You know you’re in safe hands with a writer who uses the word crescendo¹ correctly on the first page, and comes with an endorsement from Alison Moore. That Dark Remembered Day bubbles with elegant descriptions from the Cornish coast to the windswept Falklands as the past is uncovered layer by layer until the full horror of that day’s events are finally revealed.
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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.
Stephen is in trouble, suspended from work after a violent outburst that’s left him shaken and his wife concerned for their shared future. She wants him to talk about his childhood; he is terrified of resurrecting the ghosts of the past. Yet when he gets a phone call telling him his mother is unwell, he decides it’s time to pay her a visit in the town where the events of a single day shattered so many lives.
You know you’re in safe hands with a writer who uses the word crescendo¹ correctly on the first page, and comes with an endorsement from Alison Moore. That Dark Remembered Day bubbles with elegant descriptions from the Cornish coast to the windswept Falklands as the past is uncovered layer by layer until the full horror of that day’s events are finally revealed.
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I’ve been hanging out with some false friends lately; fortunately these were solely of the literary kind. Three novels by female writers featuring those duplicitous characters our mothers warned us, if we were lucky, to steer away from; not a great advert for women’s friendships but they do make intriguing companions on the page. I first read Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood over twenty years ago, but a recent review from Vulpus Libris has had me itching to give it another airing. A middle-aged painter returns to her home turf to find herself haunted by childhood memories of unbearable betrayals and cruelties perpetuated by her supposed best friend and tormentor, Cordelia. As we’d expect from a writer as talented as Margaret Atwood, the relationship is brilliantly portrayed, both in terms of how the ten-year-old bully grooms and seduces her victim, and its impact on the adult personality of Elaine who, despite objective success in her chosen field, remains badly bruised by the experience.
Clara and Rachel, the ill-fated best friends in Precious Thing by Colette McBeth, first meet at fourteen, slap in the middle of messy adolescence. Inseparable until Clara mysteriously goes away at the end of their teens, when they meet up again in their late-20s, their roles are reversed: Clara, the previously charismatic one, is insecure, while Rachel, the dumpy awkward teen, seems to have it made with the boyfriend, smart flat and successful media career. What I liked about this novel was that, while it’s narrated primarily from Rachel’s point of view, the reader is left to read between the lines to make up her own mind of which of the two women is the most poisonous. In Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly, the psychopathic Eve is certainly the villain of the piece, but Natty is no angel either, and is prepared to give as much as she gets. The two women met at university at the end of their teens and have kept in touch, despite living in different continents, for fifteen years before Eve seizes the opportunity of Natty’s temporary absence from the home to take over husband, house and life. The reader wonders just how far these women will go, as the author makes things progressively harder for her characters, until the surprise but satisfying ending, which neatly ties up several plot threads. While both of these novels are page turners and, with one a debut and the other second novel, it would be unfair to expect them to be as faultless as Cat’s Eye, but in neither of these was I totally convinced that the women’s friendships would have endured the way they did. Although in Precious Thing the reason for the hiatus in, and re-establishment of, the friendship becomes clear towards the end, and reassessing the past is part of the plot, my scepticism did impinge on my enjoyment of the early chapters. In Keep Your Friends Close we are given a rationale for Eve’s extreme behaviour, yet I wasn’t altogether convinced. However, this may simply reflect my preference for novels with a stronger emphasis on character than plot. I also wondered if the difference in the ages at which the girls/women got together affected how credible the unbalanced relationships seemed; I know we can be duped at any age, but perhaps those early friendships are the most risky. You can check out my own limitations in writing about female friendship among children in my short story Jessica’s Navel and among adults in my short story The Good News. What’s your experience of dodgy female friendships in fiction and/or real life? I look forward to your comments. Thanks to Headline Review for my copy of Precious Thing and Alison Barrow at Transworld books and Sonya from the blog A Lover of Books for my copy of Keep Your Friends Close. My recent post about the challenge of representing the reality of terror in fiction attracted some interesting feedback. I’m not alone in shying away from graphic details, it seems. In fact, my main interest in fictional terror is in its potential long-term impact, which is often more subtle. Like a plucked string, terror keeps on vibrating even when the original trauma has passed. The enduring effects of the narrator’s imprisonment and torture are eloquently described in In the Orchard, the Swallows: They took everything from me. My health, my family. They took from me the person I might have been, and returned in its place half a man, a shadow. Even now I am not sure I will feel lasting pleasure