Blog Archives

Ever so ‘umble? What’s wrong with pride?

29/4/2016

I’m proud to be taking the reins this week at the Carrot Ranch, with a flash fiction prompt on showing someone around a property. My theme arose partly from the open weekend at North Lees Hall, which attracted over a thousand visitors across the two days. Although I got rather chilled standing in the doorway trying to steer a one-way system on the two sets of stairs, it was great fun. For those who couldn’t make it to Derbyshire, here’s a virtual tour of the house, both inside and out.

Did you notice the p-word in my opening sentence? Did it make you wince? If so, I hope I can persuade you that, not only is the adjective perfectly apt for the purpose, you should lay claim to it yourself.

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Two Novels about Bullying and a Craze from Times Past: Bone by Bone by Sanjida Kay & Hush by Sara Marshall-Ball

26/4/2016

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Humans are social creatures, and the social systems we create can serve as both help and hindrance. Bullying is one of the more disturbing things that can happen when we gather together, but the dark side of human nature can catalyse engaging fiction. In Bone by Bone, childhood bullying is at the core of the novel, while in Hush it’s a consequence of a family trauma, but both make for gripping reads. On a lighter note, I’ve followed these too short reviews with a memory of a more positive aspect of human association, the childhood crazes from which no-one is excluded.

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Life circles: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

23/4/2016

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As a child, Lucy Barton was the strange kid no-one wanted to talk to, who, lacking a television, knew nothing of popular culture and who, according to the other kids, stank. At home, she and her two older siblings were emotionally neglected, often hungry, and periodically on the receiving end of a vicious slap. Lucy hung around at school at the end of the day for the warmth. Too small to have a library, there were nevertheless books in the classrooms and it was in books that Lucy discovered both a solution to her loneliness and her own secret desire to write.

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In Brontë Country: Howarth vs Stanage-NorthLees

20/4/2016

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We British are proud of the Brontës, especially in cinematic form played out by attractive actors. But the Japanese are the real fans, apparently, making pilgrimages to the village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales where the sisters penned their novels. One such tour is the launch point for Mick Jackson’s fourth novel for adults in which the eponymous “heroine”, after a few days drinking with her sister in London, travels north with a coachload of older women. But Yukiko is no Brontë aficionado. Instead, armed with a handful of photographs taken in the area, she considers herself a psychic detective, intent on discovering the secret of her mother’s visit ten years before, which she believes precipitated her suicide back home in the snow.

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How to Be Brave by Louise Beech & Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

17/4/2016

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I must confess I’m rather suspicious of the word brave. On the one hand, the term is overused, especially when referring to endurance in the face of tragedy. (Is it brave not to succumb when your life is threatened or is the human drive for survival? Do we call people brave to avoid having to empathise fully with the enormity of their trauma or to deny their despair?) On the other hand, I think bravery, even when applied to cases in which the person has a genuine choice whether to act, is overrated. Sure, if I were drowning I’d be grateful to anyone who dived in and rescued me, but if a stranger were in the same situation I’d rather my loved ones didn’t risk their own lives to save them. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up these two novels with the b-word in the title. Read on to see whether the characters’ bravery convinced me. (Incidentally, I wasn’t aware when I decided to pair them based solely on the titles that both are partly influenced by the author’s grandfather’s experience in the Second World War, and both featuring the ordeal of hunger.)

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Hotels of North America by Rick Moody & Thomas and Mary by Tim Parks

14/4/2016

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The protagonists of novels are often called upon to act more heroically than they might have to in real life. So it can be refreshing to come across main characters who are as ordinary as the rest of us. Here I’m reviewing two novels about the loves and limitations of middle-aged men; the first in America and the second in the UK. Do these characters have enough oomph to keep our interest? Read on for my personal view. (And, for another take on masculinity and compromised morality, see my review of The Faithful Couple.)

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What Drives Your Characters: Fear or Desire?

11/4/2016

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The coincidence of Charli Mills’s latest post on the loss of a secure base with the buzz about the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth later this month (more on both later in this post) reminded me of this piece on fear as a motivator that has languished in my drafts folder for well over a year.

I’m a great fan of Emma Darwin’s posts on writing because, while they’re stuffed with useful advice, she never pretends there’s a simple formula (or two or three or two hundred and three) to make our novels novel and our sentences sing. That’s not the case in some other corners of the creative writing industry. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m particularly hacked off by an implicit assumption that the classic quest underlies each and every story structure: we just have to decide what our hero wants and thwart him in his journey to find it. While I can see how that works for some fiction, lots of the novels I read and love don’t go down that route. On top of that, human motivation is a complex construct: some people genuinely don’t know what they want and some are far too passive to follow their dreams. Some are constrained by circumstances or demons from the past and some characters sabotage their own desires.

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In Her Wake by Amanda Jennings & Pleasantville by Attica Locke

7/4/2016

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Today’s focus is on plot, with reviews of a psychological thriller about identity and a sophisticated crime novel against a backdrop of African-American politics.

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Fever at Dawn by Péter Gárdos & The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

4/4/2016

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If there’s a genre for translated novels featuring dentistry, early April must be the prime publication slot. While there’s little else to connect these two novels, they got me wondering about teeth in fiction and I couldn’t resist pairing them here. Fever at Dawn is published this week in hardback, while The Story of My Teeth first appeared in English in 2015 and comes out in paperback this week.

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Hard on the outside: Armadillos by PK Lynch

1/4/2016

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Fifteen-year-old Aggie lives on a Texas sheep farm. Her family are God-fearing folk but, according to her elder sister, Jojo, a subspecies, below human. Momma’s long gone and rarely referred to, except as a whore, but Pop needs an outlet, and he likes to keep it in the family. Jojo has tried to protect her, but there’s not just Pop, there’s their brother Cy although, fortunately, Ash refrains until the day he leaves. One day Aggie gets it into her head to leave also and, without packing a bag or even picking up a bottle of water, she walks.