Books do furnish a room

Killing Jericho by William Hussey William Hussey (who also writes as Will Harker) is an author local to me: about forty miles down the road in Skegness and I do try to read a few local authors. This is a crime/detective novel with a bit of a twist. The protagonist Scott Jericho is an ex-cop who has been in prison for assaulting a particularly odious suspect. The twist is that Jericho is gay and is a traveller, born and raised in a travelling fairground. Hussey is better known for his YA novels addressing queer and trans issues. He does write of what he knows as he is a gay man and was brought up in a travelling family himself. Hussey has a good knowledge of the history, culture and folklore of fairground people and puts it to good use. Hussey has drawn on the diaries of a travelling showman (Tom Norman). In the novel without going into too much detail a modern day serial killer is recreating a nineteenth century disaster called Traveller’s Bridge. A bridge collapsed with a traveller’s caravan on it and five members of a freakshow were killed. Again this is based on a real life in 1853. The collapse of Hartley Bridge where a number of travellers were killed. The novel itself is rather macabre and violent with a gothic edge to it. As you would expect there are plenty of plot twists and misdirection. Hussey takes a few swipes at some current issues with some positivity about librarians and an exploration of the hatred and xenophobia in Britain at the moment. This works if you like this genre and the variation on the traditional tropes is welcome. 8 out of 10 Starting Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree "A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you've got women and a border, a story can write itself." “You’ll never understand that the tales of our deaths are the tales of our passionate living.” This won the International Booker in 2022, a hefty novel of over 700 pages. It covers a variety of themes and elements. The story is told from a variety of perspectives and centres on an eighty year old grandmother whose husband has just died. There are elements of magic realism (a magical cane) with talking birds, but there are also political elements with reflections on identity and borders. It is in some respects a partition novel. Shree is a sharp observer of women’s lives and has a few things to say about Indian men. There is a playfulness here, a sort of comedy of manners, but it is essentially serious as well. There is lots of wordplay going on and the translation seems to me to be a good one. It also has a tendency to meander a little, but the language is certainly creative: “But there is wind and rain, and the puff of no that flies up between them and takes the form of a snippet. A scrap, that flutters and flaps and flit-flit-flitters and swirls about the branch into a ribbon of desire that wind and rain unite to bind there. Each time they tie another knot. One more knot. A no, not. A know not. A knew knot. A new knot. A new desire. New. Nyoo. Becoming. The new refusal of no. Flutter, flitter, flap flap flap.” The working out of the tension between the personal and political is one of the strengths as is the character of Rosie the hijra. The tale of an older woman who suddenly decides to do something for herself to the consternation of her family. There are some good passages about food, not to mention fashion and saris. “Understanding has become a much eroded, much abused word, to the point that its sense has come to mean to establish meaning, when its real sense is to displace meaning. To give you such a shock you see lightning. And that shock is so clear pointed wounding shiny sharp, and earth and sky get swept into that and between them, the sea, flowing like conversation, to make sense of each other, to keep trying, without coming to an end.” The heart of the book is in the past, in partition, in borders, between countries, people, religion, genders, age and indeed people. “A world without borders is world where everyone can find, make and belong at home,” A point we seem to be losing sight of. There is a lot to this tale and it’s well worth the effort. “But the sum total of the thing is this: life is life and death is death, and what is dead is dead, and gone is gone, and busy is busy. The gist being that if great beings and treasures and memories depart, never to return, what happens to ordinary everyday items? Nothing.” 8 and a half out of 10 Starting The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers ‘novels are surely spell books’. ‘The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumple to sand.’ This is the third work I have read by Benjamin Myers and again this one did not disappoint. It is poetry and prose, fact and fiction, passionate and discursive: a dash through over a thousand years of history. Cuddy is a shortened form of Cuthbert and refers to St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a seventh century shepherd boy who became a monk and then prior of Melrose Abbey and finally a hermit on the island of Lindisfarne. This is an experimental novel using a variety of forms. There is indeed poetry, prose, the occasional epistle, dramatic dialogue and bibliographical references woven into it stretching from Bede to modern times (Schama). There are strands running through the book and the past haunts and informs the present. Myers explains some of his fascination with Cuthbert in an interview: “Cuthbert was – and is – a figurehead for the North East as he was perhaps the most prominent religious figure in the North to endure down the centuries. Ironically he was generally regarded as humble and not enamoured by the trappings usually afforded to people of his status; quite the opposite. “Fame” would have been anathema to him as he lived a very simple, austere life and died alone on a rock in the North Sea. The fact that he then inspired an entire community of wandering acolytes strikes me as almost Monty Python-esque. I can imagine them crying “Behold! A saint!” and Cuthbert charging across the moors. “No, I’m not, leave me alone!” But that community built a cathedral in his honour too, and preserved his reputation. Without them he might have been a minor, or forgotten, figure.” There is a Prologue which is set at the time of the death of Cuthbert in 687. Book 1 moves to 995. Cuthbert’s remains have been moved several times to avoid Viking raiders and they are on the move again with a group of monks plus a few others on the lookout for a final resting place. Book 2 moves to 1346 and is set in and around the cathedral and its masons and tells the story of Eda and her violent husband who is an archer fighting the Scots. There is an interlude set in 1650 when Cromwell was fighting in Scotland. Following the Battle of Dunbar three thousand Scotsmen were imprisoned in the Cathedral, 1700 of them died. The interlude takes the form of a play with the Cathedral itself as one of the characters. Book 3 is set in 1827 when Cuthbert’s remains were disinterred and is basically a Victorian Ghost story in the tradition of M R James: the ghosts being previous characters. Book 4 is set in 2019 and concerns Michael a young labourer caring for his dying mother. A labouring job at the Cathedral leads to new horizons but the past is ever present. Women’s voices are at the forefront in the first two books, the last two focus on men who don’t have faith. One review called it a “polyphonic hymn to the North-east”, a pretty good summation. Characters recur, the haliwerfolk, two in particular: the boy with owlish eyes in a number of forms and Ediva, the cook in the first book also recurs in various forms. Spotting the links is part of the fun and they are ordinary voices. The layered connections and the build up to the present day do indicate that although this is not directly a state of the nation novel it does have things to say, particularly about those at the bottom of society. There is a continuum which Myers weaves through an ancient folklore which challenges the powerful and defends the vulnerable. It is an orphan girl that is given the vision of the cathedral not one of the holy monks. The ending captures both the finality of death and continuation of life at the same time. This is historical novel writing at its best 10 out of 10 Starting Killing Jericho by William Hussey

