Guest review by Peter Crawley: THE JOURNAL OF HÉLÈNE BERR: a Young Jewish Woman's Life in Occupied Paris, translated from French by David Bellos

 

"The beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil."

Peter studied social, political and economic geography, and later languages at The Goethe Institut in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. Having written aural histories, obituaries and magazine articles throughout his life, in 2011 he returned to writing full-time. His first published novel, Mazzeri, about the shaman of Corsica, was published by Troubador in 2013. Subsequent works include Ontreto (Lipari, Sicily), Boarding House Reach (Norfolk), The Wind Between Two Worlds (London), The Truth in Fiction (short stories), What you Don’t Know About Me (a novella), and Constant Tides (Messina, Sicily), which has been translated into Italian. Theo’s Voice, a story of aphasia, is his latest work. Peter’s interests include listening to and researching personal histories and landscapes, believing that both our epoch and our surroundings shape us as much as our DNA. He lives in Midhurst, West Sussex, with his wife, Carol, and is currently writing a second novel set in Lipari, Sicily.

These days, if one was to lose an hour or two to the second-hand bookstalls of the Left Bank, or an afternoon to the gentle majesty of the Jardins de Tuileries, one might be forgiven for thinking le vieux Paris was forever thus – light of heart, perhaps even carefree. Yet the city was not always so.

In June 1940, Hélène Berr was nineteen when the German Army marched down the Champs-Élysées; she was studying English language and literature at the Sorbonne where, later, she was awarded the coveted Diplôme d’Études Supérieures for her thesis on ‘Shakespeare’s Interpretation of Roman History’. Born into a middle-class, secular Jewish family, Hélène was what some would have called strong-willed and others independent. Her father, a former artillery lieutenant wounded in the First World War, was deputy chairman of a major chemical and industrial group, and, as such, Raymond Berr was deemed by the Nazis to be a person of use, which meant his family were afforded protected status; a status that endured only until they were deported on the 27th of March 1944, Hélène’s twenty-third birthday. Two years earlier, the young woman had begun a diary, in which she recorded the passage of twists and turns that led her to that wretched day; a diary she deposited, often only pages at a time, with Andrée Bardieu, the cook who had remained in her father’s employ for more than half a century.

The first page of Hélène’s Journal, as it has become known in David Bellos’ brilliantly empathic translation, finds her wandering down the Avenue Victor Hugo, her thoughts consumed with the challenges of falling out of love with Gérard and in love with Jean, both of whom subsequently fled the country to join Free French Forces and in doing so survived the war. What these entries don’t tell us, however, is that by this time Hélène was working for the L’Entraide Temporaire, a clandestine organization committed to saving Jewish children from deportation. A letter to her sister, written on the day Hélène was arrested, reveals her use of codewords – Henri for her father; Minnie for her mother, Gaston Bébert for police station, Marcel for the police – and many of the entries describe her shepherding orphaned children to safety, while disguising their true destination. The narrative is almost poetic in its flow and the writing of the highest quality, yet the beauty in this in many ways tragic journal is the awakening of spirit, the blossoming of defiance and the hardening of determination not to be beaten by the ranks of evil, both foreign and domestic.

Some would call Hélène’s Journal a rite of passage through a dystopian landscape in which Jewish adults, adolescents and children were considered less than human and therefore treated inhumanely; I would call it an awakening, if not a clarion call. And to those who turn a tin ear to the Holocaust, I would say read this story of a young woman’s resistance – a resistance both physical and intellectual – and rage that one so talented, so compassionate and courageous, should be taken from the world before her time.

Much of her Journal is given over to philosophy and reflection, to the agonies and ecstasies of adolescence, and to the price one pays for being both ordinary and otherwise. Hélène understood her life was soon to end, and in one passage reasons that after death one lives on, if only in the memory of those still living. Now, because of her Journal, the name Hélène Berr will live on and remind us how truly fortunate we are to be light of heart and carefree.

There are three other exceptional books that deserve mention: the first is Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), a fascinating and meticulously researched account of how the women of the city ‘lived, loved and died’ through the occupation; the second is Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Vintage) which, although classified as fiction, provides a stark reminder of what it took to survive; and the third is A Life In Secrets (Abacus), Sarah Helm’s exceptional history of ‘Vera Atkins and the lost agents of the Special Operations Executive’, in which we come to know the women, and some of the men, parachuted into France during the Second World War, the majority of whom were never to return. Neither Irène Némirovsky nor Hélène Berr lived to see the war’s end; both were murdered, brutally, by the Nazis.

Like so many, their names must never be forgotten.

The Journal of Hélène Berr is published by MacLehose Press. The French edition is published by Tallandier.

Peter's latest novel, Theo's Voice, is published by Troubador

WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"One of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Having published widely for young readers, with titles including the Costa category winner Set in Stone, she is now writing adult fiction. Her most recent novel, The One True Thing, was one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing last April; it will be followed by The Hide this autumn. 

This is one of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader, and the effects of climate change on landscape and wildlife at its core.

The setting is a remote island, Shearwater, based on Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica. A research team has been forced to abandon its project because of rising sea levels; central to this work is a subterranean seedbank designed to last far into the future, but now threatened with flooding. Various disasters, slowly revealed, have left the Salt family - father Dom, teenagers Raff and Fen and nine-year-old Orly - as the sole inhabitants of an old lighthouse until a shipwreck survivor, Rowan, is rescued from the sea. Deliberate sabotage of the communication equipment has left the islanders unable to summon help from the mainland; they can only wait for the evacuation ship to arrive in six weeks' time.

