A Reading Marathon with some Recommendations

Since winter arrived I have found more excuses to ‘curl up with a book’.  That and listening to selected titles on my trusty Audible App.  I’ll give a brief rundown of some books without a lot of comment and then say a bit more about recommendations.

Continuing with my discovery of the British Library Crime Series I read Cornish Murder by John Bude and Christmas in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon.  Both enjoyed as comfort blanket 

reading.  Perfect over the Christmas interval.  Feel free to borrow!

I read my first Ken Follett, The Man from Moscow, a thriller set in London in 1914.  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ken-follett/the-man-from-st-petersburg/9781509862344

Other titles include Exile by James Swallow, sequel to Nomad  which I thought was much better. If you like biographies you might be tempted by Becoming by Michelle Obama.  This has been widely acclaimed and very popular amongst my reading friends but I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, even though her achievements are phenomenal,  I found it a bit too self-promoting.  Perhaps it was not such a good idea to listen to it read by the author herself.

Three to recommend:

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s second trilogy following His Dark Materials is The Book of Dust. 

I read volume 1 La Belle Sauvage where the baby Lyra Silvertongue is rescued by Dr Malcolm Polstead, and enjoyed it because I do get swept up into the alternative world around which the novels are based.  Volume 2, The Secret Commonwealth finds Lyra, now twenty years old and her daemon Pantalaimon finding their relationship is put to the test in a dangerous world that finds Lyra travelling through Europe and to the Middle East in a quest to be reunited with Pantalaimo whilst Malcolm now a man with a strong sense of duty and an attachment to Lyra is sent on a journey to find out more about the mysterious roses with special properties that only grow in a desert referenced in the diary of a murdered man.  Rose growers of any kind, even those growing “normal” roses, are being terrorised and murdered by mysterious attackers from the mountains.  Both travel far beyond Oxford where the earlier novels are set to uncover secrets and solve the mystery of the Dust.  I’m not a fan of magical realism but when an author works really hard to make his narrative credible I cannot help get swept up into it.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I read this for my French group.  This was a rewarding novel to read. 

Ondaatje’s prose grabbed my attention and interest : the opening sentence ‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals’ suggests all manner of outcomes might be possible. From the beginning I could not be sure in what direction the narrative might lead. The Moth and then the Darter seemed to be doubtful and rather dangerous adults to be left in charge of two children. Were they going to be mistreated? This seemed a likely plot. The school arrangements were decidedly dodgy, the children deciding they would rather live at home than board as the parents had directed that they should. The Moth acquiesced and his supervision of the children seemed very lax, as the house filled up with a group of eccentric, mysterious, maybe even nefarious characters who came to populate the children’s milieu in postwar London. The narrative unfolds but the reader is never sure where the story is going. In the background I was wondering where the parents were and why they, and in particular the mother, had left so suddenly. What important reasons were there for the parents’ continued absence? I found certain notable scenes and passages particularly memorable when I came to think about the book after I finished it.   For example the greyhound runs on the Thames, and Nathaniel and Agnes’ encounters in the London house. I thought the narrative was cleverly plotted and then unveiled as a story of espionage activities with which Nathaniel and Rachel were necessarily involved.   There were no dramatic twists and turns as often is the case with novels in this genre. Events and explanations were nicely understated in the concluding part of the novel. I liked the book all the more for that.

Second Sleep by Robert Harris

I’ve read most of Robert Harris’s novels (except the Cicero trilogy) and have never been disappointed.  His latest offering is described as a genre-bending thriller: ‘All my books are about power’ he says. What connects them all is a preoccupation with power at its  apogee, on the brink of collapse.

“Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to officiate at the burial of a village priest. In his opening pages Harris conjures a lost England in its mix of religiosity and brutishness. When Fairfax discovers a display cabinet in the dead priest’s study, its shelves crammed with illegal artefacts, the truth of this world is revealed. Among the plastic bottles, banknotes and toy bricks displayed there, Fairfax discovers “one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate”, its back marked with the ultimate symbol of their “hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it”.  Abruptly everything shifts, slotting those strange anachronisms into place. Fairfax’s 15th century is not ours but part of a new calendar that had been reset to 666, the numeral of the Beast of Revelation. In Harris’s imagined future, God has brought down the four riders of the apocalypse on the satanic civilisation of the 21st century and the church has reasserted itself at the centre of the state. “Scientism”, the curse of the ancients, is a heresy, a mortal sin. Stripped of the medical and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, life is once more nasty, brutish and short.

To say more would truly be a plot-spoiler.  I found Harris’s writing so easy on my reading mind, a book that was enthralling.  With a great ending.