A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux “This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, nor my own memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.)” My second nobel winner in a week! Certainly my first work by Ernaux, although this isn’t fiction. It is short, less than a hundred pages, and is about Ernaux’s mother, her life and death. It begins with her mother’s death. It’s heartfelt, but it does not sugar coat the relationship: “One could tell whether she was upset simply by looking at her face. In private she didn’t mince her words and told us straight out what she thought. She called me a beast, a slut, and a bitch, or told me I was “unpleasant”. She would often hit me, usually by slapping my face, or occasionally punching my shoulders. Five minutes later, she would take me into her arms and I was her “poppet.” It charts a poor upbringing in Normandy, marriage, motherhood, work as a small shopkeeper, boredom in retirement, Alzheimer’s and death in a geriatric hospital. The descriptions in relation to Alzheimer’s are well described and poignant. Effectively it’s a portrait of two women tied by a biological bond. The relationship was a difficult one at times and writing it was not easy: “It’s a difficult undertaking .For me , my mother has no history .She has always been there .When I speak of her , my first impulse is to “freeze ” her in a series of images unrelated to time – “she had a violent temper ” This is an interesting account and a whole lot shorter than Proust or Knausgaard! It’s a mundane life but in Ernaux’s hands it is a compelling account. 8 out of 10 Starting The Element of Water by Stevie Davies

A Dance with Dragons After the Feast by George RR Martin Well that’s all the published volumes completed! Obviously there will be more at some point, well when Martin eventually finishes the next one. There are many loose ends to be tied up and a few cliff-hangers. There are 18 POV characters and some juggling with names to keep the readers on their toes, also the dragons are back. There’s nothing new to say, but it is engaging. The elements of the medieval world are still there but there are no Peasant’s Revolts and we don’t see a great deal of the great unwashed. The scheming and violence don’t waver and Martin likes his little twists. The sheer number of characters can make if feel like some of the characters could do with even more space. The world creation is good; detailed and complex. Probably another five years until the next one! 7 out of 10 Starting Waterland by Graham Swift