At first it's uncertain that Rowan will survive. Nursed by the family, she does, but both she and they are hiding secrets. Why did she set out for the island? What is Dominic hiding in the underground vault? How did his wife die, and what has disturbed Fen so much that she can't sleep indoors?

The seedbank gives a focus on all that's threatened and is a powerful metaphor for the intensive crop farming we already depend on. Time and space make it impossible to save all the seeds - but which should be prioritised? Those already known to be food crops? Those that are fire-resistant? Those whose qualities are as yet unknown? Rowan sees the terrible dilemma this poses: "how to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favour of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland."

There are plenty of thrills, twists and revelations, but what made this such a compelling book for me is its focus on landscape, weather and climate adaptation.  The black sands where the seals breed, watched over by Fen, are disappearing under rising tides; Rowan has experienced the devastating loss by fire of a house and land she had come to love. But there are glorious moments too, including an episode where these characters achieve the seemingly-impossible rescue of a beached humpbacked whale and her calf.

Strong characterisation and a range of viewpoints bring us close to each character in turn: to Dom, who cares passionately for his children and believes himself to be haunted by his dead wife; to the teenagers, who've known little else but solitary island life; to nine-year-old Orly, drawn to Rowan as a substitute mother; to Rowan herself, who at first sees the future only as bleak: 'everything will be drowned, burned or starved' as the climate becomes increasingly inhospitable. Later, through her involvement with the family, she (with the reader) begins to see possibilities for them all when they leave Shearwater. But nothing is certain in this dangerous, changing world. The sinuous plot keeps us hooked to the end of this story with heart and soul as well as thrills. 

Wild Dark Shore is published by Canongate.

More cli-fi:

Q&A with Jane Rogers about her short story collection, Fire-Ready

Q&A with Alison Layland about After the Clearances

Riverflow by Alison Layland

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

The Overstory by Richard Powers, reviewed by Tracey Mathias

Guest review by Jane Rogers: STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

"I first read Stone Yard Devotional in great greedy gulps. It is intense and nakedly personal, and left me wanting more on every page."

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, most recently of Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day which was a Radio 4 afternoon play. She has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her new short story collection Fire-Ready, in which several of the stories are about the climate emergency now or in the future, is now available in paperback. For more information, see Jane's website.

I first read Stone Yard Devotional in great greedy gulps. It is intense and nakedly personal, and left me wanting more on every page. Afterwards I re-read it more slowly, with my writer’s head on, trying to work out how Charlotte Wood has made this, her seventh novel, so compelling.

At first glance it’s not riveting subject matter. A burnt-out environmental activist goes on retreat to a small religious community in rural New South Wales, near the town where she grew up. She then decides to stay there permanently.

If you were to pitch this idea to a publisher, I wouldn’t fancy your chances.

But the novel is, as they say, unputdownable, and has won accolades around the world including shortlisting for last year's Booker prize.

The unnamed narrator is initially bemused by the nuns’ prayers and psalms: ‘The words seem to make no sense. There’s a lot about evil-doers trying to destroy the psalm’s narrator. All day long they crush me. All this warbled by a bunch of nuns way out here on the high, dry Monaro plains, far from anywhere.’ Her critical observations of life in the nunnery are intercut with memories of her beloved parents and her grief at their early deaths.

Three events disrupt monastic life. The first is a plague of mice, caused by a drought in the north. First they nest in the piano; soon they have eaten all the electrical wiring and infested every room, to the point that nuns are emptying traps every hour and an excavator has to be brought in to dig a pit deep enough for the stinking corpses and the layers of lime which must cover them. ‘Opening the car door now takes mettle. Yesterday I lowered myself too heavily into the seat and felt a squirming sensation at my back that made me roar and hurl myself from the vehicle … A dozen mice exploded into the air from behind the cushion.’

The second is the discovery of the bones of Sister Jenny, who had gone missing after leaving the convent to work in a women’s refuge in Thailand. Covid shutdowns complicate the return of her remains, and her coffin is accompanied back by the third disruptor, Helen Parry. Now an internationally famous climate activist, and the convent’s most celebrated former member, Helen Parry is returning to her home town to visit her dying mother.

The tension between activism and retreat from the world is a vital thread running through the novel. Early on the narrator quotes to herself, firstly from Joan Baez: Action is the antidote to despair. And then in opposition, from Hippocrates, First, do no harm. She chronicles the harm done by even the most well-intentioned of activists (‘Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat, etc’ ), and develops real respect for the nuns’ spiritual work; their slow careful observation, the depth of their attention. I was reminded of Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman: ‘Attention must be paid.’

Other threads include mothers and daughters (the narrator was close to her earth-loving, honest, kindly mother; Helen Parry was beaten in public by hers, who spent long intervals in the local asylum, while Helen was left to bring herself up.)

In an interview for Literary Hub Wood says, ‘I realised early on that I have this place of silence and stasis, which is not good for a novel. I thought, I’m kind of writing a still life painting.’ Her solution is to use an episodic diary form, shifting seemingly randomly from one time period or place or event to another. In the course of a few pages she goes from the nuns’ diet, to their chickens eating live mice, to a childhood memory, to the arrival of Sister Jenny’s bones, to a dream, to pangs of guilt at having bullied Helen Parry as a child. The reader is expected to join the dots – the reader is an active player. And I believe this is the key to the novel’s strength. Wood cites W B Yeats as a powerful influence on her book, and the LitHub interview features a quote from him, which guided her in her work.

‘Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’

Wood has followed his advice with consummate skill, and – to this reader at least – her novel is irresistible.

Stone Yard Devotional is published by Sceptre.

See also: a Q &A feature with Jane about Fire-Ready, her short story collection. 

Q&A: Alison Layland talks to Linda Newbery about her new novel AFTER THE CLEARANCES

 

"It's not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel."

