Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: WHEN THE DUST SETTLES by Lucy Easthope

 

"For the lay reader this is an extraordinary book. For a writer it is gold."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series at Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. More recently she has written fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies. Her first title under that name, The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan, was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne. Both titles are set during the English Civil Wars.

I don’t usually review non-fiction. Not because I don’t read it. I read a lot for research but perhaps that’s it. I tend to review the novels I read for relaxation, while non fiction, however interesting, for some reason gets lumped with work, which is very unfair. This book, by Lucy Easthope, has propelled me out of my curmudgeonly attitude and made me determined to review more of the excellent non-fiction out there. In addition, this book would be a brilliant resource for many novelists. How could I not review it?

I came across Lucy Easthope’s name when I saw she had been booked to appear at our local Stroud book festival in November 2022. The strapline on the book is “Stories of love, loss and hope from an expert in disaster.” That intrigued me, and I booked tickets. It was electrifying! Lucy is a very engaging person. Cheerful, and yes…funny; a great speaker and absolutely devoted to her career in disaster management. But there’s much more to her than that, and she also seemed comfortable in referring occasionally to the ups and downs in her personal life. I learnt a lot that evening and my partner queued afterwards to buy a book and get it signed. I asked if I could borrow it some time but for that most prosaic of reasons, forgetfulness, it just didn’t happen. A year drifted by, then one day I happened to notice the book on his table.

“Oh! I meant to read that,” I said. “I’m going away on a writer’s retreat soon. Do you mind if I borrow it now?” And so I did.

Lucy Easthope has an engaging style and I was instantly hooked. She was telling me so much that I didn’t know. What a disaster expert is, for starters. And, chillingly, what the dust in the title can refer to. So much important work is done, even months and years after a disaster, analysing the dust created in a disaster such as the twin towers in the USA. Loved ones left behind want and need a body to say farewell to, but of course this is often impossible. DNA testing of such dust and fragments can result in tiny particles being found and identified long after the initial trauma has passed. Families are left with the horrific prospect of receiving minute amounts of matter several times, sometimes years apart. Then they have to decide whether to have yet another funeral to honour the person they loved and lost. One thing Easthope feels very strongly is that the people left behind have to be considered much more. What is vital to her is to help a person and a community to begin to recover, or at least start to move forwards.

In the hours and days after a disaster, whether a plane crash, a tsunami, a terrorist attack or a fire, multiple agencies swing into action. Police, ambulance workers, firemen, and all the science that goes with police work in a crime scene. We are all used to seeing these people on our TV screens and I had known that these things are rehearsed from time to time. Now I was reading an expert’s account of how what happens afterwards can make or break the recovery of those left behind. A blood-smeared cinema ticket could mean the world to someone who has almost nothing else to remember their loved one by. Such things, rather than being maudlin, can comfort, in the knowledge that the person was doing what they loved just before they died.

The blurb on the flyleaf of the this book tells us just how experienced Lucy Easthope is. She is the UK’s leading authority on recovering from disaster. From the 2004 Tsunami, 9/11, the 7/ 7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, Grenfell and the Covid 19 pandemic; she is the one who has answered the call, packed her bag and gone to support everyone involved. She holds authorities and government to account. She lets us see into the briefing rooms, how politics can get in the way and how simple thoughtlessness, or lack of understanding can make it so much harder for those left behind to begin to turn towards recovery. I am writing this during the Covid 19 enquiry. I have no doubt that Lucy Easthope will figure somewhere, unknown to most of us but vital to the process. For this was the overdue disaster, the one we really should have been ready for and weren’t.

For the lay reader this is an extraordinary book. For a writer it is gold. Between the pages we have an insight into exactly what goes on during, after and long after a disaster has happened. Any thriller writer who has a disaster in their plot would be well advised to read it.

I couldn’t take it in one breathless sitting. Occasionally it almost became tedious in the awful inevitability of what happens over and over again, although every disaster is also unique. But I was drawn back to it after a short break and never felt like abandoning her story. I simply had to read it to the end, and then sit and ponder.

