Blog Archives

Code makers and code breakers: I Can’t Begin to Tell You by Elizabeth Buchan and a 99-word flash

28/8/2014

After my recent posts about obedience to a malign authority and the ensuing atrocities, it’s refreshing to be able to bring you a novel in which people refuse to submit. Even better, in contrast to the stories of women’s subjugation within marriage – wonderful reads as they were – I Can’t Begin to Tell You is a celebration of women’s resistance, courage and determination.

Like Simon Mawer’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky which I read last year, this is a gripping story about the agents and code-breakers of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. At its centre is Kay Eberstern, British-born wife of a Danish landowner. Like John Campbell in Johanna Lane’s debut novel, Black Lake, Bror’s attachment to his ancestral lands has led him to go against his wife’s wishes, in this case by signing a declaration of goodwill towards the occupying Nazis. This crack in the marriage widens when Kay is persuaded to provide a refuge for an SOE agent, drawing her into a world of secrets and subterfuge which endangers not only her relationship with Bror, but the entire family.

Meanwhile, over in England, Ruby Ingram channels her fury over the fact that, as a woman, she couldn’t be awarded the degree she had earned from Cambridge University, into her efforts to improve the safety of agents in the field.

21 Comments

School: a Suitable Place for Fiction?

24/8/2014

31 Comments

I’m ambivalent about school. On a personal level, I achieved good outcomes from my long ago schooldays, but this was more by dint of my capacity for obedience than any genuine nurturing of my intellect and creativity. (I’m always pleasantly surprised when children these days claim to enjoy school.) On a political level, the view that mass education can be used to weaken working-class culture sits alongside the genuine enthusiasm for learning I’ve witnessed in places where a school place can’t be taken for granted.

How does this translate into my reading and writing? As a child, I lapped up Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories, although the settings were worlds away from my own experience. The junior equivalent of the country-house genre, St Clare’s, Malory Towers and the like served merely as the backdrop for schoolgirl adventures. And that’s the thing with school stories, the experience is so near universal, it’s difficult to untangle the school aspect from the fact of being a child. When I wrote my bite-size memoir, School at Seven, it was more about friendship betrayed than education. Of my short fiction, school provides the setting for the hormone-heavy story of adolescence, Kinky Norm, and frames the parent-child conflict in both Jessica’s Navel and Elementary Mechanics. The epistolary Bathroom Suite is more about inequality than school refusal.

31 Comments

Not enough “no”? A Sixpenny Song by Jennifer Johnston

21/8/2014

14 Comments

I’m always suspicious of novels penned by the famous: when the name’s enough to shift the copies off the shelves I’m concerned they won’t have put in their 10,000 hours of apprenticeship to develop the writing craft. It goes against the grain to say it, as I believe we learn better through praise than punishment, but I think we writers need to have been told time after time that our work isn’t good enough before we reach the pinnacle of publication.

I have similar feelings about established writers with a lengthy backlist. Sure, they’ve earned their place in those hallowed halls but, with a clutch of literary prizes on the mantelpiece, they don’t have to work so hard to stay there. So why did I pick up (the much lauded Irish writer) Jennifer Johnston’s fifteenth novel? Perhaps it was because I so enjoyed one of her late-ish works, This Is Not a Novel. Perhaps, as I discovered via musician Nick Cave’s wonderful The Death of Bunny Munro, and Peter Matthiessen’s moving final novel, In Paradise, exceptions do exist.

A woman returns to her childhood home following the death of a parent and, in the process, discovers some painful truths about her family which impact on how she perceives herself.

14 Comments

9 Fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 8. By Blood by Ellen Ullman

18/8/2014

26 Comments

Who can say they’ve never dreamt of being a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on the intimate exchanges between people who don’t even know we exist? Such an opportunity presents itself to the unnamed narrator of this unusual and multi-layered novel when he rents a room in an office block right next to a psychotherapist in 1974 San Francisco. A troubled, and troubling, university professor on enforced leave from his post, and veteran of decades of unsuccessful therapies, he is obsessively drawn to the unfolding story of the young woman to whom he refers as “my patient”. Adopted as a baby, her journey to discover the identity of her birth mother takes her, via Israel, from affluent 1930s Berlin to the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. As a reader, I also became engrossed in her tragic story but, in keeping with the parameters I’ve set myself in this series of reviews, I’ll now turn my attention away from the content to the process of its telling, packaged as it is within a series of therapeutic encounters over the course of around sixteen months.

This was one of the most credible fictional accounts of psychotherapy I’ve discovered so far. Alongside the mind-blowing personal discoveries, were the sulks and silences, the tedium, the long hard graft for both patient and therapist in their search for the truth. While some might find the fly-on-the-wall approach introduces an unnecessary distancing from the patient’s narrative, it works well as a way of exploring the process and rituals of therapy. His observations, such as this on the Christmas break:

26 Comments

The Complexity of Desire: He Wants by Alison Moore

15/8/2014

14 Comments

One of the signifiers of good fiction is the early clarification of what the main characters want and sending them on a journey where they will be continually thwarted in their search to get it, right? With each of the seventeen chapter titles flagging up something the characters either want or don’t want, Alison Moore, in her second novel, seems on the surface to have taken this to heart. Lewis, doesn’t want soup or sausages but, when he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon. Sydney wanted to live in Australia. Lawrence wants a CD of The Messiah.

But Alison Moore is too sophisticated a writer to churn out a formulaic quest story. He Wants is populated by people who singularly fail to pursue their desires, or even to know what they are. Lawrence, an elderly resident of a nursing home, eagerly accepts the staff’s offers of tea, even when he already has one going cold on his lap. Lewis, his son, a retired RE teacher, eats the soup he does not want that is delivered each day by his daughter. Sydney, the childhood friend who mysteriously disappeared, wants to meet Lewis’s daughter but Barry Bolton gets in the way. Yet, despite their passivity, the reader can’t help rooting for these characters as it gradually dawns on us how, for most of his adult life, Lewis has wanted something he could never bear to acknowledge.