After the Clearances: They were eager to remind themselves, and teach the children, that nothing should be taken for granted; things didn’t just happen at the flick of a switch

In a fractured world, the past is never truly buried and the future depends on what we choose to remember.

On a remote island ravaged by storms, a community of exiles known as the Seeders fight to preserve a fragile, self-sufficient way of life. When Sandy arrives from the mainland bearing secrets, young Seeder Glesni is forced to confront long-hidden truths about her people.

Far away in the wild hills, Bela lives by her own rules. Fierce, unyielding and shaped by the land itself, her voice carries the weight of loss in a world scarred by collapse. But when she encounters Winter, a fugitive from a shadowy government programme, their unlikely bond forges a path that leads back to the Seeders and a reckoning with the myths that bind them all.

Rooted in Welsh history and rich with the rhythms of its language and landscape, After the Clearances is an evocative, hope-filled story of resilience, resistance and what it means to belong in the ruins of what came before.

Alison Layland answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on writing such a compelling follow-up to Riverflow. As you know, I admired and enjoyed that (a link to my review is below) and now find myself equally impressed by this new novel, which moves forward to 2056.

Alison: Thank you for the invitation; it’s lovely to chat with you here on Writers Review. I'm delighted you enjoyed both novels.

Linda: Although After the Clearances includes some of your earlier characters, it can also be read as a compelling stand-alone. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but were you already thinking of this new setting and time period while working on Riverflow, or did the idea come to you later?

Alison: Although I knew the connections when I began writing After the Clearances, it wasn’t something I’d had in mind from the start. I was reluctant to let go of the Riverflow world, and since both novels are set against a background of concern for the environment, and the issues surrounding protest, it made sense to look at how my characters would be faring some 35 years on – the world has already changed considerably since 2019, with the effects of climate change becoming ever more apparent, and the UK laws on protest becoming increasingly draconian, so I wanted to imagine how things would be in the 2050s, when the Paris Agreement targets are supposed to have been met, but look unlikely to be achieved.

Linda: Clearances has a particular resonance in Scottish history and is equally dramatic here. Was After the Clearances always going to be your title?

Alison: It wasn’t; in fact, this is the first time I’ve been asked to change a title – no small feat, since I find titles difficult! My working title throughout the process of writing, which had become entrenched in my mind, was Tidings (reflecting both the ‘tide’ and ‘news’ meanings of the English word, as well as the Welsh word taid, grandpa, since Glesni’s grandfather is a significant figure). However, my publisher, Honno, had recently published a novel called Tiding, so we agreed to change it. The ‘Clearances’ in the novel refer to a government scheme of deliberate rural depopulation to new towns, with the aim of greater control and simpler distribution of scarce resources. This policy was officially dubbed the Resettlement, but popularly known as the Clearances (or Digartrefu in Welsh, with the added meaning of ‘making homeless’), with all the historical associations. There is a similar colonial feel to the hints in the novel at typical English attitudes to the Welsh language and culture.

Linda: I liked the framing of the story with the viewpoint of teenage Glesni, who was born on the island, Ynys Hudol, and has never known any other life. We meet the various other 'Seeders' as established members of the community (apart from Sandy, the new arrival), gradually learning about their occupations and experiences before coming to the island - Cai, for instance, had been a policeman who became disillusioned with increasingly draconian measures towards protestors. I found this effective - too much of this from the beginning would have taken our attention away from the island set-up. You obviously thought in great detail about Seeder philosophy and ground rules - there are sections of their manifesto, or creed, in the book. Was this your starting point, or did you elaborate as you got into the story?

Alison: My story always featured the Seeders as an idealistic community, living apart from the world but trying to establish a blueprint for a new way of life, kinder to both the environment and people. At first, I introduced various aspects of the community’s rules, customs and values, largely from Glesni’s point of view, within the main narrative, but at a later stage decided I could say more, while interfering less with the story, by incorporating extracts from Seeds of Change, the founders’ record of their experience and a blueprint for the community. I found it surprisingly easy, presumably since the community’s ethos was already embedded in my mind, and founder Edith Turner’s voice flowed readily (the pamphlet is credited to both founders, but for some reason I think of it as her voice). The hard part was slotting the extracts in, at the beginning of the relevant parts of the novel and at key points in the narrative, while taking care to edit out the previous references as appropriate, to avoid repetition.

Linda: Bela's sections are different in tone and style from the rest - first-person and very direct, a stream of consciousness. Living in the woods, in solitude until the fugitive Winter comes into her life, she is alone with her thoughts and impressions. Did you decide on this approach immediately, or was it something that grew from the writing?

Alison: Bela was there as a character from the start, as was her voice and attitudes. However, as I tend to make things up as I go along (I’m very much a ‘pantser’ rather than a ‘plotter’, to use the common writers’ terms), I only worked out where her story fits in as the novel developed.

Linda: It does take the reader a while to realise how Bela's sections connect with those about the islanders - it's a puzzle that slowly comes together, with hints along the way. Did this require careful tracking as you wrote - i.e. what you want the reader to guess at any point, and how soon the links and connections should be revealed?

Alison: It definitely required careful attention, but more at the redrafting and editing stages – which is how I tend to work. In the finished novel, some aspects are maybe revealed sooner than I intended, though it has varied from reader to reader. As I got feedback from early readers, it became clear that there were certain connections that some people were missing altogether, which made me realise I was perhaps being a little too subtle! I won’t talk about specific examples because of spoilers, but I hope I’ve managed to retain a certain amount of mystery without being downright confusing!

