The more he saw of the world, the less he understood. Worse still, what he did understand was so crazy, so cruel, that none of the lessons of his old teacher Soviet Malala seemed to apply; not rage nor the many sides of history, neither the lumpenproletariat, nor the settler entity.
Welcome
I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
A strange young man emerges from the ocean in 1980s South Africa. Neither black nor white but a bit of both, with the blue tinge of the coelacanth thrown in, Jimfish is a problem for a country in which people are “coralled in a separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification and tightly controlled” (p1). Nevertheless, he finds employment as a gardener under the tutelage of Soviet Malala until he’s caught “as tightly tangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig” (p7) with the police sergeant’s daughter, Lunamiel, and has to flee the country. His attempts to stay on “the right side of history” take him on an epic journey through Africa into Eastern Europe and back again. Everywhere he goes he encounters carnage and confusion (p123):
The more he saw of the world, the less he understood. Worse still, what he did understand was so crazy, so cruel, that none of the lessons of his old teacher Soviet Malala seemed to apply; not rage nor the many sides of history, neither the lumpenproletariat, nor the settler entity.
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Novels of character often address the question of how our experiences define us. In The Lives of Women, Elaine was shaped by the tragedy that brought her childhood to an abrupt end. Lillian, another middle-aged woman subjecting her life to an unflinching review, sees herself through a succession of lovers and, to a lesser extent, her parents’ marriage and the constraints or otherwise of social class. Living through the postwar decades of change in Missouri, Munich, Paris, London and New York, Lillian presents at first as witty and unconventional, as bold and independent as a single woman can be in a world where the apotheosis of achievement is to work as PA to the (male) head of the organisation (and never mind too much about what the business of that organisation might be). In her late 50s, Lillian refuses to be held back by the embarrassments of her ageing body; all she needs is a pot of KY Jelly strategically placed at the bedside and she can continue to welcome her married lover into her home. She might have been a late starter sexually, but she soon caught up, learning how to adapt herself to a man’s desires, “pretending not to notice … [being] the key to so much” (p142). Even as she acknowledges her disappointments, she has no room for self-pity (p152): Following the death of her mother, Elaine returns to her childhood home to care for her disabled father and aged dog after an absence of over thirty years. Her feelings are at best ambivalent (p10): He arrives to heel, an old dog again, half-blind and utterly exhausted, then he folds himself down on the ground and looks at me sideways, as if ashamed of his own frailty. And I find myself wondering which I will be left with in the end, the dog or my father, then try not to think which one I’d prefer. The enclave of absent men and frustrated women, the suburban homes hide their quiet violence beneath a mask of respectability (p40): Some detached, some semi-detached. Redbrick to steep roof. Some gardens bigger than others. Apron of lawn front and back; elbows of lawn at the sides of a detached house. A driveway. Square pillars, double gate. A hedge to the front: not so high that the house could hide behind it, but not so low that a child could climb up and hurt itself – or, worse, ruin the line of the hedge. I think I, ah, sort of lost my mind this year? Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, he says finally. I think a lot of women go through that. What, abandon their dissertations? Lose their minds. Having a kid. It’s a year now since Walker was born, and Ari is still struggling. Most days, the baby goes to a childminder so she can go through the motions of working on her dissertation, about how feminist organisations implode (p46) and even her supervisor is beginning to see through the façade (p22): There’s a curt email from Marianne about the dissertation. How is the thinking coming? … Does Marianne actually think I’m working on my dissertation? Does she think I give a flying fuck about my dissertation? It’s all I can do to bathe occasionally, keep the house reasonably tidy, feed us, launder, get some sleep … Sorting through the effects of her beloved grandmother, Mariam, shortly after her death, British journalist, Katerina Knight, discovers a wooden spice box containing a journal and stack of handwritten letters. The documents are written in Armenian, a language which neither Katerina nor her mother understands but, on holiday in Cyprus, Katerina meets a handsome young man who offers to translate them. Mariam’s scribbles tell of relatives lost to slaughter and exile in the 1915 Armenian genocide, of a fortuitous rescue by an English couple and a country childhood ending with another lost love. Meanwhile, Gabriel, an elderly Armenian living in Nicosia, exiled a second time with the partitioning of Cyprus into Greek and Turkish sectors, is bemoaning his granddaughter’s engagement to a man from outside the community, perceiving it as a betrayal of her origins, as cultural genocide, although one of his drinking friends advises tolerance (p175-6): ‘Let go of the past, my friend. All that stored up resentment isn’t good for the soul.’ ‘The past is not like water in a toilet bowl. It can’t be flushed away. It’s a septic tank growing more rancid by the day.’ The reader discovers before he does Gabriel’s link to Mariam and Katerina, and from that point the novel is driven by the question of whether these characters will finally connect. Imagine you’re out for a walk one weekend and see a young man swallow handful of pills and jump into the river. Without thinking – or perhaps even as a distraction from the torment of your failing marriage – you strip off your heavy coat and plunge into the river to save him. Much later, after the ambulance has driven him away and you’ve sloughed off the river’s mud in a hot bath, you realise you’ve got the young man’s coat and, more to the point, he’s got yours, with a set of spare house keys in the pocket, along with a bunch of letters bearing your name and address. So you hot-foot it to the hospital to do a swap. Where were you when you heard the news of the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center? I was at work, trying to squeeze a month’s worth of tasks from my to-do list into the remaining forty-eight hours before I left for a three-week holiday. One of my colleagues had heard the news on the radio during a ten-minute break between clients, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me until I got home and saw the footage on TV. So it wasn’t my story. Another of my colleagues was bound for a conference in New York, on a plane that got diverted to Canada. He came back with a tale to tell about the kindness of strangers, of sleeping like a refugee in a sports hall, and missing out on what might have been his only opportunity to attend a conference abroad. His story was bigger than mine, but still not much of a 9/11 survival story. In Richard Bausch’s Before, During, After, Michael Faulk is waking up with a hangover in a hotel in New York, deciding against breakfasting at the top of the towers before attending his cousin’s wedding. His fiancée, Natasha Barrett, is on a Jamaican beach holiday with one of her friends, frantically trying to find out if Michael is alive. This is their story. The Haitian earthquake of 2010 makes an unusual setting for a romantic comedy, but this novel manages to beautifully balance the devastating impact of the unexpected seismic event alongside celebrating bonds of affection and the resilience of the human spirit. A love triangle between twenty-year-old artist Natasha Robert; her new husband, the president, forty years her senior; and Alain, the lover she has abandoned in the hope of escaping the confines of her native country. The novel opens with a bang in the rubble of the airport, with the reader sharing Natasha’s initial disorientation; only moments before, she was climbing the steps to the plane that was to take her and her husband to a better life in Italy. As some of my reviews will testify (e.g. My Real Children; Indigo; Hidden Knowledge), I can feel disorientated when a novel fails to unfold according to my expectations. But isn’t that often the case initially when we come to read fiction? Unless it’s ploddingly formulaic there’s an interval, before we settle into both story and style, when we don’t know where we are. Part of the pleasure of opening a new book is that sense that, despite the clues from title, cover and blurb, it could lead us somewhere new. But, as I’ve intimated time and again in my reviews, there needs to be balance between novelty and familiarity, and each of us have our own preferences for where we position ourselves between them. Completing the initial round of my publisher’s edits for my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails, I’m reminded of the potential for disorientation I’ve built into the story. My narrator, Diana, has a secret she is unable to share with the reader initially; when you get it, you might look back on what she’s previously told you in a new light. I have to hope I’ve hit a reasonable balance between surprise and security, but I know it won’t work for all. The blue cover of the English edition shows a silhouette of four young people above a précis of the pitch: “What if you had a child who was toxic to you and everyone else?” At the bottom, a further enticement, or is it a warning? “You won’t get away unharmed.” I wasn’t expecting to be disturbed by a futuristic novel about a sinister epidemic of which children are the only carriers, causing anyone who comes near them a barrage of symptoms including dizziness, severe headaches, and nausea. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the darker side of the relationship between old and young, and the devastating impact of parental distance on children’s development, is familiar territory for me, and I looked forward to seeing how this would be explored. The back-cover blurb did nothing to discourage me, but perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to the phrase “part postmodern puzzle”, post-modernism being a concept I’ve consistently failed to understand. America at the end of the twenty-first century: a world of droughts; advanced technology; and boys identified with the gene for criminality compulsorily enrolled in corrective institutions from the age of three. James is one such child: a Level 1 student with the prospect of a decent life on graduation in under a year’s time. That’s if he can abide by the school’s strict regulations to avoid accumulating any “demerits” and prevent the memories of a vicious arson attack on his previous school from disturbing his calm. Yet, brutal as the school may be, James is anxious about venturing into the civilian world with its confusing freedoms and potential