10th Birthday Special Feature: PATRICK GALE tells us what's on his radar

 

Photograph by Jo and Rob Whitworth

It's our tenth birthday! Since we started in July 2016, we've published weekly, welcomed more guests than we can count (all authors or booksellers), produced end-of-year roundups, special features and lockdown extras, and have had over a million viewings. To mark the occasion we're doing a new kind of birthday feature, On My Radar (pinched from The Observer ...) and who better to launch this for us than the popular and highly acclaimed novelist Patrick Gale? 

Patrick is a favourite here - we've reviewed several of his novels and he did a Q&A feature with us on publication of Mother's Boy (find links to all these at the end of this piece). Pictured above in his west Cornwall garden, Patrick is currently on tour with his latest novel Love Lane, but kindly found time to give us his choices in various categories.

Book? It’s impossible to pick a favourite book as I so love reading that frequently my favourite is the one currently holding me in thrall. In homage to my father, who loved them dearly, I’m currently rereading Trollope’s Barchester novels and finding them infinitely more subtle and feminist than I remember them. Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage are wonderful on love and economics, but they also contain marvellously free spirited women like Miss Dunstable. Highly recommended.

Film? Bette Davis’ masterpiece, Now Voyager, is always deeply nourishing on revisiting. It’s at once witty, sad and wonderfully clear eyed in its portrayal of depression, maternal oppression and the small, but significant triumphs in life.

Podcast or radio programme? I’m afraid that, since being diagnosed with Ménière’s Disease and having to wear hearing aids, I have become such an audiobook addict that podcasts and radio programmes have been elbowed aside. I’m currently doing a lot of dog walking and gardening to the accompaniment of David Rintoul’s heroic reading of Proust.

TV drama? We’re addicted to the world drama offerings on Channel 4. However terrible - and many are marvellously gripping - they give such fascinating insights into domesticity in other cultures.

Photograph by Jim Champion

Favourite walk? Right on my doorstep lies the beautiful 3 kilometre circuit across our fields and down the cliff path to Nanjizal then along the cliffs around Mill Bay towards Land’s End and home again across a different run of our fields. It may bore the dogs but I love noting the small changes from week to week on the same walk, the flowers, the weather, the insect and bird life.

Place to eat? A great treat of the Penzance LitFest is nipping across the road after a really good author talk to feast in the Honey Pot. They do delicious cakes and serious brunches.

Photograph by Tim Sheerman-Chase

A place that's inspired your writing? People always assume that Cornwall must be a great inspiration to me, but I seem to have drawn equally on my childhood memories of growing up in Winchester, the beautiful cathedral city where I lived from seven to twenty-one.

Ideal day?  I never lie in but I love waking really early and going back to bed with tea and biscuits for us both. I’d like that to be followed by a beehive inspection where I found only good things, an unexpected jaunt somewhere pretty for lunch with Aidan and then a sunny walk by the sea with the dogs. I’ve included no work in there but a few good hours of writing between bees and the unexpected lunch would lend the day an extra fillip.

Photograph by Krzysztof Ziarnek

Tree? Right outside out library window is a melaleuca linarifolia or Snow In Summer. Its delicate leaves smell like the best, headiest cough sweets and every July it is covered in flowers that look exactly like snowflakes. It’s one of the first trees we planted when we met and I’m moved that it not only survived but is thriving somewhere so unlike its native Australia.

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Season? Autumn. I love the drawing in of nights, the reaching for knitwear, the lighting of the season’s first log fire.

Dawlish Warren: photograph by David Gubler

Mode of transport? Happily, given how many hours I spend on them during a year when I have a novel to promote, I adore train journeys. I hardly ever drive beyond the Tamar but think nothing of spending nine hours staring out of a train window.

Thank you, Patrick, and we hope your tour is bringing Love Lane to a great many appreciative readers!

See also our reviews of

Take Nothing With You

Notes from an Exhibition

Love Lane

Q&A with Patrick on Mother's Boy

NINTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Michèle Roberts chooses OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

 "Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent."

Photograph: Viv Pegram

Michèle Roberts is half-French and half-English. She has published fifteen novels, plus poetry, memoir, essays and artist's books. Her first cookery book French Cooking for One came out in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London.

My (highly subjective) definition of a classic novel is one that I regularly re-read. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979) perfectly fits that bill. I enjoy it more every time I read it, relishing its celebration of unconventional attitudes, its sharp observations of the thrills and dangers of life afloat, its wry, dry humour that makes me burst out laughing. Fitzgerald’s humour is rooted in her lack of sentimentality, her honesty about human behaviour, the messes we make, our illogical yearnings, the way we sabotage ourselves. Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent.