I did apply careful tracking throughout, as I always do when writing. I have a detailed timeline, both of characters’ backgrounds and events referred to – in the characters’ past but our future. I also have a detailed outline of each chapter with key points, both to ensure balance between chapters from different characters’ points of view, and also so I can detect and correct continuity issues if, or when, I move things around.

Linda: The main part of the story is set in 2056 but we're referred back to a dramatic incident in the 2030s in which some of the island community may have been involved. That the UK (not Welsh) government plans to take over lovingly restored land for a dam and reservoir to provide water supplies - for England! - was particularly poignant. Were you thinking of real-life settings where this sort of thing has happened?

Alison: Yes; the fictional Irlas Dam incident is based in part on the Llyn Celyn dam and reservoir. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, the Tryweryn river valley was dammed and the Welsh village of Capel Celyn drowned, to form what is now known as Llyn Celyn reservoir, which to this day provides water for the city of Liverpool. Despite extensive protests, both by the villagers themselves and much further afield, the project went ahead, drowning a traditional Welsh-speaking rural community. It was an significant event in the burgeoning Welsh language movement, which ultimately led to the language being given its due status in Wales, and to the fight for devolution. The beautiful and apparently peaceful waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the Elan valley reservoirs conceal similar tragedies, but it was Tryweryn captured the public imagination. This was partly due to its immortalisation in a famous graffitied slogan near Aberystwyth in the early 1960s that has become an icon – it even has its own Wikipedia page if you want to read more. The slogan Cofiwch Dryweryn (Remember Tryweryn) has seen a revival in recent years, with copies springing up throughout Wales.

In After the Clearances, it is not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel and highlighting the interconnectedness of social and environmental issues.

Linda: The 'Seeders' community on Ynys Hudol is convincingly drawn - the daily lives of the inhabitants, their communal beliefs and practices, but also the conflicts and tensions. Some members of the group are described as 'purists' - they want to live entirely self-sufficiently without recourse to trips to the mainland, or the use of money, and without harvesting fish from the sea - while others are more pragmatic. All this has the ring of truth about it which I feel must surely come from your own experiences with activist or community groups?

Alison: It’s largely human nature but yes, experience of community and activist groups comes into it! Although the Seeders are an idealistic community with a vision of how to live in the face of the effects of climate change, I wanted to make sure that they’re realistic, not all sweetness and light. There are always differences in opinion. For instance, there are constant debates within activist groups about whether it’s more effective to undertake direct action or concentrate on community-based activism, which takes time that we can ill afford to build up. I believe we need both – the attention-grabbing actions are still needed in the face of government inaction, but these need to be backed up by work at grass-roots level, both to do essential work in the community, but also to build up acceptance of, and support for, more radical protests.

Despite differences in opinion, the shared vision – both in real life and in the novel – is more important than the differences; my experience, for instance with deliberative democracy in people’s assemblies and guarding against the build-up of hierarchies, fed into the Seeders’ system of governance and decision-making, with Gatherings and regularly rotating co-leaders.

As far as the details of daily life are concerned, I enjoyed a number of fortnight-long stays on Ynys Enlli/Bardsey Island, which was the inspiration for my fictional Ynys Hudol. The guest accommodation there is lovely, the welcome warm and the island truly atmospheric, whatever the weather, but the houses have no electricity or running water and the facilities are basic (though there is excellent provision for guests, I hasten to add). These experiences helped to feed the detail of what life for the Seeders would be like. It also helped me become immersed in the atmosphere of the island – you can get a glimpse of this in the lovely video my daughter made on location to accompany the launch of the book. 

Linda: After the Clearances could be classified as cli-fi. All fiction set in the present day should surely at least include references to the existential crisis we all face, while stories set in the future will need to look at how the climate emergency has been addressed and how humanity has adapted (or failed to). Are there ‘cli-fi’ titles you particularly admire?

Alison: I recently loved The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger, published by Fly on the Wall press. With relatable characters and a brilliant combination of humour, tragedy and the tackling of serious issues, it’s the kind of enjoyable novel perfect for drawing people in – it’s made its way round my family with the speed of a calving glacier!

Another climate fiction novel I’ve particularly enjoyed is the magnificent Playground by Richard Powers, which does for oceans what The Overstory did so powerfully for trees.

And of course, there’s your own The One True Thing, a beautiful novel which may not immediately appear to be climate fiction, but has love of the environment and natural world firmly at its heart, as you suggest in your question.

Linda: Thank you! Can you give us any idea of what you'll write next? Are you thinking of making another leap forward in time with some of these characters, or will your next project go in a different direction?

Alison: I haven’t started writing a new book yet, but I’ve got ideas for Bela’s story in my mind – the events that led her to where she is now, and what shaped her unusual personality. Alternatively, I’m toying with the idea of connected short stories – before I began to write After the Clearances, I had an idea of people on Ynys Hudol sitting round a campfire, or the benches of the community’s roundhouse, sharing their stories. This didn’t come to pass, but may well make its way to the page in future!

Linda: Thanks so much for sharing these insights, and I hope After the Clearances will find its way to huge numbers of appreciative readers!

After the Clearances is published by Honno Press.

Linda's review of Alison Layland's Riverflow

LOST ANIMALS, DISAPPEARING WORLDS - STORIES OF EXTINCTIONS by Barbara Allen, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Allen says that she wrote this book 'accompanied by many tears', but warns that it is too easy to judge the generations that came before us, while our own shows equal carelessness."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her latest novel for adults is The One True Thing.

Mention extinction, and the first animals that come to most people's minds will be dinosaurs, followed by the iconic dodo, woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger. Barbara Allen's book ranges more widely, taking in a number of creatures I (and probably you) had never heard of, and moving closer to the present day, to species whose demise is most definitely down to human activity. Inevitably a sad compilation, it's informative and engaging too, largely thanks to the author's device of giving a 'voice' to a member of each vanished species. Most famous of these is 'Lonesome George', the Pinta Island tortoise who died in 2012 at about a hundred and ten years old - like other animals here he was an 'endling', the poignant term for a lone survivor destined to die unmated and as the last recorded individual of its species.