Her matter of fact style helps to stop what she says ever being sensational or overwhelmingly ghastly. But we are dealing here with torn bodies and traumatised people. The people who pick up the pieces are so often heroic and almost broken by what they do. That Lucy Easthope is still standing is a testament to her desire as a young child, growing up near Hillsborough, to help, and she does this in spite of her own issues. We can thank her for thinking about us so carefully, and seeing through experience what works best to help us recover. We can all hope that a disaster never engulfs us, but if it does, she will be there somewhere: in the notes the recovery workers study, in the plans she has drawn up and usually in person, whether in a pop-up mortuary or a warm and welcoming place for families to gather. She strives to make sure the materials are there to ensure the proper collection and labelling of the remains of lives, so that eventually, those left behind can grieve and begin their own recovery. Little do we know how much we need her - so thank you, Lucy Easthope.

When the Dust Settles is published by Hodder.

THE HIGH HOUSE by Jessie Greengrass, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"A disastrous near future that could be the day after tomorrow..."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers of all ages, winning the Costa Children's Book Prize with her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her latest title is non-fiction: This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living. She is currently working on a new adult novel.

When I think of the hot summer days of childhood, my memories are of a paddling pool in the garden, adults resting in the shade, the jingling tune of the ice-cream van; maybe a day at the seaside and sunburned skin in the days before we knew to take more care. We enjoyed it while it lasted, before the heat disintegrated into a thunderstorm and the days became cooler. Now the feeling is different, threatening. What if temperatures continue to rise and become unbearable? What would be the effect on wild animals, vegetation, crop-growing, and even human ability to survive? What if huge areas of the world become uninhabitable?

In The Great Derangement, recently reviewed on this blog by Jane Rogers, Amitav Ghosh asks why literary fiction so comprehensively ignores the climate emergency, the most pressing issue of our times, and why those novels that do deal with it tend to be sidelined into genre fiction. His book was published five years ago. Since then we've seen Richard Powers' The Overstory deservedly shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Melissa Harrison wrote in The Guardian that "the 'cli-fi'  genre is growing exponentially – no surprise, given the coming crisis. In fact, as an artist in any medium it can feel self-indulgent, in 2021, to be making work about anything else."

Now here's another novel that puts climate breakdown centre stage, set in a disastrous near future that could be the day after tomorrow. Although to climate change deniers it could be seen as science fiction, the sense of foreboding in the early section of the novel - flooding, changes in the seasons, dangerous cyclones, migration patterns disrupted - is all too familiar to anyone seriously concerned about human impact on the planet. 

With its focus on a group of isolated survivors, the novel reminds me of Robert C O'Brien's Z for Zachariah and Edwin Muir's haunting poem, The Horses. The High House is located somewhere unspecified on the east coast of England (the nearby church with its carved angels and the shifting of the coast and river call to mind Blythburgh and Dunwich). Unknown to teenaged Caro, her stepmother and father have been meticulously preparing this house as a refuge for when disaster strikes; stepmother Francesca, environmentalist and climate campaigner, is more aware than most that the ways of life we take for granted cannot endure. "She didn't have the habit that the rest of us were learning, of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures: that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmasses and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless uneventful round. And the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn't speak about at all."*

Just before he and Francesca are lost in a violent cyclone that hits Florida, where Francesca is speaking at a conference, Caro's father tells her to take her toddler stepbrother Pauly to the High House, urgently. Caro resents Francesca for neglecting Pauly in favour of campaigning, but becomes equally critical of herself for devoting herself to him as a means of shutting off from the catastrophic wider situation. Arriving, Caro is surprised to find the house already inhabited and grounds well-tended, by the practical Sal and her wise grandfather, Grandy, recruited as custodians by the prescient Francesca. When the floodwater comes, inundating the village and drastically changing the shape of the land, this little group is safe on its bulwark, carefully husbanding their resources, growing crops, keeping chickens, preserving fruit and vegetables. We move into a future where the rest of the world seems to have disappeared; as Pauly matures and is given his own viewpoint, we realise what limitations these young people have accepted, and how they must cope without medical treatment beyond what they can provide for themselves.

