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.

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...

During the Christmas celebrations of 1860 Charles Darwin sat down to try to assemble a list of his predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But as he was such a poor scholar of history, he told his friends, he failed to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives.

In this chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.

This a masterful and thoroughly engaging retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.

The Light Between Oceans

Originally from Western Australia, M L Stedman has for many years lived in London, where she worked as a lawyer. She first decided to try creative writing in 1997, and set about finding a writing tutor. In the years that followed she did a few writing courses, and some of her short stories were published in anthologies.


Her debut novel, The Light Between Oceans, draws inspiration from the landscape of her native Western Australia, though she wrote and researched much of it, at the British Library.

A survivor of the First World War trenches, Tom enjoys the solitude of life as a lighthousekeeper, but one trip to the mainland brings him a wife, Isabel, with whom to share Janus Rock.

"The crying persisted.  The door of the lighthouse clanged in the distance, and Tom's tall frame appeared on the gallery as he scanned the island with the binoculars.  'Izzy!' he yelled, 'a boat!'  He vanished and re-emerged at ground level.  'It's a boat all right', Tom declared.  'And - oh cripes!  There's a bloke, but -'  The figure was motionless, yet the cries still rang out.  He hoisted out a woollen bundle: a woman's soft lavender cardigan wrapped around a tiny, screaming infant."

One fateful day, the sea washes a dinghy up on the shore containing the body of a man and a baby - very much alive - which the couple, desperate to start a family, decide to take as their own.

It is a tragic story about good people and the tragic decisions that they made.  They break the rules and follow their hearts.  It is about the love and beauty that Tom and Isabel found in their decisions for a brief interlude.  It is a story about right and wrong and the fine line that sometimes separates these values.  It is a story for which there can never be a 'good' and tidy outcome for the characters involved.

Tempus doni

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot - from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary.

It has been described as a book of compelling glimpses - not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world's grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic.

This is the second travel memoir that I have read within a month.  And it is altogether of a far superior calibre to the account of Bryson's latest roamings around Britain.  Fermor came to be regarded as Britain's greatest living travel writer during his lifetime, which spanned 96 years.  That I found Fermor's book tedious is accounted for by several factors.  I did find the author's raconteur style rather grandiloquent, and this was not helped by a very able narration by Crispin Redman of the book on Audible.  He managed to inject the tone of a rather self-centred and pompous young traveller.  Nevertheless I doubt I would have been able to read this book in paper form.  In the final analysis I have come to the conclusion that I am not an armchair traveller and that vicarious globe-trotting is not my thing. 

Of a Sad and Troubled Upbringing

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is a moving book of Winterson's childhood and adolescent awakening as she discovers that she is a lesbian. "Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful).

             

Jeanette's experience of home life under the aegis of Mrs Winterson was bleak.  She was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household, the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard."  In the end the story of Jeanette's early years ends in escape.  

The writer then skips forward a quarter century, and she has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in her father's effects, when he is moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide.  "In February 2008 I tried to end my life," she writes, describing an attempt at gassing herself in a sealed car before realising that her cat was trapped inside with her. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." She begins her journey to track down her biological mother. 

She describes the beginnings of her current relationship with the renowned psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach, with whom she thought a romance would not develop, "because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women". Orbach is portrayed in tender, maternal terms as she accompanies her on the search for her biological mother. Indeed, one senses Orbach's influence in passages on abandonment and the loss of mother love.

The quest to find her mother, Ann, and their first meeting in working-class Manchester, leads to a painful acceptance of the fact that a pre-adoptive identity - and its sense of wholeness - can never be regained. In some ways, this meeting takes her back to Mrs W and the dual role that she occupied as a mother and a non-mother: "I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster".  In the book Winterson unpicks the damage her adoptive parents wrought  on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is perhaps more significant and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

Commentary with excepts from The Guardian and The Independent Reviews.

Gradus Vitae

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

A little book like no other, this 'sort-of' memoir from Julian Barnes is the story of his own closely-observed grief at the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh.  When she died.......

"Nothing had prepared him: not his parents' deaths, nor all the thinking about death that went into his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, published just a few months before. And very little helped him cope.

Certain things that were said, or not said, only made it worse: the friends who suggest he get away while they look after his house and their dog has the run of the garden (this while his wife is not yet dead); the ones who pretend not to hear when he mentions her name; the ones who ask – convinced he is looking better – "Have you found someone?" The griefstruck rarely know what they want, he says, so these offences are lightly noted, not raged over. What do they matter, after all – what does anything matter – when the worst has already happened?

One by one, the classic consolations offered to the bereaved are considered and repudiated: that suffering makes you stronger; that things get easier after the first year, through repetition ("why should repetition mean less pain?"); that the two of you will be reunited in the next life (which no atheist can believe). He owns up to thoughts of suicide and explains the reason for resisting: he is his wife's chief rememberer, and if he kills himself he will be killing her too.

One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated. Denying himself woolly comforts, Barnes scorns the euphemisms of "passed" or "lost to cancer" (the linguistic equivalent of averting one's eyes). Even actions that others might find strange – his habit of talking to his wife, though she is dead – have their own irresistible logic: "the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist."
Pat Kavanagh was my agent for 30 years; it is hard for me to be objective. But this is not a book written for people who knew her. Nor is it "Before She Left Me", a story of her life and last weeks. Candid about his own grief, Barnes remains protective of her privacy; though her photo is on the back cover, her name doesn't appear in the text. Distressed by how many memories of her have gone, as if she is slipping away a second time, he lists the things he does remember – the last book she read, the last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. But he doesn't disclose what they were.
"Let me tell you something about her," he wrote of his wife in the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, while giving away very little. Levels of Life, similarly, is a book that levels with us only up to a point. Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Even this essay is only one panel of a triptych – a form arrived at to "give sorrow words" when it might have been a mere stubbed-toe cry.

Review from the Guardian by Blake Morrison, 10th April 2013.

Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.
A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'.

Tipping the Velvet is a historical novel pubished as Sarah Water's debut novel in 1998. Set in  Victorian England during the 1890s, it tells a coming-of-age tory about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator.  Nan follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city.

The novel has pervasive lesbian themes, concentrating on eroticism and self-discovery. Waters was working on a PhD dissertation in English literature when she decided to write a story she would like to read. Employing her love for the variety of people and districts in London, she consciously chose an urban setting. As opposed to previous lesbian-themed fiction she had read where the characters escape an oppressive society to live apart from it, Waters chose characters who interact with their surroundings. She has acknowledged that the book imagines a lesbian presence and history in Victorian London where none was recorded. The main character's experiences in the theatrical profession and her perpetual motion through the city allow her to make observations on social conditions while exploring the issues of gender, sexism, and class difference.

I really enjoy Waters' fiction.  Through her writing she tries to convey what one might come to view as insights into what it is to form same-sex relationships, hitherto from the female perspective.  Quite apart from the compelling narratives of her stories that she creates, the heterosexual reader may begin to develop some understanding of the similarities and the differences between the lesbian life and more traditional adult relationships.