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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Coming of age in a concentration camp: The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull and The Undesirables by Dave Boling

17/10/2014

10 Comments

 
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In reviewing Peter Matthiessen’s novel In Paradise, I referred to our collective responsibility to bear witness to the Nazi death camps. Yet in focusing on the Second World War, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the first concentration camps weren’t the brainchild of Hitler, but constructed by the British in South Africa during the second Boer War. When British troops destroyed the farms of the Dutch settlers, ostensibly because they were providing supplies to the command of fighters – much as the Nazis did to the Russian peasants as illustrated in Audrey Magee’s debut novel, The Undertaking – women and children were forced into refugee camps where rations were meagre and infectious diseases rife. This shameful episode of British history is explored in two novels published earlier this year.

The Visitors is a coming-of-age story that begins on a hop farm in late Victorian England. Liza, deaf-blind from the age of two, is like a wild animal until Lottie, through laborious hand signing, gives her the gift of language. Travelling to the oyster farms of the Kent coast as a child, and to South Africa as a young woman, Liza learns about first love and the limits and compensations of her disability. Since infancy, she has communicated with ghosts in her head; through them she finds a way of saving those who have saved her.

While I enjoyed this novel, I had a sense that it was trying to cover too much, and I found Liza’s character most interesting when she was locked into her own world, raising questions about what it means to be without language, what makes us human. But it was heartening – in contrast to those novels depicting duplicitous female friendship – to spend time in the company of strong female characters who were prepared to travel great distances to support each other and those they loved. In both style and its attention to historical detail in the lives of ordinary people, Rebecca Mascull’s debut novel was reminiscent of the work of Tracy Chevalier, making her a writer to watch for the future. 

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Aletta Venter is fourteen when she is transported with her mother and younger brother and sister to an overcrowded tented camp overseen by British soldiers. An endearing character, well-intentioned, but with a healthy streak of adolescent rebellion, as a budding writer she’s well placed to observe the everyday indignities of camp life on the reader’s behalf. As she juggles friendship, family conflict and her first teenage crush amid the confinement and squalor, she is somewhat reminiscent of the real-life heroine, Anne Frank. The Undesirables – the title comes from the British term for those who refused to surrender – moves back and forth in time between the camp and the farm from which the family were evicted, showing in both settings the fortitude with which the women and children attempted to live a normal life under abnormal circumstances. As in A Song for Issy Bradley, the family’s Christian faith is tested to the limits: 

I know she was thinking of ways to find strength and pass it along to us. Nothing is unbearable, praise be to God. She had said that many times when we first got to camp. But less often since. (p255-256)

As in A History of Loneliness, I admired how the novelist is even-handed in his treatment of a tragic situation; for example, in the character of a guard who feels almost as imprisoned as the Boers. A teenage narrator seems ideal to reflect the different nuances of camp life and the painstaking research behind it all serves as scaffolding, never intruding on the telling of an engaging story.

Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton Publishers for my review copy of The Visitors and to Picador for The Undesirables.

I’ll finish off with my response to the latest flash fiction challenge, which is to write a 99-word story that has an expectation missed or met. Initially I thought I’d focus on arriving at an early concentration camp expecting food and shelter to find disease, hunger and mud. But then I had an impulse to defy my own, and perhaps your, expectations of a downbeat story by returning to the character of Liza in The Visitors in her early years, long before she travels overseas:

She was a handsome child, but what were looks when she’d never see her own face reflected in the glass? Those shell-like ears so completely blocked she’d never hear her own screams? Locked in darkness and confusion, our daughter grew wilder with each passing year.

We’d planned to commit her to the insane asylum, when Lottie began tracing shapes on her palm. Some strange occult practice, we thought, and made to lead the child away. But these were letters, words, an entire language written on the hand. Our daughter was reborn, civilised. God had granted us a second chance.



Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
10 Comments
Charli Mills
17/10/2014 08:19:33 pm

Anne, I'm really falling for your strong reviews and excited by the books coming out. Even before you mentioned Diary of Anne Frank, that thought came to mind about The Undesirebles. And I thought of Helen Keller in relation to The Visitors. These are great stories to make anew, and glad to see writers tackling historic settings, too. Something I'm now studying, beyond the pleasure of reading such books. Your flash is remarkable and almost cried at the realization of a deaf and blind child writing in her own hand. Sometimes, I feel so deep about the urge to write, to read, to communicate. It breaks through seemingly impossible barriers.

Reply
Annecdotist
19/10/2014 06:55:36 am

Thanks, Charli, I'm glad these reviews evoked those associations for you. I remember learning about Helen Keller in primary school – or perhaps it was through a library book or the film that Rebecca Mascull refers to (in an interview reproduced at the end of my copy of the novel) as one of her prime influences. We know how hard it is as writers with a high level of proficiency in the language to communicate our experiences of the world – how much harder it must be not even to have a language to commune with oneself. Rebecca Mascull has done an amazing job in getting inside the head of such a character.
So glad both the reviews and the flash were able to communicate something to you.

Reply
Charli Mills
20/10/2014 03:48:57 pm

Sometimes authors avoid certain terrain believing the best maps have already been drawn (such as Diary of Anne Frank). But sometimes I feel like we need more explorers into those regions.

Annecdotist
21/10/2014 09:15:41 am

I think many of these stories are worth telling again and again but also, if we're lucky, each telling will bring something different because each author is different.

Geoff link
18/10/2014 03:07:54 am

The horrors of the Boer war haunted my grandfather apparently. It gave him a way to talk to my father about the horrors of war without telling of his own experiences in WW1. He recounted the damaged men returning and the sieges - Mafeking etc - and how codes of behaviour broke down. He was to young to fight but old enough to appreciate what it meant. I thought it heroic until, at school, we were told the other side - of concentration camps and scorched earth. I must read this one - the undesirables. South Africa was the first time I saw my father cry too. Funny how that works.

Reply
Annecdotist
19/10/2014 07:00:45 am

How interesting, Geoff. I think of the Boer war as one of the forgotten parts of history and don't think I was taught about it school – or am I saying it's only my forgetting? But it certainly served a purpose for your grandfather enabling him to talk about his own wartime experience one step removed – something that seems to happen so often. I'd certainly recommend The Undesirables. Dave Boling is also the author of Guernica, which I confess I haven't read, but I know was an extremely popular novel. Thanks for sharing.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
19/10/2014 05:30:22 pm

I do admire your choice in reading material, Anne. There is nothing light in their content.
I also love your flash. One of my (irrational?) fears is of being trapped inside my head e.g. after a stroke, unable to communicate and incorrectly considered a 'vegetable'. How wonderful that your character was able to communicate and be 'rescued', just in time. It reminds me of an attitude towards slaves expressed in Michener's 'Chesapeake' which has haunted me ever since reading it years ago.

Reply
Annecdotist
20/10/2014 05:14:55 am

Thanks, Norah, I actually thought of The Visitors as one of my lighter reads!! The fear of being locked inside one's head isn't irrational to my mind. Would be bad enough if you are being cared for by benign people, but what if they were abusers who knew they'd get away with it because you couldn't tell?
I haven't read Chesapeake – would you say that's one for me?

Reply
Georgia Bell link
21/10/2014 04:00:32 pm

I am forever amazed by how much can be accomplished with 99 words. I feel like your contribution was a full story in itself. Time and place and tone all established so evocatively.

Reply
Annecdotist
22/10/2014 02:44:21 am

Thank you, Georgia. I'd never have tried it is not for Charli's prompts. I continue to be amazed myself!

Reply



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