The novel is saved from bleakness by the immersion in daily lives, the tenderness between Caro and Pauly, Sal and her grandfather, the small satisfactions of daily life and self-sufficiency and even moments of joy. But it's a stark warning too: how we take for granted that there will be power at the flick of a switch, food available in shops or delivered to our door, "that vast net which, invisible, imperceptible, held us up," and how ill-equipped we'd be for survival if these systems failed. It's also a hymn to the natural world and a reminder of how much we face losing if we continue to behave as if the Earth's resources were infinite. "You think that you have time," Grandy says. "And then all at once you don't."

The High House is published by Swift Press.

The Bolinda unabridged Audiobook is narrated by Mariam Abu-Hejleh, Sam Newton and Camilla Rockley.

* I listened to the Audiobook, so the punctuation and sentence breaks in these quotations may differ from those in the print edition.

See also: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, reviewed by Jane Rogers

The Overstory by Richard Powers, reviewed by Tracey Mathias

TOUCHING THE VOID by Joe Simpson, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of giddy exhilaration ..."

Linda Newbery has written many novels for young readers and one for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (published in paperback as Missing Rose). Her Victorian Gothic young adult novel, Set in Stone, was children's category winner in the Costa Book Awards. She is currently working on a new novel and completing a non-fiction title which will be published this year. 

Just looking at that cover is enough to make my stomach lurch in fear. But, although my own experience is limited to walking to easy summits with at most a little rock-scrambling, I love the lure of mountains and am fascinated by the courage and single-mindedness, even fanaticism, of those who tackle forbidding heights.

I read Joe Simpson's account of his extraordinary near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes many years ago, and have seen the Kevin Macdonald film. This time I listened on Audible, and although obviously I knew the outcome - and so does everyone, as here's Joe Simpson writing about it - I was as gripped as on my first reading.

The facts of what happened on the slopes of Siula Grande are well known far beyond mountaineering circles. With climbing partner Simon Yates, Joe completes the ascent of the treacherous, previously unclimbed, 4,500-foot West Face of the mountain. Shortly after they begin to descend, Joe falls, fracturing his leg and driving his tibia through his knee. With conditions worsening, no fuel for their stove and no food left, they attempt to descend quickly to the glacier, Simon supporting his partner on a rope from above, but he inadvertently lowers Joe over a sheer drop. Knowing that both are in mortal danger, and slipping from a snow ledge himself, Simon cuts the rope, sending Joe to (as he presumes) his death.

Joe Simpson has always made it clear that he doesn't blame Yates; it seems to be climbers' ethos that anyone in that dreadful situation would do the same. But Joe, instead of falling to his death, plunges into a crevasse, landing on a snow bridge. Astonished at still being alive he finds himself in darkness and extreme cold, with frostbitten fingers, a fathomless drop beneath him, an excruciating injury, fading torch battery and no provisions … Yet against fearsome odds he slowly extricates himself, facing then a long, agonised crawl over glacier and boulder fields before reaching the relative safety of base camp. Even then - will he reach camp (itself the height of Mont Blanc, and two days' rough walking from the nearest village) before Simon and their waiting colleague Richard depart for Lima, as surely they will, with no reason to wait? It says much for the skill of the writing that even though Joe obviously does make it, tension remains high. 

Whether your knowledge of climbing paraphernalia and techniques is greater or less than mine, it's a mesmerising read. A large part of the appeal is that while describing his 25-year-old self in retrospect as "bold, ambitious, or even a little crazy ... too much testosterone and too little imagination," Joe Simpson is also frank about his feelings of weakness and despair. Though loth to let Simon see how scared he is at particularly dangerous moments of the ascent - his tough, capable persona must be maintained - to us he lets the mask slip. It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of exhilaration. There is so much I could pick out, but I’ll just give these samples:

On reaching the summit: "I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious - a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me ... the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical and frightening conclusion."

