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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

Quarry: The Trout by Peter Cunningham

23/1/2017

6 Comments

 
Picture
All trout eat each other, including females, who regularly consume their young. In the case of the alpha male, the choice and preferred size of prey is an adolescent fish, one-third of the predatory trout’s body-length.

Alex and Kay have traded in thirty-year careers in Toronto – he as a teacher and she as a psychotherapist – to pursue more creative pursuits in rural Ontario, but things aren’t working out as well as they’d hoped. The financial crash has put their travel plans on hold and, alongside her painting, Kay is working part-time at the hospital in the next town, perhaps as much to escape their
limping marriage as to boost the household’s economy.
Both their Irish childhoods were overshadowed by early parental loss and she wonders if, at nineteen, they married too young. Alex sees that “her glance … contains sadness, as if she is harbouring personal regrets, or fears that our happiness is never more than provisional” (p9); she is frustrated with his failure to seek help for panic attacks and depression. These feelings come to a head when he appears distinctly unenthusiastic about the proposed publicity tour for his recently published novel, Sulphur, loosely based on his own childhood, featuring a boy out fishing with his father. As promised by the blurb, The Trout is “a spellbinding story of one man’s search for the crucial secret locked in his memory since childhood” that doesn’t yet seem to have accrued the attention it deserves on Goodreads. Beginning this novel on the evening after the inauguration of President Trump, I want to urge more people to read it, but don’t feel free to fully state my case without alluding to (although not spelling out) the nature of the secret, which dovetails with some of the themes of this blog. If you’re suspicious of spoilers, just skip the section headed The Secret. Thanks to Sandstone Press for my review copy.

The voice

The novel is narrated by Alex in a gentle voice in which the reader quickly adapts to his ability to describe scenes which occur in his absence. It is accomplished without being showy, relaxed, and almost mesmerising, like sitting with on a riverbank with a fishing rod on a summer’s day, or listening to poetry in a mellifluous Irish accent which made the reveal, when it comes, all the more shocking.

A credible fictional therapist

If you’ve read
my reviews of novels containing fictional therapists, you’ll appreciate that I wasn’t terribly excited about Kay’s career. But Peter Cunningham knows what he’s doing (I see from his website that his wife is a Jungian analyst): although we visit her in her office, we don’t see her in action as a therapist, although the listening skills that are inseparable from her character are deployed to move the plot forward when more of the miserable past is revealed. She’s also convincing in the back story to her vocation (p186):

an analyst told her that she had spent her life, including her childhood, caring for other people. With her father dead and her mother unable to face reality, the responsibility had all fallen to Kay. It was as if she was in a role she could not change, facing a future she could not resist. Eight later, she qualified as an analyst, and ever since, she has been listening to the problems of others

although she might have preferred an “artistic life with like-minded friends [and no] baggage from someone else’s life” (p181).

A novelist as character

Although I was similarly suspicious initially to discover this was
a novel about a writer, I quickly came to appreciate Alex’s exploration of the boundary between fiction and biography. His wife hoped that (p18):

writing the novel would be a catharsis for me, that it would amount to a form of self-analysis that might help me come to terms with my problems. It seems the opposite has happened; I have become even more eccentric.

But although Alex
left home more than three decades ago, when his father disowned him, he is still desperate for parental approval, having written about their relationship “not to tell the truth but to please him” (p60). While Kay understands this attempt to be accepted, she underestimates the extent to which the darkness has been denied (p76-77):

The doctor of the book, a crusty old widower with a heart of gold, was hard on his only son, fearing that to indulge him would be to spoil him; and the son was often bewildered by his father’s seeming rejection, and the beatings, losses of temper, and the bouts of lonely drunkenness. And yet the underlying love between the father in the book and his son was heart-warming, the emotions beautifully etched and delivered, Kay felt.

The gap between fiction and truth, not only in the facts themselves but in his disloyalty to
the emotional truth, sees Alex travelling back to Ireland in search of the reasons for his recurring sense of guilt and shame. It also, in the shape of a childhood acquaintance seeking revenge, or at least to set the record straight, catalyses the thriller element of the novel in which Kay and her grandson seem to be at risk from a stalker, something I found, although convincingly plotted, less satisfying than the psychological themes.

