I was a little surprised to find that Marvellous Ways is a character, rather than a method, in Sarah Winman’s second novel but, as she reviews her long life in the company of a bereft young soldier, it turns out that a life lived according to her own ways is rather marvellous after all. Aged eighty-nine when we first meet her in 1947, her years have passed mostly alone in a remote Cornish creek. Her mother, she’s been told, was a mermaid and her father found a place “between God and medicine” in administering to the dying in their final hours, perhaps a precursor to the hospice movement featured in a couple of other novels. Marvellous finds a role for herself at the other end of life, as a very different kind of midwife to Gugu in Mo Yan’s Frog.
It’s not easy to summarise this life-affirming novel about the magic in everyday life, encompassing so much of the human condition, from birth to death, from love to loneliness, bound up in the healing power of storytelling and compassion. It’s also about the fishing industry and the aftermath of war that divides the survivors into heroes versus harlots and cowards. Finally (for me, at least, I’m sure others will find other themes) it’s about ageing and culturally acceptable and unacceptable manifestations of grief, as in these words of the doctor (p177):
I too understand the madness that ensues when someone you love dies. But I kept mine clothed. Respectable. I kept mine hidden so as not to frighten people. But it was there, behind my job, behind my eyes. But because I was respectable, people would come to our house with food, or a cake, or kind words. My grief – because I was respectable – was not misinterpreted. I too went mad … But I still polished my shoes.
A Year of Marvellous Ways is published by Tinder Press who provided my review copy.
I too understand the madness that ensues when someone you love dies. But I kept mine clothed. Respectable. I kept mine hidden so as not to frighten people. But it was there, behind my job, behind my eyes. But because I was respectable, people would come to our house with food, or a cake, or kind words. My grief – because I was respectable – was not misinterpreted. I too went mad … But I still polished my shoes.
A Year of Marvellous Ways is published by Tinder Press who provided my review copy.
Roland Nair might be a captain in the Danish army. He might be a NATO agent, sent to investigate his old friend Michael Adriko, or he might be on a money-making mission of his own. What is clear, is that he’s travelled from Amsterdam to Freetown to do something clever and potentially dangerous, that he likes a drink and spending time with prostitutes, between writing emails to his fiancée back at base. Some of my uncertainty is down to the tendency of spies to play their cards close to their chests; some to the fact that I really ought not to have elected to review a novel in this genre when I struggle to follow the ins and outs.
What attracted me was another opportunity for a virtual visit to Sierra Leone, the territory of one of my favourite fictional psychologists, and for a lighter foray into the murk of that continent than I encountered in Jimfish. While I greatly enjoyed some of the detail, from the intermittent electricity supply to the micro portions of alcohol sold in sealed plastic bags, I struggled to follow the plot (although I did get the part about the environmental and human casualties of mineral mining, which also features in The Zoo), which might say more about me from the book itself. Thanks – and apologies – to Harvill Secker for my review copy.
Apologies also to readers as there’s not much to link these two novels together, apart from my finding them hard to review, but I’m tidying up my virtual bookshelves in readiness for my Books of the Year post tomorrow.
What attracted me was another opportunity for a virtual visit to Sierra Leone, the territory of one of my favourite fictional psychologists, and for a lighter foray into the murk of that continent than I encountered in Jimfish. While I greatly enjoyed some of the detail, from the intermittent electricity supply to the micro portions of alcohol sold in sealed plastic bags, I struggled to follow the plot (although I did get the part about the environmental and human casualties of mineral mining, which also features in The Zoo), which might say more about me from the book itself. Thanks – and apologies – to Harvill Secker for my review copy.
Apologies also to readers as there’s not much to link these two novels together, apart from my finding them hard to review, but I’m tidying up my virtual bookshelves in readiness for my Books of the Year post tomorrow.
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