Two Women: Eleanor Oliphant and Marvellous Ways

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Here is a debut novel, discovered through a writing competition, by an author in her 40s, which has sold for huge sums worldwide.  This title was chosen by my Winterborne Kingston Book Group, known as 'Splinter'.

Amazon says:  Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

An astonishing story that powerfully depicts the loneliness of life and the simple power of a little kindness

What I thought:

From the outset I realised that Eleanor is something of an oddball.  I confess at first I thought she was, as we tend to say these days of someone who is a bit odd, obsessive, or antisocial, 'on the spectrum'. Being so precise about her food choices and meals, buying two tickets for a gig in case she lost one, and taking people literally, leading an orderly life, these all spoke of some kind of autism, I thought.   But as the narrative progressed I realised that rather, Eleanor was lonely and a damaged person, used to being let down in life.  During the course of the novel we gradually find out why she is isolated.  There was much humour in the portrayal of Eleanor in the context of her interactions  at work, her shopping habits, her regular consumption of two bottles of vodka  (somehow this did not sit as quite convincing to me).  I laughed out loud at her puzzlement after she had opted for a Hollywood wax.  Even odd titbits such as her buying a copy of Razzle for Sammy! And her shopping expedition to buy clothing was equally funny.  Then there are poignant things as when Eleanor goes to a hair salon and thanks Laura for “making her shiny”.   But where did her naïve belief that she was destined to connect with the second-rate self-obsessed pop star for a romantic relationship come from?  Did this fit with the character as she was being revealed by the writer.  Certainly it gave a mechanism for the emotional crash that was to come.  

When you see a section entitled Bad Days, you think you know it is going to go end badly. I did guess that the mother was no longer alive and the phone calls were taking place in Eleanor's head.  Something of the language the author used in that dialogue was not quite authentic to my ear and that is what started me thinking.  Raymond is a character of continuity throughout it all and I wondered if  he and Eleanor would end up together.  Gail Honeyman does not go that far for her reader, but in the end you do feel that Eleanor has been rescued from the loneliness that has dogged her all her life.  

A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman

A Year of Marvellous Ways begins on the bank of a Cornish creek in
1947. The year absolutely helps me to ground this novel in historical
terms, I was born that year so it gives a good context. And Cornwall
was the destination for many family holidays between the years of
1976 and 1984. We did not do abroad when our children were young.
Where Winman talks of creeks off the Carrick Roads, the ebb and
flow of tides, the gathering of cockles to coddle and limpets to pickle,
this is so familiar to me. I thought her descriptive prose was beautiful
and vivid with a real feel for nature. I loved the descriptions of the
orange starfish, many of them getting washed onto the shore and the
idea that they are stars that have fallen to earth. There was lots of

imagery which was beautiful.

The arrival of Francis Drake, the young man only recently returned
from the battlefields of France on his errand to deliver a letter to a
bereaved father from his son, a fellow soldier who didn’t make it
home. On the face of it you might think that Francis has been the
lucky one to survive the war but there are traumas in his past and he
has only recently had the shocking experience of Missy drowning
herself before his very eyes. I found this passage very shocking. I
liked Missy, she introduces the idea of a mermaid, how life can
change. I connected with her character rather better than Marvellous.
Yes, this was a character that the author wrote many words about,
she is after all the raison d’etre of the novel. But I found her a bit
tiresome sometimes, whimsical, ambiguous, contradictory. I
sometimes found it difficult to separate the real from the ‘magic’ this is
the so-called genre magical realism and I find it a bit frustrating. You
can sometimes not know where you are. Also known as 'marvellous
realism' it essentially represents a view of the real world whilst also

adding or revealing magical elements.   It does not ring my bell 

(Is it a coincidence that the main protagonist is called 'Marvellous'?) 

A good definition for Magical Realism is 'It is what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe'.

In some ways the narrative almost reads like a fairytale, complete with 

a journey into the woods; characters with strange, winsome names
and enchanted pasts (Marvellous tells the story of her mermaid
mother, shot shortly after her daughter’s birth, mistaken for a seal
frolicking in the water); and a gentle kind of magic is available to those
in need: a young girl drops an egg white into a glass of water to see it

take the form of the face of her one true love.

                                         ………………… 0000000...……………...

Here is a Short review from the Guardian below, "gripping suspense", "pacey plot"
...…...do any of Splinter recognise this as the book we read?