encounters with the hostile Zeros, religious fundamentalists intent on purifying the world by fire. When, on his first Community Day outing, he steals a girl’s barrette hair slide, a set of progressively harsher punishments is set in train which sees James, not only losing his relatively protected status, but uncovering a network of corruption within the school far deadlier than he could have imagined. Andrew appears to be particularly accident prone, everywhere he goes he brings disaster, especially to those he loves. After one marriage has ended in divorce and the death of a baby, his second has left him as the hapless father of a motherless baby girl. In a purported conversation with his therapist, he reviews his life story, and the extent of his responsibility for the tragedies that have occurred. Andrew is a “cognitive scientist” with a strong belief in the impact of brain biology on our actions as opposed to the more nebulous mind. Although not necessarily a likeable character, his voice is lively and appealing. At first the novel comes across as a parody of therapy, with the therapist’s questions and largely unhelpful interjections generally ignored. But as the novel progresses, we find ourselves embroiled in a far darker story of not only the wrongs unwittingly triggered by this one individual, but, via Andrew’s college-day friendship with a war-mongering president, of political shenanigans of the worst kind. By the end of the novel the dreams, “soundless voices” and speculation about how far studies of the human brain can take us, that have preoccupied Andrew from the early pages, and even the identity of the seemingly neutral therapist take on a more sinister significance, in which his only note of hope is in the science supposedly underlying his experience, along with his insistence on his inability to feel. What can I say to attract you to a novel that starts and ends with a funeral and mines a deep well of sadness in between? Academy Street is one of the most honest and heart-breaking accounts of fictional grief I’ve come across, as well as one of the most beautifully written. Tess Lohan is marvelling at a blackbird that has flown in through the window to peck at the wallpaper in the family farmhouse as a coffin is carried downstairs. Seven-year-old Tess finds herself intermittently forgetting that her mother has died, that she won’t be able to run and tell her what she’s observed. We stay with Tess over the next six decades as she follows her sister to boarding school, moves to Dublin to train as a nurse and then to New York to spend the bulk of her life on Academy Street until, echoing the opening chapters, she returns to her beloved Easterfield for the funeral of her elder brother. Tess finds moments of intense joy in the little things, but she’s often lonely: her deepest loves are ephemeral, her losses profound*. Like Dear Thief, Academy Street addresses the pain of attachments, whether it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m not exactly sure why moving house is such a stressful life event, up there with death of a spouse and divorce. It might have something to do with the fact that, like a marriage, we invest a lot of ourselves in our homes. When we leave, we take with us what we can, but some of the essence of what we had and what it meant to us is fixed in that place, embedded in the floorboards, the bricks and mortar, the grouting between the tiles. My last house move, nearly 15 years ago, was pretty stressful but I remember how reassured I felt when friends from where we’d previously lived came to visit and could see the fit between the new place and me. Although the houses were radically different in style and layout, both were mirroring some of my character. When Hildy Good, the estate-agent narrator of The Good House by Ann Leary, says that she only has to walk through a house once to understand the psyche of its occupants, she may be exaggerating, but not very much. Moving house can have different meanings at different points of the lifespan: a young adult might need to flee the parental home to unleash their creativity; for an older person, moving might present risks to their health. In my short story, Spring Cleaning, a daughter and granddaughter’s attempts to give an older woman’s home makeover while she’s in hospital proves to be disturbing enough. In Emma Healey’s debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, Maud is confused and disorientated when she gives up her home, despite her daughter’s attempts to smooth the way. Young Russian immigrant Slava Gelman’s writerly ambitions stretch far beyond his post among the pondlife at a New York magazine. Following the death of his beloved grandmother, his grandfather commissions him to build upon their sketchy knowledge of her escape from the Minsk ghetto to submit false claims for reparations from the German government on behalf of various inhabitants of “Soviet Brooklyn” who don’t quite fit the strict criteria of experience of ghettos, forced labour and concentration camps. Initially reluctant, Slava discovers in these accounts, not only way to reconnect with his own cultural history, but also the perfect outlet for his literary skills. I was looking forward to reading this novel both for yet another oblique perspective on the second world war and its aftermath and for the sheer audacity of the premise, reminiscent of Shalom Auslander’s fictionalisation of an elderly Anne Frank in Hope: a Tragedy. Unfortunately for me, the novel failed to deliver the promised humour; nor, given that Slava was required to invent the survivor narrative, his grandmother having shared