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk “Whoever pauses will be petrified, whoever stops, pinned like an insect, his heart pierced by a wooden needle, his hands and feet drilled through and pinned into the threshold and the ceiling … This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads – this is why they persecute the “Gypsies” and the Jews, and why they force all free people to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.” This is my second work by Tokarczuk having already tackled “Dive your plow over the bones of the dead”. This is a collection of reflections, musings and stories on travel and flight. Some very short, some rather longer. It is also an exploration of the human body and there is a certain amount of anatomy and dissection over the ages present. Lots of body parts in jars juxtaposed with descriptions of airports and flights. Because of the way it is structured it does give the sense of movement. It’s certainly an experimental novel, but not the sort of experimental novel that is incomprehensible (there are a few of those), but it does take thought. The journeys are inwards as well as outwards. There is a first person narrator at times and a cacophony of voices. The intertwining stories include Chopin’s sister travelling with his heart, a Polish holidaymaker whose wife and son disappear on an island off Croatia, a woman travelling to poison a terminally ill school friend, a daughter pleading by letter for the return of her father’s body from the emperor, a pupil searches for his master’s amputated leg to complete a burial, the mother of an ill child flees a grim life in a Moscow block of flats and much more. “Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law of quantum physics that states that a particle may exist in two places at once? […] I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness — these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Tocarczuk has been compared to Sebald, don’t let that put you off!! She’s more Beckett than Sebald. I found this interesting and its movement between the seventeenth and twenty-first century was seamless enough. There are some captivating vignettes, like the ferry driver who learnt his English from Moby Dick; a few I found irritating as well. It’s also very quotable, although not in short pithy pieces, but larger chinks: “The internet is a fraud. It promises so much – that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfilment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiple, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive…” 8.5 out of 10 Starting A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux

I know Madeleine! One day .... Medusa by Jessie Burton "My name was Medusa and I was a girl. Perseus had made me sound like a mythical beast. I didn't want to be a myth. I wanted to be me. ... I thought I was safe, because Perseus still didn't know about my snakes" “If I told you that I’d killed a man with a glance, would you wait to hear the rest? The why, the how, what happened next?” This is a YA and feminist retelling of the Medusa and Perseus myth in novella form. It takes place over a few days, and the ending is different to the original. It addresses the issues you would expect: the nature of beauty, love, attraction, victim blaming, being different, gender stereotyping and the trauma of sexual assault. Both Medusa and Perseus feel very young and indeed they are eighteen and seventeen respectively. The illustrations are very good. Medusa is the first person narrator. One clever twist was giving each of the snakes on her head its own character and personality. There are also a couple of dogs thrown in as well as Medusa’s sisters. “‘Who are you?’ I called down. I spoke in panic, worried that Argentus’ suspicion of this new arrival would drive him to his boat at any moment. And I spoke in hope: it felt of utmost importance that this boy should stay on my island – for a day, a week, a month. Maybe longer.” This is ok; I can see it being used with teenagers in school. It can be a bit heavy-handed and there’s no real plot. It is predictable and certainly not the most interesting addition to the current clutch of myth retelling tomes. 6 out of 10 Starting Villager by Tom Cox.