In the opening, Barbara Allen, a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, speculates about why she's included some animals rather than others - for example two of those I've just mentioned, the woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger, don't appear here. "What I do know," she acknowledges, "is that no book, with one exception, can contain stories about every extinct species; the only volume that can, and does, cradle those sad tales close to its heart, its core, is Earth." 

The concept of extinction was first used in 1796 by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who spoke of animals living in "a world previous to ours". The religious establishment was affronted by this, just as it was sixty years later by the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. We now know that extinctions are caused both by cataclysmic events such as asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions and by more gradual changes such as pollution, competition for food or shelter, and habitat loss. But how can we know when a species truly is extinct? The IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) is the global authority, categorising a species as extinct if no sightings have been reported for fifty years - though there are sometimes comebacks from 'Lazarus' species such as the coelacanth, which until 1938 had been known only as a fossil. But it's sobering to note that 41% of amphibians, 27 per cent of mammals and 13% of birds are currently threatened with extinction. More optimistically, the IUCN's Green List analyses conservation efforts and their impact on species recovery.

Allen also writes about 'de-extinction' or 'resurrection science', and how this could be done through cloning and genetic engineering; but she examines the ethics of this, how feasibly it can be done, the effects on other species if, say, mammoths were reintroduced to the Arctic tundra, and whether hubris might result in humans thinking that by 'tinkering' they could do better than nature. And, as she points out, "If we think we can 'replace' a species, then apathy may set in, making us less inclined to protect others."

In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, or Holocene extinction, many of us experience the ecological grief referred to by the American conservationist Aldo Leopold when he wrote of the 'world of wounds' experienced by those who care and learn about the natural world. Allen wonders how best to 'memorialise' the lost creatures, recognising that each led its individual life and was not just a representative of its species. She describes the huge 'Lost Birds' sculptures of Todd McGrain: the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the great auk, the heath hen and the Labrador duck, each sculpture positioned, where possible, at the site where the last known individual was shot or sighted. As McGrain says, "at those places haunted by what is missing". Some of the creatures in this book are illustrated with drawings, others by sad photographs of an animal alive or preserved: Qi Qi, the world's only captive Yangtze river dolphin; the Xerces blue butterfly; a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker; a solitary Quagga in a cage in London Zoo.

Allen's own approach is to give an individual of each species a character and allow it to 'speak' to us, in tones of outrage, resignation, boastfulness or accusation. The Dodo, for example, introduces itself: "What a stupid name! Sets me up as a thing of ridicule; if one is not accorded respect, it is easier to kill ... some individuals in the past and in the present have found it had to believe that I was real, that I was not a made-up character for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I wonder when children realize that I was factual, real, rather than a creature of legend or fantasy? But fantasy doesn't exist and now neither do we." The Spectacled Cormorant, which inhabited Bering Island, complains that "Less than a century after we had been 'discovered', we were extinct" - thanks to its short wings and lack of suspicion of humans.

It's hard to comprehend how the once so numerous passenger pigeon could have been allowed to become extinct. The acclaimed bird artist John James Audubon wrote in the 1930s that when a flock passed over "the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse". (The book's cover shows a version of his painting of these pigeons, with the birds as blank silhouettes.) A flight of the massed birds could take three days to pass. Of course, they consumed grain and damaged trees and were not beloved by farmers, so they were shot in their thousands, sometimes as part of organised competitions. Forest depletion also led to a reduction in their numbers; efforts to save them came too late. The last known bird, Martha, died in 1914 at Cincinatti Zoo. 

Allen says that she wrote this book "accompanied by many tears". but warns that it is too easy to judge the generations that came before us, while our own shows equal carelessness. The penultimate chapter has the Bramble Cay Melomys, a rodent inhabitant of Papua New Guinea, lamenting as the tides rise higher that humans destroyed it: "not face to face but, rather, through greed, or ignorance, or indifference ... or apathy". Snails, small rodents and amphibians don't attract the attention given to polar bears or snow leopards, but their loss is just as significant as that of the bigger, more iconic species.

It could be argued that the fate of most species on Earth is to become extinct in time, but human activity has produced a current rate of loss estimated to be between 100 and 1000 times the rate of natural background extinction. Allen's book doesn't include any British species, but the recent State of Nature report found that an alarming one in six species, including the once-familiar water voles, hazel dormice and turtle doves, are at risk because of farming activity, pesticide use and habitat loss.

"May we endeavour," Allen concludes, "to add as few names and pages as possible to this book of extinction." Amen to that.

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds is published by Reaktion Books

See also: The Invention of Nature - the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Sarn Helen, a Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future, by Tom Bullough, reviewed by Alison Layland

Q & A: Màiri Kidd on her new novel THE SPECIMENS

 

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"Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal."

Màiri Kidd is Director at the Saltire Society and was formerly Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. Mairi is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC. The Specimens is her first novel for adults.

Up the close and down the stair, meet the women of Burke and Hare ...

Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.

The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?

This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.

WR: Firstly, congratulations - this is a compelling read which I finished within three days. And the book is very handsomely produced by Black & White Publishing, with its striking cover. I certainly learned more about the exploits of Burke and Hare than I'd known previously, and looked up more details after finishing. You've written widely on folklore and feminism but I believe this is your first novel for adults. What was the impulsion behind it - was this something you'd been thinking about for some while?

Màiri: Thank you!

