The Light of Day by Graham Swift

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

Graham Swift is a writer who is held in very high regard by his peers. He was born on 4 May 1949 in London, educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993) and Last Orders (1996). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The prize-winning Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. 

Of The Light of Day Amazon says:  On a cold but dazzling November morning George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, prepares to visit Sarah, a prisoner and the woman he loves. As he goes about the business of the day he relives the catastrophic events of two years ago that have both bound them together and kept them apart.
 
Making atmospheric use of its suburban setting and shot through with a plain man’s unwitting poetry and rueful humour, The Light of Day is a powerful and moving tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us.


Synopsis - contains spoilers!
George Webb's detective agency is run from an office above a tanning studio on Wimbledon Broadway. He's used to snooping: as a child, he spied on his father's adultery. His assistant, Rita, is also, occasionally, his mistress, and he hasn't missed his opportunities with some of his lady clients. No St George in shining armour, then, but a "corrupt" cop thrown out of the force for coercing a witness, his marriage a failure, his daughter only recently back in his life after a long estrangement. (He makes her nice dinners; he's a "cooking detective".) Sarah Nash, a language teacher and translator, enters his life, and changes it for ever, when she comes to ask him to spy on her husband. He's a gynaecologist who's been having an affair with a Croatian refugee they've taken in. The affair is over, Kristina is going back to her war-scarred country, but Sarah wants them followed to see if she really does get on the plane. Slowly, and, it seems, inexorably, this chain of events leads to a death. Now, two years on, George is putting flowers on a grave and visiting Sarah in prison.

What I thought:
Of this novel a Guardian reviewer wrote:  

The Light of Day has a brilliantly slow, precise, careful structure, covering "every hour, every minute, every detail" of its case with as much control as it lays out its geography and deals with its parts of speech. Within this tight little map, the story it has to tell is wildly extreme, sensational and romantic: completely out of hand. Its characters "cross a line" into savage places. In this banal surburbia, they "fall through space"; in this quiet corner of the civilised world, there are no safe houses. 

The style of the writing gives the impression of spoken word.  A stream of consciousness, the events that the novel describes being played and replayed in the narrator's head.  The book is crafted in such a way that it moves back and forth in time to build suspense.   It makes for open text on the page, deceptively accessible and an invitation to read at speed.  But that would be to lose the sense of the rather flat and repetitious narration with spare use of vocabulary.  I am not sure if this is a consequence but the reading of this novel had a lowering of mood as I followed the text and absorbed the story.  Lugubrious is the word that springs to mind.  The style does not suit everyone.  One reviewer wrote:  

"It is difficult to reconcile the fact of so much writerly achievement with the feeling that the novel is somewhat underpowered" and that the author "has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and suspense. The pages turn, but the pulse never quickens."

Knowledge of Angels

Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh.

THE BLURB:
It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.

But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

To read a success story in terms of self-publishing against the odd, do read the Review in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/24/jill-paton-walsh-a-life

And here is good review from the Independent.
The prince, the wolf-girl and the Inquisitor
WOLF-CHILDREN have always haunted human imagination, even though there is precious little evidence that any ever existed. In her novel Knowledge of Angels, Jill Paton Walsh explores this myth as a way of wondering what any of us might be like if left to grow up without human influence.

The urge to find answers to this question has also been a feature of history. In the 13th century Emperor Frederick II instructed a group of wet nurses to remain silent at their job in order to discover whether the babies in their charge would first speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic or their mother tongue. (In fact, under so odd a regime they all soon died.) In 1940 a psychologist husband-and-wife team kept a pair of twins - not their own - in isolation for their first 18 months to see how they would develop without any stimulation.

But in this novel, the author is interested in the symbolic rather than the developmental aspects of rearing an infant on its own. For as things turn out, waiting to discover whether the wolf- child Amara has an inherent knowledge (or ignorance) of the idea of God once she has acquired language is the pivotal point of the story.

