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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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Tragic misunderstandings: Missing & Speak No Evil

28/5/2018

3 Comments

 
When the press release described Speak No Evil as “a novel about the power of words”, I thought it would fit nicely with Missing, about a translator who has personal reasons for using precise verbalisations. But, although I could see what the publishers were getting at, it didn’t chime strongly with my reading experience. Nevertheless, these short novels – the first from the UK, the second from the US and Nigeria – have something in common: the grief and guilt that has diverted a woman’s life after a tragic misunderstanding at the age of eighteen. But, given that exactly how that happened is part of the mystery, you won’t find much about that in my reviews. Don’t let that stop you reading on, as both these novels are well worth your time.


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Missing by Alison Moore

Jessie Noon leaves a translation and interpretation conference in London to take a train north to Carlisle and a bus on to Hawick in the Scottish Borders where she’s lived for the past thirteen years. She shows her house because she believed it belonged to her great-great-grandmother, although her mother – when Jessie eventually visits her parents in their retirement village after Christmas – insists she’s mistaken.
 
When he walked out about a year ago, her husband left her a note in steam on the bathroom mirror, a cat, and a beagle called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Her son from her first marriage left home years ago and Jessie has no idea where he is. This
estrangement might be the reason her neighbour tries to forbid Jessie from speaking to her son.
 
Living and working alone apart from the pets and a ghost that seems to inhabit the spare room, Jessie doesn’t question whether she’s
lonely. She follows her routines of cooking and cleaning, walking the dog and breakfasting on five-of-day. She sends her Christmas cards out early and reminisces on playing games with her niece.
 
Jessie is not
without feeling and when Robert – a local man whom she first met at a Halloween party where she came dressed as tuberculosis – shows an interest, she welcomes the attention. Although unsure whether her marriage is actually over, she imagines creating a new family with him.
 
A plot summary can never do justice to Alison Moore’s fiction. The story’s essence emerges through an accumulation of acutely-observed detail, that’s both quirky and determinedly ordinary (shopping at Morrison’s, drinking her tea from a Silver Jubilee mug). And funny. Reading this on a train, I laughed out loud, both from the text itself and from witnessing my fellow passengers acting out Jessie’s observations (unwrapping sandwiches from silver foil).
 
The blurb tells us:
 
This is a novel about communication and miscommunication and lives hanging in the balance, occupying the fine line between life and death, between existing and not existing.
 
For me, it’s also a refreshingly unsentimental story about how life continues after tragedy, not because those affected are particularly resilient, but because it’s the human condition to carry on. The opening quote from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – the novel also echoed in Sue Hubbard’s
Rainsongs – is a reminder that what might appear simple on the surface is a tangle of complexity underneath. Which rather sums up Alison Moore’s enthralling fiction.
 
Like her three other novels – my reflections on which can be found through
this 2016 review – Missing is a short novel. This time, perhaps because I still had another fifteen minutes or so before my train pulled into my station, the ending felt a little abrupt. But, on reflection, I admire how the author tells the reader know more than we need to know, and leaves us to decipher the rest.
 
Thanks to Salt publishing for my review copy. Follow this link for reviews of a couple of other novels on the
missing theme.

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

There’s a blizzard in Washington DC on the night two teenagers find themselves alone in her parents’ house. Gifted students in their final year at an elite high school, they’ve been friends for years. Yet when she makes a pass at him, he rebuffs her, and finds the only way to console her is to face up to the fact that he’s gay.
 
Isn’t the coming-of-age and coming-out narrative somewhat passé? Not if the central character’s religion considers homosexuality an abomination. Not if his parents hail from Nigeria where it can spell fourteen years in gaol. Alas poor Niru!
 
Soon after his father discovers his proclivities, the pair are flying to Lagos and on bumpy roads to the poverty-stricken village where he grew up. Then it’s to a church and a stifling night-time laying on of hands. On returning to the US, the friends drift apart as Niru tries to conform to the stereotype of masculinity his pastor and parents require.
 
Although Niru does give into temptation by connecting with another gay young man, the narrative ventures into the broader territory of
the precarious nature of adolescence when, if the pressures are too great, a sunny child risks becoming an unhappy adult. Then, for the final third of the novel, we switch to Meredith’s point of view for a deeper insight into how it’s not only gay black teenagers – in a city where, despite hosting the residence of the first black president, prejudice endures – who struggle to fit in.
 
Six years on, and despite the efforts of
a therapist, Meredith feels alone in her grief. (Although the therapy is a teeny tiny part of the plot, it’s more successful than many in demonstrating how it works in practice, by contrasting the therapist’s complete focus on her client’s well-being with the “PR crisis specialist” recruited to minimise the damage to her parents’ reputations.)
 
Uzodinma Iweala’s third novel is
a powerful and poignant multi-layered story of promising lives diverted from their projected paths. It’s about misunderstandings, parental expectations, racism and the pain of youth. Despite the sadness of the story, it’s a beautiful read. Thanks to John Murray for my review copy.

As always, I welcome your responses to my reviews in the comments section below. t Unfortunately, at the time of writing, this function isn’t functioning on Weebly blogs. Since Weebly also isn’t yet displaying the cookies opt-in banner, this might be the result of GDPR chaos. So do check my new privacy statement if you’re at all concerned. (I’ve gone for the plain-language version rather than confusing myself with legalese, but please let me know if you think I’ve missed anything important.)

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.
3 Comments
Charli Mills
29/5/2018 09:28:55 pm

testing...

Reply
Charli Mills
29/5/2018 09:36:10 pm

It worked! I've missed the comments, Anne. Although, it's only been on two posts.

Ah, I think you nailed why I like Alison Moore's writing -- she gives us the right details that makes her story come to life as if she observed what we do, but better.

I'm also enjoying the books coming out of Africa. They seem to be catching their literary stride after finding a voice.

Reply
Annecdotist
30/5/2018 10:55:56 am

Thanks for testing, Charli. Would have been nice if Weebly had informed me the bug was fixed! (So it’s probably not down to GDPR since the cookies banner still isn’t showing.) I’ve missed the conversations too – although in some ways I don’t think I could manage the amount of interaction you get over at Carrot Ranch – but the aspect that bothered me most was being unable to reply to comments posted before the problem arose. But that’s done now and all posts are accepting comments.
I went to Alison Moore’s book launch – which happened to be on the same night as the launch of Stephan Collishaw’s Zimbabwe novel just a couple of streets away, so I was able to get to both – and I asked her about choosing characters who have apparently dull lives on the surface that so much going on underneath. One of the things she said in reply was in defence of the much-maligned “domestic” which actually takes up so much of all our lives. But I think some writing about the domestic can be dull (and I hope I don’t think that because I’ve absorbed the cultural dismissal of the female perspective) but she approaches it an entirely different way, emphasising the trivial so that it is both resonant and funny.




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