The motivation for writing about the Burke and Hare case was originally to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless. I have previously sought to do this by writing non-fiction and short fiction about Scotland’s ‘witches’, who have a lot in common with the Burke and Hare victims - mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and their bodies were destroyed after death. In both cases, also, there’s a general perception that the facts are well known and well understood whereas in truth, many people hold serious misconceptions about the witches and about Burke and Hare, and so there’s a lot to explore. I did flirt with the idea of working in short format and with non-fiction but Black and White encouraged me to write it as a novel and I’m glad they did.

WR: I was astonished to read in the Acknowledgments that you drafted the novel in just a few months, alongside your full-time job and a position on the board of MG Alba (the BBC's partner in delivering media services through Gaelic). Had you already done much of the plotting and research before that?

Màiri: First off, I should perhaps say I don’t recommend this as a way of working - there were various reasons behind the short turnaround, but of course it wasn’t ideal. Needs must, though, and I had to find a way to make it work to my benefit. I told myself if would be as though I were living the plot in real time – the killings happened over about a year – and the fact I was often working at night certainly helped with the dark atmosphere I wanted.

I hadn’t plotted the book at all before I began – all I had written was one of the victims’ narratives as a short story. I knew the basics of the story because I grew up here and it is very widely known, and I plotted it very strictly to help make best use of the writing time (I did deviate a bit from my outline in the end, but not much). In terms of research, I was lucky in that I wanted to know the facts but thereafter rather to avoid reading other people’s analyses of the whys and wherefores so I could make up my own mind. That saved some time…

WR: Your novel covers a span of nine years, not including the prologue and epilogue, and is told from the viewpoints of several characters - mainly Helen, the lover of William Burke, and Susan, the wife of anatomist Robert Knox. How did you decide on this structure? Was it difficult to contain so much information within the frame of the novel?

Màiri: I am a big fan of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and wished that a treatment of that sort might be possible for the Burke and Hare crimes, but it just isn’t. The killings happened around sixty years earlier, before universal registration, the victims were often itinerant, and their remains were destroyed. It’s unlikely that we will ever know more than we do, and it’s not enough for a book. I hit, then, on the idea of writing about the women in Burke and Hare’s lives as a means of telling the story. Helen MacDougall immediately presented as a medium for the ‘action’, and as I began to read more about the case, I discovered that Knox the anatomist – Burke and Hare’s ‘client’ – had a wife no one knew existed because (as one of the few who knew her understood) she wasn’t of an appropriate social standing. From this I began to think in terms of a two-hander with victims’ stories interwoven throughout.

The greatest challenge I found I faced wasn’t the volume of information – the women don’t have all the information at any point in the book – but rather creating a twin plot. That took some tweaking of timelines so that the set pieces of Helen’s and Susan’s stories could work as one novel, and there were times I struggled with that. I had a lot of pieces of paper on my desk with dates and times for different happenings and I scratched my head a great deal.

WR: The selling of dead bodies will come as no surprise to the majority of readers, who will know what's going on behind the scenes at Tanners Close and Dr Knox's surgical theatre for some while before either of the women, Helen or Susan, begins to suspect. Yet there's still plenty of tension as events unfold - was this something you felt you needed to address?

Màiri: I think that was my greatest concern as I worked – how can one sustain tension when the ‘end’ is known to almost every reader? My ‘solution’ was to try to use that foreknowledge to create a sense of dread in Susan and Helen’s stories as the reader knows more than they do. In the stories of the victims, I wanted to focus on their lives, so their ends arrive very quickly and aren’t really the point at all. That was my tribute to The Five.

WR: As we enter into the relationship between Helen MacDougal and William Burke, Helen having been treated with horrible brutality by her late husband, we see that William can be kind, tender, considerate and even conscience-stricken, and sense that his fate could have turned out very differently. Did this come from your research, or was it your wish to differentiate between him and the apparently far more callous William Hare?

Màiri: This is something a lot of readers have asked me about – they struggle with the idea that Burke might have been likeable at times. I think he must have been, because he was able to earn the trust of some of the victims, and indeed one poor woman was handed into his care by a policeman, presumably on the understanding she’d sleep off the alcohol she’d drunk in the lodging house. His relationship with Helen was of long standing and seems to have held some level of genuine affection.

Fundamentally, I understood Burke as weak, uncontrolled, violent, self-pitying but broadly ‘normal’ – he wasn’t a psychopath, he felt remorse as far as we can tell, being dependent on alcohol and opium to sleep during the killings. The motivations of people without empathy don’t interest me, but the actions of people who should know better do.

Perhaps, too, there is some bias in me – when we learned the story as children, of course we learned that Hare turned on Burke in the end, and got off Scot free. That has rankled ever after in the Scottish mind, I think!

WR: The reader is encouraged to sympathise with Helen, who wants to see the best in her lover - but do you think she is too forgiving, to the point of complicity?

Màiri: I think ‘my’ Helen does something many of us will recognise – put kindly, seeing the best in people, or less kindly, turning a blind eye to significant concerns. People are terribly torn in their loyalties when loved ones do awful things – just look at the partners of perpetrators in the Pélicot case in France who have refused to accept the wrongdoing of their partners.

The level to which the real Helen was complicit is unclear and I had to make a call on that for the book. In my early reading around the case, I was struck by the fact that the Hares wanted William Burke to kill Helen, and Burke took Helen out of Edinburgh for a time, presumably to keep her safe. They seem to have left the Hares’ house thereafter. That doesn’t really speak to me of a fully complicit member of the ‘gang’. Again, though, I recognise my own biases! Helen was described by one commentator as a female ‘of the degraded sort’ and that perhaps made me pity her. Society definitely viewed people in that way, had no ambition for them and accordingly offered no safety net, creating the conditions for people without a strong moral compass to be motivated and able to do awful things, or to turn a blind eye.