again. My capacity for it has been damaged. The suffering has retreated, but it leaves behind it an absence, a joylessness. If you are able, imagine breathing, and nothing stirring within. Yes, I feel relief that I am free, and it is a deep relief at that, but there is no joy. My pleasures have gone from me, like petals pulled from a flower head, or lost to a winter frost. Peter Hobbs (p 109) Life continues, but in an almost zombified state, the illusion of safety destroyed. In Pat Barker’s Regeneration, the trauma of the trenches continues for the hospitalised soldiers in the form of hallucinations and nightmares and in hysterical symptoms such as mutism, paralysis and bodily contortions. What was then termed shellshock, we now label post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that grants sufferers more sympathetic understanding and access to treatment. Yet psychiatric diagnosis is always a dual-edged sword and perhaps runs the risk of pathologising an extreme, but normal, reaction to an abnormal situation. How does one write about terror? I don’t mean the delicious spine tingling sensation evoked by the thriller or horror story, the literary equivalent of Halloween or the latest upside-down turbocharged fairground ride. I’m thinking that raw state of mind when logic goes out the window and with it any trace of pride or self-consciousness, when body and brain conspire towards a sole objective: survival. Even Verdi’s glorious Dies Irae doesn’t do justice to the torment. Any strong emotion is difficult to portray; there's always the risk of overdoing it and ending up telling the reader what to feel. Like hallucinatory states, it’s an extra challenge to translate the reality of terror into language. True terror is a psychotic state where words have little currency. How do we begin to describe the all-engulfing fear, the belief – rational or otherwise – that our life is about to end? Regeneration commences Pat Barker’s lauded First World War trilogy, dramatising a real-life encounter between the poet Siegfried Sassoon and WHR Rivers, an anthropologist, neurologist and psychologist working with shell-shocked soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital. In July 1917, Sassoon, an army officer, has published a declaration on the injustice of the continuance of the war and is refusing to return to the front. Partly to avoid the negative publicity that might arise from his being court-martialled – and presumably shot – for disobeying an order, he is sent to Rivers for treatment. Over the ensuing months, both men come to change their positions in relation to the Declaration and their respective roles in the conduct of the war. In a parallel process over 250 pages, readers are challenged to consider their positions, not only in relation to war, but also about the ethics of psychological and psychiatric intervention that stifles protest by enabling people to function in an insane world. 9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 3. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna1/10/2013 Adrian Lockhart is a British clinical psychologist who has fled his failing marriage to work in a psychiatric hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, shortly after the civil war. Adrian is no knight in shining armour; even he wonders what he can offer a country where the entire population has been brutalised, and his efforts are impeded by structures he can't possibly understand. Yet this reflective outsider is an ideal literary vehicle to explore what remains of humanity in the aftermath of war. While Adrian's ineffectiveness is no great advert for clinical psychology, I find him one of the most convincing fictional psychological therapists I've encountered so far. This might be down to the author's expertise in creating plausible characters, as well as her good sense in seeking professional advice, as noted in the acknowledgements. (As I mentioned in the introduction to this series of posts, psychologists and psychological therapists are appealing to writers, but can be hard to get right.) Although I've never worked abroad, or with those blunted by war, some of Adrian's experiences reminded me of the challenges of working as a psychologist in longstay psychiatric institutions in Britain, with the sense of overwhelming need and not yet having the right tools or structures to meet them. Perhaps the best he can do is listen to the stories of those able to tell them, and bear witness to the tragedy around him.
In that context, the ending didn't work so well for me, when he offers his friend, local surgeon Kai Mansaray, a potential remedy for the trauma that prevents him sleeping. It might be a case of letting the psychology dominate the story rather than support it: while the treatment, EMDR, is a recommended intervention for post-traumatic stress disorder, and one that a suitably trained psychologist might practice, the somewhat mechanical method seems quite a shift in tone from Adrian's previous approaches. However, those with a more immediate experience of trauma work may disagree with this reading and, either way, it's a small point in a psychologically astute and deeply moving novel. More war trauma with the next in the series, I'm afraid, when I review Pat Barker's take on the treatment of shellshocked soldiers in the First World War in her 1991 novel, Regeneration. But I'll be posting on some jollier topics before then, starting with my reading pile in four or five days time. If you can't wait that long for something on the lighter side, check out this style blog for a very different take on the spirit of the people of Freetown, Sierra Leone. |
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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