Dark Things in the Night and the Arctic Cold

So I press on with my Read Harder Challenge.  One item on the list is:

'Read a book with a main character that has a mental illness'

The Bird of Night by Susan Hill fulfils this category very well.  It also ticks a box on my Booker Shortlist Personal Challenge.  It is a bleak read and not a long one.  Unfortunately the author commented in 2006 "It is a novel of mine that was shortlisted for Booker and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. It was a book I have never rated. I don't think it works, though there are a few good things in it. I don't believe in the characters or the story.  

Hill is known for her gothic style and penchant for a ghost story several of which she wrote in the 80s and early 90s.  Her 21st century novels are, in one way, lighter being thrillers written around her detective character, Simon Serrailler.  In terms of writing they are rather lightweight when compared to, for example, The Bird of Night.  But she has captured an audience with Simon Serrailler and this sells books and pays bill!

Moving swiftly on therefore I come to three detective novels written by Icelandic authors.  Two, by Arnaldur Indridason, are part of a crime fiction series written around the character Inspector Erlendur.

Strange Shores and Hypothermia are full of Icelandic atmosphere.  Having recently renewed my acquaintance with Iceland in general and Reykjavik in particular and rekindled my enjoyment of everything the country has to offer,
and given my fondness for a good thriller, these are books to enjoy for their page-turning qualities added to which there is an ongoing story surrounding
Erlendur and his early life, during which he experiences the death of his younger brother, in circumstances the nature of which he has not been able to establish. 

Another Icelandic writer, Ragnar Jonasson has also captured my attention.  His output is not quite so prolific but he is the author of the Dark Iceland series in which there are only two titles published so far but three further novels planned according to his website.  I've read Night Blind and I now need to retrace steps and read the first title, Snow Blind.   As with Indridason we are in the realms of Icelandic noir, atmospheric with good characterisation and plotting.  The tension sucks you into a claustrophobic story whose main protagonist is a novice police detective Ari Thor.  The peace of a close-knit Icelandic community is shattered by the murder of a policeman - shot at point-blank range in the dead of night in a deserted house. With a killer on the loose and the dark Arctic waters closing in, it falls to Ari Thor to piece together a puzzle that involves tangled local politics, a compromised new mayor and a psychiatric ward in Reykjavik where someone is being held against their will...

Ordo Equitum Solis

In four early books J G Ballard succeeded in making a kind of steely poetry out of the nastiest incidentals of late twentieth century life. So reads the Guardian review for 'Empire of the Sun'.   This novel however merits consideration as a work which distinct from that early, essentially science fiction, genre.

"Based on events which Ballard himself witnessed and suffered while interned as a boy in Shanghai during the Second World War, this is an extraordinary addition to our modern literature of war.

  Indeed, it could be said that if there is still room for a masterpiece about the Second World War, then this is it - and like other masterpieces it gains its initial effect in standing at a slightly oblique and unexpected angle to its subject matter.   By concentrating on the expatriate colony of Shanghai, and by showing us the events following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Ballard achieves the creation of an amazing microcosm. Above all, the book is a triumph of truthfulness of tone. The boy, Jim, separated from his parents, camping out first in his own empty house and then in the deserted house of his parents' friends, eventually interned for four years in the camp at Lunghua, becomes an admirable clear-eyed guide to a most peculiar inferno.  This, Ballard convinces us, is how it was. No heroes, no heroics, just war as the normal condition, and the only battle that to survive."

The tone of the narrative of Empire of the Sun sounds authoritative and, lacking the need for imagination in the events which take place between the pages of the book, it is completely convincing. I 'read' this novel as an Audible experience.  The narrator, Steven Pacey, made an excellent job of characterisation, finding voices and accents for the cast and in particular for Jim, the young and naive ingenu who is caught up in the adult folly of war. 

Another novel by Ballard, High Rise, was another Audible read.  A new high-rise block seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming pools, its own school, a supermarket and high-speed lifts.  But at the same time, the building seems to be designed to isolate the occupants from the outside world, allowing for the possibility to create their own closed environment.  Life in the
high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty annoyances among neighbours escalate into an orgy of violence. Soon skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools. And party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalize them.  It does not take long for the occupants of the entire building to abandon all social restraints, and give in to their most primal urges. The tenants completely shut out the outside world, content with their life in the high-rise; people abandon their jobs and families and stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. Even as hunger starts to set in, many still seem to be enjoying themselves, as the building allows them a chance to break free from the social restrictions of modern society and embrace their own dark urges and desires. As the commodities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities.

