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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

Scary stuff: The Death House by Sarah Pinborough and Real Monsters by Liam Brown

27/2/2015

6 Comments

 
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A bunch of teenagers lounge about in a country house on a remote island. They form gangs, their leaders battling for supremacy, though, with nurses and teachers standing on the sidelines, it’s not quite Lord of the Flies. Drugs also help to maintain order, in the form of the nightly “vitamins” that the narrator, Toby, secretes in his bedpost, leaving him free to wander through the house while the others sleep. Although, when he witnesses one of the boys being taken at night to the top-floor sanatorium, he almost wishes he’d stayed in bed. Everyone knows why they’ve been wrenched from their families to live in the Death House yet, through a mixture of boredom, bravado and emotional distancing, they try to defend themselves against the truth. Blood tests have shown that their defective genes have been activated; the adults are merely keeping watch for the signs of their sickness to show.

Sarah Pinborough has constructed an intriguing story around one of the enigmas of the human condition, how we manage the knowledge that we will die. While the younger children conduct religious rituals, the older ones imagine a less spiritual kind of love. The hope of escape embraced by Toby and Clara was reminiscent of the young couple in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. Yet initially it’s bully-boy Jake who seems most attuned to reality; only he is able to acknowledge they cannot save the owl with the broken wing.

I enjoyed this novel, but it took a while for it to approach the tension of Goodhouse, another novel about unfairly institutionalised adolescents, or the hope for the impossible of Bel Canto. In the final third, with some surprisingly satisfying twists and turns, Toby learns compassion, but I wondered, despite my satisfaction with other novels for adults with adolescent protagonists, if this one might actually be YA.

Thanks to Gollancz for my proof copy.
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Two separate narratives, or extended letters, to the same son: a soldier more acquainted with the varying types of sand than the enemy; a mother spied upon when she ventures outside the home, or else she’s suffering from an extreme case of paranoia. Since the terrorist attack that killed her father when she was twelve, Lorna’s life has become bleaker, alcohol her only retreat until she meets Danny. At the time, Danny is about to complete the last of his assessments for joining the army; they barely have time to get to know each other before she’s losing him to a world of machismo overseas. Yet now, with most of his unit murdered in an ambush at the dead of night, Danny is lost in the desert. Although the landscapes are vastly different, there are echoes of Cormac James’ The Surfacing in their predicament with the readers’ hope that, against all odds, they will survive.

Although the countries involved are never named, and the narrative differs in places from the recent history with which we are all familiar, Real Monsters picks up from where Before, During, After leaves off. For a while, I wasn’t sure if the narrators’ reference to the enemy as monsters was intended to be taken metaphorically, until Danny tells us (p78):

You see, son when they first sent us out here no one really had any idea about the kind of threats we faced. Still don’t. Of course the papers go on about people getting eaten and shit, but the truth is that even after all this time we still don’t have a goddammed clue what these Monsters are capable of. Might they shoot laser beams out of their eyes? Or fireballs out of their arseholes? Honestly we don’t know.

When he and his friends open fire on three locals off to market with a couple of camels (p91), mistaking them for the most hideous monster their drug-fuelled minds can dream up, I finally caught up with the author’s intention. This is a novel about what philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists call othering and psychoanalysts projection and how wars arise from our attempts to externalise and control the monsters that reside within us all. It’s an ambitious premise and, although a bit too unsubtle for my liking, I applaud the author for tackling it for his debut novel and Legend Press for publishing it.

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As this is my last post for this month, I leave you with a visual reminder of my February reviews. Do click the link for any you might have missed and join me again early next week for a dissection of the clinical psychologist in Pat Barker’s Border Crossing along with a river flash and a quiz.



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.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
28/2/2015 03:52:38 am

My, what a lot of reading this month, Anne. Your ability to read so quickly but so thoroughly always impresses me. These two are probably not to my taste but I always enjoying reading your thoughts about them. Your reviews are always so thorough that no reader is left in doubt about whether the books would be suitable for their own TBR pile.

Reply
Annecdotist
28/2/2015 06:07:34 am

Thanks for your support, Norah. Not sure I read quickly, but I am reading a lot, it's more not having much of a social life!!