The novel’s ending is pre-figured in its beginning. Grace, a leaky old barge with a rotting anchor, no cabin doors and unreliable plumbing, is moored at Battersea Reach on the river Thames. Other nearby boats are in similarly dodgy condition. Sooner or later, we begin to suspect, disaster will occur; possibly even drowning.

On board these rickety, rackety craft live an eccentric crew of neighbours, all lovers of the water in different ways. Chief among them, on Grace, is Nenna James, her two young daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna is estranged from her husband, who skulks in a rented room in far off north-east London. One strand of the engaging plot concerns Nenna’s hapless attempts to stay afloat morally and financially, to keep an eye on her truant children, to deal with her need for love and sex. Fitzgerald draws splendid sketches of the earnest priest visiting from the local convent school Martha and Tilda attend, the hopeful marine artist trying to sell his boat while knowing it is riddled with leaks, the chancer-thief hiding his stash of stolen hairdryers below decks on another craft nearby, the kindly ex-naval stalwart who tries always to do the right thing: “Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service … and his whole temperament before and since, had done that before him.” Even Nenna’s cat, Stripey, is given a portrait, a place in the story.

Fitzgerald writes well about men. In these pages they may be unheroic, self-deluding and occasionally incompetent (just like the female characters) but they are never mocked. Richard, the ex-naval officer, says to Nenna: “I can’t for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it’s got to be talked about. In fact, I should have thought it lost something, if you follow me, if you put it into words.” Later in the chapter he does manage to pursue his conversation with Nenna, and to act on his feelings. When they return from a trip in his dinghy and tie up alongside his boat, Lord Jim, he realises “He had to do the right thing. A captain goes last onto his ship, but a man goes first into a tricky situation … Their sense of control wavered, ebbed, and changed places.”

Nenna’s younger daughter Tilda regularly swarms up the mast of the barge, the better to survey the movements of people below, the swelling tides, the shifting light. These are all lovingly, beautifully and accurately described. Tilda stands for the novelist herself, sometimes seemingly omniscient and sometimes inhabiting a close-up perspective, surveying the world she inhabits and has brought into being and valuing its goodness mingled with its flaws.

The major delight of this short, packed novel, for me, lies in its brilliant writing, which of course creates and illuminates its story and its characters. In the gap between land and river, wharf and deck, Penelope Fitzgerald entrancingly suggests that we can find and explore both freedom and belonging.

Offshore is published by Harper Collins.

Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability: a diary of surviving is reviewed here by Jill Dawson.

 

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: our best reads of 2024 so far, by Adèle Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees

 

Part two of our 8th birthday celebration!

Adèle:

Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania is about the near future where cleverness has been forbidden and it's a crime to be clever. There is no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, but no one is to be called stupid or dumb or thick or any synonym for these words. This conceit is taken to the extreme: our protagonist, Pearson, almost loses her job as a college lecturer because she dares to teach The Idiot by Dostoevsky in one of her courses. She was born a Jehovah's Witness but has escaped from her background and now has a husband who's a tree surgeon and three children. She has a son and a daughter, (born with the use of a donor) who are very clever indeed. Her second daughter, born to Pearson and her husband after the introduction of the new laws, becomes a danger to the household by her adherence to the rules. The results of such a law play out in disasters. Bridges collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors are no longer required to study medicine. There is no such thing as intellectual rigour or careful science. So far, so Swiftian. It's written with all the sharpness and brio we associate with the author of We need to talk about Kevin but it's also about the importance of close friendship and love (of your spouse and your children) and personal betrayal and forgiveness. It's about the way we navigate our lives in the face of horrendous goings on in the wider world. It's quite a short book and very fast moving and even if you don't agree with Shriver's take on things, you will never not want to turn the page.

I haven't yet watched the Netflix version of One Day by David Nicholls but I was very upset by the book because (no spoilers!) it didn't end in the way I was expecting. His latest novel You are Here is a joy from start to finish. And starting and finishing is relevant. It's about a walk undertaken by a group of people: the Coast to Coast walk. Maps are provided throughout and many details about this walk are included seamlessly in the story. The main narrative is about two people: Michael, a Geography teacher with problems and an editor, Marnie, who is also far from happy in her private life. She has made the mistake of bringing some work along with her for the walk and her descriptions of the book she's editing and her remarks about editing in general are a really hilarious highlight. The fact that Michael teaches Geography is a short cut to having the landscape and natural surroundings described for us with enormous skill and subtlety. We learn things without knowing we're learning them. I try to say as little as possible about the plots of novels but this is the perfect book to take on holiday. It's truly engaging and engrossing and totally satisfying. Read it before it's on Netflix.