In time the tenants abandon all social and moral etiquette. As their environment gives way to a hunter/gatherer culture, they gather together in small clans, claim food sources from where they can (which includes eating the many dogs in the building, and eventually even the other tenants). Every stranger is met with extreme violence.

Ballard here offers a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways.  It is an allegory based on the tower block phenomenon, an architectural money-saving expedient in maximising potential accommodation over a given area.  But with this new approach to providing living space came various social problems which discredited this innovation.  Ballard's satire illustrates these issues in an extreme way.

As a postscript to the above reviews there are two further things to say about Empire of the Sun.  Firstly, in order to comply with a requirement of the Read Harder Book Challenge 2016 that I have embarked on, I sat down to watch the film of the book.   Steven Spielberg directed the 1987 American production with Christian Bale playing the role of Ballard as a boy and John Malkovich playing Basie.  Ballard chose Bale (who was 12 at the time he was cast) because he felt he bore some resemblance to himself as a boy. The casting was based on the recommendation of the wife of Steven Spielberg; more than 4,000 child actors were auditioned.

By and large I felt the film was fairly faithful to the book although visually it was heavily sanitised in comparison to the narrative of the novel.  To complete my understanding of the novel I also read Ballard's Miracles of Life which is a short autobiography describing his childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by war.  Ballard is plucked from a happy and comfortable childhood to experience the horrors and deprivation of internment camp with his parents. 

After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James travels to England with his mother and sister, but he finds the atmosphere of post-war Britain difficult to penetrate.  After his schooling he embarks on medical studies but throws this over to enlist in the RAF.  This also turns out to be a wrong move and subsequently Ballard marries, becomes a father only to be widowed unexpectedly.  Faced with bringing up his three children single-handed he embarks on his literary career and makes forays into the art world of the 60s and 70s.  The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1991, and with a very short and moving epilogue, dated September 2007, wherein he announces that he is sick with a terminal illness

In Ore Pomarii

Tracy Chevalier is a very readable author, her books though are far from lightweight and I like the way she researchers thoroughly in order to introduce real people into her narrative.  These real life characters from recent history, as well as the drafting of stories of documented human, family dramas mean the book you read holds the attention and engages you in something beyond a complete fiction.

I really enjoyed 'Beautiful Creatures' because it told a story based on the life of fossil-hunter Mary Anning of Lyme Regis.  Within the pages the reader learned about some of the fossil remains Mary found and sold. We met the palaeontologists, geologists and unscrupulous fossil dealers and collectors with whom she came into contact as they are woven into the novel.  It was a Winterborne K book group choice and at a later gathering, using shells and fossils I have at home in my collection, I gave a show and tell session to my fellow groupies which was a pleasure for me and enlightened the others.

I won't be able to give a show and tell session for At The Edge of the Orchard because our biologist from history is the botanist William Lobb and I don't have an authentic collection of pine cones.  Lobb was a Cornish plant collector, employed to collect for an Exeter nurseries and was responsible for the commercial introduction to England of the monkey puzzle tree, the Sequoia and the Redwood. I see that he is also responsible for introducing Desfontainia spinosa,  a pretty shrub with holly-like leaves and with small deep orange and yellow trumpet flowers, which Andy Doran persuaded me to plant in the newly-designed garden at Godalming.  

The novels tells the story of the Goodenough family who battle to establish a plantation of 50 trees in order to secure a plot of land in Ohio’s Black Swamp in the mid 1800s.  The pressures of poverty, illness and the grind of working land that was never meant to be farmed are intensified by the simmering hostility between James and Sadie Goodenough.  Really the novel tells the story of Robert, one of the sons of the warring parents who heads west and keeps on running.  But there is a cast of memorable characters the most memorable being some of the feisty women with whom the passive character of Robert comes into contact.

Robert's encounter and employment with William Lobb allow Chevalier to provide the reader with the benefit of her research into the  life of William Lobb and plant collection practices which took place in order to bring exotic species to the British Isles for introduction into prestigious gardens and estates.  

