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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

Power battles: Fractured by Clár Ní Chonghaile

7/2/2016

10 Comments

 
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Locked in a dark room somewhere in Mogadishu, Peter Maguire has ample time to consider the legacy of his three decades on this earth. A journalist with a CV full of danger zones, he has a girlfriend in Paris who enjoys weekends in the Loire Valley and a five-year-old son in Monrovia she doesn’t know about and he’s never seen. He’s been estranged from his mother, also formerly a journalist in West Africa, since she told him his biological father is not the gentle Irishman he’s called Dad all his life, but an American photographer with whom she had an affair in Liberia. If life weren’t complicated enough, his friend and local driver was shot dead when Peter was kidnapped, and he’s about to be sold on to the brutal Al-Shabaab. He finds a glimmer of hope and humanity in the Somali teenager who brings his food, but can Abdi really rescue him from captivity?

Fractured is an ambitious debut novel about the parallels between kidnap and its aftermath and the struggle for freedom from the traumas of the mind, in the context of the complex politics of Somalia (see also the biography A Man of Good Hope). There are some fine bits of writing, such as when Peter arrives in Mogadishu (p25):
Outside, the air remoulded our features, sheening them with sweat as the wind cheekily tugged at the scarves the women on my flight had hastily pulled over their hair
and when the teenager, Abdi, realises he feels an affinity for Peter because his world is not reduced to black and white (p176):

I would like to always live in the grey, in a world where there are no absolutes, nothing to fight for, nothing to kill for, nothing to preach for.

I also liked his mother’s reflections on how the story of Peter’s kidnap is not considered sufficiently juicy (p188):

he didn’t give good story. A single man, to all intents and purposes, held for only a few weeks, a journalist rather than an unfortunate civilian. He lived, and so his past remained buried

reminding me of my own short story about a kidnapped journalist,
Habeas Corpus. (See also another novel about kidnap in a lawless country, An Untamed State.)

But, overall, I found this novel overly information heavy, so that it dragged in places. The story is certainly important, and Clár Ní Chonghaile, a journalist who has covered the African Union’s battle against Al-Shabaab seems well qualified to tell it, but I felt Peter’s challenge in making the war interesting was one that also applied to the author. I also found the structure a little strange: we move between Peter’s, his mother’s and Abdi’s points of view in the main, but the Somali’s voice disappears around halfway through (although we do hear from him indirectly via the other two).

What makes journalists risk their lives to bring us these stories we don’t really want to hear is a fascinating subject, as is what it means to “bear witness to … suffering” (p129) as Peter maintains. I’d be interested if Clár Ní Chonghaile chose to write a quieter novel focusing on that next. Thanks Legend Press for my proof copy.

I read Fractured a little in advance of publication day on 1st February, but held back with my review because no-one wants a moany appraisal to intrude upon their publication party. But the latest
Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge on the question of “What good is power?” brought me back to a novel that has a lot to say about power and fear, from the African warlords to the journalists and their editors who select how the stories of the disadvantaged are portrayed to the wider world. The dynamics of power can make for some engaging fiction, from the fathers whose wealth and historical authority enable them to control where a son expresses his sexuality or how and where his children play to the stranger who rewrites history, and more. I’ve encountered a few abuses of power in my series on fictional therapists and in novels with an institutional setting. Along with my recent reminiscences on social psychology experiments, it’s the latter that forms the basis of my flash, hoping this might help kickstart the second draft of my WINMP (Work In Not Much Progress). If you’re not familiar with Rosenhan’s pseudo-patient experiment, Wikipedia will help you out.

“Anything else? Do they threaten to harm you? Command you to do things you don’t want to do?”

You shake your head. “Just those three words – empty, hollow, thud.”

The psychiatrist pushes his glasses up his nose. “Better have you in for observation.”

You don’t protest, expecting they’ll evict you as a fraud before bedtime. But the days drag on, the dull routine of meals, meds and a movie on TV. How do the really sick survive?

You scribble away, observing the staff as they observe you. But their notes are the clinical record; yours dismissed as “writing behaviour”.
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
Jeanne Lombardo link
7/2/2016 03:36:53 pm

Great book review Anne. Your thoughts on power and your flash here really set off some thoughts. (Syncing well with those generated by a recent viewing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.) The dynamics of power...might often making right...the victors writing history... And in the case of your flash, the ones with the power deciding the very validity of an individual's experience. My husband (Ph.D. in psychology) worked in mental health in the 80's. He has written about his experience at a major mental health center, where he sometimes questioned who was acting more "insane." The "crazies" were in some ways very well adapted to their environment. They knew how to access resources in the winter (by getting institutionalized); they knew how to manipulate the system; they may have even seen "craziness" as a desirable way of life in that it gave them drama, meaning, importance (it got a lot of people in white coats to listen to them and take care of them)...in this sense, did their "craziness" not give them power? Of course this is a complicated issue to which a short comment can in no way do justice. Adn the whole issue of mental health as a BUSINESS begs many questions. But thanks for provoking a lot of thoughts on something we too easily sweep under the carpet.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/2/2016 02:43:07 pm

Thanks, Jeanne, I'm glad it resonated for you. There was a lot of fascinating research around mental illness identities at that time, including Sue Estroff's Making It Crazy – which I'm glad to see is still in print http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520054516.
As with any devalued identity, there are significant gains in the crazy one, and I also met people who were very skilled at getting the best from the system – nevertheless, their choices are significantly restricted. I think mental health services over here are much less patronising than they were then, but budget cuts and the atrocious business model brings other problems. I can't imagine any of Rosenhan's pseudo-patients managing to get themselves admitted to hospital today.

