Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THE NEEDLE'S EYE by Margaret Drabble

 

"A master of her craft."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

I admired Margaret Drabble’s work so much that I read each of her novels, one after the other, through my late teenage years. Eventually, in 1972, the year The Needle’s Eye was first published, her sixth novel, I married and took myself off to the West Coast of Scotland, burying myself in the Highlands while I raised twins. I don’t think I have read anything from her since then. Then, last year on my birthday, one of those twins, my daughter, gave me The Needle’s Eye as a present. It took a while to reach the top of my reading pile but eventually it got there and I devoured it!

Reading her for the first time in fifty-odd years I was struck how different her writing is from my memory of it. In the 70’s I read each novel almost as a thriller. I couldn’t put them down. I had totally forgotten the reflective pace of her work, the many words used to set the scene. But then, this novel is a world away from our shiny, frenetic pace of life today. It is the world of my youth, of draughts, knitting children’s jumpers, coal dust, washing up at the sink, not possessing a car. It was a world where sexual equality was a toddler, constantly falling over. It was also a world where I was thirsty for literature.

Fifty years on, it took me a few pages to get into The Needle’s Eye. I found myself impatient for ‘something to happen’. Had I really galloped through her books in my twenties? If so, what a lot I had missed, and yet, I remember stopping to read a word, a phrase, a sentence several times, sometimes aloud to savour the taste of it, thrilled to read a master at work. The truth is, half a century on, one is not the same person. I couldn’t possibly read it as if I were twenty. But then I relaxed and decided to read with no prior expectations, as if I’d never read any of Margaret Drabble’s work. And the miracle happened. The long, slow unwinding of the plot that demands you attend to the depth of her writing. There it is, and it felt like coming home.

Rose marries against her parents wishes and renounces her inheritance. Her marriage is difficult and she eventually separates from Christopher. When she meets Simon, an unhappily married barrister, they become friends and he is able to give her legal advice. He can’t understand why she insists on living in a run down street. Is she simply stubborn? As he gets to know her better he admires her more. She fights for her children, distraught that she might lose them. She wishes to live a real life, as other people do, not a life of privilege. Her family and estranged husband might view her intransigence as stubborn foolishness but Simon eventually sees the real depth of her character.

Margaret Drabble is a master of her craft. I love the way she can paint a brief picture of something that will have little effect on the story but which lives with me, long after I have finished the book. The woman in a shop, telling of the pram cover she was knitting, rather than getting on with the purchase. The boat, seen out at sea, then glanced at again, closer in, and then, when only the author is left to see, it disembarks several disorientated men who scuttle away. We are left to wonder whether they are perhaps refugees, or illegal migrants of one sort or another. They are part of a different story, one that has not been told, at least not in this book. Each time, these glimpses of other lives enrich the novel, giving it a depth that remains unexpected, every time it happens.

In contrast, we get enough detail about Simon and Rose to feel we know them very well from their thoughts as well as their decisions, although there will always be things about them we will never know, things maybe they don’t know themselves.

There are a few later novels from this writer that I have never read. I now want to revisit The Millstone, one I have read before, but also I will find one that I can come to honestly fresh. Thank you, lovely daughter, for reintroducing me to a writer I didn’t know how much I had missed!

The Needle's Eye is published by Canongate.

More reviews by Cindy:

The Master by Colm Toibin  

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

Guest review by Jon Appleton: MEMORIAL by Bryan Washington

 

"Memorial is about the impossibilities of love as well as its opportunities ... sometimes tragic, often very funny, always true."

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

Just when Benson and Mike consider their relationship has run its course, but are afraid to call it quits (for the reasons that keep couples together), two significant things happen to Mike.

His mother, Mitsuko, arrives from Japan for a visit while his estranged father lays dying in Osaka (Mike is Japanese-American). Mike flees his life in Houston, Texas, leaving Ben with Mitsuko. Something big has already happened to Ben, before he met Mike, which we discover halfway through the story – something he has learned to accommodate but not entirely.

The first part of Memorial is narrated by Ben and deals with his experiences at work, with his friends and family, and his new unlikely flatmate, the dour and laconic mother-in-law. Ben adjusts to living without Mike in their apartment but can he move on without Mike in his life?

The second part of the novel is from Mike’s point of view in Japan. Whereas Ben’s paragraphs are bite-size and brittle (his voice is caustic at times), Mike’s are longer, more elliptical. It is through Mike we learn the story of their coming together and their falling apart.

