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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.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Fascism in the ascendant: The Fourth Shore & In the Full Light of the Sun

16/5/2019

8 Comments

 
I have no hesitation in recommending both of these literary novels, intriguing stories set against the rise of fascism leading up to the Second World War. The first is a coming-of-age story set in Italy and Libya; the second about vested interests in the art world set in Berlin.

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The Fourth Shore by Virginia Baily

As the shadow of fascism creeps across Italy, Liliana is too young to imagine the damage it will bring to all she holds dear. After all, what could be wrong with patriotism? Isn’t the Duce right in wanting to recover what has been stolen from her country in the aftermath of the First World War?
 
She doesn’t even realise that it’s his opposition to black-and-white politics that has taken her beloved older brother, Stefano, to the Italian colony of Tripoliana, along the Libyan coast. All she knows is that life is dull without him and, when he’s saved up the money, and their parents agree to let her go, she jumps at the chance to join him.
 
Befriended by a glamorous socialite on the voyage across the Mediterranean, Liliana has high hopes of mingling with the smart expatriate set. But her brother has married a Bedouin woman whom he wants Liliana to Italianise, without acknowledging that a cultural exchange must work both ways. As Liliana gradually warms to her sister-in-law, she keeps one foot dangerously in the opposite camp, through a liaison with the colonel she met at a party in Rome the night before they set sail.
 
Five decades later, Liliana is newly widowed in London, having excised her Italian past. But a newspaper report, and an unexpected windfall, sends her back to Rome and her fragmented memories to confront the tragedy of her youth.
 
While this strand, set in 1980, serves up the heroine’s elixir of redemption, I found the foreshadowing of the mystery a little heavy-handed, but felt the historical strand could easily have carried the novel on its own. Knowing next to nothing about the Italian occupation of Libya, I was fascinated and appalled. Liliana – naive, idealistic and desperate for love – is perfectly placed to highlight the cruelty and corruption of the regime, and the lengths that many of us will go to in order to justify the behaviour of those on whom we depend. Technically, for writers like me still grappling with how to build jeopardy without compromising credibility, it illustrates how the right character can create the plot.
 
A great addition to my recent reading on fascism – for example Deviation – and on colonialism – for example The Old Drift  – Virginia Baily’s second novel is published by Fleet. Thanks to them for my review copy.


In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark

Is there a line, a marked a point where hopefulness becomes dishonesty, where faith shrinks to nothing but a resolute determination not to see?
 
Berlin almost a century ago: a tolerant city where artists bask in the full light of the sun. Where forbidden love can sparkle, confident the authorities will continue to turn a blind eye, and where van Gogh is gaining the celebrity he never had when he was alive.
 
Julius, a wealthy art critic and author of a bestselling book on the Dutch painter, has finally accepted that his marriage to a woman half his age has come to an end. His wife has fled to her parents along with their baby son and the van Gogh painting he’s loved longer and more than either of them. Around the same time, Matthias, a mercurial art dealer, consults him about a painting’s authenticity, and Julius, with a gap in his life to fill, takes him under his wing.
 
Emmeline, the daughter of a woman he met at a house party, is also a talented painter, but Julius is reluctant to take her side. When Matthias acts as a go-between, he serves his own interests more than either of theirs. All three are dragged into – or complicit in – a scandal involving possible forgeries. Frank is the lawyer engaged for the defence.
 
In her sixth novel, Clare Clark has drawn upon real-life events in mapping this intriguing tale of vested interests in the art world, whose politics would be sufficiently gripping alone. But this also takes place within a terrifying period of national politics, as Germans live through crippling hyperinflation into the pseudo-stability of fascism, and the scapegoating of the people at the centre of Berlin’s beating heart.
 
The novel is structured in linear time over around a decade, with three sections, each focusing on a main character in turn, with Matthias the common thread. While Julius is vulnerable under the Nazis because of some distant Jewish heritage, and Emmeline because she loves another girl, I found the lawyer Frank’s account, structured as a diary, the most poignant. He and his wife have already lost so much; now he’s heading to lose his right to earn his living and potentially the right to life.
 