WR: Susan, Dr Knox's (supposed) wife, is largely your own creation, and in her way she is just as much a 'specimen' as the bodies procured by Burke and Hare - kept in close confinement, repeatedly pregnant and used shockingly as the object of observation and experimentation. You cleverly use the device of the dolls' house and its miniatures both to emphasise her infantilisation by Knox and to link her story with Helen's, and later to reach a kind of resolution. How did this idea come to you?

Màiri: The idea of miniatures came to me in part because the plot links to a set of miniature coffins found on Edinburgh’s city centre volcano Arthur’s Seat in the early 1830s and which are traditionally associated with the killings. Recent research has suggested that the coffins were made with cobblers’ tools and that suggested a plot thread to me.

More broadly, the idea of collecting is key to the novel. During the period in which it is set, the real-life Knox manoeuvred his way into a role as curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum where – much later – Burke’s own skeleton would join the collection. The ethics of retention and display of medical specimens are the crux of the case and remain controversial into the present day. Interestingly, there is a tendency today to view the Burke and Hare story as though it was all about ‘medical progress’, whereas doctors like Knox were in it as much for profit and social advancement as the good of humanity.

Outside museums, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were all the rage at the time, and the feminine equivalent was the baby house. I didn’t see Susan’s house as being infantilising – these were costly women’s treasures – but she does see it as a symbol of her imprisonment, only gradually realising she can use it to form a new allegiance.

WR: I found that one of the most moving chapters was the one from Abigail's point of view - a fictional character we accompany through a hard but successful day of trading that ends in her fateful encounter with Margaret and William Hare. These details of working life lived on the edge of poverty give the novel such colour and texture. The story of Burke and Hare has been recounted many times, but is yours the first to tell it entirely from the point of view of women?

Màiri: Generally the focus is on the murderers although I understand that one Victorian melodrama focused on one of the known victims - Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error by David Pae, originally serialised in the Dundee Courier. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought much about Susan, who really fascinated me. How could a man have a secret wife and seven children in a small place like Edinburgh?

WR: Having worked as publisher and editor, how did it feel to be sitting on the other side of the desk as an author?

Màiri: It is quite strange but I am lucky in that my publishers are very understanding and let me be involved in things like the briefs for covers. I hope that having experience on both sides of the desk means that I am not too hard to work with from my publishers’ perspective! I have of course learned immense amounts from working with so many authors I admire over the years (including one Linda Newbery – I think back very fondly on working with your books for Barrington Stoke, including the unusual experience of commissioning an embroidery for the book jacket of Tilly’s Promise!)

WR: (Ah, thank you ... I was so delighted with that cover!) What has been the response to the novel so far? It would make an excellent TV drama or film ... 

Màiri: The response has been very kind. It has been reviewed very positively in the most amazing places, and the Scottish press and booksellers in particular have been really generous. Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal. I am also enough of a publisher to know that books must be positioned and its beautiful jacket says ‘women’s fiction’ to me, so I have been especially pleased when it has been reviewed by male readers like Teddy Jamieson in The Herald who have said it spoke to them too.

WR: Finally - will you be writing more historical fiction?

Màiri: I am just finishing the first draft of my next book and yes, it is historical. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say an awful lot except that it is about a group of people who are generally incredibly well documented, but not for the period about which I am writing. It is set largely north of the Border but links to an iconic work of literature most people do not associate with Scotland at all…

WR: Well, that's an intriguing note to end on! Thanks so much, Màiri, for answering our questions and we hope The Specimens will reach many more appreciative readers.

The Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing.

RIVERFLOW by Alison Layland, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core."

This novel was a welcome surprise that came to me via a roundabout route. It began when I attended a Society of Authors ‘at home’ event – a workshop hosted by Lauren James, author of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and Green Rising, and founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League. The focus of the session was how to bring climate concerns into fiction set in the present day – not necessarily foregrounding the various issues, but rather weaving in details as part of the daily lives and concerns of the characters.

I find it irritating to read fiction set in the present day that makes no reference to the climate emergency – especially when characters are taking flights here and there, driving big cars and eating steak in restaurants. It’s almost as if there’s a parallel world to ours with no looming crisis and with no need to change and adapt. It seems, both in young adult and adult fiction, that climate awareness is largely limited to ‘cli-fi’ – fiction usually set in the future, often involving fantasy. (An honourable exception to this is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood – see our summer round-up.)

After the workshop I joined the Climate Fiction Writers League and was invited by Lauren to write a conversation piece with another author. This author turned out to be Alison Layland, whose novel, Riverflow, was published in 2019. As I haven’t yet published adult fiction with an environmental theme (working on it) Alison is to read my non-fiction title, This Book is Cruelty Free – Animals and Us. (For anyone who doesn’t yet acknowledge the link between animal agriculture and the climate crisis, please read the book, or for a more comprehensive overview, Philip Lymbery’s Sixty Harvests Left.) 

Knowing nothing of Alison Layland or her work, I found myself immediately drawn to her characters, setting and plot. Riverflow is set in a small Shropshire village, Foxover, close to which Bede and Erin, a couple in their thirties, have lived off-grid on a smallholding for many years. Until eighteen months ago they shared Alderleat with Bede’s uncle Joe, until he drowned in the surging river, leaving Bede unable to accept that his death was accidental.

