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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

A lifetime of lies: Testament & Should You Ask Me

16/7/2018

8 Comments

 
Can you rewrite your own history and get away with it? That’s what Joseph Silk and Mary Holmes, lead characters in these two new novels, seem to have done. Both have been motivated to avoid traumatic memories – but there are consequences. In Joseph’s case, it’s been the impact on his family; in Mary’s, it’s a lifetime of guilt. Both novels feature a bond between young and old. Both address aspects of the Second World War: Joseph takes his suffering under Nazi-inspired racism in Hungary to his grave; far away in relatively safe Dorset, the backdrop of war pushes Mary to confess. Read my reviews and see whether you sympathise with the decisions they took.

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Testament by Kim Sherwood

Joseph Silk is dead. While the art world commemorates one of Britain’s greatest 20th-century painters, the Jewish Museum in Berlin wants to capitalise on his reputation to draw further attention to Nazi atrocities. Meanwhile, his son John is so bitter about his failures as a father, he might not even attend the funeral.
 
It falls to John’s twenty-something daughter Eva to piece together the different versions of her beloved grandfather’s life. When he died, she was making a documentary about him. Travelling to Berlin, and to his native Hungary, where Silk began life as Jósef Zyyad before reinventing himself as an Englishman, she wonders if she’ll finish it. Or is she, as her father insists, using her camera to hide herself?
 
Silk never spoke about the past. As Eva learns about the dreadful conditions he endured in the labour camps and marches, she alternates between protectiveness and a sense of having been betrayed. His testimony – responses to over 300 questions at the end of the war – if made public, would shatter the image he so carefully built for himself. On the other hand, while Eva has always respected his reticence, that he lied to his family is difficult to reconcile with the man she felt she knew.
 
Particularly tragic is his lack of communication with his younger brother László who settled in Israel after the war. The brothers’ attitude to past trauma couldn’t be more different: Silk’s dismissal and denial versus László’s repeated reopening of his psychological wounds to younger generations in the hope of “never again”.
 
Reading this novel alongside musing on
Narrative structure, psychoanalytic theory and the grief that never goes, I could pick out hero’s journeys – the brothers gaining the elixir of survival, while Eva seeks the truth – but this is too big a story to confine itself to that path. What happens after survival is the question this novel asks.
 
This reminded me of some influential research on
styles of recovery from acute psychosis which identified two distinct types: integration, similar to László in this novel, versus sealing over, like Silk. The psychosis research found no strong differences in effectiveness for either approach although, as far as I’m aware, the potential impact on significant others wasn’t investigated. So I was interested that, in Testament, Silk seems to have fared better than his brother, but at a cost, and not only to the well-being of his son.
 
But neither man meets the conditions
object relations theory associates with resolution: László continually re-traumatised in his attempts to share his suffering; Silk clinging on to a false version of the self. But that might be the best anyone can do after bearing the unbearable.
 
A thought-provoking and ambitious debut novel about a shameful period of European history of which the legacy continues to this day, Testament is published by Riverrun who provided my review copy. Winner of the Bath Novel Award with plaudits from literary worthies, I trust it won’t detract from the novel’s success for me to admit I didn’t appreciate it as much as I’d hoped.

Should You Ask Me by Marianne Kavanagh

In a small town in Dorset towards the end of the Second World War, the police are really too busy to listen to the ramblings of a lonely old woman. But Mary Holmes’ claim to have information about the human remains recently discovered nearby can’t be dismissed. William, confined to the station due to the injuries that ended his army career, is told to take her statement.
 
Over the course of a week, Miss Holmes gives an account of her early life, and the childhood friends who battled for her affections as they grew into young men. She paints such a vivid picture that 19th-century England seems like yesterday but, while entertaining for the reader, her digressions into looting from a shipwreck, a boxing match and slaughtering a pig prove frustrating for the young constable assigned to her case. Is she weaving a web of lies?
 
