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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Reviewing the past in new novels from Louise Doughty & Jane Rogers

22/11/2016

8 Comments

 
As the world goes crazy, I crave, in my reading, not escapism, but a reflection of the flawed complexity of human beings and the things we do to make life that bit harder. But I need to be in safe hands to do so. So thanks to Louise Doughty and Jane Rogers – both established British authors unafraid to tackle difficult subjects – for providing that in their latest novels. Although quite different in their focus, both involve the characters reviewing painful pasts and their own culpability in order that their next mistakes might be that bit smaller.
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It was the closeness of everything. Here he was, and the floor was polished and clean because the maid had been in while he had been out in a city in which people were being beaten, killed, and there was a television and a sofa and a fridge with food in it, and all the normal business of a normal life, and a few minutes ago he had watched a boy come close to having his life snuffed out, beaten from him – and that could happen or nearly happen, and he, Harper, could then go home and put his key in his door and have a beer, or perhaps something to eat, just like all the other people who were doing things like that, and minutes away, the world was ending for a boy, or for another boy like him, in the most horrible way. It wasn’t long ago or in the middle of nowhere: it was now, in one of the modern cities of the world. And all at once, he realised that what he could not stand was the closeness of everything.

John Harper has been numbed by the horrors he has witnessed in the course of his life. Born in a Japanese internment camp in the Dutch East Indies in 1942, after his father had been beheaded in the street, his Dutch mother took him to the Netherlands following Indonesian independence in 1945. Aged six, she uprooted him to California where he found surprising stability for all of six years in the home of her new husband’s father, a black civil rights lawyer and all-round gentleman. At twelve, she summoned him back to Holland where she’d returned after the breakup of her marriage, where Harper bore the brunt of racism at school and, at home, his alcoholic mother’s disappointments.

After National Service, he joined an organisation attending to the interests of multinational companies in areas of political and financial instability; writing economic forecasts while acting as a courier on behalf of political powers, such as the CIA. Posted to Jakarta on the brink of the 1965 genocide, Harper finds himself complicit in the communist purge. Returning to Holland, he has a breakdown and is rehabilitated to a desk job in Amsterdam. But, with a crumbling marriage, he jumps at the opportunity to return to Indonesia, where the 1997 elections presages another uprising. When Harper fails to advise the multinational staff to evacuate, his company exiles him to a hut in rural Bali, which is where the novel begins. By day he develops a friendship with Rita, a teacher with her own troubled history; by night he lies awake listening to the rain on the roof, convinced insurgents have been recruited to murder him. As his past is gradually revealed to the reader, Black Water explores themes of loss, guilt, responsibility and the possibility of redemption. Louise Doughty’s eighth novel is both a disturbing political thriller and an unflinching psychological study of human fallibility. Thanks to Faber and Faber for my review copy.

His marriage, which has already transformed so many times that no-one can see it straight. Hasn’t he gone from loving her to hating her and back again so many times that the path between them is worn out? There is no love. There is no hate. There is only exhausted and exhausting familiarity, stalemate, they ignore and do not know each other because they have known each other too well for too long, invested too much, watched each other become incomprehensibly different and still the same, dealt each other the most deadly wounds …

Largely forged from his reluctance for her to have an abortion in the mid-1970s, Conrad and Eleanor’s marriage has been a modern one, with both partners equally free to pursue their careers. In practice, like the couple in The Tidal Zone, this has meant Conrad letting his career stagnate to devote himself to his wife and four children, while Eleanor’s soars. The children now grown, the couple, while sharing a house, have moved apart; Eleanor’s primary identity is still single, while the more romantic Conrad becomes increasingly depressed. But it isn’t until his failure to return home from a scientific conference in Munich, leaving Eleanor and the children increasingly perplexed, that the couple are forced to confront the joys, resentments and compromises of their long marriage and whether it’s worth saving.