little of her trauma with her family, did I learn as much as I’d hoped. I also found the flashy prose slowed the pace, especially in the first two-thirds of the novel. However, I became more engaged towards the end with the appearance of Otto, German civil servant and amateur sleuth, raising moral questions about whether, and if so under what circumstances, it’s ethical to lie. When Stella hears the doorbell one dark winter’s afternoon, she ignores it. After all, she isn’t expecting anyone to call and she herself never leaves the house. But her visitor, inadequately dressed for the blizzard conditions, is persistent. Reluctantly, Stella lets her in. Torn between suspicion and compassion, Stella is ill-equipped to handle the duplicitous teenager who wants to see her husband. Does Blue need protection or is she out to do the couple harm? How much of what she says can be believed and is Stella strong enough to face the truth? Moving back and forth between Stella’s present dilemma, a series of undated therapy sessions, and a complex case at the Grove Road Clinic two years earlier, the reader gradually realises what’s at stake. We come to appreciate the depth of fear that has led to her withdrawal from the world and the danger that still lurks at the heart of Stella’s supposed safe haven. This is an engaging psychological thriller about vulnerability, trust and webs of deceit, in the manner of How to Be a Good Wife. Segueing neatly from my last post featuring my late-adolescent hairstyles, I’m sharing my experiences of two novels about 17/18-year-olds at different ends of the 1970s, both of which puzzled me until they blossomed into something surprisingly deep and moving with the concluding chapters. All eyes are on Aviva Rossner as she arrives at the prestigious Auburn Academy in the late 1970s exuding glamour and youthful sexuality. Bruce Bennett-Jones is mortified when she snubs his feeble advances and takes up with the unlikely Seung Jung. The couple flaunt their relationship, evoking the envy and fascination of their classmates and irritation among their teachers: this is a fictional school where rules may be broken but not in such a blatant manner. But underneath the veneer of almost-adult confidence, the pair are struggling. Aviva, in love with being loved, is terrified of the loss of control that could come with indulging her appetites; Seung, gentle and caring, can’t understand her reluctance to join him in his experiments with drugs. But it’s sex that proves their downfall: as every fumbling attempt ends in failure, they blame themselves, and the stakes are heightened for their next encounter. Around the sixtieth anniversary of the ending of the Second World War, there were whispers in the media about old men being traumatised by the memories of the horrors of their youth that were triggered by the worldwide commemorations. As a psychologist, I’d long been interested in repressed memories and, as the offspring of a World War II veteran, I was curious about the impact on my generation, one of the themes I wanted to address in my novel, Sugar and Snails. So my ears pricked up when, earlier this summer, I caught a BBC radio broadcast about a novel exploring one of the greatest atrocities of that war by a man whose father had survived it. I liked the way Richard Flanagan refused to provide easy answers: he’d spent twelve years trying to understand what evil was but ended up no wiser. I strongly recommend you listen to his interview with Mariella Frostrup – it starts about two minutes into the broadcast and lasts about 10 to 12 minutes – who does a much better job at selling the novel than I can. But I’ll give it my best shot … Facing Their Demons in the Fight for Freedom: After Before by Jemma Wayne … and a 99-word Flash19/9/2014 The best part of Jemma Wayne’s debut novel is the part the reader might feel tempted to skim over. We know what’s coming – Emily/Emilienne is a traumatised Rwandan refugee – but, even so, when it comes, the account of her family’s massacre is so harrowing we might prefer to look away. In a previous post, I asked how does one write about the feeling of terror? Jemma Wayne has produced a credible account of terror both in the here and now and its longer term repercussions via Emily’s panic attacks and episodes of disassociation. This novel addresses various other serious topics I’ve foisted on my blog readers. A diagnosis of terminal illness leads Lynn to confront her lack of fulfilment in the traditional women’s role of mother and homemaker: new priorities constructed themselves around her. Their foundations rested robustly upon that single new word, wife, shooting taller with each passing month so that it became harder and harder to peer over them as they arched into a protective dome above her, their oculus, that ever-present possibility of another word, mother. (p90) as she struggles to remain active in the process of her own death: They talked about themselves. All three of them seemed united in this end, though the lunch had been, Lynn knew, a symptom of their guilt at the fact she was dying […] She should humour them, act the grateful parent, but she couldn’t help the surge of bitterness inside her […] Every now and then one of them […] made an inquiry into her health: was she experiencing any of those dizzy spells she’d been warned about yet, any sickness, any lethargy? This was the topic on which she was consulted, her illness, though even this was not something they considered her to be an expert in. They knew better it seemed. They were young, they’d been on the Internet, Googled it, had a better grip on these things (p198) I’d