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner “To be called Dame and live in a cloister was a better prospect than their natural future of scrubbing trenchers, clacking at a loom, and bearing great hordes of hungry children” This is a historical novel set in a Benedictine convent in the fourteenth century. It runs from 1349 (the Plague) until 1382 (just after the Peasant’s Revolt). The convent of Oby is in Norfolk. It was published in 1948 and Warner worked on it during the war. Warner herself warned that there was no real plot and what she was exploring was whether a community run by women can survive under patriarchy following vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. There are multiple points of view in the novel and the reader becomes immersed in the ordinariness of daily life. “it seemed that nothing new ever happened or ever would.” Warner was a musicologist (amongst other things) and so her accounts of liturgy tend to be spot on. The plague at the beginning of the novel has been compared to the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 40s: “It travelled faster than a horse, it swooped like a falcon, and those whom it seized on were so suddenly corrupted that the victims, still alive and howling in anguish, stank like the dead. All across Europe it had come, and now it would traverse England, and nothing could stop it, wherever there were men living it would seek them out, and turn back, as a wolf does, to snap at the man it had passed by.” The parallels are clear and it also reflects the anti-Semitism of the time. For all the broad themes the action is narrow and doesn’t stray far from Oby, just to nearby villages and a couple of towns. Over the years there is adultery, fraud, murder, deception, jealousy, a priest with a secret, corruption as well as the mundane. There is a tension between the life of the spirit and the daily grind, the necessity of feeding and clothing the body. Warner did do some research for this. She consulted a seven hundred page book by historian Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries. Life, death and nature all figure and Warner does manage to pull off the feel that this is a time limited slice of life. There are interesting characters around the nuns and the locals are just as sharply drawn as the nuns. In the US edition Warner adds a historical note which indicates the background that she is working from: how the Black Death led to the Peasant’s Revolt: “In the years immediately following the Black Death the labourer had the best of it. By the next generation the situation had changed. The population was rising again. Many landowners had adjusted themselves to the labour shortage by converting their acres from arable (which needs many hands) to sheep-rearing for the woollen trade (which needs few), and in so doing had made over common fields and grazings into sheep-walks. And though wages had risen, the cost of living had risen more. Serfs who had welcomed the opportunity to move about and strike their own bargain found themselves at a disadvantage, and Parliament, which had disapprovingly watched the crack spreading through the old feudal structure, now applied a plastering legislation of wage-fixing and price-fixing (the former, as always, more adhesive than the latter), and pressed for a reversion to the status quo ante. Yet the crack had been made and was kept open by a pressure of dissatisfied thinking.” On the whole I enjoyed this. I could see the parallels with what was happening in Europe at the time it was written. Because it is a slice of life there is now real ending and a distinct lack of plot. The sheer number of characters does mean there is sometimes a lack of characterisation. But it’s an interesting analysis of a community of women. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Villager by Tom Cox

I Claudius by Robert Graves “I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Claudius”, or “Claudius the Stammerer”, or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.” There is a famous TV adaptation of this from 1976 which I was not allowed to watch, it being for too wicked!! Graves wrote this and the sequel entirely to make money and quite consciously so. He had moved to Majorca and was living with Laura Riding at the time. He picked Claudius as he felt he was the only one of the main characters who would be credible as a narrator. Claudius was intelligent and erudite, although he was considered a fool because of his stammer. The characters are larger than life as Graves writes the outrageous rather well. It is based on actual events. Graves has done his research but his characters he has certainly developed! We know little about Livia for instance, but here she is magnificently evil and scheming: “Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus.” “Though Tiberius hated his mother more than ever, he continued to let her rule him. All the appointments which he made to Consulships or provincial governorships were really hers: and they were very sensible ones, the men being chosen for merit, not for family influence or because they had flattered her or done her some private service. For I must make it plain, if I have not already done so, that however criminal the means used by Livia to win the direction of affairs for herself, first through Augustus and then through Tiberius, she was an exceptionally able and just ruler; and it was only when she ceased to direct the system that she had built up that it went wrong.” The novel also reflects the times. There is a level of anti-German sentiment which feels uncomfortable and probably reflects Graves own experiences in the War and his feelings about his own German ancestry. All the main characters are caricatures and the whole feels quite Dickensian. Even Graves however is quite coy about the worst excesses. There are elements of Game of Thrones and Martin used the Claudius books as part of his inspiration. Stannis Baratheon being based on the character of Tiberius Caesar. There is always a tension between the empirical and literary invention and this is worked out in all historical novels. Graves tended to believe that the poetic is non-empirical and non-historic as opposed to actual historical figures. This tends to make the narrative a little plodding at times and the historiographical story lacks a bit of literary inventiveness. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Claudius the God by Robert Graves