When Conrad gets on a train to Bologna instead of coming home because he fears he’s being stalked, it’s as a he’s undergoing a psychotic breakdown. But, as he loses himself in the freezing foggy streets, it emerges that it’s not only his wife’s infidelities and their consequences he’s been at pains to deny. His job in transplant research has brought him into contact with an animal rights activist with no qualms about destroying his marriage and career. As in The Course of Love, we’re also shown how his early attachments have shaped his attitudes and expectations of his own marriage, and my only quibble with this psychologically astute novel (apart from the title, which I think is rather dull) is that we don’t get the same level of insight into Eleanor’s character.
But even she, as the more practical, and initially less endearing, partner in the relationship comes to realise how much she depends on the psychological security it brings her. The reversal of traditional gender roles within this marriage cleverly reveals the vulnerability behind the successful in a way that might go unnoticed within couples in which the man is the main breadwinner. I found Eleanor’s transformation particularly moving and the eventual resolution, in which the couple slip back a little from a potential happy ever after towards their old ways of relating, refreshingly honest. Marriage, it seems, is a continual journey of adjustment and compromise.

Having read four of Jane Rogers’ previous novels, and attended an Arvon course which she tutored (and provided encouraging feedback on an early draft of Sugar and Snails), I was well disposed to like Conrad and Eleanor, but it went beyond my expectations. Not only is it extremely satisfying as a reader in its forensic examination of the contradictions of genuine grown-up lives, but it’s a gift for any writer who wants to learn how to map psychological development across narrative time. Until Jane can be persuaded to devise a course to show how she’s managed it within this novel, this is one I’ll be reading again.
Thanks to Atlantic books for my review copy.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
geoff le pard link
22/11/2016 11:08:11 pm

Good to know Jane is back in form after three terrible Jessie Lamb. I heard this was good from a colleague on my masters too. And interesting you juxtaposed it with louise doughtery as she taught my first Arvon

Reply
Annecdotist
23/11/2016 05:42:37 pm

I thought you’d be interested in Jane’s novel, Geoff, but I didn’t realise I was giving you two for the price of one. I did a half day workshop with Louise a few years ago which was very good.
Jessie Lamb did quite well after being initially rejected by Jane’s publisher: long listed for the Booker and won the Arthur C Clarke award (as the flyleaf of my copy of Conrad and Eleanor informs me). I quite liked it although it was kind of YA. This is loads better – I’ll be interested in your opinion if you get to read it.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
23/11/2016 11:46:54 am

It's interesting that you recommend Jane Rogers' work so highly. I was getting the impression that you had been disappointed in it; but on rereading now, I realise that was me reading that into it. I agree with you about the title. Something a little more imaginative may have worked, but maybe it's not really necessary.
I enjoyed the quote from Black Water that you opened the post with. I experience those same thoughts frequently. While we can become desensitized, I think, by media reports, I find it very easy to put myself in the shoes of those on tragic paths. It's nice that we can put the key in the lock and close the door on the world outside. Or can we?

Reply
Annecdotist
23/11/2016 05:51:10 pm

Sorry I confused you, Norah. Maybe some of my initial lack of enthusiasm for a novel about marriage came through; maybe it’s that I wrote this is one of four reviews on Monday on the day that started off rather early with a rotten migraine.
Glad you liked the quote – it’s something that strikes me quite a lot how opposites can exist side by side and it can be hard to live with those contradictions. I remember the first time I went to India being struck by the sight of families living out on the pavements outside large comfortable houses – I’m sure it wasn’t like that in Britain in those days but it certainly is now. And interesting that you’ve also integrated that theme in your own blog post today. I read it earlier this morning and hope to get around to commenting later.

Reply
Sarah link
29/11/2016 03:04:29 am

This is beautiful: "the flawed complexity of human beings and the things we do to make life that bit harder..."

The excerpt from Black Water is amazing. I'm not sure I'd want to read it from your review (it's good, just a bit much for me, I think) but the writing is gorgeous.

Reply
Annecdotist
29/11/2016 04:26:36 pm

Thanks for that, Sarah, and I’d agree that this probably isn’t your ideal book, despite the undoubted quality of the writing.

Reply
Charli Mills
8/12/2016 01:46:26 am

You have a way of deepening my understanding of why we read and what we expect to read through your reviews. You bring up a point that validates the importance of an author's credibility -- that of delivering to the reader what is sought or expected. Most readers, though, probably don't think this deeply. I'm glad you do. Two intriguing books by credible authors one can trust for exploration of human complexities. Interesting that you and Geoff have had workshop experience with Rogers.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/12/2016 10:55:39 am

Oh, thanks for that, Charli – sometimes I think I don’t read deeply enough to learn what I need to learn from the authors I admire, so I’m glad it comes across okay. And of course I’m grateful for your reading of my reviews. Geoff and I actually met on the course with Jane Rogers and then he went on to do the master’s degree of which she is head.

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