Category: Institutions

Horror: Grey Bees, Witch Bottle & Faces in the Water

22/11/2020

Only one of these three recent reads is classed as a horror novel and, although not my usual genre, it turned out to be my favourite of the three. But we don’t need to evoke the supernatural to scare ourselves: there are real-life horrors in each of these stories. In the first, a translation, war has killed many and put the survivors’ lives on hold. In the second, set in rural Cumbria, the spooky happenings are extra disturbing for a man with unprocessed memories of violence from childhood, as well as his helplessness in the face of his wife’s agonising three-day labour. The third is a 1960s classic set in a horrific – but typical of its time – psychiatric hospital where the regime seems designed to make a bad situation worse.

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Communities set apart: Three Things about Elsie; The Pear Field; Oshibana Complex

26/10/2020

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I’m sharing my thoughts about three recent reads set in communities slightly apart from the mainstream: the first two in contemporary residential care settings and the third in a dystopian future world. In genre they’re also slightly apart from my usual fare: the first mass-market commercial fiction; the second, a translation (and therefore closest to my usual); the third, cyberpunk. Each offered something to intrigue and enjoy.

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Married daughters back in the parental home: Grace and Serenity & Beyond the Glass

24/6/2020

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I recently read two novels set in England almost a century apart about young women returning to their parents after their marriages break down. Unfortunately for both of them, their childhood homes are stepping stones to something more terrifying than the confidence lost from relationship failures: in the first, Grace spends months on the streets; in the second, Clara is confined to a dismal mental institution.

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Unrecognised: Rabbits for Food & Miss Iceland

24/4/2020

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Is there discrimination against women writers? (Is there even more discrimination against older women writers?) Probably but, there being even worse things to get hung up about right now, I’ll gloss over the fact that these two novels about under-appreciated female writers – one in 1960s Iceland, the other in 21st-century New York – come from fairly successful female authors. With a couple of caveats, either or both would make great lockdown reads.

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How our minds work: Tyll & Human Traces

19/1/2020

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Although these two historical novels are very different, both sparked some deep reflection about the workings of the human mind, and especially how our reasoning and problem-solving is influenced by beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, are shaped by the times and cultures in which we live. Both are set primarily in mainland Europe – the first in the seventeenth century and the second towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – and feature – predominantly in the first and latterly in the second – countries ravaged by war.

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The challenge of cognitive difference: Census & The Heavens

29/12/2019

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Both these novels feature characters who are challenged and/or challenge others with their different-from-average minds. In the first, it’s a young man with Down’s syndrome, viewed from the perspective of his loving father. In the second, it’s a young woman, latterly diagnosed with schizophrenia, who inadvertently time travels to Elizabethan England. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of book, do give me the chance to persuade you otherwise!

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Seeking sanctuary in strange places: Dolores & I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

27/12/2019

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In these two novels, a teenage girl needs a safe place to retreat from the world, but the sanctuary she’s chosen won’t easily let her go. In the first, a convent provides shelter to a girl fearful of the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy; in the second, a psychiatric hospital offers a welcome respite from the strain of appearing sane. It’s pure coincidence that the main characters’ names – Dolores and Deborah – begin with the same letter and that both remind me of my forthcoming novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.

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Bicultural: The Topeka School & The God Child

22/12/2019

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Amid the painful aftermath of the UK ‘people’ voting in our pig in a poke, I had reason to remind myself of the literature on the cognitive advantages biculturalism. While I doubt our new PM possesses the skills or intellect to unite an increasingly polarised country – or even the desire, whatever might spout from his mouth – it’s essential if we’re to avoid civil war as we helter-skelter into economic and climactic ruin. So, although neither of these very disparate novels is primarily about straddling two cultures, I make no apologies for linking them via this theme.

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Teenagers trapped in houses of no hope: How We Disappeared & The Nickel Boys

30/9/2019

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Two historical novels in which young people are subject to brutal institutional regimes: in the first as comfort women in Singapore under the Japanese invasion; in the second as supposed offenders in Jim-Crow-era Florida. Both novels contrast the main character’s aspirations prior to captivity with their struggle to survive unspeakable cruelties with their sanity intact, and the scars they carry for the rest of their lives. Thankfully, for the reader who can vicariously accompany them, there’s some hope of redemption by the end. Read on, or jump to the end of the post for this week’s 99-word story.