After the first fall: "We both knew the truth, it was very simple. I was injured and unlikely to survive. Simon could get down alone. While I waited on his actions, it felt as if I was holding something terrifyingly fragile and precious." Simon could, he realises, simply leave him there to die.

When he emerges from the crevasse and realises that his struggle is far from over: “I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact … If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse … In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices … I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength.”

In a new epilogue, following the making of the film, Joe wonders what course his life would have taken without his Siula Grande experience, concluding that he’d have looked for more and more extreme challenges and probably killed himself in the process, as many of his peers have. Instead, although he continued climbing, the international success of Touching the Void launched a career as writer and speaker.

I think I’ll continue my armchair mountaineering with another Joe Simpson memoir, This Game of Ghosts. Who else can’t resist mountain books? What do you recommend?

Touching the Void is published by Vintage.

The Audiobook is read by Daniel Weyman (Joe) and Andrew Wincott (Simon), with an introduction by Chris Bonington.

See also: Linda Newbery's review of a ghostly mountaineering novel, Michelle Paver's Thin Air.

FIRST ANNIVERSARY guest post by Tracy Chevalier: THE OPTICIAN OF LAMPEDUSA by Emma-Jane Kirby

It's our birthday! We are a year old this week. Huge thanks to all the guest contributors who make this possible by lending us their time, expertise and enthusiasms - we wouldn't be able to do it without their willing help. Special thanks to this week's guest, Tracy Chevalier, for helping us to mark the occasion. Her brilliant novel Remarkable Creatures was our very first review, and we're delighted to welcome her now in person with this timely recommendation.

"The most moving and important book I’ve read in the past year..."

Tracy Chevalier FRSL is the author of nine novels. She is best known for the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into 39 languages, sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and made into a film. Her most recent books are the historical novel At the Edge of the Orchard, and New Boy, a retelling of Othello for the Shakespeare Project. She is President of the Royal Literary Fund, a Trustee of the British Library, former Chair of the Society of Authors, and holds honorary degrees from her alma maters, Oberlin College and the University of East Anglia. She grew up in Washington DC and in 1984 moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son.

The most moving and important book I’ve read in the past year is The Optician of Lampedusa by the journalist Emma-Jane Kirby. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction other than for research purposes; I’ve often found it slow-going and worthy, as if a determined lecturer is trying to force information into me. This book is different: short, urgent, devastating. Kirby first came across the story and reported it on BBC Radio 4. Now she has turned it into a clear, simply written true tale for our time. I read it in two hours and it will stay with me for life.

A few years ago an ordinary, unnamed optician who lives on the small island of Lampedusa off the coast of Sicily went on a fishing trip for a couple of days with his wife and six friends. One morning they woke to distant sounds of distress, and discovered that close by a boat full of migrants and refugees crossing from North Africa had sunk. The waters were churning with over 500 people struggling to stay afloat. The book describes in detail how the optician and his friends scrambled to rescue 47 people, pulling them onto a boat designed to hold only 10. If you have ever wondered how you might respond to an extreme crisis, the optician and his friends provide a model of how to connect with your vital inner humanitarianism.

The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of that harrowing experience and the group’s struggle with the resulting psychological trauma. Having thought little about migrants and refugees until then, they developed great concern for the people they rescued, and later managed to meet with them, in a heartfelt reunion. It is a lesson in how specific stories change people’s views of a general crisis.

The optician is realistic about the effect the influx of refugees has had on Lampedusa’s community and resources, but reveals a new understanding of what it means for people to risk so much to get to Europe and a new life.

Many of us have spent a lot of time talking about the refugee crisis without having any real experience of it. Whatever our views, most are unlikely ever to meet a refugee, much less save them from drowning. The Optician of Lampedusa makes concrete and personal what has been an abstraction. Once you’ve read it you’ll feel like a crucial piece of the jigsaw – the human piece – has been filled in. For that reason, it is a must-read.

The Optician of Lampedusa is published by Or Books.