My final choice is a poetry book. Nic Aubury writes short, rhyming poems in the Wendy Cope tradition and I guarantee that even if you think poetry is not your thing, you will find something here to make you laugh and think at the same time. The collection is called Things my Children Think I'm Wrong About. Instead of telling you about it, I will quote two poems in full. They're that short!

No Right Turn

We'd rather go on suffering the pain of our mistakes,
pretending this was really what we wanted all along,
and promising to see it through, no matter what it takes,
than face the mild discomfort of admitting we were wrong.

Polonian

If I were more convincing and
my children more convincible
then this would be the wisdom I'd impart:
be ready to abandon an
opinion, not a principle,
and learn to tell those different things apart.

Linda: 

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison is set in rural Suffolk in 1933, narrated (with hindsight) by fourteen-year-old Edith. The First World War is still a recent memory, the farm affected by the loss of Doble's son and the emotional scarring of horseman John, while there are also foreshadowings of the war to come, brought into focus by the arrival of Constance, a young journalist from London. At first Constance seems to offer Edith an escape route from the inevitability of marriage to a local lad, childbearing and farm work; but her obsession with rural traditions soon reveals a disturbing affinity with Nazi ideals of nationalism and racial 'purity'. Melissa Harrison's beautiful observations of countryside, weather and routines give the novel a real grounding in time and place, with a sense of wistfulness - the corncrakes, nightjars and turtle doves are part of Edith's experience but largely lost from ours.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe moves from 2010 through general elections, the Brexit referendum and London Olympics and on to 2018 (in the future at the time of publication). Known as a chronicler of our times and the various attitudes, biases and aspirations of the public, Coe looks at this turbulent time from the perspectives of characters including political journalist Doug, Ben Trotter who finds unexpected success as a novelist, and lecturer Sophie who deplores her mother-in-law’s casual racism, finds herself at serious odds with her new husband over Brexit and is suspended from her university post over a casual remark to a transgender student. In this larger-than-life, still topical, left-leaning but not one-sided novel, Coe blends pathos, seriousness and comedy with a deft touch. I especially enjoyed the snippy conversations between socialist Doug and a Downing Street press apologist for ‘Dave’ (i.e. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton). 

Lauren Bravo's How to Break Up with Fast Fashion may seem a peculiar choice for someone too old and certainly not enough interested in fashion to be the target audience. But a friend lent it to me because I was organising a Clothes Swap for Great Big Green Week, and I found it both entertaining and a source of information and advice. Knowing nothing of Lauren Bravo, I immediately warmed to her humour and empathy. Once a self-confessed fashion victim, she challenged herself to a year of nothing new, and realised how addicted she'd become to the thrill of seeking out and buying new garments - something the fashion industry is adept at encouraging, with temptations and 'must-haves' flaunted everywhere. Alongside shocking facts about the waste and pollution of fast fashion and the abysmal working conditions and pay for many textile workers, she suggests ways to do better: seeking out charity shop bargains or vintage clothes; swapping with friends; hiring outfits for special occasions like weddings instead of buying something that will spend the rest of its life in a wardrobe; and of course simply buying less and making the most of what we already have. She looks too at ethical fashion and how to avoid 'greenwashing'; most brands now make some kind of sustainability claim, but how can we be sure we're not paying for worker exploitation, use of hazardous chemicals in the dyeing process, or animal abuse? There are websites such as Good On You and Ethical Consumer where fashion brands are assessed and compared. An irresistible read that looks beneath the surface of new-new-new.

Celia Rees

I first read George Orwell's 1984 in the sixties but I was seeing so much that is relevant to our world now, that I really had to re-read it. The year, 1984, is never mentioned in the novel. Clearly, the writer's deliberate choice. One neat theory is that Orwell reversed the numbers of the year in which he was writing his dystopian future, arriving at 1984. Sufficiently distant, but unsettlingly close. When 1984, the actual year, arrived, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. I remember her crowing that Orwell had got it wrong and I remember thinking, 'No, you're wrong, Maggie. He was spot on.' 1984 is a novel of no time and all time. Orwell was writing when television was in its infancy. Now his tele screens are everywhere. I'm looking at one now and have another beside me on my desk, another downstairs in the living room and still others scattered round the house. We carry the means of our own surveillance in our homes and outside it we have CCTV and Facial Recognition. The slogan Orwell coined, Big Brother Is Watching You, is universally recognised. He might be, might not be, we don't know, not for sure, but we've made sure that he can. So much of the novel has uncomfortable modern resonance. The world has changed in ways he could not have imagined but the underlying impulse towards totalitarian power and control that he foresaw remain the same. The destruction of language and thought complexity, which he calls Newspeak, is present in the deliberate limitations of X (ex Twitter) and TikTok and in the Gifs, text language and emojis of WhatsApp, social media posting and messaging. The inversions of meaning: Ministry of Truth for Lies,  Love for Hate, Peace for War, and so on, are present in Alternative Facts, False Truths, Fake News and are part of of our everyday lives. Technology has brought Orwell's dystopia that much closer. He might not have got it all right, but he gave use fair warning. Let's hope we heed it.     