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Quirky: From the Wreck, Asylum & The Pine Islands

25/4/2019

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Three short reviews of quirky novels published in the UK this month that have taken me around the world without having to leave my armchair. The first, set in Australia, marries historical fact with a lonely alien visitor. The second, set in South Africa, posits an alternative near future where the sick are quarantined. The third, a German translation set in Japan, pairs a suicidal student with an expert on beards for a journey in the footsteps of a revered haiku poet.

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Psychoanalysis, friendship and failure: Jott by Sam Thompson

10/6/2018

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The world poses impossible questions and the future is in darkness, you have no claim on health or peace or the way that you feel things ought to be, you are required to live without knowing what comes next, you must carry on in hope as best you can, and you must begin by attending to one another.

Despite differences in lifestyle and temperament, the friendship between Arthur and Louis, begun as pupils at an Irish boarding school, has endured through university in Dublin to early adulthood in 1930s London. Arthur, a junior psychiatrist, has always been overshadowed by his friend, an unpublished writer with the flair and determination to live by his own rules. While Arthur is shy and socially awkward, Louis can charm anyone, including Arthur, such that the psychiatrist often finds himself sacrificing his own needs for the sake of his friend.

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Disgraced daughters: Circe & The Butcher’s Daughter

15/5/2018

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These two novels reimagine well-known stories from the perspective of women who find themselves banished in disgrace from their parents’ homes. The first is about a witch who features in Homer’s Odyssey; the second about a nun who proves to be a keen observer of Tudor politics. In carving out her own place in the world, each woman discovers there’s not much to envy in the upper echelons of society.

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Two novel views of disillusionment within South African healthcare

27/7/2017

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Two authors with their own lived experience of the challenges of working in South African health care. Two fictional healthcare professionals forced to confront their own privilege within the system and the limitations of what they can achieve. One black, one white; one psychologist, one medical doctor; one in contemporary post-apartheid, one in an imagined dystopia in which it never ends. Two political novels; two engaging reads. Let me know which of them takes your fancy.

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Twin studies: Mischling by Affinity Konar

16/2/2017

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When the cattle car stops at Auschwitz, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski’s mother realises their best chance of survival is in Josef Mengele’s Zoo. As the other kids point out, to the twins shivering on their bunk that night alongside a girl on the brink of death, they get more food there (although “it’s not kosher and it eats your insides”) and keep their hair “until the lice come” and their clothes. Submitting their bodies to the doctor’s measurements and experiments, they hope the bond between them will save their humanity. But when, not long before the camp is liberated, Pearl disappears, Stasha embarks on a perilous journey through Poland’s devastation in search, not only of her sister, but of the man who has done them both such harm.

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Can you imagine? The NHS, then and now: The Tidal Zone & The Dark Circle

3/11/2016

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Let me introduce you to two novels by established female authors about young people struck down by serious illness, set in the social context of the British National Health Service, the first in its contemporary incarnation and the second at its inception.

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The lodger’s hands: Fell by Jenn Ashworth

8/9/2016

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We hated them but we never, ever suggested we should have them taken out. It might have been the money but more likely it just didn’t occur to us. You worked round things and played the best hand you could with the cards you’d been dealt. That was our way. Whatever the neighbours said and however badly we needed the money, we clung on, as if the house wasn’t a gift to us from Jack’s dead parents, but their flesh and blood itself.

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At home in the asylum: Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

10/8/2016

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Not long after their marriage, Tom and Ally must spend several months apart. He goes to Japan to oversee the building of earthquake-proof lighthouses and falls in love with the culture. She, a newly qualified doctor, an unusual profession for a woman in 1880s Britain, stays in Cornwall to volunteer at the asylum until, unable to bear the gap between her own ideals and the often brutal treatment of the inmates, she flees to Manchester and the madhouse of her childhood home. She runs from there to her aunt’s house in London and wonders, with her mother’s voice chiming in her head, whether she will ever be fit to work again. When the paper she publishes on the possible social causes of insanity is well received, she’s invited back to Cornwall to serve as medical director of a new convalescent home to support women to make the transition from the hospital back to their communities. It’s just when she seems to have found her feet that Tom returns from his travels. He’s also changed and, like Kirsten and Rabih in The Course of Love, it looks as if their different ways of turning away from hurt will bring their marriage to an end before it’s properly begun.