Reply
Charli Mills link
1/3/2015 12:32:58 pm

I always find value in your book reviews, whether it's new ideas (the concept of othering), author's ambitions (taking on a complex premise or style of narration) or staying on top of modern literary book debuts. So thank you, Anne, for giving up a social life! :-)

The Death House reminds me of your review of the Goodhouse. I don't know if this is a legitimate connection, but in marketing demographics the youthful generation of "millenials" is receiving much attention. Perhaps authors are also tackling that generation's issues of boredom and disconnection and the older generations' perceptions that they are potentially dangerous. Just a far-flung thought.

As to Real Monsters, I would argue that military leaders and politicians are more apt to project and "other" in order to justify the wars they establish. The grunts (the common soldiers on the ground) do not typically fall into this projection scheme. Perhaps some do as a way to cope. More likely, they do what they are asked to do out of a sense of camaraderie to the "brothers" they serve with and a belief that they are protecting the men (and some women) of their units, which can coalesce as families. What the general public may not realize is that highly specialized forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers screen out individuals who do not have strong moral values. Fiction tends to focus on brute strength when really they are selected for their strength of character. I tend to bristle at stories that vilify soldiers. I'm all for villifying war, but it is the disregarding politicians and their disconnected officers that lead us there. Soldiers are not typically the monsters. I'd say Liam Brown has no idea what a soldier does or why he serves. And that's fine. This is from his imagination, but I'm waiting to read a truer story that portrays the gritty complexities real people serving out their military duty without being made out to be fueled by heavy-metal music, machismo or drugs.

Reply
geoff link
1/3/2015 10:41:44 pm

Charli has a great point in her last para. One of the things that strikes me about my dad's letters from Palestine is his increasing awareness of the subtleties and troublesome double standards in his situation caused by the various political powers jostling for position. He sympathises at various times with both Arabs and Jews and perhaps that's what made him a decent solider. He always joked that he couldn't understand why his superiors approached him both to stay on as a regular and apply for a commission because he loathed what was expected of him but perhaps it was that ability to carry a world view that made him attractive as both a long term recruit and an officer while being at the same time the reason why he couldn't countenance staying. I suspect, had he been a few years older he might have stayed; it was at root the futile nature of what was happening in Palestine that curdled any enthusiasm he might have had. I'm reminded, not sure why, of the Groucho Marx quote (and I may have it wrong; I've not googled) that he would never join any club that would have him as a member.

Reply
Annecdotist
3/3/2015 03:30:02 am

Thanks for sharing this perspective, Geoff. I think awareness of the subtleties, while closer to reality, must put an extra strain on the soldiers who are really given an impossible task. I think it’s the same dynamic that occurs, perhaps less intensely, in lots of professions where it’s easier to operate without knowledge of the grey areas, but doing so has a dehumanising effect.
A bit tangential, but it reminds me of the Arlo Guthrie song, Alice’s Restaurant, which tells the story of a character’s minor infringement of the law supposedly making him ineligible to fight in the Vietnam War. A lot of contradictions there, I think.

Annecdotist
3/3/2015 03:24:39 am

Happy to sacrifice my social life of this blog, Charli, and glad it still works for you.
Really interesting hypothesis about a culture of anxiety about the post-millennium generation. I can’t actually tell if there are genuinely more of those kind of novels around or merely that they are coming to my attention and thereby to the blog. Wonder if anyone’s got any statistics on this? It did remind me of Goodhouse, which actually preferred to this because the parallels were closer to real life.
Regarding Real Monsters, I don’t think the author was vilifying soldiers at all, but used a soldier’s perspective to explore the craziness of the war. I don’t know anything about how soldiers are screened, so can’t comment on that, but as I’m thinking about projective process that we all use, unconsciously, under conditions of anxiety especially, it’s hard to imagine they’d be immune. But I do agree, from what I’ve read, loyalty to comrades and team spirit is a huge part of the motivation of soldiers on the ground, and I think this was acknowledged in this novel. Also, it seems to me, that it’s those with the most power who can do the most damage, and that lies in the politicians who start the wars in the first place and then put themselves at a safe distance from the fighting, and the complex and conflicting emotions and motivations that ensue. The role of the bigwigs and the propaganda at home was also flagged in this novel. I just thought it could have been more subtle in its approach.
I look forward to your truer story of the soldier’s experience on the ground.

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