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I first came to Jon Ronson through his podcast series, Things Fell Apart. The title is taken from the W. B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. In the first series, Ronson looked at the plethora of conspiracy theories swirling on the internet and traced them back to their sometimes surprising origins. The second series, explored the culture wars and did pretty much the same thing. Ronson is an engaging journalist but beneath his informal, gonzo, faux naive cover he is a serious and meticulous investigator. The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with the disclaimer: This is a true story. It then goes on to describe how a man hurls himself at his office wall convinced that he has the power to pass through it into the office next door by mind and will power alone. He doesn't, of course. He ends up with a bruised nose. All a little bit weird and quirky, except that he is a Major General,  the U.S. Army's Chief of Intelligence with 16,000 soldiers under his command.  From this starting point, Ronson tracks backwards to the Vietnam War and 1960's alternative culture, forwards through the U.S. Military top secret psyops goat staring operations to the chilling application of torture techniques developed during the Bush Administration's war on terror. 

Empire of Pain by Patrick Redden Keefe is the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world, best known, until relevantly recently, for their patronage of the arts, museums and academia. Their name adorned the walls of the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, Harvard and Oxford Universities but a visitor to any of those institutions today, would find that name removed. Empire of Pain tells us why. Extraordinarily secretive, three generations of Sacklers deliberately obscured the source of their immense fortune.  It lay in the manufacture and marketing of two highly addictive drugs that they made ubiquitous, first the tranquillizer, Vallium (Mother's Little Helper) and then the powerful, opioid painkiller, OxyContin. The relentless, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, particularly the claims that the drug was virtually non addictive, generated thirty billion dollars of income for the Sackler family and triggered an opiate epidemic in America that has brought misery to millions of Americans and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The story of how this happened, the unmasking of the family behind the crisis and the extraordinarily challenging task of bringing them to account is unputdownable. A real life thriller.  

Don't miss the guest post by our birthday guest, award-winning crime writer Simon Mason!

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

SEVENTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Anthony Horowitz chooses THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Jonathan Freedland

 

"A study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read."

Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. A born polymath, he juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee. A third series has just been filmed and the fourteenth Alex Rider novel, Nightshade: Revenge will be out later this year.

Also an acclaimed writer for adults, Anthony was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series, With a Mind to Kill, was published in May 2022.

Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It was televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.

Anthony is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved and successful television series including Midsomer Murders and he is the writer and creator of award-winning drama series Foyle’s War, which was the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA.

Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.

(photo credit: Canneseries/Olivier Vigerie 2022)

 

I’ve always had misgivings about books about Auschwitz. The evil of the place is so overwhelming, its darkness so profound, that how can any writer find anything new to add to what is already an extensive library on the subject? And there is a danger that repetition will only blunt the horror of it all. I visited the camp one February, a few years ago, and standing there in my jersey, gloves and puffer jacket, but still colder than I had ever been, I wondered how anyone could have survived even a week there (the average life expectancy was actually four months). Meanwhile, all around me, other visitors were taking selfies. 

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, which came out last year and is now in paperback, is a brilliant and important piece of writing because it tells a story that is less well-known, because it finds fresh details to illustrate the horrors of life inside the camp but above all because its focus extends far beyond the gas chambers and the electrified fences. In terrible detail, it explains how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Its central protagonist, Walter Rosenberg, was just nineteen years old when he became the first Jew to escape from the camp, hiding in a tiny dug-out beneath a pile of wood and covering himself in petrol-soaked tobacco to put off the guard dogs. This breathless sequence – he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, were just seconds away from being discovered – is extremely tense; a reminder that, under another name, Freedland has written many successful thrillers.

Once out, the two men had to travel 75 miles through enemy territory to reach the border with Slovakia. “Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own. The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world…” And this is the nub of the matter. The descriptions of life inside Auschwitz are horrific enough. The casual murders, the starvation, the daily torture are detailed in sombre, effective prose. But as incredible as it may sound, what happens to Walter (who renames himself Rudolf Vrba) is in some ways even worse.

He had escaped in order to tell the world what was happening. “If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” A scientist and a mathematician gifted with an extraordinary memory, he described his ordeal to a Jewish organisation in Bratislava – the UZ – and the result was The Auschwitz Report which detailed everything from the arrival of the transports from different parts of Europe to the numbers and even the names of those who perished. The final list numbered 1,765,000 dead in just two years.