The secret

When Alex travels to rural Catholic Ireland, I had an uncomfortable feeling about what might unfold. By sheer coincidence, I started reading this novel not only on the day that a misogynistic egomaniac ascended to the most powerful position in the universe but after a surprise critical comment on one of my old posts about
a fictional perspective on childhood sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Wanting to be open-minded, I don’t think I realised how disturbed I was by a comment seeming to excuse, or at least underplay, the offence by appeal to the higher authority of the divine. But it’s exactly this sense of being above criticism and the culture of obedience to authority that enables the bullies and abusers to flourish. So, although I wasn’t shocked on learning of the corrupt behaviours with which Alex had unwittingly concluded, I was disturbed. And rightly so. Anyone who believes the billionaire in the White House can be trusted to govern for the good, should read this novel. If and when I manage to process my thoughts a bit better, I’ll be adding to the comments on Charli Mills’ timely post about a safe space for writers.
The quarry

As it happens, it was also partly due to Charli that I picked up this book when I did. With
a challenge to write a 99-word story about a quarry, I thought I’d have to recycle one from last year about the millstone manufacturing industry, until I had a closer look at my TBR shelf. While the prompt related to geology, I thought a novel featuring fishing might work on the metaphorical level. If you’ve read this far you’ve probably gathered that pursuit of the trout in The Trout is itself a metaphor both for taking advantage of the vulnerable and for Kay’s stalker, but I did enjoy the short paragraphs on the intricacies of fly-fishing, about which I previously knew nothing, and was delighted to find one that fits perfectly with the prompt (p72):
Picture

Fly fishing allows man to revert to his state of being a natural hunter and to stalk his quarry as he has done since memory began. Fly fishing allows man to act out an elemental part of the forest glade that lies within us all.

After reading such a powerful novel, I can’t resist composing a flash on a similar theme.


Picture
To swim in the quarry

Father Gregory at the wheel, Father Benedict beside him. Three boys and their towels in the back. No room for me. “Get your dad to take you.” Yeah, right, if we had a car.

Kicking a ball across melting tarmac, my envy burned. Why did those scruffs get to swim in the quarry? Snotty nosed kids from broken homes, not even the manners to look grateful.

Years later, I hiked past the quarry, the pool filled in with rubble since the scandal broke. Understood how I’d been the lucky one. Wondered if the boys’ memories were buried so deep.


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.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
23/1/2017 10:16:33 am

Hi Anne,
What an interesting read. It's good to see you approve of both characters: writer and therapist. That's got to make it a good read. The subject matter sounds tough going, and I followed the link back to the recent comment you mentioned. I read the other comments I'd missed being one of the first to respond, and found much there to contemplate. I agree with your most recent comment. Some people choose our blogs to promote their own message rather than respond to our content. They need to write their own blogs and posts!
Your flash is very well done. I know those feelings, firstly at being left out, and then feeling lucky to have been so. You capture it well.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/1/2017 05:51:00 pm

Thanks for the feedback, Norah, and for a reality check on the other post. I know you’re very open to diversity of opinions so especially welcome your support. It’s so difficult to tell whether this novel disturbed me more because of when I read it – it wasn’t as if it’s dealing with stuff we don’t know about already – but perhaps because it was so well done. I imagine the calm voice replicating the predicament that’s hidden in plain sight – somehow it’s more chilling without the high drama. Regarding the flash, although it was very much prompted by the dynamics in the novel, I realise I really do have a short story with a very similar theme which is currently under submission.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
24/1/2017 10:10:25 am

Hi Anne,
I have just read your comment re your recent commenter on Charli's post. I think you are just right to be cautious and to have responded as you did. (I didn't like to be too vocal or obvious about it in my comment.)
Interesting you use the words "predicament that's hidden in plain sight." No unlike that of Diana, I feel?
Another short story for me to look forward to reading! Yay! (When is your book of short stories to be released?)

Reply
Annecdotist
25/1/2017 08:58:43 am

Thanks for that, no, I do appreciate your perspective. Gosh, you’re right about Diana, but her predicament is so different, I didn’t see the connection.
Um, I haven’t done anything about the short story collection yet. I was going to pull some together around the theme of identity, but I’m focusing on another project at the moment. But it will come!

Reply
Charli Mills
26/1/2017 06:43:47 am

Without reading the book, I sense it matches the emotional story unfolding behind the headlines of the POTUS. Most Americans can attest to this being an abnormal week. Many are clinging to worn cloaks proclaiming them warm enough for what is to come and others declaring resistance. I wonder how this book will impact American readers. I intend to find out. And interesting how your commenter would emerge this week. I think people are getting stirred up, whether they recognize it or not. Love your flash! I feel it forms a literary comment of its own, showing the truth beneath the appeal to the divine argument.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/1/2017 05:58:06 pm

Yes, indeed, and the author himself is on the ball about this as I detected from one of his tweets at election time. And you’re right about things being stirred up, I’d assumed it was coincidence but when all influenced by the overall cultural and emotional climate.
I’m about to sign off and watch the evening news – I don’t tend to keep up with the fluctuations of news in the daytime, but this morning he was on the way to endorsing torture. However, I’m wondering if it’s preferable for this to be in the open, given how it was used clandestinely in the past.
I think one of the things that struck me from the book and what motivated the flash was recognising that even those not directly abused by this culture were still damaged in a way. It’s not so strong in my flash but there is an emotional blunting involved in turning a blind eye, sometimes essential for survival.
Hope you find this novel a useful read, but do take care of yourself when you do. From what I can make out on Goodreads it’s to be published in the USA sometime this year, so I hope that will bring in a lot more readers.

Reply

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