The narrative ducks back and forth between time frames but is always fluent and manages to keep the reader firmly rooted in the moment.  Above all this is a book with a good ending which does justice to the foregoing narrative and this leaves the reader with a feeling of full circle.

A Sweet Caress, A Beating Heart: Lives lived to the Full – two engrossing offerings from Audible.

Sweet Caress; the Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

This title has been in my Audible Library for some months.  Somehow I had not got round to downloading it from the Cloud onto my Device, favouring more immediate urges for easy listening, by which I mean thrillers and stories that have a classic structure of a beginning, middle and end.  In point of fact once I settled to Sweet Caress I found that it had a coherent, compelling and chronological structure and was easy to get into. 

This is a story of a life lived to the full.  Through this life, that of Amory Clay, a brave, feisty, characterful woman who becomes a professional photographer, William Boyd tracks some of the defining moments of the 20^th century as told through her camera lens.

  Her professional life, during which she looks for life, love and artistic expression, spans the decadent demi-monde of late 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the violence of the Blackshirt Riots in London in the same decade and where she receives an injury that will dog her life, and to the Rhineland in the Second World War.  She also, despite her advancing years for a frontline photographer, sees ‘service’ in Vietnam. 

Amory’s father is a flaky paternal figure.  She is born in the decade before the First World War and her disappointed father gives her an ambiguous name and announces the birth of a son.  She has patchy memories of his intervals of leave and there is a bizarre and vivid incident when he drives to pick her up from boarding school, ostensibly to go off on a jaunt, and tries to drive himself and Amory in their car off a bridge to commit suicide.  It is her gay photographer Uncle Greville, who is a more stable and nurturing influence, who gives her a camera, this gift representing the defining moment of her life.

Endings are tricky.  If you have been held by a book all the way through you expect a ‘good’ ending.  It may be happy or sad but if you are me you don’t like ambiguity, you don’t like to feel you have been sold short either.  Boyd’s ending to Sweet Caress is a good one, with a twist of surprise at the very close.    

Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks                                                                               

The Literary Review has written that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; he has been named "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book".  He is best known for his three novels set in early 20^th century France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.  These were published in the late 80s and early 90s.  Fast forward to 2015 and in Where My Used to Beat Faulks returns to that wartime era, but has shifted his arena for the action. 

The novel contains more than one of Faulks’ main recurring themes, the World Wars of the 20^th century and he sheds a long and woeful light over the 20^th century as glimpsed through the life of Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has experienced the best and worst of times in that century.

  On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor is forced to confront the events that made up his life.  The agent of this process, Hendricks’ host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man who is living on borrowed time, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.


To try and make sense of events and people who have shaped his life Hendricks must explore events and his experiences during the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that is never resolved, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.  Here Faulks has written an intensely vivid, insightful and heartbreaking passage of unbearable tragedy which epitomises the attitude of the higher echelons of military power in the arena of the First World War towards its ‘foot soldiers’, the millions of souls who were drummed up as little more than cannon fodder, whilst the generals parked themselves in their makeshift canvas headquarters at the rear of the battlefield and dreamt up new manoeuvres for their plans of campaign.

It is a complex novel, representing, in common with Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a commentary on the 20^th century.  Such a complex novel deserves a more detailed and insightful review and for this I attach the following link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/01/23/struggles-heart/q8snoR1kLJN7i1gzzxaLTJ/story.html

A Double Billing: Double Vision and Border Crossing

Pat Barker is an author some of whose books I read in the early days of my Godalming book group.   We started with Regeneration, the first of her First World War trilogy.  It was the second book we read as a group.  Regeneration is a historical and anti-war novel first published in 1991. The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.  The novel explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.  Inspired by her grandfather's experience of World War I, Barker draws extensively on first person narratives from the period. Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals present at the hospital including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder during and after WWI. The novel explores several themes around the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure.


I stumbled upon Double Vision and Border Crossing in a charity bookshop. Whilst war, atrocities
and war-reporting feature in Double Vision it is more a novel dealing with social issues such as stalking, the exploitation of a widow by her handyman, and the questionable relationship between a young woman in her late teens or early twenties and a man twice her age.  The text flows and the novel is discrete and contained.  I enjoyed it.