Almost nobody cared. Nobody did anything. The Catholic church responded to their report with silence. Copies of the report got ‘lost in the post’. Jewish community leaders who did receive it dithered. The Americans were lethargic. Churchill read the document but his response was ineffectual. “What can be done?” he wrote to Anthony Eden. “What can be said?” The British did consider air strikes on Auschwitz or even on the railways leading to the camp. They decided not to.

Jonathan Freedland does not lose faith with his subject. “His life was defined by what he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it.” Even so, reading the second half of this book, it’s hard not to feel that Rosenberg does not come out of it as quite the hero he most certainly was even if he is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people. For him, it wasn’t enough. The last part of the book describes a life that self-destructs. He falls out with Fred Wetzler and also with his daughter. An inveterate womaniser, he divorces his childhood sweetheart and wife. He moves from country to country and seems to have few friends. When he dies, in 2006, just forty people come to his memorial service.

The Escape Artist is a complex portrait of a man who was no artist and who never really escaped from the shadows of Auschwitz or, indeed, from himself. It is a study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read.

The Escape Artist is published by John Murray

Sixth anniversary special guest: MICHAEL ARDITTI chooses THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER by F M Mayor

"F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym."

It's our birthday - today we are six! Since July 2016 we've posted 328 articles by an impressive array of guest authors and independent booksellers, with features including round-ups, anticipated reads, virtual awards and Q&As with authors. As usual on our anniversary we feature a very special guest; this year we're delighted that novelist and dramatist Michael Arditti has kindly written this piece for us about a great favourite of his.

Michael Arditti has written twelve novels and a collection of short stories. He began his professional career writing plays for the radio and stage and has worked extensively as a literary and dramatic critic. His novels have been short- and long-listed for several major prizes. He has been a Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum, a visiting professor at King’s college, London, and was awarded an Honorary D Litt from the University of Chester. His most recent novel is The Young Pretender.

F M Mayor doesn’t feature in my copy of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, although she surely merits a place between children’s writer William Mayne and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The unjustly neglected Mayor (1872 - 1932) wrote a collection of stories and three novels, of which The Rector’s Daughter is generally considered her masterpiece.

The Rector’s Daughter was first published in 1924 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and, in an early chapter, the protagonist, Mary Jocelyn, is taken up by a London artistic coterie, which is surely based on the Bloomsbury Group. The novel was well received, and Mayor was compared to three of her literary heroines: George Eliot, Mary Gaskell and Jane Austen. All of them, incidentally, are referenced here: Mary reads to her father from Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life; she alludes to ‘the Cranford ladies’; more obliquely, a maid is named Mansfield.

Mayor insisted that the book wasn’t autobiographical. Although a spinster who, in later life, divided her time between her parent’s home in Kingston and her brother’s house at Clifton School in Bristol, she had a far more active and eventful youth than Mary, having been one of the first women to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and enjoyed a brief career on the stage. What she does have in common with her protagonist is the clerical background. Indeed, whereas Mary is merely the daughter of a clergyman, the octogenarian Canon Jocelyn, Mayor was the daughter of one and niece of several others, including the Cambridge professor of Moral Philosophy, John Grote.

This ecclesiastical heritage suffuses the novel and gives it its authenticity. The village of Dedmayne (the name is a clue to its character) is defined as a series of negatives. It is ‘insignificant’, ‘without a station’, ‘ugly’, ‘treeless’, ‘on the way to nowhere’ and, most damningly, ‘the social advantages of Dedmayne were on a par with the scenery.’ Mary and her father are the only gentry in the village and act as moral and social arbiters of its rigidly stratified community.

Mayor allows 35-year-old Mary even fewer physical attractions than Charlotte Bronte allowed Jane Eyre. ‘Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes and hid them with glasses. She was dowdily dressed.’

Although the rectory is staffed with a cook, housemaid and coachman, Mary is little more than a drudge, caring for her mentally ill sister, Ruth. When Ruth dies, Mary devotes herself to her father, who shows few signs of gratitude, let alone affection. Her life changes when Robert Herbert, the son of one of the Canon’s old friends, takes over the neighbouring parish of Lanchester. Mayor skilfully delineates Mary’s attraction to him, which she hardly dares admit to herself. After one of the most tentative love scenes in literature, Mary is convinced that an understanding exists between them. Then, on a short visit to Buxton, Herbert meets, falls in love with and becomes engaged to the brittle social butterfly, Kathy Hollings.

