistic father (the local butcher) beats him mercilessly. Jaxie is a school delinquent mocked by his peers, who call him ‘Horsemeat’, and he spends much of his time wandering about the deadbeat rural settlement of Monkton in Western Australia, close to the highway but backing onto the wheat belt and then the inhospitable and desolate landscape of the Murchison gold fields, settling arguments with other teenagers in the only way he knows – with his fists – and wishing his father dead. A wish that is shockingly fulfilled when Jaxie returns home one evening to find his dad crushed beneath the roo bar on his car because he’d not bothered to use the right equipment to jack it up. ‘Being a cheap bastard is what killed him’ is Jaxie’s comment.

Everyone in the small community knows that Jaxie hated Captain Wankbag (Jaxie’s name for his father) and that the local policeman, ‘that fat ranga with the hissy laugh,’ was his dad’s bestie, so Jaxie doesn’t hang around to be accused of murder. Panicking, he puts together a few essentials and goes on the run, heading first into the wheat belt: ‘Nothing but stubble paddocks far and wide. Everything flat and bare. Shanksing across that country you stick out like a rat on a birthday cake, … houses rare as rocking horse turds.’

Jaxie heads north. There is one good thing in his life and that’s his girlfriend and cousin, Lee, 'the only person in the world who gets me,’ but Lee and her family live in Mt Magnet. It's only a couple of hours by car, but Jaxie has no transport avoids the highway in case he’s hauled in by he police. He sets off to walk across the desolate landscape of goldfields and salt flats to reach her and, as he soon realizes, it is a fool’s errand. It is hot, waterless and vast and although Jaxie is by no means ignorant about survival in the bush – he knows about camping, has a gun and can shoot and butcher meat – he is dangerously ill-equipped for the journey.

Jaxie is brave and devoid of self pity and we follow him as he lurches from one crisis to another, hardly able to see out of his injured eye (a legacy of his father’s brutality) and at one point nearly dying of thirst. He follows an old track to a deserted prospector’s camp where he stays for a while, and then, in a search for salt to preserve a great roo he’s shot, he comes upon a shepherd’s hut, in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a great salt lake. Someone is living there and whoever it is has been there for a while as it is well set up, but there is no sign of a vehicle. Who could possibly survive in this desolate place for any length of time without supplies from the outside world? Suspiciously Jaxie observes the hut through his binoculars, keeping his distance and, he believes, keeping out of sight. But the old man who lives there has already sensed Jaxie’s presence and when they finally confront one another, it is, at first sight, at least, a meeting of two totally contrasting worlds - that of a well-travelled, highly-educated but disgraced Irish priest called Fintan MacGillis and of an illiterate and foul-mouthed teenager from a deadbeat rural settlement.

The oddest of odd couples, then. Jaxie never lets his guard down. No adult, apart from his mum, has shown him any kindness and he is narky and suspicious of this weird old man who talks to himself, reads books and sings. ‘With that accent of his and the way he said things fancy and musical, it was like camouflage and you knew deep down he’d been doing this all his life, hiding in clear sight. He had a boozer’s face but as far as I could see there was nothing to drink out here but rainwater and billy tea. He had skinny legs with ropey blue veins winding up them and his top teeth were plastic and they moved enough to make you seasick. His specs was always on crooked too, one hinge busted and the arm wired on rough as a pig’s tit. And it was clear he was half deaf. Anytime you said something he cocked his head like a kelpie.’

They insult one another, are exasperated with one another, but slowly they create a fragile bond. Jaxie often flares up and threatens to leave, but somehow he never does, in spite of his yearning to get to Lee. Through flashbacks, we learn a lot about Jaxie’s past life, how his relationship with Lee developed and of the abuse he’s suffered, but Fintan remains an enigma. We are never told why he lives here, who brings him supplies at Christmas and Easter (except this Christmas, when no one turned up) or for what crime he is doing penance. Jaxie immediately assumes it is ‘kiddy flddling’ and though Fintan assures him it is not he won’t say much about his background – just a tantalizing hint, here and there.