As his father’s health deteriorates, Mike must take charge of the restaurant he runs – ironically, poignantly, the restaurant is named after his former wife. Mike negotiates new relationships with customers and staff and, like Ben, is offered the chance of new love. But he faces his lover’s dilemma: what does he want?

In the third section, Mike returns to Texas and both men have to make decisions – or do they?

Memorial is about the impossibilities of love as well as its opportunities. The novel challenges the foundations on which we construct our adult lives (including how we re-cast our parents). It poses the question: what is home? Mike writes:

‘I used to wonder what Ma meant when I asked her about Japan, because I could only remember so much of that shit from when I was younger, and she’d tell me it was different from home, but also the same. It was her home, not mine. But it was still home. Whatever that means.’

He also suggests that ‘You shouldn’t make a home out of other people’; people change, but ‘you’re stuck in whatever your idea of home was.’ He says this to his new lover, who doesn’t think it’s a problem. ‘We’ll all have plenty of homes in this life. It’s when you don’t that there’s an issue. That’s settling.’ Another acquaintance challenges Mike’s right to claim Japan as home: ‘But you’re not from here. You get to leave.’

For all his bluster, Ben is equally flummoxed. He tries to pin their projected break-up on Mike but Mitsuko is having none of it.

‘So Mike’s going home, I say and Mitsuko looks my way.

You could also say he’s leaving it, she says.’

Words trip over each other in quickfire banter. The novel brilliantly shows how language gets in the way of how we act and feel. Parents and children tiptoe round each other, wary of causing offence and intruding but equally wanting to make their bedrock beliefs crystal clear.

The novel is full of truisms, line after line, but in Washington’s hands they are never trite but malleable. Early in the book, Mike says, ‘Just because something isn’t working doesn’t mean it’s broken. You just have to want to fix it.’ Easy, right? Can you fault the logic of ‘We take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life’? Other arguments include: is good enough good enough? What about the policy that if something happens we deal with it? Words can be both weapons and shields.

Sometimes, you forget how people are, Mike suggests. And then they remind you. But there are some things you can never forget. Ben, an African-American, is all too aware of hard-line and casual racism. Both men acutely sensitive to homophobia. This is America in 2021 – this is life.

Memorial is sometimes tragic, often very funny, always true. A vital novel, which I’m so glad I’ve read and happily recommend.

------

Memorial is published by Atlantic Books.

Jon is a regular reviewer here. Read more of his choices:

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

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.

MILLER'S VALLEY by Anna Quindlen reviewed by Adèle Geras

Anna Quindlen is an American writer who ought to be much better known in this country. Her last novel, STILL LIFE WITH BREADCRUMBS, is very good indeed and I will be posting a review I wrote of it from my own website very soon.

This book is the last novel I read and it impressed me hugely, moved me and made me realise how very restful it is to read a book that is a) beautifully written b) quite devoid of stylistic tricks or special effects c) quite small and limited in its scale while encompassing so many emotions and d) so much in tune with the normal run of the  daily life of ordinary people.

We exist in families. We have houses. Those houses are in communities, large and small. We live in the city or the country or a small town, but wherever we come from, what we remember of the place where we were children is in our DNA. For me,  for example. Jerusalem is imprinted in my mind like nowhere else, even though I stopped living there when I was five.

The eponymous Miller's Valley is home to the Miller family which has been there for generations. Now, it's about to be flooded in a government plan to develop the area. The inhabitants will be compensated and moved to higher ground. Natural floods do occur in Miller's Valley  and our narrator,  Mimi, has lived through  quite devastating ones.

She tells us about her life. Her parents, her brothers, (one who returned from Vietnam a changed person) her best friend, LaRhonda, her aunt Ruth, her mother's sister, who lives in a house on the Miller property and is severely agoraphobic.   We meet her teacher. We learn to find our way round the streets of the town. We follow Mimi from childhood, through her teenage years and on to college and a career. Her love life, her disappointments, her triumphs: Quindlen brings them so vividly to life that you feel you are yourself, as a reader, inhabiting the town, sharing in its doings and privileged to be the  confidante of such a careful, kind and sympathetic narrator. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Mimi. At the end of the book the valley is indeed under water and we knew this was going to happen from the first page, but Quindlen has put in a last-minute surprise that leaves the reader stunned and looking back at everything they've learned so far with entirely different eyes. 

This is a beautiful novel and if it's not on the Bailey's Prize shortlist next year, I will be very disappointed. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.