To get to this position some good storytelling is needed, and Walsh is well qualified here. A skilled and prolific writer mostly of children's books, she brings a firm narrative hand to some otherwise unlikely events. The adventures of Amara, once separated from her wolves, are told in tandem with the story of Palinor. He is a glamorous middle-aged prince washed up on the 15th-century fantasy island where all these events take place. He comes from an advanced, equally mythological country where all or no faiths enjoy the same respect. As a gifted engineer and uninhibited sensualist, he has much to offer and soon makes friends. But under the island's laws, he is a unapologetic heretic and must therefore be put to death.

His only hope is last- minute conversion, and this task is given to the saintly Beneditx, a monk previously devoted to writing about angels. But Palinor makes short work of all his standard Roman Catholic proofs of faith, and it is Beneditx himself who finally comes to disbelieve. At this moment, enter the sinister figure of the Inquisitor from overseas - a thankless role in any work of the imagination long before Monty Python finally took them all on and won.

Palinor's last chance is with Amara, now more human than wolf. If she too shows no knowledge of God, then Palinor can be excused on the grounds that mere ignorance as a result of one's upbringing is not in itself heretical. But Amara, carefully coached by the nuns who guard her, answers pietistically and Palinor is doomed.

This story is half fable, half parable. It enters into dialogues about the nature of faith with wit and passion. Coming across it now is like going back 60 years to a time when such 'novels of ideas' might once receive good notices from T S Eliot in the Criterion, only then to fall foul of Orwell reviewing in Tribune. Often hypnotically readable, it engages in debates of more historical than contemporary interest. Principal characters move fluidly between ancient ignorance and Victorian rationalism while the surrounding proles remain happy with their lot and content to leave every decision to their betters. It is all rather like looking at a medieval illustrated manuscript recreated by a clever modern artist. Contrived, often describing an idealised world but with luminous moments quite outside the normal run of contemporary fiction, this is a serious children's book for adult readers, and none the worse for that

What I thought:
Until I read the Independent review it did not occur to me that this was a serious children's book.  I would hesitate to give it to either of my granddaughters, aged 10 and 12, who are committed and intelligent readers, who read beyond their age.  It is dark and disturbing and ultimately agonising when Palinor meets his fate.  I learnt stuff about the Inquisition, about the horrors, really, of  religious dogma and the cruel lengths to which men of God will go to force their belief on others or exact a dreadful penance.  I also discovered that the way a human brain and intellect receives something such as a novel is, certainly in my case, very much governed by the one's disposition and mental outlook at the time of reading.  What I am say is, don't read this book if you are feeling at all anxious or low.

Breakfast on Pluto

Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe

Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick McCabe's lyrical and haunting new novel, became a #1 bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970's and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder. Brilliant, startling, profound and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines light and dark, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long after the initial impression................ so says Amazon.

This was a fairly rapid read, and cleverly crafted.  It was a set book for me being a Booker Prize Finalist.  The juxtaposition of violence associated with The Troubles in Ireland intercut with the seedy and sometimes humorous sides of Patrick (Pussy) Braden's life in London and Belfast made for a fast moving narrative.  I would not have read this title had it not cropped up on my reading list, and fortuitously found it in the tiny Canadian bookshop in rue Parcheminerie in a Paris Veme.  

Europa

Europa by Tim Parks

Europa is a stream of consciousness novel by Tim Parks, first published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year, losing out to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

Jerry Marlow is a neurotic obsessive whose first-person narration describes a coach trip he and several colleagues take to Strasbourg in order to petition the European Parliament for improved working conditions for foreign university teachers working in Italy. While observing the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues, Marlow constantly revisits personal anxieties about relationships with his ex-lover, his wife, and his daughter. In a surprising tragicomic ending, Marlow realises both success and failure, all somehow entwined and impossible to separate.

Whilst Amazon says...........At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus taking him from Milan to Strasbourg. Sitting slightly off-center on the long back seat, he takes stock of the wreckage strewn behind him—a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even Marlow's teaching job at the university in Milan is jeopardized by new Italian laws restricting foreigners. And ahead? What lies in wait around the next bend? There are times when the most appalling premonitions seem all too plausible, yet the pull of hope cannot be resisted.  