So, the weeks go by and Jaxie helps the old man with trapping and butchering goats and some of the heavier jobs around the place, giving the reader a well drawn picture of the harshness and tedium of the daily business of keeping alive in the bush. Then, after a furious row with Fintan, Jaxie finally leaves to continue his journey north. However, he has only gone a day’s walk when he makes a shocking discovery that changes everything. From here on the tension really ramps up and after one careless act and fatal indecision we are witness to a tragic conclusion with an extraordinary and heartbreaking description of stubborn loyalty and unexpected tenderness.

Writing in the vernacular is never easy to sustain but Jaxie’s dialogue rings absolutely true throughout and is a wonderful contrast to Fintan’s mellifluous tones. There’s a lot of humour, too, often quite dark and delivered through Jaxie’s one-liners; there's also lyricism, particularly through descriptions of the landscape with its huge skies, its mirages, the changing colours of the salt flats and the rocks, the hostile scrub and the well observed habits of the wildlife. In this Winton captures the essence of the utter isolation and vastness of the place and shows how both Jaxie and Fintan, in their very different ways, are in awe of it.

I have spent a lot of time in Western Australia and I’ve been through one horse towns such as Monkton and flown over the goldfields and salt flats. Winton’s descriptions, through the words of Jaxie and Fintan, are utterly convincing. I was immediately transported back there, seeing, smelling and experiencing it all again.

On the surface, Jaxie is unlovable and inexpressive but we're taken inside his thoughts from time to time - ‘Some nights there was so much feeling in me head I was glad it couldn’t get out. Christ, you could burn a skyscraper down with what’s in me’ - and we cannot help but empathise with him. Despite the rotten hand he’s been dealt Jaxie has soul and we end up loving him and longing for him to survive, to find Lee and ride off into the sunset with her. Though in many ways this is an unremittingly harsh story it is shot through with such bright streaks of perseverance, hope, love, loyalty and humanity that I found it an utterly compelling read - a real page turner. Quite an achievement, given that there are only two main characters.

I have long been an admirer of Tim Winton’s work and in The Shepherd’s Hut he is at his very best. I know I shall go back to it again to savour the rhythm of the writing, the sense of place, brilliantly fleshed out characters, humour and depth of insight. It's a wonderful, acutely observed, tautly-written book from a master storyteller set in a landscape he knows intimately.

The Shepherd's Hut is published by Picador. 

TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU by Patrick Gale, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"The sureness, eloquence, humour and hope of this novel will endear it both to Patrick Gale's many fans and to those coming to his work for the first time."

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is now working on her second novel for adults.

Patrick Gale's most recent book, A Place Called Winter, was set mainly in Canada in the early 1900s, drawing on the experience of his great-grandfather, a pioneer farmer in the prairies. His new novel marks a return to more familiar territory - boyhood and adolescence in the West Country, music, the complexities of love, sexuality and relationships.

Take Nothing With You sounds like a foreboding of death, but although the threat of death is always present - central character Eustace's parents run a retirement home, where any reference to 'change' in the resident population is euphemistic - the novel is ultimately about survival and the renewal of hope. Our first encounter with Eustace is as a man in his fifties, recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and about to experience radioactive treatment. Having lost one lover to AIDS and another to mutual indifference, he's been alone for some while, but has recently fallen in love, long-distance, with a much younger man, Theo. They are soon to meet in person for the first time, but although they've shared confidences via Skype he has yet to tell Theo of his cancer treatment, fearing that such news would end the relationship before it's properly begun.

