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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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Young idealists: Godsend & Deviation

25/2/2019

8 Comments

 
Two novels about eighteen-year-old women who abandon the advantages of their previous identities to make common cause with oppressed peoples, at great risk to themselves. In the first, set in 2000, Aden travels from a secular society in California to study Islam, and to join the jihad. In the second, set in 1944, Luce leaves her bourgeois family in Italy to experience first-hand the Nazi labour camps. Are these rebellious adolescents idealists or deluded, or a little of both?

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Godsend by John Wray

Eighteen-year-old Aden’s parents don’t approve when she converts to Islam, and plans to join the jihad at the other side of the globe. But she doesn’t approve of their choices either: her mother numbing her feelings with alcohol; the father, an academic who studies Islam but laughs at Muslims, embarking on an affair with a colleague at work.
 
Having cut her hair and bound her breasts, she boards a flight from California to Dubai and on to Karachi, then takes a bus Peshawar and on to a village beyond. There, along with her friend, Decker, who has family in the area, she enrols at a madrasa and takes a new name. Although both are a mixture of piety, defiance, idealism and adolescent bravado, Aden seems more suited to their new life than he.
 
But diligent student as she is, she wants to do more than recite the suras. Before long, she’s crossing the border and beginning her military training in Afghanistan. Like the bacha posh traditional to the area (see The Pearl That Broke Its Shell) and Constance, who fights as a man in the American Civil War (see Neverhome), Aden manages to ‘pass’, although she has an extra anxiety beyond the harsh terrain, trigger-happy fellow-fighters and American drone attacks.
 
For a white Western male to take a female character into the ‘other’ side of the War on Terror suggests either arrogance or naivety. Fortunately, the author of The Lost Time Accidents is guilty of neither: the story is even-handedly told, and he’s done his research into the geography and religion too. Or as far as I can tell, being expert in neither, although I did have the audacity to include a story in my collection, Becoming Someone, about a Muslim anxious about timing his prayers correctly on a long-haul flight. (Since you’re asking, although set early this century, it draws on my own experience on a flight from Dhaka, before Islam became a dirty word in the West.)
 
Glad to say I’m adding Godsend to this year’s favourites. Thanks to Canongate for my review copy.
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Deviation by Luce d’Eramo translated by Anne Milano Appel

Luce is helping to rescue a family from a bombed building, when a wall collapses on her back. Paralysed from the waist downwards, the hospital places her in a room conveniently close to the morgue. But Luce fights for her life and her independence, making light of her struggle. She marries, has a child, gets a degree and gets divorced, and generally manages to earn her own living, but it’s hard.
 
It could be repression, it could be the drugs she’s taking, it could be the extra effort each day requires but, over three decades, she barely thinks of the time she was confined, not by her body, but by the barbed wire of various Nazi camps. At eighteen, against the wishes of her bourgeois parents, she left her comfortable home in Italy to volunteer at a German labour camp. There, outraged by the conditions, especially for the Easterners – Russians and Polish – she helps to organise a strike.
 
Her comrades might be executed, but circumstances lead to Luce being repatriated to Italy. Unwilling to return to her parents, and the privileges of her class, she destroys her documents and falls in with a group of deportees destined for Dachau concentration camp.
 
Branded as an autobiographical novel, Deviation, is a dispassionate account of living with disability and of the fight for survival within various types of Nazi camps. It seems closer to memoir than fiction with, for me, insufficient distance between narrator and author to allow the reader her own interpretation of events. Luce d’Eramo’s musings on her motivations to forget read like essays about a book that might have been, and I’d have welcomed more space to explore her early Fascism and the transformation she undergoes.
 
A bestseller when first published in Italian in 1979, this new English translation came to me courtesy of Pushkin Press.


I was going to finish with a rant about a topical case that links these two novels, but found that Geoff LePard (well he is a lawyer) had done it better than I could. Shemima Begum left the UK at fifteen, not to fight like Aden, but to be an ‘ISIS bride’. Three children (one newborn, the others dead) the Home Secretary is revoking her British citizenship on the grounds she’s eligible for Bangladeshi. Remember the Nazis? Here’s Geoff on the topic:
 
Which brings me to Shemima Begum and the question of her citizenship. Should someone who left England for the caliphate in Syria and ISIS be allowed back when it collapses, even if she expresses no regrets, justifies egregious terrorist acts against innocent concert goers and challenges the authorities to find evidence against her? Read on.
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.
8 Comments
Geoff Le Pard link
26/2/2019 09:27:00 pm

thank you for the link Anne

Reply
Anne Goodwin
4/3/2019 12:11:36 pm

Thank you for bringing your lawyerly expertise to this topic.

Reply
Charli Mills
2/3/2019 10:31:58 pm

Ah. I begun wondering the same thing as I read both reviews but not about Shemima Begum, specifically. Earlier I listened to a podcast regarding two American women who left the US to join the ISIS caliphate, and who now regret their decisions and want to come "home." The dilemma has haunted me all week with warring thoughts. When you paired Aden's story with Luce's I began to see historical connections in a different way. This is a tough one and I'm off to read Geoff and do more thinking.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
4/3/2019 12:18:36 pm

I hope you find Geoff's post and the comments helpful. For me, it's straight forward: whatever, they've done, you cannot make a person stateless. You might not want to rush to bring them home, and they should answer for their actions through the courts and criminal justice system when they do, but rich countries like ours have no right to dump their unwanted citizens on countries with fewer resources to deal with them.
But going to be a big issue internationally with the apparent defeat of the caliphate, although why worry when climate change is making these difficult decisions redundant?

Reply
Anne Goodwin
6/3/2019 01:43:11 am

Ah, I better understand, now considering your point that making one stateless, they become a burden to another country. So much complexity as we struggle with a global society made up with unequal nationalism, power, and resources. I found Geoff's post and the ensuing comments informative.

Anne Goodwin
6/3/2019 12:38:44 pm

Ha, you seem to be suffering from an identity disorder, Charli, unless it's the evil bot in my blog crediting your thoughts to me!
I think we recognise globalisation when it suits us and push it aside when it doesn't -- but sometimes rebounds on us.

Norah Colvin link
10/3/2019 10:46:35 am

Ha! I popped over to Geoff's and read before commenting here, Anne. That was a mistake because I've now forgotten anything I may have thought as I read your post. Thank you for linking to his though. It's always great to hear different opinions, including yours in relation to Charli's comment.
Your comment about the author and his main character in Godsend is interesting but I'm pleased to hear you think he succeeded.
I do remember your story about the timing of prayers. I've now read all your stories in Becoming Someone and loved them. There were more that I hadn't read than I expected and it was good to revisit those I had. Thank you for a great read.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
10/3/2019 03:46:45 pm

No worries, and glad you remembered that story and enjoyed the collection.

Reply



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