Waiting is what 89-year old Marvellous spends the year 1947 doing, in
an isolated Cornish hamlet, although she isn’t sure what she is waiting for. This
might seem like a less-than-engaging narrative device, but Sarah Winman creates
gripping suspense while unfolding Marvellous’s memories, from lonely nights spent
“willing her life to change” to the time “Whatshisname” was lured in her direction by
a Louis Armstrong song playing on the wireless. Paths cross in unexpected ways in
this pacey plot. An unlikely friendship develops at the core of the compelling tale
when Marvellous meets a troubled young soldier, Drake. Storytelling rejuvenates
Drake: as Marvellous shares stories of her life resonating with the transcendent
power of love, Drake learns how to marvel at life again, seeing the extraordinary in
the ordinary. “Everyone had a limit,” writes Winman, engrossingly showing
characters pushed past their breaking point. The novel’s surprising denouement is
also well worth the wait. .

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The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

My niece came to visit me a month ago.  Like me, she is a veritable bibliophile and hunts along the shelves of bookshops in Paris where she works and lives, for books that will catch her eye for one reason or another.  She is on a voyage of reading discovery.

When she arrived she handed me two books, the first by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  The second, by Childers, turned out to be a real discovery.  I emailed her as follows:


"I'm really into the Riddle of the Sands, love its gung-ho plot and somehow all that sailing technique does not get in the way.  I feel Childers is showing off, I assume he was a keen yachtsman.  Actually I am listening to it partially on Audible, read by Anton Lesser a vintage actor who is perfect in conveying a school boy earnestness for the adventure and he does an ace German accent.!"

Amazon says:  The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television. While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since.

Wiki has a full entry on this book and I really recommend a reading of the background information given.  If you might be minded to read the book don't read The Plot section though!

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

The Ballroom and Wake

Two novels by Anna Hope, read in succession.  The debut novel following her second:

The Ballroom 

Compelling, elegant and insightful' Observer'Beautifully wrought, tender, heartbreaking' Sunday Express 5/5
'Moving, fascinating' Times
'A tender and absorbing love story' Daily Mail
'Unsentimental and affecting' Sunday Times
'Exquisitely good' Metro


1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors,
where men and women are kept apart
by high walls and barred windows,
there is a ballroom vast and beautiful.
For one bright evening every week
they come together
and dance.
When John and Ella meet
It is a dance that will change
two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, The Ballroom is a historical love story. It tells a page-turning tale of dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

The Guardian review

In 1908, when the newly appointed home secretary Winston Churchill arrived in office, one of the social problems he was given to solve was that of the “feeble-minded” – individuals deemed incapable of self-sufficiency who often ended up in workhouses or prisons. Over the next two years, Churchill became increasingly favourable towards arguments for compulsory sterilisation, going so far as to circulate pamphlets on the subject among his cabinet colleagues.

Churchill’s ambitions for compulsory sterilisation ultimately failed but with the increased influence of the Eugenics Society, in 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act established powers to incarcerate those believed to be “feeble-minded” in purpose-built asylums, where men and women were segregated, ensuring their inability to reproduce without the need for controversial medical interventions.

Dr Charles Fuller's own troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences

It is this fascinating historical backdrop that forms the basis of Anna Hope’s compelling second novel, The Ballroom. It begins with the arrival of Ella Fay at the Sharston asylum in 1911, her supposed “madness” being the breaking of a window in the textile factory where she works. Meanwhile, in the men’s wing sits John Mulligan, an Irishman suffering from depression provoked by the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his marriage. When Ella and John meet at a Friday night dance in the asylum’s unexpectedly beautiful ballroom, their feelings for one another transcend the restraints of their surroundings in what becomes a poignant and sensitive love story. The trio of voices narrating the novel is completed by Dr Charles Fuller, a failed medic and ambitious eugenicist, whose own complex and troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences for Ella and John.

The Ballroom is shot through with insidious violence – that witnessed by Ella against her mother at the hands of her father: “She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside, she had heard the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound”; that experienced by Ella as an eight-year-old working in the textile factory; and that imposed on asylum patients who are unable or unwilling to comply. And then there is the violence the patients inflict on themselves when language fails them and freedom is denied to them. Hope treats her subject – and her characters – with the care of an attentive therapist, imbuing the novel with psychological and emotional depth. Even Charles – arguably madder than most of the inmates – is portrayed by Hope with impressive understanding.

Hope skilfully and subtly deconstructs our notions of madness, revealing how inextricably linked those definitions are to questions of class and gender. Ella knows her only chance of escaping the asylum is to “be good… She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving.” She allows contemporary resonances to filter through the narrative: when Charles attends a meeting of the Eugenics Society, the speech he hears – railing against the rights of those in receipt of poor relief to reproduce – sounds disturbingly familiar to the arguments of far-right voices in our own age.