Border Crossing deals with other themes:  the novel explores the controversial issue of children who have committed murder, in particular the aftermath after their sentence is served out. A tense psychological thriller, Border Crossing investigates the crimes of a particularly violent boy and the possibility of redemption.  When the protagonist, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from suicide, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he had hoped to forget. The rescuer, Tom, already knows the young man as Danny Miller. When Danny was ten, Tom presented evidence that helped commit him to prison for the murder of an elderly woman. Danny, full of suppressed memory and now free from prison, turns to Tom to help him recount what really happened, and discover the truth.  The Border Crossing in the story takes place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt are blurred and confused.

Whilst reading Border Crossing my memory of a similar case of

murder by minors is triggered.  The events in Barker's novel are possibly inspired by the tragic murder of James Bulger in 1993.  Then a the two-year-old boy was taken from his mother's side whilst in a shopping centre, and suffered ten skull fractures as a result of an iron bar striking his head. His body was then placed on railway tracks and covered with stones. The two murderers were found to be Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old.  The case caused considerable controversy both in Britain and worldwide. Just like Danny in Border Crossing, Thompson and Venables were tried and sentenced as adults, served a sentence then were released under new identities.  Again this was a book that read itself: structured and with an almost unambiguous ending.  With his cover blown once you are not sure whether Danny will manage to escape the grip of his past.

Challenging Reading

In recent months I have been working through novels that I have picked up here and there, titles by authors whose work I have consistently enjoyed.  My reading thread has periodically been punctuated by novels that have previously been nominated for the Booker Shortlist, or have been winners.  Titles such as St Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler, Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes and Time's Arrow by Martin Amis.  None of these was a particularly 'easy' read.  They are not what I would call accessible novels and I found the challenging.  But there you are, I am a collector and these are four titles ticked off the list.

Meanwhile I continue with another list, my BookRiot challenge.  Slade House by David Mitchell
fulfils the 'horror' category although it is more weird and mystical as a fantasy than frightening.  It began as the series of tweets by Mitchell in July 2015 which evolved into a story and which was set in the same universe as The Bone Clocks.  But the 2,000-word story quickly acquired a life of its own and was published on 27th October 2015 just in time for Halloween.  You need to concentrate when Mitchell is doing his thing, slipping between time frames but his writing is always inventive and articulate.

And then I decide to tackle The Year of the Flood by Margaret Attwood.  I love this woman's writing, and her voice even more.  My sister in law Jenny forwards me a link; it takes me to a slot on YouTube where you can listen to Attwood read one of her poems, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGOaB7Ifg5U   Listening to ' The Moment' has a remarkably calming effect on me.  Her deeply modulated voice and the words and their meaning speak directly to me, have the ability to change a personal perspective.  The message is clear and I heed the message as I continue to sort through a surfeit of papers, documents, publications that I no longer need.   Meanwhile I plough on with The Year of the Flood......  

With a reading of MaddAddam this third novel by Margaret Atwood brings together two of her previous works, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.  I read Oryx and Crake at least ten years ago and have no clear memory of the book.  Tackling The Year of the Flood through the medium of an audio book requires a lot of concentration.  I find it is not always easy to hold onto the strands of narrative and I miss the ability to leaf back through pages to help re-orient myself in the narrative when I 'lose the plot'.   Some reviews of MaddAddam run as follows:

“The final entry in Atwood’s brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire … Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind’s failings but with a sense of awe at humanity’s barely explored potential to evolve.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An epic dystopian journey through a wasteland of high science and low deeds that ends in hope.” – The Independent

I am left with the feeling that I have not done the trilogy justice.  It seems clear to me that I should tackle a second reading challenge in that I should at some point reread the three novels, in hard copy, and try to make sense of the narrative and the new world disorder that is portrayed.

Of Hares and Unicorns: folklore and myth

The hare (Lepus europaeus) appears in English folklore in the saying "as mad as a March hare". 