I’ve read a few fictional accounts of the collective madness of Nazism and In the Full Light of the Sun is up there with the best. With Frank in particular, Clare Clark perfectly evokes that mentality of denial and delusion as a defence against paranoia: who would believe that civilisation was unravelling, that the attacks on ordinary people’s existence would only get worse? Who wouldn’t hang onto the life they know until it was too late? The precise, yet understated, way the author portrays this makes In the Full Light of the Sun one of my five-star favourites. Thanks to publishers Virago for my review copy.
 
For another novel about van Gogh, see Let Me Tell You about a Man I Knew. For another pitch-perfect rendition of life under the Nazis, see my review of A Boy in Winter.  As my elixir is truth, I’ve also drawn on this painful theme in my writing, as in the shortest story in my collection, “Communal Shower”. Sadly, the politics of intolerance and mutually-assured destruction feel all too relevant today.
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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.
8 Comments
Norah Colvin link
19/5/2019 11:26:51 am

Wow, Anne. What a pair of books these are. Both sound appealing, but I think I'd read the German story first. I'll check to see if it's available on audiobook when I'm finished my current read.
The quote with which you introduced the second review is very you.
Your comment too about people hanging onto life as they know it makes me think of the political situation around the world at the moment, including here with our election held yesterday. The future seems scary so people think (maybe) that holding onto the past is a safer option. Unfortunately, we need new solutions, and quickly, to make our way into the future with some small hope of survival.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
20/5/2019 10:06:04 am

Thanks, Norah, glad you recognise me in that quote! Charli has been nudging me very nicely again on branding and this is almost it. I wish I could phrase it so eloquently, but there’ll be something along those lines in the blurb for my next book.
Commiserations about your election shock result. I’ve had a fair few post-election mornings feeling stunned and bewildered after checking the news in recent years. It’s horrible discovering the majority of one’s compatriots – or at least of those bothering to vote – the world’s apart in their views. We have the European Parliament elections on Thursday; I think I’m prepared for the disappointment on Friday morning but we’ll see.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
3/6/2019 12:46:45 pm

Hi Anne,
I have just purchased the audiobook version of "The Fourth Shore". I'll let you know how I go with it. I'm not sure if I'll enjoy listening - the preview reading is quite fast, but maybe it's only so in contrast to the slower reading I finished this morning. I'll see. (hear!)

Anne Goodwin
3/6/2019 05:40:46 pm

Yay, glad to have inspired you! Hope the reading slows down for you.

Norah Colvin
10/7/2019 06:58:23 am

Hi Anne,
I finished listening to The North Shore on Monday morning. The reading pace was okay and I enjoyed the story. The narrator annoyed me though as she interrupted the flow of far too many sentences by putting on an Italian accent for the Italian names of people and places. It was quite unnecessary, I thought, and I wished she'd stop.
While I enjoyed the story and didn't mind the predictable ending, I felt there was a huge gap between the birth of the babies in the desert and the meeting with her future husband in Italy. While there wasn't any detail about married life in England, I didn't mind that as it wasn't necessary for the plot. I do think a little more detail to fill the other gap might improve the story.
People can certainly be ghastly to each other in the name of a 'greater good'. Seems to be me it's often a greater evil that is served.
Thanks for your recommendation. I enjoyed the read despite what I consider its limitations.

Anne Goodwin
11/7/2019 08:24:21 am

Thanks for sharing your reading experience. My memory’s vague about the England thread, which suggests I’m with you on it being less satisfactory. And such a pity the reading voice was jarring – it could so easily throw you out of the story.

Charli Mills
20/5/2019 06:54:24 am

Never did I believe that in my lifetime would I see fascism raise an ugly eyebrow to see if it might find a welcome once again. I'm dizzy, going out on FB, with all the swirling posts as states take back women's reproductive rights in the US. I'm not opposed to a moral debate, but it's the undercurrent of nationalism and dogma that clenches my stomach. Both these books seem to deal with the topic in unique ways, too -- like you, I'm not versed on the Italian connection with Libya, and the use of art circles in Berlin makes a different backdrop for watching the changes unfold there. Thank you for these enlightening reviews!

Reply
Anne Goodwin
20/5/2019 09:53:45 am

I agree, Charli, it’s very sad how some things seem to be heading. I was shocked about Alabama, until I recalled that abortion is still illegal in some parts of the UK. I’m doubtful about fiction’s capacity to fix things, but books like this sing out to me like a canary in a coal mine. Thanks for your support.

Reply



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