The frictions and rivalries of a rural community are convincingly depicted. Bede and Erin, former activists, clash with local landowner Philip Northcote who’s developing a fracking site. Bede, clever at mechanics and problem-solving, is an idealist, probably on the autism spectrum and at times infuriating to live with; to some villagers he’s known as Eco, a nice demonstration of the ease with which people can pigeonhole and ‘other’ an outlier, avoiding the inconvenience of acknowledging that his views are both valid and necessary. He and Elin are devoted to each other, but with the unavoidable sticking-point that Elin wants children whereas Bede thinks it would be irresponsible to bring a child into this threatened world. Elin, too, tries to steer a calm course through village conflicts while Bede can never curb a sarcastic or angry response when challenged.

Partly through snippets of the journal Joe kept hidden, we’re drawn into the backstory of Bede’s upbringing. Never knowing who his father was, he was brought up by his mother until her death, when her brother Joe took him in. But Joe had secrets of which Bede is unaware and which begin to threaten the self-contained life he and Elin have built at Alderleat. The plot centres on a series of incidents involving Philip Northcote, his widowed mother Marjorie with whom Joe had a close relationship, and attractive newcomer Silvan, Northcote’s gamekeeper, who befriends Bede and Elin. Bede is apparently being framed for acts of minor sabotage – releasing pheasants reared for shooting, scratching the side of Northcote’s Bentley – and then for a far more serious crime. The revelation of who's behind this malice is cleverly constructed, with several clues hidden in plain sight.

What makes Riverflow so appealing is the deft and delicate portrayal of the shifting relationship between Bede and Erin, alongside the details of daily life which are always underpinned by environmental aspirations and what it’s practical to achieve. It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core.

Riverflow is published by Honno Press. The conversation piece between Alison and myself is now online here. 

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

Guest review by Helena Pielichaty: THE LAST BOAT OUT OF SHANGHAI by Helen Zia

 

"The broken paths are still being trodden, not mended. That is why stories like this are so important and need to be told."

Helena Pielichaty is a children’s writer. She has had over thirty books published, mainly by Oxford University Press and Walker Books. More on her website. 

Although there have been other works set around Shanghai during the turbulent 1930s-1950s, such as J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) and Lilane Willens’ Stateless in Shanghai (2010), Helen Zia is the first to tell the story from a Chinese perspective. During an interview following the publication of Last Boat Out of Shanghai, the Chinese-American author, academic and activist declared: ‘There isn’t a single book in English about this; not even a dissertation.’

By ‘this’ she means what she calls ‘the forgotten exodus’ when, during the late 1940s, Shanghai became the epicentre for tens of thousands of people fleeing both the city and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist regime. The book is the result of twelve years of meticulous research, including hundreds of hours of interviews with survivors, most of whom were in their seventies and eighties by then.

It is divided into four parts: ‘The Drumbeat of War’ (covering 1937), ‘Childhood under Siege’ (1939-1947) ‘Exodus’ (1948-1949) and ‘War’s Long Shadow’ (1949 -1957). Zia focuses on four of the interviewees: Benny Pan, Ho Chow, Bing Woo and Annabel Annuo Liu, beginning in 1937 when the Japanese took control of parts of Shanghai by force. Like all good non-fiction, Last Boat Out of Shanghai reads like fiction; and gripping fiction at that.

We are introduced first to Benny, a nine-year old boy with ‘unruly black hair, his knee socks bunched at the ankles.’ Benny is the favoured son of social-climbing parents, who, thanks to his father’s connections as an officer in the police auxiliary, enjoy a comfortable life-style. Like Jim in Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Benny has learned to cycle past the dilapidated shacks and squalid tenements ‘reeking of raw sewage’ and to look the other way if he sees a dead body.

Next, we meet Ho, an earnest 13-year-old: ‘lanky, bedraggled and bewildered’ who has accompanied his grandmother to the ‘safety’ of the city, mistakenly thinking, like many others, that Shanghai, with its foreign concessions populated by Americans, British, French, Russian Jews and - since 1941 - German Jews, would offer protection. On Ho’s shoulders rests the fate of his family’s future; he must not let them down.

Then we have eight-year-old ‘Bing’ formerly known as ‘Little Sister’ before her poverty-stricken father sold her two years earlier. She was re-named Bing by her new ‘Mama’, whom she had grown to love but who now appears to have deserted her, just like Baba had. A new home beckons in Shanghai with a different ‘mama’ - Miss Woo - and Miss Woo’s foul-tempered mother. Numbly, Bing awaits her fate.

Finally, there is Annuo, barely two years old. Annuo has a big brother, Charley, who swears to protect her from the incessant bombs, and a doting mother who is a trained physician. Of her father, Yongchio, away fighting for the Republic of China’s Nationalist Party, she is less certain. She senses he has an antipathy towards her for some reason and she is right. This antipathy grows as Annuo does; Yongchio’s anger flaring at every perceived wrong doing and any spark of independence.

Zia follows these four people’s shared histories for two decades. I learned so much about Chinese and Shanghai's culture, family hierarchies, food, the vibrant street life, and the volatile politics. Yet one of the hardest parts to read about is the period during the 1950s, when, having witnessed so much cruelty and overcome all kinds of odds to reach safety, Benny, Bing, Ho and Annuo then have to endure further hostility in their new countries. Those bound for America, especially, arrive at a time when Senator McCarthy’s ‘Reds under the Beds’ hysteria had whipped up suspicion and prejudice against any Chinese refugee, regardless of their background and political affiliations.

In the epilogue Zia concludes ‘…If told often enough, one day such stories may become lessons for historical reflection, not broken paths to be retrod.’ I’d like to think so, too, but given what happened during a recent, similar ‘exodus’ – that of Afghans fleeing the Taliban in 2021 - the broken paths are still being trodden, not mended. That is why stories like this are so important and need to be told.

The Last Boat out of Shanghai is published by Ballantine Books.