As with Hope’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Wake, the writing is elegant and insightful; she writes beautifully about human emotion, landscape and weather: “There was no wind. It was as though they were all simmering under the great grey lid of the sky, like water almost brought to boil.”

Like all successful historical novels, The Ballroom tells us a story of the past in order to shed light on the present. As Charles proclaims at one point: “The future was coming. Even here. Even here in this island ship of souls, cast away on the green-brown seas of the moor, even here it would find its way through.”

What I wrote to a fellow reader:

"Thanks so much, Jane, for recommending The Ballroom.  You were a bit hesitant as you had not read it but I have to say I found it a brilliant read.  Sure it was a love story as it said on the tin, but so much more and I thought the author steered her way to the conclusion skilfully, keeping her reader wondering how a 'satisfactory' ending could be achieved as I felt it could not be a traditional happy ending, nor would it all end in tears.  Well, tears of misery anyway.  It did end in tears of another kind for me as I listened to the narrator Daniel Weyman (who is so good on Audible) read the letter that John had written to Ella. I am going to write it up for my blog when I can find a minute amidst all the last minute preps.  Hope you are on top of things chez vous!

Wake

Five Days in November, 1920: As the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way home from the fields of Northern France, three women are dealing with loss in their own way: Hettie, who dances for sixpence a waltz at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who toils at a job in the pensions office, and Ada, a housewife who is beset by visions of her dead son.

One day a young man comes to her door. He carries with him a wartime mystery that will bind these women together and will both mend and tear their hearts. A portrait of three intertwining lives caught at the faultline between empire and modernity, Wake captures the beginnings of a new era, and the day the mood of the nation changed for ever. 

Goodreads website says:

A brilliant debut for readers of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in which three women must deal with the aftershocks of WWI and its impact on the men in their lives—a son, a brother and a lover. Their tragic connection is slowly revealed as the book unfolds.

Wake: 1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep 2) Ritual for the dead 3) Consequence or aftermath.

Hettie, a dance instructress at the Palais, lives at home with her mother and her brother, mute and lost after his return from the war. One night, at work, she meets a wealthy, educated man and has reason to think he is as smitten with her as she is with him. Still there is something distracted about him, something she cannot reach...Evelyn works at the Pensions Exchange through which thousands of men have claimed benefits from wounds or debilitating distress. Embittered by her own loss, more and more estranged from her posh parents, she looks for solace in her adored brother who has not been the same since he returned from the front...Ada is beset by visions of her son on every street, convinced he is still alive. Helpless, her loving husband of 25 years has withdrawn from her. Then one day a young man appears at her door with notions to peddle, like hundreds of out of work veterans. But when he shows signs of being seriously disturbed—she recognizes the symptoms of "shell shock"—and utters the name of her son she is jolted to the core...

The lives of these three women are braided together, their stories gathering tremendous power as the ties that bind them become clear, and the body of the unknown soldier moves closer and closer to its final resting place.

What I thought:

A story of three women’s life experiences as Britain surfaces after the Great War.  With a well-drawn cast of supporting characters I thought.  I did enjoy this book.  As I was drawn further and further into the story I recognised that although here was yet another novel set around the First World War, the structure, unfolding and telling of the story (the stories of the three women protagonists) was indeed novel, engaging and as the characters were bit by bit fleshed out by the author, they became credible people.  Towards the end I was very moved by the account that a war-traumatised Private delivered to one of the three female principals.  As he recounts the last moments of a fellow soldier who is executed for desertion and who calls out for his mother, I wept buckets because, having sons, I think now of all those mothers who gave birth to and reared their sons (and daughters too of course) in great optimism for their future lives, only to be cut down as they had barely matured into young men.  Those generals in their tents, their field headquarters where they conducted the war, in relative safety, pushing their soldiers around for King and country, like so many chess pieces on a board, I feel such anger when I am reminded of it.  The more I read of episodes like this in the literature, the sadder it makes me each time.  I thought the narrative as it related to the choosing of the Unknown Warrior and his transfer to Britain and the burial gave a fascinating thread to run through the book because I did not know the background and I had not really imagined that there was a real body under the tomb in Westminster Abbey.  (needless to say you can read all about it on Wiki!) 

I do think carefully about who of my fellow readers will want to read novels such as this one by Anna Hope’s.  Someone once said, none of us Splinter I think, "Not another book about the World War…….".  But I thought a recommendation was called for because the writing is really good, the text flows, it is full of humanity and it is an excellent debut too.

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.