In the lead-lined room in which Eustace receives his treatment, everything he wears or touches must be discarded afterwards, so he must take nothing he wants to keep - a warning which give the novel its title. But the main part of the story concerns itself with his boyhood in Weston-super-Mare and the growing importance of music in his life. An unsporty misfit at his fee-paying school, he finds purpose and expression in playing the cello, taught by the flamboyant Carla Gold. Through her, he enters "a world in which art, headily, was everything" and meets pianist Ebrahim and painter Louis, with the revelation that two grown men can live openly as a couple. Relationships, however, prove fickle for all the adults in Eustace's life. Like L P Hartley's The Go Between, this novel of emerging sexuality and self-awareness allows the reader to see tensions in adult interactions over the head, as it were, of the viewpoint character. The marriage of Eustace's parents undergoes a cataclysm, the remnants of which we partially assemble from the present-day episodes.

Although Carla quickly sees Eustace's talent, this isn't a tale of a prodigious performer who soars to the heights against all odds. There are practical difficulties: although Eustace secures a place at music school, his parents can't afford the fees. His potential is seen by Jean Curwen, another charismatic teacher who runs a summer school, and although she seems to offer a solution there are plenty of other talented players who deserve her attention. And a family crisis, combined with a change of school, pushes Eustace's cello-playing into the background for a while. 

The Ancrum summer school section is particularly intense, with the hothouse atmosphere of living with strangers and the potential for friendships and sexual encounters. Eustace has a hurtful skirmish with a handsome older boy, but also forms a lasting and important bond with fellow cellist Naomi, who plays a significant role in the present-day scenes. And Patrick Gale excels when writing about the music - which is notoriously difficult, but these sections sing from the page. A cellist himself, he give enough but not too much technical detail, alongside a sense of how it feels to play in a group, the lines interweaving to powerful, poignant or playful effect. "Ralph played a hesitant sort of interrupted monologue on the violin to which Eustace's cello responded with a sequence of pizzicato phrases while the other three players sustained harmonies that shifted so slowly the changes in tonality were barely detectable. It was like watching a square of moonlight move across a floor." Eustace gradually appreciates that "it was chamber music, the creation of music with others, not pyrotechnic solo playing, that was the benchmark of true musicianship." 

Reading this, those of us who aren't musicians will wish that we were able to take part in this most exhilarating form of communion. "Music knits," Jean tells her students. "It heals. It is balm to the soul but is also the refiner's fire. It requires rigour and application." (Like writing.) The sureness, eloquence, humour and hope of this novel will endear it both to Patrick Gale's many fans and to those coming to his work for the first time. 

Take Nothing With You is published by Tinder Press.

EDUCATED reviewed by Adele Geras

Adele Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published by Quercus in paperback. She’s working on a historical novel for adults. She lives in Cambridge.

The cover of Tara Westover's Educated  is striking. The passage quoted on the back of the book tells you something of what this memoir is about: the author's journey from Idaho to a PhD from Cambridge, a path strewn with astonishing descriptions of life in her extraordinary family. It also demonstrates some of the power of Westover's writing style: plain, sinewy and elegant, all at once. 

You couldn't make it up... that's what people say when what they've read or seen takes them aback to such an extent that they find it an effort to (in another popular form of words) get their heads round it.

I read Educated about two months ago and I'm still thinking about it. It's been universally praised. I predict that it will be on every shortlist it can possibly be on. It will be passed from one friend to another and anyone who reads it will come away moved, touched, horrified and above all knocked sideways by Westover's gift for telling her story in such a powerful and resonant way. She writes most beautifully, with a gift for conveying at the same time the terrible, violent, abusive things that attended her childhood and family life and at the same time, the tenacity of the bonds she feels binding her to her parents and siblings.