Mary behaves with absolute propriety, calling on the new Mrs Herbert, who patronises her. She feels utterly isolated, unable to confide in her one girlhood friend, Dora, who is visiting her sister in China, where (in a phrase that would not get past today’s sensitivity readers), ‘the natives are just like children.’ Afraid to admit that Herbert kissed her to her father, whose enjoyment of Scenes of Clerical Life is marred by knowledge of George Eliot’s adultery, Mary is left to deal with her desolation alone.

The second part of the novel shifts its focus from the rector’s daughter to the vicar’s wife. Mayor expertly depicts the wretchedness of the Herberts’ marriage, from which Kathy flees to the Riviera with her malevolent sister-in-law, Lesbia (in this case, the name is not a clue!). There, something occurs, which it would be unfair to disclose, but which effects a sea change in Kathy. These passages inspire Mayor’s finest prose and reveal her deepest sympathies, as she endorses Mary’s belief that ‘Mistakes sometimes turn out right in the end.’

Notwithstanding its excursions to London, the Riviera and Southsea, The Rector’s Daughter is steeped in a village life which was old-fashioned even at the time of writing. Virginia Woolf may have published the novel, but its subject, style and concerns could not be more remote from The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which had appeared, respectively nine and five years earlier, let alone Mrs Dalloway, which appeared the following year. Nevertheless, the book is a middlebrow classic, and F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.

The Rector's Daughter is published by Virago Modern Classics.

Michael Arditti's The Young Pretender is reviewed here by Adèle Geras.

Fifth Anniversary special guest: VAL McDERMID and A DARK MATTER by Doug Johnstone

 

"The set-up sounded like a delicious prospect ... And so it proved. It had me at the first line."

Val McDermid has sold over 17 million books to date across the globe and has been translated into more than 40 languages. She is perhaps best known for her Wire in the Blood series, featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan, which was adapted for television starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris. Her most recent TV series Traces aired in a BBC1 primetime slot in January of this year, and a second series is currently in production, as is ITV’s adaptation of Karen Pirie, based on Val’s cold case detective of the same name.

1979, the beginning of a new series for Val, featuring journalist Allie Burns, is published on 19th August. She has also published Resistance, a graphic novelisation of her critically acclaimed radio drama, illustrated by Kathryn Briggs, this May.

Val was chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017 and has served as a judge for both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2018 Man Booker Prize. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is Visiting Professor in the Centre of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She is an experienced broadcaster and much sought-after columnist and commentator across print media.

Val is also lead vocalist with The Fun Lovin' Crime Writers, possibly the only band made up of crime writers ever to play at Glastonbury!   

McDermid fans - what's your favourite title? Tell us in the comments!

When I first heard about Doug Johnstone’s proposed trilogy of novels about three generations of women running a funeral home and a private eye agency, I couldn’t wait to read it. I’ve long been an admirer of his spare and insightful prose, and the set-up sounded like a delicious prospect.

And so it proved. It had me at the first line: ‘Her Dad took much longer to burn than she expected.’ Not, it turns out, the aftermath of a murder, but the garden funeral pyre of undertaker Jim Skelf.

A Dark Matter has its origins in the six months Johnstone spend as writer in residence in a funeral home in Edinburgh, where this book is set. He spoke to as wide a range of employees and employers as possible, and that gives the book its authenticity and authority. There’s nothing gruesome or voyeuristic here; but we never doubt that he knows what he’s talking about. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s emotionally intelligent and it’s a page-turner too.

The triple-stranded plot revolves around the three women of the Skelf family. (‘Skelf’ is a Scots word that means either a thin splinter of wood or a troublesome person.) Dorothy, the matriarch, is a transplant from California who married Jim, the owner of the long-established family business. A healthy 70-year-old, she deals with her grief and stress behind her attic drum kit or on her yoga mat.

For her daughter Jenny, Jim’s death feels very close to the final straw. She’s lost her job as a journalist and her marriage imploded afer she discovered husband Craig was cheating on her. She can’t afford the rent so she has no choice but to move back home and take over her dad’s role in the business, nursing her bitterness to keep it warm.

The youngest Skelf woman is Hannah, 20 years old, studying quantum physics at Edinburgh University, in a lesbian relationship with Indy who works in the funeral home. Bright and sparky, her light has been dimmed by her grandfather’s death.

Of course, in fiction, a death in the family always opens the door on secrets and lies. Jim’s ashes are barely cold when Dorothy is stricken by the discovery that her late husband had been making secret payments to another woman for years. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that her happy marriage was nothing more than an edifice, but she’s determined to get to the truth.

Jenny meanwhile has taken on what appears at first to be a straightforward PI case of establishing adultery, an investigation that has painful undertones every step of the way.

And Hannah’s grief is made all the sharper when her best friend disappears. As she tries to unravel what happened to Mel, she finds a shocking trail of dark revelations.

