Guest review by Karen Ball: THE CAZALET CHRONICLES by Elizabeth Jane Howard

"A feat of plotting and plate spinning; it takes a particularly magnificent and often humble skill to craft a series of books on this scale."

Karen Ball is the author of The Little Book Of Sewing, published by Head of Zeus, as well as over 20 children’s and YA books. She writes one of the UK’s leading sewing blogs at Did You Make That and has contributed to The Guardian. She is a Bookseller Rising Star and runs the publishing consultancy, Speckled Pen. Karen lives in Walthamstow with her miniature schnauzer, Ella.

Website: www.speckledpen.com

Twitter: @karenball

Instagram: didyoumakethat

What do The Cazalet Chronicles mean to you?

Until recently, this series of five books meant nothing to me – I didn’t know they existed. I was introduced to them by the author Sally Nicholls, after I mentioned I was researching a novel set in 1939. ‘Oh, you must read The Cazalet Chronicles!’ she told me.

‘What are those?’ I asked.

What, indeed, are The Cazalet Chronicles? Five novels set between 1937 and the 1950s, following the course of a single family. Most commonly, they’re described as saga fiction: historical, multi-generational, gentle books for old ladies, a front cover with a woman standing on a street wearing a shawl. Saga is publishing shorthand for cosy. Is that what Cazalet is?

Yes – and yet they are so much more. The delight of these books is the minutiae woven around the drama. The discomfort of a heavily pregnant body … a nice cup of tea … the tiny limp body of a breach birth … which cuts the butcher has in … how to avoid having sex … knitting … how to have sex … white, cotton gloves … sons lost in the war … hierarchies of grief … picnics and dolls…

A story that stretches across thousands of pages, The Cazalet Chronicles are the opposite of page turners in any modern sense, though they were written in the 1990s – not so very long ago. These are books to sink into, drift with, fall asleep reading on the sofa, knowing that when you wake again, you can lift the pages and start again with barely a hiccup.

They are set before and during the years of the Second World War and span three generations of the same Cazalet family. Multiple perspective. Ensemble cast. A feat of plotting and plate spinning; it takes a particularly magnificent and often humble skill to craft a series of books on this scale.

So why had I never heard of them before? How had I been allowed to overlook them? Howard’s writing occupies a particularly ‘female’ place on the literary stage – you only have to look at those watercolour covers to see which readers publishers think they need. This is a world of sandwiches and still births over war bunkers and bomber planes. The multiple narratives weave around each other, passing on the baton; a fresh loaf of bread has as much significance on the page as a death bed. There is never any authorial comment from Howard; this is life laid bare, all of it, for the reader to judge or not judge. I prefer the latter – after all, any family morality has to stretch fine as gossamer as it floats over the heads of the living and the dead.

So, a family. An invisible author. A series. And a saga. Words that, as a rule, neither critics nor judges rush to write.

‘I’ve allowed myself to lead this little life,’ says Shirley Valentine, in Willy Russell’s play. ‘When inside me there was so much more.’ Howard wrote both – the small and the momentous. I guess five books worth of artful juggling wasn’t enough for some. But oh, they are enough for me. I hope, whether small or big, I lead a long life. Long enough to re-read The Cazalet Chronicles at least twice over.

What do you say? A drop of milk in your tea?

The Cazalet Chronicles are published by Pan Books.

Guest review by Tony Bradman - THE PASSAGE trilogy by Justin Cronin

Tony Bradman has written books for children of all ages. His most recent titles are Anglo-Saxon Boy (Walker), Revolt Against the Romans (Bloomsbury Education) and The Greatest Stories Ever Told, illustrated by Tony Ross (Orchard).

Is it me, or is there still a general air of snootiness about genre fiction in our literary culture? An implicit belief that if a novel features an apocalyptic plot or vampires then it can’t have any literary merit? We could add accessible prose to the charge-sheet, and stories with lots of jeopardy, terrific action sequences and memorable dialogue. To some critics I’m sure that all seems rather, well… vulgar.

I’ve always found that attitude to be enormously irritating, so I’m pleased to say Justin Cronin’s trilogy of doorstep-sized novels make it look as narrow-minded as it really is. His trilogy - The Passage, The Twelve and The City of Mirrors - is an apocalyptic novel with vampires, but it also has enormous literary merit. It explores character and relationships, it has intimacy and grandeur, melancholy and joy. There are passages of technical explanation any writer of science-fiction or thrillers would be proud of, but also moments of genuine lyricism that will linger in the mind. I bought each volume in hardback as they appeared, and was utterly gripped.

The premise does combine several familiar genre tropes. A rogue element of the US government sets in motion a secret project to develop super-soldiers with hugely enhanced physical powers and a capacity for instant self-healing. The catalyst for these changes is a virus discovered in a rare species of Colombian bats, and the first test subjects are a dozen death-row convicts, men who are offered the chance of life if they ‘volunteer’ for the project. But the scientists, government agents and military men seriously underestimate what the virus can do - the convicts are turned into giant vampires who are virtually invulnerable. The inevitable break-out occurs, the test subjects escaping from a secret laboratory - and the apocalypse soon follows.

And what an apocalypse it is, an almost complete extermination of the human race. The original twelve vampires kill thousands, but also spread the virus in order to create more vampires who are like them - and who will be under their control. Before long only small pockets of survivors remain, their outposts dotted across America and completely cut off from each other. But from the beginning we know there is hope. The bad guys - and this is a measure of just how evil they are - also infect a six-year-old girl called Amy with the virus thinking that she won’t turn out to be so dangerous. They’re right - she gains some powers yet doesn’t lose her humanity, although they can never imagine the role Amy will have in the long-term future of our species.

I should point out that Justin Cronin doesn’t tell his enormous tale in a strict chronological sequence. The Passage does begin at the beginning, setting up the premise, introducing the twelve convicts, Amy, and some other key characters. But it quickly leaps 92 years, telling the story of one of the outposts and its people, the descendants of refugees. The storylines in both The Twelve and The City of Mirrors then move backwards and forwards in time, filling in more background detail in the lives of important characters, setting up clues and foreshadowing events to come. All, is resolved at the conclusion of the final book - the stories of individual characters as well as the ultimate fate of the human race a thousand years after the catastrophe.

The trilogy weighs in at something like 800,000 words, and by my reckoning that’s about six-or-seven-novels-worth of material. I was going to say that this puts it on a Tolstoyan scale, but in many respects it’s even bigger that. There’s a huge cast of characters too, many of whom could easily have whole novels devoted to them. But you never get them confused with other characters, or forget what their place is in the overall tale, and that has to be a testament to the sheer craft of Justin Cronin. He manages it all with great aplomb; I was gripped by it all, often re-reading sections.

It’s difficult to convey the sheer quality of the whole thing - until you read it for yourself you’ll have to take my word for it. The trilogy has been very successful in terms of sales, and film rights were bought by Ridley Scott before the first book was published, although now it seems likely to be made into series for television by HBO. If that happens, then I think it could do for the apocalyptic novel what the Game of Thrones adaptation has done for fantasy fiction, ie proved that it’s best done on epic scale on screen as well as in print. And don’t forget, you heard that here first.

The Passage trilogy is published by Orion.