Fuelled by Marlow's scalpel-sharp commentary - double-edged and decidedly adult road novel with a rich international gallery of characters, and offers an explosive sometimes hilarious portrait of a man patching together his life on a continent whose rhetoric of unity is less convincing - and far less exciting - than its bizarre polyglot passions and ancient conflicts.  

 I say........... "I found this a tricky novel to read.  The densely printed narrative was indeed a stream of male consciousness which I found difficult to engage with.  'Our hero's' obsession with the fine detail of his own preoccupations and with his mental machinations failed to make any connection with me.  In the end, to be truthful, I read the novel because I had to, a set book (Booker-nominated) and once started it had to be finished."

Two Titles set around 1914

Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson

World War One pilots were the knights of the sky, and the press and public idolised them as gallant young heroes.

At just twenty-three, Major Stanley Woolley is the old man and commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron. He abhors any notion of chivalry in the clouds and is determined to obliterate the decent, gentlemanly outlook of his young, public school-educated pilots - for their own good. But as the war goes on he is forced to throw greener and greener pilots into the meat grinder. Goshawk Squadron finds its gallows humour and black camaraderie no defence against a Spandau bullet to the back of the head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goshawk_Squadron


Dubliners by James Joyce

I chose this to fulfil a category on the Reader Harder Challenge 2017.  I have slipped behind with the list this year but one category was to choose a title about which there was a rumpus over publication.

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.^[1] They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.    

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.^[2] The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.

Above is the cover of the First Edition - I guess what you would call a plain brown wrapper.  Since then there have been many covers generated for this book, each typifying the era in which they were printed.

I listened to a reading of these short stories; the narrator was the inimitable T.P McKenna.  His rich Irish Brogue brought the characters to life as I listened.  So much of the substance of the stories is focused in the dialogue.  What I love is that although these are stories of over 100 years ago the dialogue is familiar in terms of vernacular, the expressions people choose as they talk to each other.  It does not feel remotely old-fashioned.  For me this was definitely a 'story' to have read to me.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing

This was a tricky read for me.  One might have thought it would have stirred up some ghosts as it relates to a mental illness, a breakdown and how it was dealt with by the medical profession and by the protagonists friends and family.  But it wasn't a matter of stirring up the muddy waters of my protracted bout of anxiety with depression, it was the burden of getting into the book and being engaged by it.  The opening section of the novel is lengthy and I found this rather heavy-going, turgid to get through.  Once the unrelenting narrative of the protagonist's dream whilst he spent the early weeks of his illness sleeping had been accounted for, the novel opened up into some sort of 'action' in terms of interaction between Professor Charles Watkins and the doctors into whose care he had been placed and with the people who visited him.  Exchanges of letters are interspersed as well as accounts of episodes in Watkins' past.  In the end three letters suggest he has made a complete recovery but whether this is because the advice of one doctor that the patient should be administered with EST or not is not made clear.

Here is a synopsis

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London's Embankment.

Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.  Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown.

As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday...`Briefing for a Descent into Hell' is one of Doris Lessing's most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction.

Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

And this is what appears on the dust jacket of the first edition in 1971:

Doris Lessing's new novel - which she defines as inner space fiction - is an incomparably exciting voyage into the marvellous, terrifying, unexplored, yet sometimes glimpsed territory of the inner man.

Professor Charles Watkins (Classics), doomed to spin endlessly in the currents of the Atlantic, makes a landfall at last on a tropical shore. He discovers a reined stone city, participates - moon-dazed - in bloody rituals in the paradisiacal forest, witnesses the savage war of the Rat-dogs and is borne on the back of the lordly White Bird across the sea of the dead. Finally, the Crystal claims him, whirling him out into space on a breathtaking cosmic journey.

Yet this most exotic of trips is as firmly rooted in the reality of a mental breakdown as De Quinceys fantasies were in the chemistry of opium. Watkins is a patient of Central Intake Hospital, an enigma to the doctors who try with ever more powerful drugs to subdue his minds adventure, a candidate for electric shock treatment. In a series of extraordinary letters - brilliantly illuminating both the writers and their subject - Watkins is reconstructed by those who have known him: the forgotten women who have loved him, or been awakened by him; the pendant, incensed by his intellectual anarchy; the wartime colleague around whose exploits with the Yugoslav partisans Watkins builds an astonishing fantasy.