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Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew

2/6/2016

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Provence, 1889, and there’s a new arrival at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, the former monastery at the foot of the mountains that’s now an asylum for those too troubled, eccentric or disturbing to survive outside. The Dutchman, known for his red hair as the fou roux, is the first new patient for years and, though this spells extra work by the already worn-out warden, Charles Trabuc, his wife, Jeanne, is curious, even excited at the prospect of someone new. Although, warned by her husband to stay away from the patients, she can only watch from the cottage overlooking the grounds, she’s eager for change.

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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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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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After the Asylum: The Ballroom by Anna Hope & Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull

11/2/2016

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I’m delighted to showcase two second novels published this week (although Song of the Sea Maid has been out for a while in hardback) featuring feisty female characters. Both take a sideways look at history, with a focus on scientific thought either side of Darwin, and celebrate love against the odds. Both stories begin in an asylum (the first a psychiatric hospital, the second an orphanage) and take the reader on an engaging journey beyond its walls.

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What connects a popular psychology book and a novel about psychosis?

29/1/2016

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I hadn’t been reviewing for very long, when I was invited to contribute to the book recommendation site, Shiny New Books. Honoured as I was, I didn’t feel ready back then, but kept it in mind. After Victoria posted a lovely early review of Sugar and Snails on the site and hosted my guest post on writing about secrets, I resolved to keep an eye out for suitable books to review. I’m pleased to announce that my reviews of The Social Brain and Playthings were accepted for the latest edition so if you’re satisfied with the easy answer to my question you can go straight to the reviews by clicking on the images. But if you’d like to discover another connection, then read on.

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Further instructions for a novel: Neverhome by Laird Hunt

30/11/2015

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I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings, and a blanket too. There was a heat in the air so I walked in my shirtsleeves with my hat pulled low.

So begins the story of the transformation of Constance Thompson, wife and farmer, into Gallant Ash, fearless soldier and folk legend of the American Civil War. Hers is a story of love and loss, deceit and duty, and the way in which violence can be used as a defence against unbearable pain that, in the end, brings its own trauma. It’s also the story of how women are airbrushed out of history.

While I’d recommend this novel to readers, I want to focus, as I did some time ago with Instructions for a Heatwave, on what we can learn from Laird Hunt’s sixth novel (although the first to be published in the UK) as writers, whether we are looking to write historical fiction or not.

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Taking refuge in madness? The Offering by Grace McCleen

14/11/2015

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Two and half months short of her thirteenth birthday, Madeline sets off with her parents for a new life on an unnamed island. With no job organised, and no real plan other than to spread the word of God amongst the neighbours, it seems that their faith has been rewarded when they discover a dilapidated farmhouse, with a garden somewhat reminiscent of the picture of Eden in the family Bible. Over the course of that first summer, life is idyllic, as the father finds short-term work and Madeline is home-schooled by her mother, leaving lots of time to roam the countryside with her dog. But, as the chill winds of autumn approach, it seems that their luck – or God’s protection – is running out. Madeline watches with anxiety as her father is refused work, her mother sinks into depression, their stores run low and the house falls into disrepair. Yet, as she records in her diary, she isn’t completely helpless; perhaps, as in the Old Testament, a sacrifice will make God look upon them favourably once more.

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Capitalism can damage your health: The Zoo by Jamie Mollart

3/9/2015

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High-powered advertising executive, James Marlowe, is delighted when he wins the brief to create a new campaign for an international bank. But his involvement in the corporate world comes at a heavy cost, as he becomes increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol in a vain attempt to keep the unethical nature of this endeavour out of mind. This distances him from his beloved wife and son and, eventually, from himself, as a psychotic breakdown lands him in a psychiatric hospital, terrified by a collection of plastic and metal animals and figurines which he calls The Zoo. It’s there that the reader first meets him, and there that we sit alongside him as he gradually pieces together the sequence of events that have brought him to the lowest point of his life.

The perspective on corruption is chilling, to quote one of the minor characters, Lou, the moral voice of the novel (p234-5):

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