Apologies for the less-than-inspiring title – and anyway, aren’t all novels about how lives intersect? – but I’m pulling this post together in a bit of a rush to move a backlog of reviews before the end of the year. Each of these novels is by an established writer who isn’t dependent on my short-out whose previous novel I reviewed very positively here, both Laird Hunt’s and Maggie O’Farrell’s eliciting instructions-for-a-novel posts. Their new novels are listed in ascending order of number of point of view characters. (Of course!)
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The Evening Road by Laird Hunt
Three spirited women take to the road on an ugly hot day in 1930s America. We follow Ottie Lee for the first half of the novel, in the company of her lecherous boss, her beleaguered husband and an obese hanger-on called Pop through various misadventures en route to a lynching in the beautifully named town of Marvel. Calla Destry, who takes over the wheel and then the reins for most of the second half, takes a more direct route to Marvel in the naive hope of preventing the atrocity the white folks are so excited about. Finally, we join Sally Gunner whose dual heritage and communication with angels affords her the middle ground – if such dreadful circumstances merits one – with a snip of hope that a future America might be different. If the slang terms (cornsilks, cornflowers, corntassels and cornroots) for black and white (and perhaps Native American?) confused me as much as the names in a Russian novel, I imagine it was the author’s intention to draw attention to the arbitrary designation of one group’s domination of the other.
Each of the women is optimistic, despite the burdens of her present and past, and their voices engaging and distinct. It’s testament to Laird Hunt’s prowess as a writer that we can sympathise with Ottie Lee despite our horror at her matter-of-fact acceptance of the lynching. But the obstacles the author puts in place to slow down the journey felt contrived to me, and I enjoyed sixteen-year-old Calla’s account more. She’s an endearing mélange of cussedness and recklessness that makes you want her to succeed. But it’s not just the cruelty of the external world she’s dealing with; she’s also an often grieving the loss of her sister, and caught between two equally unsuitable men.
The Evening Road is the last in a trilogy of novels exploring American history from the perspective of those the dominant accounts have overlooked. While I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as Neverhome, it’s still an admirable account of an important but painful topic which is well worth your time. Thanks to Chatto & Windus for my review copy.
Each of the women is optimistic, despite the burdens of her present and past, and their voices engaging and distinct. It’s testament to Laird Hunt’s prowess as a writer that we can sympathise with Ottie Lee despite our horror at her matter-of-fact acceptance of the lynching. But the obstacles the author puts in place to slow down the journey felt contrived to me, and I enjoyed sixteen-year-old Calla’s account more. She’s an endearing mélange of cussedness and recklessness that makes you want her to succeed. But it’s not just the cruelty of the external world she’s dealing with; she’s also an often grieving the loss of her sister, and caught between two equally unsuitable men.
The Evening Road is the last in a trilogy of novels exploring American history from the perspective of those the dominant accounts have overlooked. While I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as Neverhome, it’s still an admirable account of an important but painful topic which is well worth your time. Thanks to Chatto & Windus for my review copy.
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
An elderly Italian painter, reviled and renowned for his enigmatic still lifes of bottles, reviews the pleasures and losses of the past as he prepares for death from cancer. Recently, he’s enjoyed teaching the local schoolchildren, the young Annette Tambroni particularly talented despite her failing sight. When we encounter the adolescent Annette in her own strand of the novel, Signor Giorgio is already dead. Now blind, her mother has withdrawn her from school, and she must learn to navigate not only the material world but the restrictions imposed by her mother’s paranoia and gender prejudice.
The bottle painter also has fond memories of letters received from England from a young art student called Peter. Peter too gets his own narrative: in middle age, a reasonably successful landscape artist, happy in his north Cumbrian cottage on the edge of the moors with his beloved wife and children, twins just launched into adulthood. Fifteen years on, the elder twin, Susan, earning her living as a photographer and gallery assistant, channels her grief at the death of her brother into an extremely risky affair.
Four lives linked, to a greater or lesser extent, over two countries and half a century, through some beautiful descriptions and not a lot of plot. The main jeopardy, when Peter is trapped overnight by a rock fall, is deliberately downgraded through his daughter’s narrative when he is very much alive. First published in 2009, my paperback edition courtesy of Faber and Faber was published this year, possibly for fans of The Wolf Border of which I’m one. (Or maybe not, as I see from her website it was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction.) I would have preferred more story and a stronger central thread (I don’t think loss is quite enough).
The bottle painter also has fond memories of letters received from England from a young art student called Peter. Peter too gets his own narrative: in middle age, a reasonably successful landscape artist, happy in his north Cumbrian cottage on the edge of the moors with his beloved wife and children, twins just launched into adulthood. Fifteen years on, the elder twin, Susan, earning her living as a photographer and gallery assistant, channels her grief at the death of her brother into an extremely risky affair.
Four lives linked, to a greater or lesser extent, over two countries and half a century, through some beautiful descriptions and not a lot of plot. The main jeopardy, when Peter is trapped overnight by a rock fall, is deliberately downgraded through his daughter’s narrative when he is very much alive. First published in 2009, my paperback edition courtesy of Faber and Faber was published this year, possibly for fans of The Wolf Border of which I’m one. (Or maybe not, as I see from her website it was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction.) I would have preferred more story and a stronger central thread (I don’t think loss is quite enough).
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell
Claudette and Daniel have made their home with their two young children in a remote part of Donegal. Both on their second marriages, she is a former film star of French-English heritage who now home schools their daughter; he is an academic specialist in linguistics from an Irish-American family. On his way back to New York for his father’s ninetieth birthday party, Daniel happens to hear about the death of a former girlfriend more than two decades before. Might he have been inadvertently responsible? Should he try to uncover the truth or should he let it go?
Moving between time, continents and point of view, this is an epic novel about the lives we intersect with and the multitudes that make us who we are. Despite the multiple perspectives, it’s never confusing or, if it is, the writing and characterisation are so engaging you can’t object to getting lost in its pages. Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel confirms her as one of the most consistently reliable British novelists of our times. Thanks to Tinder Press for my review copy. I featured her previous novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, in an instructions-for-a-novel post – not that I believe I got anywhere near to unpacking how she does it – but couldn’t begin to try with this one!
Moving between time, continents and point of view, this is an epic novel about the lives we intersect with and the multitudes that make us who we are. Despite the multiple perspectives, it’s never confusing or, if it is, the writing and characterisation are so engaging you can’t object to getting lost in its pages. Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel confirms her as one of the most consistently reliable British novelists of our times. Thanks to Tinder Press for my review copy. I featured her previous novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, in an instructions-for-a-novel post – not that I believe I got anywhere near to unpacking how she does it – but couldn’t begin to try with this one!
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