come across John Boyne’s writing in the form of his bestselling novel for younger readers, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a clever tale of friendship across the concentration-camp barbed-wire, but I’d never read any of his novels for adults. Like another Irish writer whose novel I reviewed recently, his most recent book is his fifteenth. But A History of Loneliness doesn’t read like the work of someone who’s exhausted their creativity. This is a powerful, thought-provoking and deeply disturbing novel about human limitations and the disastrous institutions we limited humans create. Odran Yates is an ordinary well-meaning young man of no great ambition, who believes he is dedicating his life to the good when he enters a Dublin seminary to train for the priesthood. While some of his peers struggle to adapt to a life of sexual denial he, apart from one brief interlude, feels he is well suited to his role. But, as Irish culture evolves over the following four decades, and the extent of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is eventually revealed, his moral courage is put to the test. How far Odran, and others like him, is guilty by association, by turning a blind eye to the clues that speak volumes to the informed reader, is one of the central questions of the novel. The quote attributed to fellow Irishman, Edmund Burke, a good two centuries previously, comes readily to mind: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. 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? This Is the Water and The Cold Cold Sea ... with a quirky style and some reflections on structure31/7/2014 I didn’t expect to be dipping my toe in the water again so soon after Waiting for the Rain, but the coincidence of two new novels swimming to the top of the TBR pile has compelled me to add them to Annecdotal’s growing stream of water-themed fiction. Published today and tomorrow, both novels evoke the dangers that lurk in the water through the pain of losing a child and the question of how far a parent will go to safeguard their family. This is the water. This is the text: letters forming words, words forming sentences, sentences making paragraphs to convey the story of the pool and the girls and boys who swim in it and the parents who ferry their children there. This is Chapter One where you enter the minds of swim moms ultracompetitive Dinah and beautiful but weary Chris. This is Annie who will lead you through the chlorinated water where the killer also swims. This is Annie, confused by her brother’s suicide and her husband’s emotional distance, corsetting her girls into their skin-tight racing suits and deliberating over overpriced energy drinks. This is Chapter Fifteen. This is you still ambivalent about the “unique narrative style”, wondering if it’s slowing the pace unduly, wondering why this novel is described as a thriller. This is Annie’s husband, Thomas, reading a newspaper report about a girl with her throat slit letting you see at last how well this novel fits the genre. These are the next 200 pages of moral dilemmas around marital infidelity and withholding evidence to protect one’s own skin. This is the climax where Annie’s everyday cares and concerns are meaningless as she fights for her own life and that of her daughters. This is me wondering how many other bloggers have adopted the author’s style in their reviews. This is Yannick Murphy’s fifth novel. This is the water. Will you plunge in? In a recent post, I explored how the experience of terror and trauma can have lasting repercussions for the individual concerned. I’m also interested, both as a reader and writer, in how the impact can reverberate across the generations. Would a parent’s exposure to unspeakable horrors make them overprotective towards their own children? Would the struggle for survival render them so emotionally blunted they’re unable to give the children the love they need? Would their pleasure in the easier life they’ve created for their children be marred by envy? What do you understand by the term “a good child”? Does it imply a particular proficiency in getting up to mischief and other childish things? Or does it mean, as for the Saddeq children growing up in Lahore in the new nation of Pakistan, suppressing their own inclinations and desires in favour of their mother’s strict demands? In a divide-a-rule regime reminiscent of the British Raj, the boys, Sully and Jakie, are destined to be doctors, their learning beaten into them by a tutor they nickname, appropriately, Basher, while the girls, Mae and little Lana, hug their mother’s shadow, dressed up like dolls in scratchy frilly dresses unsuitable for the suffocating heat. Until the day they can escape their manipulative mother through marriage for the girls and education abroad for the boys, they have no choice but to comply. How well-prepared are such good children for their future adult lives? As the novel explores, children who are discouraged from questioning authority might struggle to protect themselves by appropriately saying no. On the surface, the Saddeq offspring are successful: they have careers, relationships, children of their own. But, in different ways, they are still, even in late middle age, the insecure children their mother created, maintaining as wide a distance as they dare from their parents, still scared of their mother when duty calls them “home”. Compulsive helpers, workaholics, conflicted about intimacy; even into old age they continue striving to be good rather than happy. |
entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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