Distracted by his own pain, both physical and psychological, it’s hard enough for William to concentrate in the claustrophobic room where they meet. And, despite her apparent self-obsession, Miss Holmes can tell when he’s drifting off into his own memories, as he shares with the reader the tensions in his relationship with his much-admired elder brother and a tentative wartime romance.
 
As William coaxes the story out of Mary, she insists he reciprocates with his own tragic tale. In the process, the young man and the older woman achieve some release from the lies and guilt that have haunted their lives.
 
Described by the publishers, Hodder and Stoughton (to whom thanks for my review copy), as “the perfect holiday read”, Should You Ask Me is commercial fiction at its best. Although I hesitated about the voice initially, overall I found it a comfortable read that doesn’t patronise the reader, unpretentious yet with unexpected depth.
 
While not every novel has to fit the hero’s journey format,
I’ve been rather obsessed with this lately; in those terms, Marianne Kavanagh’s third novel is about leaving the cave. It’s rather like a therapy – or co-therapy – without the anxiety-inducing boundary violations usually associated with therapy-lit.
 
Follow
this link for another style of holiday reads.

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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
Norah Colvin link
17/7/2018 08:32:09 am

Interesting question about truth and lies, Anne. I know a lot of men didn't like to discuss their war experiences. I don't blame them - reliving them in the retelling each time would be painful. For some, establishing an alternate personal history may have seemed the best solution. I do understand that families would have felt cheated though. Whose right is greater?
I'm enjoying your obsession with the hero's journey. I learn a lot from your discussions with Charli.
I enjoyed your article in the Counsellor's Cafe. I'm pleased you placed it there in clear sight and linked to it.

Reply
Annecdotist
19/7/2018 08:59:58 am

I vividly remember hearing about elderly men being re-traumatised at a time of media activity to mark some anniversary (fiftieth?) of the end of the Second World War. Very difficult for a generation that had never learnt to be comfortable discussing feelings.
I think everyone has the right to forget, or to act as if they’ve forgotten (and I’ve got a story about this, which I think you’ve read before, in my forthcoming anthology) which I think should take precedence over the rights of the offspring to know the truth. But I think the damage comes less from the factual withholding but from the effort of withholding (including some emotional blunting) – difficult to see how this wouldn’t impact on relationships.
Glad you’re not bored with all this hero’s journey malarkey! I think there’s more to come.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
22/7/2018 11:32:32 am

I look forward to "more to come"!

Annecdotist
19/7/2018 10:21:34 am

Sorry, meant to add my thanks for following that CC post.

Reply
Charli Mills
18/7/2018 10:42:22 pm

Both books seem to use the HJ in advanced ways to allow for less than perfect elixirs. I like the author's push to go beyond the survival of the two brothers in their unbearable life experiences. Did you find that the journey was also about the granddaughter, perhaps trying to find identity after realizing the impact of her grandfather's constructed and false identity?

I'm also wondering what classifies commercial fiction at its best for you? Does "You Should Ask Me" have depth as well as page-turning action?

Reply
Annecdotist
19/7/2018 09:10:20 am

The granddaughter’s is definitely a hero’s journey, but I found the historical strand more interesting.
And good question about how I’d define strong commercial fiction. To me, it’s commercial if the story is easy to access (this one is structurally interesting but nevertheless easy enough to follow the thread) and the trauma not too harrowing. But I dislike a lot of commercial fiction that addresses trauma more for the drama and oversimplifies an emotionally complex topic. (I’ve read several of these that still make me shiver – and not in the way the author intended.) This has sufficient depth and a hopeful – if not entirely happy – ending. It feels credible.

Reply
Charli Mills
22/7/2018 04:29:51 pm

Ah, yes "trauma for drama" is often exploited in commercial fiction or oversimplified to build page-turners. Good definition. It can be good escapism fiction, I think, but like eating nothing but candy, soon you crave vegetables.

Annecdotist
23/7/2018 03:58:07 pm

Good analogy, but it doesn’t take me very long at all before I crave vegetables!




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