14 Comments

Who am I, by the way? – In Search of Solace by Emily Mackie

14/8/2014

0 Comments

This week sees the publication of two second novels by female writers addressing the themes of identity and religion through the portrayal of men who don’t sit very comfortably within their own skins. Yet my experience of these novels was so different I’ve decided, despite my obsession with linking, to review them in separate posts, thereby breaking my unwritten rule and posting on consecutive days. I hope you’ll be able to join me for both.

The title, In Search of Solace, suggests a quest novel and, indeed, Jacob Little does set out to find both the woman he knew as Solace, as well as the comfort and consolation of discovering the answer to the question of who he is. But Jacob is a long way from the traditional hero: a shadowy figure who, consistent with his own theory of identity as:

not something we choose for ourselves, nor … Something that grew organically as we got older. It was something gifted to us. By others … as a kind of malleable gloop that could be manipulated by the people around us; never fixed, but changing with every situation and circumstance (p 172-173),

is revealed to the reader through the perceptions of the other, more solid, characters. I liked the idea of exploring a protagonist from the outside in, and that notion of identity as something forced upon us by other people is consistent with the psychoanalytic notion of projective identification in which we experience ourselves as thinking, feeling and acting in ways that don’t actually belong to us. But I wasn’t convinced that the omniscient narrator speaking directly to the reader in meta-fictional asides was either necessary or helpful:

0 Comments

Adventures in the multi-verse: walking and blogging with our fictional friends

11/8/2014

14 Comments

"Thornfield" in Jane Eyre

I’ve said it before and no doubt I’ll say it again: I love the webbiness of the World Wide Web. I love writing posts that link to other posts, both mine and other people’s, even as I worry that those phrases picked out in blue might impede the reading process. Even when I’m not forging links across the Internet, I enjoy rooting for commonalities, such as those between the novels of those writers featured in my debut novelists Q&A’s or plucking from my bookshelves novels on a specific theme, such as water or transgenerational trauma. (You can see how it gets obsessive and it’s little wonder my posts take so long to write.) Yet I’m much more cagey bringing different spheres of my own life into the blog. Yes, I’ll prattle on about gardening and make oblique references to the pleasure I get from singing in a choir. But until I started my series on fictional psychologists and psychotherapists, I kept my professional background entirely separate from my identity as a writer and, even now, the more structured and formalised are the alternative universes I occupy, the less comfortable I feel about providing a portal to them here.

14 Comments

Never Again: In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

8/8/2014

5 Comments

When we live in a world that includes neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to ensure that the death camps aren’t forgotten. But how do we acknowledge such a horrific and shameful aspect of European history in a way that is truly authentic? How do we avoid approaching it in a way that is either overintellectualised or overly sentimental, or filtered through our own cultural identities as victims, perpetrators, collaborators or disengaged bystanders? Do we force-feed it to children too young to understand (the subject of Elissa Cahn’s flash fiction, On Behalf Of the Class, as well as one of my own eternal WIPs)? Do we turn a blind eye to the transgressions of the descendants of the survivors on account of their culture having been persecuted so much? Do we use it to work through our individual issues of terror, trauma, cruelty and guilt?
How to bear witness to the Holocaust is the subject of Peter Matthiessen’s final novel (he died earlier this year), In Paradise. One hundred and forty people – nuns and priests, Jews, Buddhists, survivors, academics, Germans, Poles, Americans and Israelis – gather at Auschwitz in the late 1990s for a week-long retreat. They sleep in the dormitories that previously housed the camp guards, they file past the piles of hair and baby shoes in the museum, meditate sitting cross-legged on the selection platform before a meagre lunch of rough bread and thin soup, and assemble in the auditorium in the evenings to give voice to their individual and collective experience. We follow this from the perspective of Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, who has joined the retreat to facilitate his research into the life and writings of Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of the camp who committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight by sticking his head in the gas oven. Little by little, Olin acknowledges a more personal motivation for being there as he uncovers uncomfortable aspects of his own family’s history.

Faced with such horror, who wouldn’t shy away?

5 Comments

Finding Fiction in the Cracks: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray and a 99-word Flash

4/8/2014

8 Comments

If fiction thrives on strong emotion and conflict, Carys Bray’s debut novel, about what happens to a Mormon family after their youngest member dies, has all the right ingredients. Grief, while painful to experience, is a powerful launching pad for fiction and, as Derbhile Dromey commented in response to my post on religion and the right to die debate, religion channels conflict in believer and unbeliever alike.

Review of A Song For Issy Bradley

While four-year-old Issy Bradley is languishing in bed with undiagnosed meningitis, her mother, Claire, is shopping in Asda for affordable party food. Issy’s father, Ian, bishop of the local congregation, is out doing good works for the community and her big sister, Zippy, is lost in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Of her two brothers, seven-year-old Jacob, is swallowing his disappointment that his dad won’t be able to attend his birthday party and teenager Alma is looking for an escape route so he can go off and play football. When Issy dies, the family’s religious faith proves to be both a source of consolation and pain. The future focus, with the belief that the family will be reunited in eternity, is reassuring for Ian, as he keeps up his church duties, unaware of how much he is neglecting his family and exhausting himself. Claire, who, unlike the other Bradleys, did not grow up as a Mormon but converted when she met Ian, has always found comfort in the sense of order and obedience to a higher power, now feels deserted by God:

8 Comments