Blog Archives

It’s ONLY fiction? Not according to your brain!

30/5/2016

As someone who spends more time with fictional characters than with flesh-and-blood people, I’m sometimes at risk of embarrassing myself in real-life interactions. Especially when it gets to the level of gossip; it’s not that I’m not interested, or don’t have anything to contribute, but that the anecdote I’m bursting to share is about some fictional character, and some people find that a little odd.

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Fighting fire with fire

27/5/2016

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Fourteen-year-old Lucia Stanton lives with her elderly aunt in a converted garage in the grounds of a large house. With her deceased father’s zippo lighter in her pocket, she rides the bus to visit the mother who doesn’t recognise her in a psychiatric hospital, after which she goes to a bar to get drunk. Intelligent and nonconformist, Lucia adheres to a strict moral code; unfortunately it differs widely from the one followed by teachers and the cool kids at school. She hasn’t considered setting fires until, in detention one evening, she hears some students refer to a secret Arson Club.

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Greater than the sum of their parts?

24/5/2016

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It’s not unusual for a novel to tell a story from different viewpoints, or from the same point-of-view character at different points and/or places of their lives. Some writers take this a stage further, structuring their novels as a series of related but stand-alone short stories, gradually building up to a whole. Examples among my reviews are This Beautiful, The Green Road, Sophie Stark, Prosperity Drive and Vertigo. Now I’ve found a couple more, in which the disparate narratives combine to create a sense of place.

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The complexity of human relationships: Prosperity Drive by Mary Morrissy

21/5/2016

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Edel Elworthy is confused about most things, but she’s pretty sure that her adult daughter, Norah, who has moved back into her childhood home on Prosperity Drive to care for her, is aware that she’s fallen at the top of the stairs. But she “thinks she understands why lately Norah has refused to come running. Payback” (p4). Though there’s something she feels she ought to tell her if only she could form the words.

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Hidden gems: The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

18/5/2016

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When she was about six or seven, my youngest niece was obsessed with old books. Too young to articulate what drew her to them, she would spend a quiet hour when she came to visit turning the pages of an antique volume of poetry. Thinking she might prefer something more suited to her reading age and, admittedly, anxious to preserve my small collection of old books, I offered her a modern anthology of the work of Hilaire Belloc, which she vehemently rejected. Ten years on, I wonder if she’d be the ideal reader of Thomas Maloney’s debut novel, which I received courtesy of the publisher, Scribe.

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Workington and Barrow: Small towns, great fiction?

15/5/2016

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What does the working-class child aspire to? In my case, I couldn’t dream of joining a middle-class profession I’d never heard of. Nor, even though I was addicted to writing from the start, did I believe that someone like me could become an author. Books never seemed to be based in the places with which I was familiar: they were set in boarding schools rather than comprehensives; in country houses rather than a small semi-detached; in cities rather than small industrial towns. So how could I resist a novel set in my birthplace, the small northern town from which my odd accent derives? As if that weren’t enough, I’m offered a novel set where my parents grew up, a similar down-at-heel out-of-the-way place where I had my first restaurant meal. Sixty miles separates these two towns, as well as some breath-taking countryside, as depicted in The Wolf Border, one of my favourite reads from last year. But Workington and Barrow don’t have the beauty of the Lake District. Thanks to Vintage Books and Legend Press, I had the chance to discover whether they could nevertheless shine on the page. I’d be interested in your thoughts on using real places as fictional settings.

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Return to Wildfell: The Woman Who Ran by Sam Baker

12/5/2016

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After escaping a fire in Paris that might have killed her bullying estranged husband, Helen rents a large and dilapidated house on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, hoping for peace and seclusion. But she hasn’t bargained for the curiosity of the villagers, including Gil, a recently-retired journalist with time on his hands. After an Internet search throws up some disturbing information, Gil persuades Helen to tell him her story, which unfolds in a six-hour overnight conversation, reminding me of the mammoth therapy session in The Other Side of You.

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Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

9/5/2016

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Paul and Veblen are engaged to be married. They’re clearly in love and clearly, with their mismatched attitudes to the world beyond themselves, unsuited for the decades of companionship we hope will follow a wedding. It is obvious from the moment Paul gives her a ring, with a diamond so large it interferes with her obsessional typing.

Unlike Veblen, who espouses the anti-capitalist values of her namesake, the economist Thorstein Veblen, Paul is ambitious. A research neurologist, when the pharmaceutical empire Hutmacher offers him the opportunity to begin clinical trials on the device he’s developed to minimise battlefield brain damage, he dismisses his ethical reservations with the word Seropurulent “an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked” (p62). Raised by hippies, the trappings of the consumerist world spell safety for Paul (p66):

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The Wacky Man by Lyn G Farrell & a rant about punishment

5/5/2016

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Fifteen-year-old Amanda is in a bad way. Unwilling or unable to leave her bedroom, unwashed and unloved, she sits on the grubby floor, pulling out the hairs from her head one by one. She has no need for relationships, no use for her mother except that she leave her meals and cigarettes outside the door. Curtains drawn, with little sense of time, her head is full of thoughts of how intolerable the world is as she relates the story of her own unhappy life.

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Beyond Vietnam: The Outside Lands & Journeyman

2/5/2016

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I’m pleased to recommend two California-set novels published this week about the fragility of masculinity, sibling loyalty and the impact on families of the Vietnam war, the first for the generation directly affected and the second for the children of men who served.