The three narrative strands are expertly woven, building tension that never lets up on a journey of discovery that’s as much about three women learning about themselves and each other. The dynamic between the three generations is all too credible and never sentimental. Few male authors write women really well, but Doug Johnstone has created three very different but credible female characters who all resonated with me in their very different ways.

The final plum in the pudding for me is the setting. This is not the Edinburgh the tourist sees – it’s a living variegated city and Doug Johnstone opens doors and windows on a capital we don’t always see. He’s a writer whose books always have a strong sense of place, but never more than in this trilogy. The good news is that the second book in the series, The Big Chill, is already out, and the third, The Great Silence, will be published in August 2021.

A Dark Matter is published by Orenda Books.

Fifth birthday round-up by Adèle, Celia and Linda

 

What have we been reading?

Next week we celebrate our fifth birthday, and an exciting special guest is lined up to help us mark the occasion. Meanwhile, the three of us indulge in our own summer round-up. (We've been busy writing, too - each of us has published a book during lockdown! See the end of this post.)

Thank you so much to all the guest authors and independent booksellers who send us reviews, keeping us supplied now for five whole years and 275 blog posts - we couldn't do this without you! Don't forget to come back next week ...

Adèle Geras:

I love novels set in Cathedral Closes. I am a sucker for stories about the clergy and their families, like The Rector's Wife by Joanna Trollope and various books by Anthony Trollope. I also love soap operas. It's a term people use sneeringly, but they've never considered what gifts it takes to manage a cast of many people and keep us interested in every single one of them. I admire writing that's both witty and emotional, and a tale that introduces me to a whole crowd of new and interesting characters. I'd read all three of Catherine Fox's previous Lindchester Chronicles. She's married to a bishop and clearly knows what she's talking about ecclesiastically, as well as being a whizz at structure and in this fourth chronicle she casts an intelligent and sympathetic eye over what happens to her characters during the Pandemic. The phases of the moon are being studied by a young teenager and her diary threads the beads of this particular chain of events together. It's great to be back with the inhabitants of Lindford and I am now following their further adventures on Catherine Fox's Twitter account (@FictionFox) I must also admit to being envious of a writer who used the Pandemic to such good effect and has this to show for it now.

This novel has more than 2000 four and a half star reviews on Amazon and has been widely reviewed and raved over in the press. All I can say is: I quite agree with them. This is not the kind of book I thought I would love because I've lately felt I'm a bit too old for 'my life is falling to pieces' novels and also I'm not that keen on "will she find Mr Right?" novels. But I can honestly say that once I started reading Sorrow and Bliss, I literally couldn't put it down. I was up far too late into the night. I read it at odd moments....turns out it's my old friend, the frying onions kind of book. Which is, if you haven't met me saying this before, the sort of story where you hold the book with one hand even while frying onions with the other. It's most spectacularly well- written and deals in part with a wonderful depiction of the relationship between two sisters. I'm very fond of books about sisters because I'm an only child and this one is wonderful. You will laugh. You will cry. You will thank me for pointing you in the direction of this novel.

"Kieran Watts has been dead for over two years when I see him standing on the roof of a building in Shad Thames" says the narrator of this gripping thriller which isn't out till August 5th but which I read in proof. She knows what she's talking about because she killed him. So begins a twisty, atmospheric novel which has at its heart the fear and hatred which can arise when your beloved son come under the influence of someone you believe is truly hateful and evil. The reader is so swept up in the narrative that every shock comes as a real surprise. Your allegiances move around all the time. It's a book about fears, both real and imagined. My advice: read at once because The Heights a natural for TV adaptation and even though dramatisation will add to the visual representation of a London full of glittering high buildings, you won't get the obsessed tunnel vision nearly as well. It's a corker and just the thing for a holiday, at home or abroad.

Linda Newbery

The High House by Jessie Greengrass could perhaps be considered as dystopian science fiction by those who still, in spite of all evidence, don't take the climate emergency seriously, but for those of us who do it's a realistic and terrifying picture of the imminent future. Although it's a huge issue, the focus is on a small cast of characters, centred on Caro and her half-brother Pauly, sent to the house on the Suffolk coast that's been prepared for them as a refuge for when disaster strikes, looked after by the practical Sally and her wise grandfather. Along with the characters we realise how much we take for granted: that there will be light and heat at the flick of a switch, that there will be food available in shops ... and how inadequately we're prepared for survival when supply systems fail. I won't say more, as I'm planning to write a longer review of this engrossing, timely novel.