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees “Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame.” “But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what was actually holding in his hands.” This is quite an oddity. A fantasy novel from 1926 by a female author. It has been neglected for some time but has had a resurgence more recently. It is revered by Neil Gaiman who called it “One of the finest [fantasy novels] in the English Language”, and it has clearly influenced Susannah Clarke and John Crowley. Hope Mirrlees was a poet, novelist and translator and this was her final novel. In the 1910s and 1920s she lived with the classicist Jane Harrison, until Harrison’s death. She was friends with Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot and Gertrude Stein. The plot is straightforward fantasy. The town of Lud in Dorimare is at the confluence of two rivers the Dapple and the Dawl. It borders the land of Faerie and there are longstanding tensions between the two based on myth and legend. The land of Faerie has an immense allure and many dangers. In essence the residents of Lud are practical, rational and down to earth. The allure of Faerie is essentially the sublime, the romantic, bliss and music. You can see where this is going! But this is also a comedy, a murder mystery, a ghost story and a pastoral. There’s a lot of symbolism as well: Their new dancing-master was a tall, red-haired youth, with a white pointed face and very bright eyes. Miss Primrose, who always implied [to her pupils] that it was at great personal inconvenience and from purely philanthropic motives that their teachers gave them their lessons, introduced him as ‘Professor Wisp, who had very kindly consented to teach them dancing,’ and the young man made his new pupils a low bow, and turning to Miss Primrose, he said, ‘I’ve got you a fiddler, ma’am. Oh, a rare fiddler! It’s your needlework that has brought him. He’s a weaver by trade, and he dearly loves pictures in silk. And he can give you some pretty patterns to work from – can’t you Portunus?’ and he clapped his hands twice. Whereupon, ‘like a bat dropped from the rafters,’ as Prunella, with an inexplicable shudder, whispered to Moonlove, a queer wizened old man with eyes as bright as Professor Wisp’s, all mopping and mowing, with a fiddle and bow under his arm, sprang suddenly out of the shadows. ‘Young ladies!’ cried Professor Wisp, gleefully, ‘this is Master Portunus, fiddler to is Majesty the Emperor of the Moon, jester-in-chief to the Lord of Ghosts and Shadows ... though his jests are apt to be silent ones. And he has come a long long way young ladies, to set your feet a dancing. Ho, ho, hoh!’ Wisp gives it away! Fairy fruit is a smuggled commodity (no one knows how it is smuggled). It seems to have hallucinogenic powers, but it can also cause suicide and madness. There are lots of philosophic double handers here: the pain and pleasure of love, the conundrum of death and life, sacrifice and loss. It is worth remembering that Mirrlees had lived through the First World War. The ending is a bit too neat, but the whole is interesting. Society feels it is buffered by rationality against “magic”, but it still breaks through the cracks. "Reason, I know, is only a drug and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief." 8 out of 10 Starting Medusa by Jessie Burton

Who knows! Apparently part six is almost done My Antonia by Willa Cather “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains. […] And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running […] the sunflowers grew; some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the prairie.” The last of the Great Plains Trilogy, and for me the strongest of the three (only just), but also the most sentimental. It does capture the isolation of plains life and the brutality of the winters to an extent. “The snow spilled out of heaven like thousands of feather beds being emptied.” “The first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing into the red grass.” The book is narrated by Jim Burden and the Antonia of the title is a girl of his own age on a neighbouring farm. You will note the element of possession in the title. Again Cather charts the arrival of different national communities from Europe as they settle in America. There is a strong sense of America being created: a creation myth if you will: despite America having an identity and existence way before the Europeans arrived. There is the same sense of creation myth when Jim talks about Antonia: “She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” The novel is essentially a collection of linked stories. There are the usual coming of age and leaving scenes as Jim goes to college, university and finally New York whilst Antonia stays on the land and raises lots of children. There is also an interesting Protestant/Catholic tension and the reader is also left wondering whether it is Jim’s or Antonia’s story. Cather also focuses on what she calls the “hired girls”, teenagers from the Bohemian and Scandinavian communities who have to move from farm to town to work in some type of service: “Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had ‘advantages,’ never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.” There is still some casual racism, for example the treatment of the blind black pianist. Not a central part of the novel, but still present. As always Cather excels in her descriptions and when the novel moves away from the prairies it is weaker. “The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers…I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” 7 out of 10 Starting The Corner that held them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

A Dance with Dragons: Dreams and Dust by George RR Martin This is pretty much a companion to part four and we pick up those voices from part three that were missing in four. The action for these characters runs parallel with those in four. So the whole behemoth rumbles on with only one part yet to read. However there are two whole books left when Martin gets round to finishing and publishing them. Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister are at the centre of things again. Martin increasingly moves his focus beyond Westeros as well. I can see how some are intimidated at the length of this, but I can also see why some think it could be even longer! This still shifts between Greek tragedy and medieval farce. There are the usual twists and turns and plenty of dodgy dialogue. Martin continues to finish off major characters when he feels the need. And, of course to continue the medieval theme we have to have a plague as well (called the flux). I am studiously avoiding the plot as it doesn’t really seem to matter! 7 out of 10 Starting The last one After the Feast

Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” “Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.” This is a collection of essays, speeches, lectures, meditations and short pieces by Toni Morrison spanning about four decades. There are also a few question and answer sessions. There are a couple of eulogies (Martin Luther King and James Baldwin), lot of writing about race and an equal amount of writing about writing. Morrison also talks about her own work and the origins of a number of her novels. She also writes about the literary canon (“canon building is empire building”). There is plenty on belonging and exclusion. She lots at gender and violence towards women throughout. There is plenty of insight: “We will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.” “Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.” There is some familiarity in some of the pieces and a bit of repetition, which could have been sorted with better editing, but that is a minor point. Morrison looks to history when she analyses present ills. Looking at the American Revolution she sees not a nascent democracy and an “Age of Enlightenment” but an “Age of Scientific Racism”, pointing out that many the intellectual forefathers (Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin) judged black people as “incapable of intelligence”. Morrison talks about feeling both “native” and “alien” in the US and goes on to ask questions about what a literary canon really is. Morrison also talks about the impact of autobiographical slave narratives, but her scope is broad: from Beowulf to Cinderella to Stein to Faulkner and so on. This is a collection for dipping in and out of and there is much to think about. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Campbell Bunk by Jerry White

The Terror by Dan Simmons “Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.” “The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.” This novel is based on actual events on the expedition to find the North West Passage which set off in 1845 and never returned. It was led by John Franklin and there were two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The main character though is the captain of the Terror, Francis Crozier. A certain level of commitment is needed for this as it is 937 pages long. It is also probably a good winter read, because however cold you are, the characters in the book are an awful lot colder. Simmons is usually a sci-fi writer, but here he not only branches off into a historical novel, he adds a slice of horror as well. A small hint as to outcomes, not a spoiler, but the expedition did not return and no trace was found of them. The horror part is based on Native American folklore and myth and there are Native American characters who have some significance later in the novel. The whole is quite claustrophobic (and cold), confined to the two ships and the area around them. There has been a good deal of speculation about what exactly happened to the expedition. Simmons pretty much throws every possible problem at the crew: These include scurvy, hypothermia, malnutrition, starvation, cabin fever, paranoia, lead poisoning from contaminated food, cannibalism, mutiny, the “creature” on the ice (here’s the folklore element) and sheer coldness. This is a very long novel and there are a finite number of ways that intense cold and lots of ice can be described. The novel is told from a number of points of view and switches between them pretty regularly. That does break up what can become monotonous. Ultimately I am not sure if Simmons wanted to write a historical novel or a horror novel; I don’t think it really works as both. The ending feels a bit trite and the mysticism towards the end didn’t sit easily with the rest of the book. Some of the encounters with the “creature” began to remind me a little of Jaws (on ice of course) and this was the least convincing part of the book, especially when it was all explained towards the end. I’m not sure Simmons gets the nineteenth century idiom correct and he throws in some twentieth century terms on a regular basis. He also uses the word “tits”, which is a very twentieth century term. Which brings me to another point. The one female character is a Native American/Inuit woman, who is called Lady Silence by the crew. Simmons come up with this classy literary passage: “Lady Silence was about twenty feet away across a smooth blue-ice space. . . . She was naked, kneeling on thick furs. . . . [Irving] could see the curve of her right breast . . . [and] the hillocked flesh of her firm backside.” Hillocked? Really? Hillocked? Some of the descriptions of what happens to the crew is also pretty graphic: “Goodsir rolled the corpse over while Fitzjames removed his jacket and beat out the flames rising from the dead man’s face and hair. Harry Goodsir felt as if he were watching all this from a great distance. The professional part of his mind noticed with cool detachment that the furnace, as poorly banked as the low coal flames had been, had melted the man’s eyes, burned away his nose and ears, and turned his face into the texture of an overbaked, bubbling raspberry flan.” Many people really enjoyed this, so maybe I’m turning into and old grouch! 4 out of 10 Starting The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach by Jas Treadwell