Here we are on the second day of March having just enjoyed the gift of an extra day in this 'leap' year.   The legend of the White Hare tells of a witch who takes the form of a white hare and goes out

looking for prey at night, or of the spirit of a broken-hearted maiden who cannot rest and who haunts her unfaithful lover.  The mythical Unicorn is white too.  It is a legendary animal of European

folklore, often depicted as a white horse-like or goat-like animal with a long horn and cloven hooves and sometimes a goat's beard - but not lady unicorns surely?  In the Middle Ages and Renaissance it was commonly described as an extremely wild woodland creature, a symbol of purity and grace, which could only be captured by a virgin. In encyclopedias you will read that its horn was said to have the power to render poisoned water potable and to heal sickness. In Medieval and Renaissance times, the tusk of the narwhal was sometimes sold as unicorn horn.

Why all this hares and unicorns?  As it happens I have just read two delightful books; the one recommended by a new bookish friend who came to lunch at The Old Workshop with other village friends who are keen readers.  The other is my choice to fulfil a category on my reading challenge.

'Hare' by Jim Crumley is one in the series Encounters in the Wild, where the author writes of memorable experiences as a quiet bystander at the margin of a place where he can observe the animal's activity and behaviour.   Hares, golden-brown in colour with a pale belly and white tail, spend most of their day nestling in a patch of grass, known as a form, and is most active at night.  When they are disturbed, they can shift..... up to 45 mph.  Jim Crumley's Encounter series is written as short monographs on individual species; companion books include Fox, Barn Owl and Swan.  They are pretty and bijou, very much books to have and to hold. 

'I Believe in Unicorns' by Michael Morpurgo is my choice to fulfil the 'Middle Grade' category on my list of challenges.  I disliked this term intensely when I first encountered it, as it implies something mediocre and not quite worthy of the attention of a discriminating reader.  In fact it is part of educational terminology and describes a category of reading suitable for 8-12 year olds before they are ready to tackle Young Adult fiction.

Tomas hates school, hates books and hates stories. Forced to visit the library, he stops to listen to magical tales that the Unicorn Lady spins. These tales draw him in and soon his life will be changed for ever.  The story is set against the backdrop of war-torn Europe, and explores the power of stories to transform lives    Many reviews of this book are united in finding the story enchanting. "It has adult themes of loss and redemption wrapped up in a delightful and safe story for children. Adults will get as much from this book as children - it brought tears to my eyes." writes one reviewer.  Another says " It will make you cry a little or at least get a lump in your throat but a truly brilliant read and one I think everyone should read."  I am absolutely with these reviewers on that one.  It did bring tears to my eyes, happy ones.  I doubt anyone who treasures the joy they find in reading can help but feel emotional as the story draws to a close.

Whilst on the subject of animals......... I complete my reading of The Soul of an Octopus, lent to me by Francis Shaxson at one of our Bookish Lunches.  The Author Sy Montgomery offers a unique window into octopus behaviour and intelligence through eloquent and vivid descriptions — both science-based and emotional — of her extended encounters with octopuses while going behind the scenes at Boston's New England Aquarium and diving in Polynesian waters. 

The aptly-named giant Pacific octopus Octavia comes alive in the book (as do other octopuses) with a unique personality that responds to Montgomery in poignant ways.  Wild-caught in British Columbia and transported to the aquarium by Federal Express, Octavia is the octopus Montgomery comes to know best. On one occasion, Octavia and Montgomery hold on to each other for one hour and fifteen minutes, in an instance of tactile pleasure felt in an apparently mutual way by octopus and woman. 'I stroked her head,' Montgomery reports, 'her arms, her webbing, absorbed in her presence. She seemed equally attentive to me.'

Montgomery watches Octavia with added excitement when she lays eggs — thousands of them, like 'tiny seed pearls on black string.' 'Mottled with dark patches, Octavia is radiantly beautiful', writes Montgomery, 'the very picture of a healthy octopus and a diligent mother. She fluffs the clusters of eggs nearest the window with one arm, like a mom sitting on a park bench might jiggle a baby buggy.' The eggs, though, will never hatch; they are inert, infertile, sending no signs of life back to their caretaker. Never having had the opportunity to mate with a male, Octavia will not experience the evanescence of octopus motherhood shortly before death in the way that wild female octopuses do."

So three very different animals, two from the real world and the third from the surreal world of fantastical beasts.  But the octopus has been the subject of many mythological stories over the years, one of the best known being that of The Kraken, legendary sea monsters of giant proportions said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenalnd and usually portrayed in art as a giant octopus attacking ships.