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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.

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The country house meets friendship betrayed: The Long Shadow by Mark Mills, with fruit for afters

27/7/2014

5 Comments

 
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Who says fiction doesn’t change lives? Thanks to Mark Mills, I’ve learnt how to peel bananas from the bottom end, like a monkey. Not that this is a novel about fruit, or animal behaviour (unless you think young boys are like monkeys), but I was grateful for the tip about bananas at a point when the narrative pace seemed to drag.

Ben is a scriptwriter aeons away from the big time, a divorced father living in a grotty flat. When a wealthy former schoolmate offers to bankroll his film and install him in his mansion while he does a rewrite, it seems almost too good to be true. As, indeed, it is, but Ben is so seduced by his good fortune and Victor so skilled at manipulation, it takes some time for him to figure out exactly how and why. When he does, it’s immensely satisfying: country house meets poisonous friendship (and so refreshing to have the latter portrayed from the male point of view for a change) seasoned with boys’ games along the lines of Lord of the Flies, the resolution encompasses envy, childhood neglect, rivalry and turning a blind eye to painful truths in a psychologically astute way. I must confess, however, I appreciated this more in retrospect and there were moments across the first 200 pages when I was tempted to give up.

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In the first chapter, two boys go sledging; the recklessness of one deeply unsettling the other. It hooked me deliciously in its eloquence and narrative tension and spurred me to read on. Yet the following chapters might have come from a different author: the writing was merely adequate and the subject matter disturbing in the wrong kind of way. (Others may not, but I find it very difficult to read about eight-year-olds being sent to boarding school and ostentatious displays of wealth unless the immorality of both is clearly flagged up alongside.)

Given the discussion here on Annecdotal about the “stolen head”, it’s interesting to note that the chapter that grabbed my attention was in the much-maligned first-person present, but it’s difficult to say whether that would have worked all the way through. Having read to the end, and I’m certainly glad I did, it’s clear that the boarding-school flashbacks and expensive cars, hotels and yachts that failed to impress me were essential depictions of life in a cloistered bubble that would eventually burst. I suppose my experience as a reader had echoes of some relationships where you don’t quite know what’s happening until it’s over. I’d be interested to see where else Mark Mills has taken his imagination; while this wasn’t quite the novel for me, I suspect he might have another I could happily make my friend.

The banana I mentioned at the beginning is the reason I’m posting this review today, since fruit is the latest prompt for The Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge. Having confused my mandarins with my oranges on the previous prompt, I didn’t hold out much hope for my success on this one. I could conjure up lots of fruit-related memories from eating mangoes fresh from the tree in Paraguay to having a spiky tongue from eating prickly pears in Sicily to thinking I had appendicitis after gorging on unripe papaya in Thailand, but this was fiction, not memoir. (Interesting how I can dredge up the memories easily until confronted by the Bite-Size Memoir prompt.) I couldn’t even think of many novels with a role for fruit apart from The Lemon Grove (featuring a holiday villa beside a lemon grove) and The Orphan Master’s Son (where tinned peaches laced with botulism play an important part in the plot). My ideas got stuck on kids getting their comeuppance with stomach aches after eating forbidden fruit, although it seemed too obvious, or to close to my memories. Yet, with time running out, it brought me to this:

Standing guard at the entrance, the cherries on the welcome desk caught Wasp’s gaze. Luscious globes brimming over the cut-glass bowl, glistening as if someone’s mother had held them under a running tap to wash away the dust. Had they stormed the greengrocer’s by mistake?
Brock cocked his gun towards the queue. Fox passed the bags across the counter. Wasp reached for a cherry but his gloved hands failed him, and the mask cloaked his mouth.
Customers whimpered. Fox told the cashier to hurry up. Wasp was a boy again, scaling the orchard wall.
Grabbing the bowl, Wasp fled.

As always, I welcome your comments on any aspect of this post: the review; your nominations for fruity novels; the success or failure of the flash; any idiosyncrasies in how you eat your fruit. And, if you like, you can see some pics of last summer’s fruit harvest and listen to an old English song with a different take on cherries to the one in the flash.


Thanks Headline Review for my review copy of The Long Shadow. If you’ve enjoyed this post and would like to read others in a similar vein, you might like to subscribe to the blog via the sidebar.
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.
5 Comments
Charli Mills
27/7/2014 05:23:15 pm

The review is an interesting twist on the poisonous friendship theme in that it is a male friendship. I like to see themes thought of as gender-specific, examined through the other lens. I hope we, as writers, don't fall into overworking our introductions to the point that they don't match the rest of the book. Something I've fretted over.

Enjoyed reading your short story about the nun who shunned her own creativity. Such great tension in that story!

As to fruit, oranges and mandarins are citrus--easy to confuse! I did not know that about peeling bananas but I was shown how to dice a mango from a friend who grew up in Hawaii. It seems like I read a Steinbeck story that focused on fruit. It must be one of his shorts and I can't quite recall it, but I remember the description of grapes.

Your flash is delightful! I can just imagine a bank robber yielding one desire for another the way he can't keep off the cherries! That he makes off with the bowl is fantastic. Really an original flash that bore great fruit!

Thanks for sharing yet another piece of fruit...I mean music! ;-)

Reply
Annecdotist
28/7/2014 04:23:50 am

Thanks for your feedback, Charli. The issue of how we start our novels is also something I'm contemplating for my next post with reviews of another couple of books on the theme of water.
Thanks for reading my story about Sister Perpetua – I do think we have to be brave sometimes to believe in our own creativity.
And how to eat a mango is a really useful skill! A friend who grew up in Zimbabwe used to eat mangoes in the bath as a child because there were so messy. Another method I was taught – although I'm not sure if it only works with a specific type and it has to be really ripe – was to pierce a hole in the skin and suck it through that. I think that's how we ate them in Paraguay.
Looking forward to seeing what everyone else has made of the prompt when you post our virtual fruit salad.

Reply
geoff link
28/7/2014 01:17:42 pm

Such a brill piece of writing. Lovely humour throughout an awful situation. And so much to learn about eating fruit. I never knew there was a banana technique. Or one with mangoes..

Reply
Norah Colvin link
29/7/2014 05:14:31 am

Your introduction re banana peeling has me intrigued. I would have enjoyed a video demonstrating the technique. I initially thought you were going to tell about the trick from my childhood of slicing a banana without peeling it.
I thought of a couple of books with fruit that you may have read. Both are by Joanne Harris: Five Quarters of the Orange, and Peaches for Monsieur le Cure.
Then again, while I was looking for them on my shelf, I came across The Castle in the Pyrenees by Jostein Gaarder. The cover is 'covered' with cherries. Sadly, I can't remember their significance at the moment. :(
I could have mentioned plenty of picture books about fruit, but you probably wouldn't be so interested in those, and I didn't think to put them in my post.
I do so love your flash though. I love the names of the two thieves. I can just imagine the response of Fox to Wasp's escape with the cherries. I was most amused when Wasp's attempt to indulge was thwarted by his disguise.

Reply
Annecdotist
29/7/2014 12:27:10 pm

Thank you, Geoff and Norah, Now I want to be shown that trick of slicing a banana without peeling it. Much cleverer than peeling it back in the ordinary way from the bottom end.
Thanks also for these fruity fiction suggestions. On the subject of picture books, they are actually really useful for adults travelling outside one's home territory. I discovered lots of new and exotic fruits on my travels that we still don't get imported here, such as breadfruit and soursop.
Glad you liked the names also, Norah. I wasn't quite sure when I gave my main character that name whether people might read it as a natural wasp, as they do tend to hang around fruit!

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