Doris Lessing believes that society's treatment of the mentally ill is civilizations biggest and blackest blind spot, and that it is through the minds of the broken-down that truths we choose to shut out enter like the disguised messengers in myths and fairy tales. Developing themes central to The Golden Notebook and The Four Gated City, this book is her most astounding imaginative achievement - a rare work which explores new areas of thought.

There is much to learn about Doris Lessing from her website:  http://www.dorislessing.org/

In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/

I am fascinated to discover this Prize has been going since 1901.

Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Set in the late 19th century, at the height of the "Scramble" for African territories by the great European powers, Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, a proud and highly respected Igbo from Umuofia, somewhere near the Lower Niger. Okonkwo's clan are farmers, their complex society a patriarchal, democratic one. Achebe suggests that village life has not changed substantially in generations.

 

But then the English arrive in their region, with the Bible – rather than the gun – their weapon of choice. As the villagers begin to convert to Christianity, the ties that had ensured the clan's equilibrium come undone. As Okonkwo's friend Obierika explains: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one." Unwilling to adapt, Okonkwo finds himself the protagonist in a modern Greek tragedy.

The first part of a trilogy, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to gain worldwide recognition: half a century on, it remains one of the great novels about the colonial era.

The story's main theme concerns pre- and post-colonial life in late nineteenth century Nigeria. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It was first published in 1958 in the UK; in 1962, it was also the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The title of the novel comes from a line in  W B Yeats' poem The Second Coming.  

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, originally written as the second part of a larger work along with a further title.  Achebe states that two later novels A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.  Anthills of the Savannah  was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker in 1999.

FASTING, FEASTING takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family.

Anita Desai's novel of intricate family relations plays out in two countries, India and the United States. The core characters comprise a family living in a small town in India, where provincial customs and attitudes dictate the future of all children: girls are to be married off and boys are to become as educated as possible. The story focuses on the life of the unmarried and main character, Uma, a spinster, the family's older daughter, with Arun, the boy and baby of the family.  Aruna gets married.

Uma spends her life in subservience to her older demanding parents, while massive effort and energy is expended to ensure Arun's education and placement in a university in
Rather a series of events from a life than a complexly plotted work. We follow the fortunes of Uma and Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day to day living.
The novel is in two parts. The first part is set in India and is focused on the life of Uma who is the overworked daughter of Mama and Papa. She is put upon by them at every turn, preparing food, running errands. In the early part of the novel we see her struggling at school. She is not very bright but loves the sisters who teach and appreciate her. Finally she is made to leave school and serve her parents.

Uma's parents attempt to marry her off on three occasions; on the first occasion the chosen man fell for Uma's younger sister, Aruna. On the second her parents accept her marriage on behalf of her before finding out later that their dowry has been spent and the engagement is cancelled. On the third occasion a marriage took place but it turns out the Uma's new husband already has a wife. She lives with his sisters while he lives in another town spending her dowry on his ailing business. Uma's father quickly spirits her home.  We are also told of the episode of Anamika's (Uma's cousin) sad fate. She has won a scholarship to Oxford but her parents insist that she get married. She does and fails to please her husband by providing him with children. He keeps her for a time as a servant but eventually she dies by burning. It is strongly hinted that her in-laws killed her. The final scene of Part 1 is the immersion of Anamika's ashes in the sacred river.

In Part 2 we meet Arun, Uma's privileged brother. He is attending college in America and during summer holidays he lives with the Pattons an all American family. Again, plot is not complex or intricate. The events are told in a serial manner as Arun encounters them.  Of note is his intense dislike of American food and cooking methods. He is dismayed at the behaviour of Melanie, the daughter who is deeply troubled and suffering from bulimia. Although Mrs Patton seems to care about Melanie, she does little to help.  While apparently close, the family are actually distant from one another, something very different from Arun's experience of family life in India. Arun spends most of his time alone and isolated. Arun tries his best to escape from the western society but in vain.