She sees them clearly as they are: a man and a woman adhering to a Survivalist Mormon belief so powerful and paranoid that the children are unregistered with school or any other government agency and have spent their entire lives working in their father's scrapyard (with no Health or Safety supervision) or, in the case of the girls, helping with their mother's herbal remedies for family and neighbours. Westover's mother is a self-taught midwife and in thrall to her narcissistic and overbearing husband. Some of her siblings are more sympathetic than others, and one brother is a brutal abuser. The physical harm described in the book is startling and deeply shocking. If this were fiction (you couldn't make it up) your editor would say: you can't put that in your novel. No one would believe it. But it did happen to Westover and how she escaped her family and gained a brilliant PhD from Cambridge University can be seen as an (again, scarcely believable) happy ending.

But Cambridge is not unalloyed bliss. Tara Westover has suffered greatly and hasn't been in contact with most of her family for years.

I finished this book full of admiration for its courageous and hugely talented writer and I hope very much that she finds happiness in her life from now on. I can't wait to read her next book, whatever it turns out to be, and I can safely say that if you start reading Educated, you will not be able to put it down. And you certainly won't be able to forget it.

Educated is published by Hutchinson.

Guest review by Nicola Davies: GROWING PAINS: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD: A PSYCHIATRIST'S STORY, by Dr Mike Shooter

"For me, and I think for others who write for children, perhaps the greatest inspiration in Growing Pains is in the power and value of story itself."

Nicola Davies is the author of more than 50 books for children, fiction, non fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in more than 10 different languages and has won major awards in the UK, US, France, Italy and Germany. Nicola trained as a zoologist and her work focuses on nature and human relationships with the natural world. She has been a senior lecturer in Creative Writing, and now regularly runs workshops for children and adults to help them find their voices as writers and advocates for nature. She was the first recipient of the SLA’s award for Outstanding Contribution to Children’s Non Fiction in 2017 and in 2018 has four picture books longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Award.

Mike Shooter has been helping children and young people through every kind of crisis, from the ordinary wear and tear of family life, to some of the most horrific experiences that human beings can endure, for all of the four decades of his professional life.But this book, drawn directly from his difficult and demanding clinical practice, is not the voice of the arrogant practitioner handing down pills and judgment from a place of safety: Mike Shooter has battled against depression, and knows about mental health problems from the bottom up. This personal experience, plus a healthy scepticism about received wisdom, has informed his work and made him into an extraordinary listener. Listening to what children say about their lives has been the heart and soul of his work. The stories that he has heard and the insights he’s gained, are retold in Growing Pains with a clarity and honesty that is moving and powerful. It is also at times disturbing - not always because of the nature and magnitude of the mental health problems, but because of their mismanagement through poor practice in the NHS and society as a whole. Dr Shooter isn’t a sensationalist, but he doesn't mince words about the fact that the UK has one of the poorest records of child and adolescent mental health in the developed world: a culture increasing focussed on a narrow vision of success and a health service run by and for bean counters.

These are, of course, not all stories with happy endings, but they are inspiring at many levels. First there’s the ability of humans to heal, not just themselves but their relationships: adolescents apparently hell bent of a path of self destruction find better ways to express anger and frustration; parents and children living like enemies in a war zone build bonds of love and support. Then there’s the way that children can make brave and powerful decisions about their lives, their bodies and even their own deaths, when adults include them in all conversations, even the most difficult.

For me, and I think for others who write for children, perhaps the greatest inspiration in Growing Pains is in the power and value of story itself. Symbols and metaphors help children and young people to understand their own lives: the disturbed adolescent finds the root of his unhappiness when the broken heart of a Russian doll reminds him of his dead twin; the little boy who acknowledges the loss of his father and the fact that life goes on through the way the snowflakes settle in snow globe. Growing Pains has re-inspired me to go on trying to write stories that reflect children’s real experience in all its difficulty and to find the comfort and magic that can lie in the heart of the most traumatic situations

Growing Pains is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

FINGERS IN THE SPARKLE JAR by Chris Packham, reviewed by Linda Newbery

'Chris Packham clearly loves words, so much that they seem for him to fill a "sparkle jar" as enticing as the delights of the natural world.'