Like many others, I was mesmerised by Ridley Scott's TV dramatisation of The Terror earlier this year, and decided to read the novel by Dan Simmons too. In both we join the doomed Franklin expedition with the two ships, Erebus and Terror, locked in sea ice as they attempt the forbidding north-west passage. Although the ships were supposedly equipped to over-winter in the ice, crew members begin to fall ill and die from scurvy or lead poisoning, leading to the awful realisation that their tinned food is contaminated and their only hope of survival is to set off with sledges with the aim of reaching help farther south. Qualities of leadership, loyalty, resilience and self-sacrifice are to be found even as conditions become ever more desperate - but also there's malice and rebellion. Both novel and TV drama are spell-binding, though I did wonder whether the lurking presence of a vengeful spirit bear was really necessary. It was certainly used to dramatic effect, but to my mind it was the human interactions, disputes and allegiances in this dire situation that were so compelling.  

For those fascinated by the exploration of the treacherous north-west passage, I also recommend Michael Palin's Erebus - the Story of a Ship.

Miss Benson's Beetle, by Rachel Joyce, is also the tale of a journey of exploration but with a much lighter touch. Fascinated by beetles, disappointed in love by the Professor who has taught her all she knows, and disillusioned with her job teaching domestic science, Margery Benson vows to find the elusive golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for a travelling companion, she ends up with the least suitable person imaginable: Enid Pretty, who arrives in a pink outfit complete with dainty pompom-trimmed shoes, and only the vaguest ideas about beetles or travel - but with the one fixed idea that she must have a baby. All slightly larger than life, the story combines Rachel Joyce's signature warmth and humanity with the dangers of travel and a murder mystery in the background. This reminds me very much of Lissa Evans' Old Baggage, with its wit and humour and the affectionate, often exasperating friendship between women.

Celia Rees

During lockdown, I joined my friend Julia’s book club via Zoom. They had invited me to talk about my novel, Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook and at the end of the discussion they asked if I would like to join them. I accepted readily, welcoming the chance to read books that I might not have read otherwise. One of their choices was The Long Petal of The Sea.

The title is a quotation from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, his description of his homeland as a ‘long petal of sea and wine and snow’. This is an epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents, following the lives of people both real and fictional. It begins in the brutal reality of the Spanish Civil War. A young medic, Victor Dalmar, is on the losing side and is forced to flee with his sister-in-law Roser Bruguer and thousands of others; his brother has been killed, his mother lost in the confusion of the retreat. After a gruelling crossing of the Pyranees, they are interned by a hostile French Government. From here they are rescued with many others, taken on a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to find refuge in Chile.

The novel follows their lives through changing years and circumstances from impoverished beginnings in a new country to successful careers, Victor as a heart surgeon and Roser as a musician, but they are strangers in a strange land and progression is anything but straightforward.

As Victor and Roser settle into their life in Chile, other stories are brought into the narrative. Effortlessly tracking her characters through time and across countries and continents, Allende exquisitely demonstrates the vulnerability of the individual to forces beyond their control, from the cruel exile forced on Victor and Roser by the Spanish Civil War to the defeat of the Allende liberal democracy in Chile and the brutal military dictatorship of Pinochet. This is a powerful novel of identity and belonging, love and loyalty but, above all, the resilience and endurance of the human spirit.

I’ve just finished reading A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. I confess to arriving late to his work, but after reading Notes from an Exhibition and now A Place Called Winter, I’ve joined my fellow Writers Review bloggers as an admirer of this supremely intelligent and sensitive writer.

A Place Called Winter is set in the first decades of the twentieth century and follows the life and adventures of Harry Cane. Discovered in an illicit affair, he is ostracised by his family, exiled from his comfortable metropolitan life, he leaves to start afresh as a homesteader on the prairies of Canada in a place called Winter, a place as bleak and inhospitable as it sounds. Ill equipped in every way, Harry nevertheless survives, more than that he thrives, relishing the physical work, appreciating the beauty of the country, enjoying the rural simplicity of his new life. He finds friendship here in a place where neighbour depends upon neighbour, companionship, a love he hadn’t known before but even in this idyll, old prejudices endure…

This is a novel of great compassion, a celebration of difference, a round and eloquent condemnation of the kind of small-minded prejudice that continues to blight lives.

Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat is one of those books I’ve always meant to read. I’m very interested in his brand of occult psychogeography. He has a deep fascination with London and its dark history from the ancient origins of the City to the outer circuit of the M25. In Lud Heat, he explores the mythical and occult patterns underlying the modern city, detecting invisible lines, a web of pentacles and triangular patterns connecting the East London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor to plague pits and the sites of the Whitechapel and Radcliffe Highway murders. His opaque style is difficult at times but there is a mystery in what he writes and an energy which has inspired and informed the writing of many authors who share his fascination with London and the esoteric from Peter Ackroyd to J. G, Ballard and Hilary Mantel.

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