Reply
Lisa Reiter link
8/2/2016 04:59:00 pm

I'm always amazed that you have just the right book review waiting to go with whatever prompt Charli throws into the ether! So, I'm relieved to know it was 'one you made earlier' and not that you manically ran around sourcing and reading in a couple of days! That would be intimidating and therefore powerful 😅
I dread to think about a business model being imposed on mental health along with such stringent cuts. Is the patient even more lost and disempowered than before or are we expecting people to decide on their required service?
It's quite timely how this post brings together the discussion we had on labels and identity and adds the further dimension of those in psychiatry having power to attribute either or both to you. It's scary stuff but I love the twist in your flash of someone else possibly playing the system.

Reply
Annecdotist
10/2/2016 09:38:36 am

Quite a lot of my reviews are “one I made earlier”, as I like to leave them to marinate a little. And I’m glad you think they fit the prompt, as I often feel I’m stretching things quite a bit.
I don’t think the business model applies as much in the UK as the USA, but nevertheless the systems that have been set up that would enable this have reduced flexibility to a degree by requiring diagnosis to match packages of care.
The research on which my flash is based comes from the heyday of labelling theory. I’m sure not everyone thought this, but there was a view that if you take away the label you take away the disturbance, which of course hasn’t proved to be the case.

Reply
Charli Mills
10/2/2016 07:13:52 am

I wonder if the stories the journalists risk their lives to bring to those who don't care to read them is because of the desensitization of pop culture to care. Once shocked by suffering, only great suffering will shock us. Your flash shows an interesting struggle for power over sanity. Who really is in control? Whose observations matter? Interesting discussions you sparked, too!

Reply
Annecdotist
10/2/2016 09:41:32 am

Indeed, Charli. I really liked the bit in this novel about how, despite the depth of his trauma, the journalist’s kidnap story wasn’t really a story to other journalists. I’d have been happy to read a novel around this point alone!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
11/2/2016 11:58:04 am

Sounds like an interesting premise for a novel, even if it is a bit heavy going. I was particularly intrigued by the statement, "he lived, and so his past remained buried". How often is it that when we go to bury one, even someone we knew relatively well, we find out far more about them than we ever knew, and realise just how interesting their lives had been, if only we'd cared to ask. We often find out about the value of another's life only after they have life no more.
As for psychiatric hospitals.In my much younger years I read a book called "Sleep". I can’t remember who wrote it now, and can’t see it on my shelf to find out. It was about shock treatment and totally terrified me. For a number of years, I visited a close relative in a psychiatric hospital and wasn’t much more impressed. While she didn’t suffer shock treatment, she was still in an induced walking sleep. Your flash stirs up these feelings of frustration and terror of being totally powerless in situations such as these.

Reply
Annecdotist
17/2/2016 12:21:07 pm

Thanks, Norah. In my last job I had an office right next door to the ECT 'suite' – I always thought it was unconsciously intentional to put me in my place! However, I did know people for whom it had been helpful – especially when they had been so withdrawn and depressed they couldn't eat. But symbolically a very bizarre and disturbing way to "help" people – and of course I think they still don't know how it "works".
Interesting about eulogies – in a way the story of someone's life can't start until that life is finished, but can be strange hearing a new angle to the story of someone we thought we knew. I also think it's interesting that people's lives are often whitewashed in death, so they come across as much better people than they actually were.
On that point, I'm also remembering some funerals I attended in the longstay hospital which I found quite distressing because the vicar couldn't find anything interesting to say about the person's life, so it came across as very bland.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
18/2/2016 12:09:22 pm

Interesting that you have used the words 'whitewashed' and 'bland' to describe lives. Some people seem to have fascinating lives, while others appear to be rather "ordinary". I too have been saddened a number of times when an person unknown to the one being farwelled gives a very bland history of the life. Late last year I attended the funeral of an aunt, the mother of 9 children. Each of the children added something else to the eulogy, something special about their mum, as did some of the grandchildren. She was a very loved woman and very much missed. The service was a great acknowledgement of that. A true celebration, tinged with sadness.

Annecdotist
18/2/2016 07:06:52 pm

Your comment reminds me how uplifting and satisfying a funeral can be, even if the deceased is sadly missed – an important ritual I think.


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