This memoir, something of a departure for naturalist and Springwatch presenter Chris Packham, has many literary resonances. As an account of a young boy finding purpose and passion through his love for wildlife, it recalls A Kestrel for a Knave and My Family and Other Animals; the love and loss of a wild creature echoes Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, which gave Packham a love of otters. The journey through depression, and emergence from it, is reminiscent of Richard Mabey's Nature Cure and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, while the experience of mental illness and acceptance of therapy echoes Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive. It's a brave and important book, at a time when it's recognised that mental health issues, particularly for men, must not be hidden or 'toughed out'. Packham has of course published numerous books and articles on wildlife, but nothing as personally revealing as this.

The structure, a series of episodes, is an unusual one. In early chapters, Packham refers to himself as 'the boy' or 'Christopher', seen by a range of characters including an ice-cream van driver, a cinema usherette and, most touchingly, a hermit-like war veteran. Other sections are narrated in first-person - either as himself, or in short italicised sections, from the viewpoint of a therapist treating the adult Packham after he had twice come close to committing suicide. In these latter sections we learn that he came to regard himself as an outsider - clever, obsessive, but unable to relate to others. Although the term Aspergers isn't used, it is hinted at in his assessment of himself.

Chris Packham clearly loves words, so much that they seem for him to fill a "sparkle jar" as enticing as the delights of the natural world. He sprinkles them with a liberal hand, piling up adjectives in almost every sentence. At first I was exasperated by the over-writing, but gradually, as my eyes adjusted to the surface dazzle, it became part of the book's charm. The breathless rush conveys complete absorption in the behaviour of bird, mammal or invertebrate and the settings in which they are observed. Often the choice of phrase is strikingly apt, as when mosquito larvae "ziggle down in droves" or an old man peers into the "squinty dim"; glimpsing a sparrowhawk, there’s “a fleeting sense that some pulse of life had singed the air”. More than once, the rhythms and emphasis reminded me of Under Milk Wood, or of Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist. And this description of a falcon in flight surely pays homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover:

"Unfalling, the bird stands chopping air, fluttering and then rolling down smooth, slipping and then sliding away to ring a curve across the storm until it pitches at the apex and begins to dance with the wind, its plumes constantly shaken, folding and flicking to steer it still and ... balance broken it tumbles and steadies with a twist of grey - cloud-licked and clean, now measuring the weight of the sky again ..."

The sparkle jar of the title is used as a metaphor for the beauty of the natural world and its frailty in the hands of careless others. A jar filled with minnows, sparking and glinting with rainbow colours, is grabbed by older boys and smashed. “A little bang of luminous blue, a pulse of silver and a flopping thwack marked the end of my pocket universe.”

The book's episodic structure, moving back and forth in time, is held together by several sections called The Bird. Here Packham relates his taking of a kestrel chick from a nest, rearing and training it. “I squashed the blob of meat on my thumb and went down on one trembling knee to ask the biggest question of my life. He was a jewel, radiant in the rich dawn light, his head bobbing. He was the centre point about which I danced, his tail fanning. He was all my absolute everything, his freedom terrifying.” His identification with the kestrel is so complete that in some passages he becomes the bird, sharing the exhilaration of its flight. The illness and eventual death of this beautiful bird left the fourteen-year-old Packham utterly bereft. Years later, he tells his therapist, “I think too many things broke in that moment, things that couldn’t ever be mended.”

Bullied at school and accepting his outsider role, Packham later found in punk rock an outlet for suppressed anger. The joys and trials of childhood and adolescence are sharply recalled, rich in details that evoke 1970s suburban domestic life: Kia-Ora and jamboree bags, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Brooke Bond picture cards, Airfix models and the How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs, the Clash and the Sex Pistols and new stacked-heel shoes from Tru-Form.

I suspect that Chris Packham, having so obviously relished the exhilaration of the "sparkle jar" of words, will want to continue writing in this lushly descriptive vein.