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard “what feels like a tidal wave of random information crashes over me every moment. I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned into everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass….” Published by the Fitzcarraldo Press, whose blue covers I love (Yes, I’m fickle!). This book covers an interesting series of areas. It’s a pastoral novel (admittedly a bleak one), a coming of age set in the 1990s in a village in the north of England, a lockdown novel, a series of meditations on animals, plants, humans and the delicate ecosystem in which we live. There is no real plot and it seems to meander, which may annoy some, but I quite liked it. The quote above is a nod to Middlemarch. The premise is that it is the first lockdown and the narrator (Serena) looks out of the window of her flat at her neighbours, also similarly confined. Her mind goes back to her village childhood in the 1990s and she describes in detail the landscape and people she encountered. There is a danger as Raymond Williams argues that the countryside/city divide leads, in literature, to a lifeless and idealised sort of pastoral novel. That trend is still there and often it’s stocked with what poet Kathleen Jamie describes as “the lone enraptured male”. Hildyard drives a coach and horses through this. There’s plenty of nature, but no tranquillity. As the narrator says: “in spite of the meadows and the herds and the flocks. I did not know anyone who retailed local folklore or knew the weeds by nicknames, there was no village idiot, no incest, or if there was, I did not know about it because the village was not a close-knit community.” The narrator as a child explores the local area, a farm, a quarry, the local woods and interacts with the adults she encounters. There are also descriptions of school and school friends. There is a great intensity and depth to this and the descriptions are lyrical. There is a description of the narrator watching a vole and a kestrel in the quarry, who had not yet seen each other. But then there is also a teacher at the primary school where children note the bruises and occasional fractures of a female teacher, who is clearly the victim of domestic abuse. Then there is Ivy the cow at the farm, who we follow over a period of time, with her own idiosyncrasies. Along with the inevitable disappearance of some of these characters as they make their way to the local abattoir. Hildyard always has in mind the climate crisis and the plundering and destruction of the ecosystem. Indeed she has written an accompanying essay called Shades of Emergency for Extinction Rebellion. There is an acknowledgement of the complicated boundaries in rural areas between what is man-made and nature. Illustrative of this is the quarry. There are descriptions of sand martins and falcons along with the knowledge that the stone quarried is going to Norway and China to build motorways. The complex and often tragic juxtapositions continue with the story of the lapwing who Serena observes on her nest. She has built it in tyre tracks because there is a little shelter and the eggs are repeatedly destroyed by the tractor. Hildyard looks at things that are sometimes just beyond the range of perception. I loved he meditative quality of this novel. It does have a message about the climate crisis, but it is also a reflection of the messiness of our relationship with nature and on the fact that we are intricately a part of our environment. 9 out of 10 Starting Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

How the one-armed sister cleans the house “If you must learn to love a man, he is probably not the man you should be loving.” "In her dreams, one good chop, the kind that slices bone like butter, is all it would take". This is a debut novel and is set in Barbados in 1984. The blurb describes this as unflinching; you know then there is going to be a significant level of violence. There is rape, murder, violence towards women (which feels routine), drug dealing, incest, sexual assault, gun crime, the death of a baby to name a few. It focuses on male violence towards women and the inability of men to control themselves. The main character Lala is married to Adan, an increasingly violent man. Each chapter takes the point of view of a different character and the timeline jumps around so the reader is almost following two stories at once. It is pretty much set on the beach in a tourist area. However paradise has an underside and even coconut trees can be sinister: “These are not the trees of postcards, not the type you tie your hammock to and lay under with a good book and a rum punch. These trees throw shadows with claws onto the steps and sometimes, when the wind is high, they throw coconuts you have to dodge for fear they could kill you. The fronds of these trees are home to centipedes that fall out while dreaming and land writhing on the steps to Adan’s house.” The novel looks at three/four marriages over a twenty year time period and considers how history can repeat itself. The interplay between poverty, misogyny and abuse is explored. It is also about inter-generational relationships between women: “Esme would have explained to her daughter, if she had lived, why, despite all this, she did not say no, why she had stood in the cramped bedroom she shared with a man she did not love and watched him get on one knee and present her with a box with a thin gold band crowned by the single small diamond he had slaved the better part of a year for. She would have said to her that she did not wish this for her own daughter – the responsibility of having to say yes to a man for whom this proposal was the singular objective of several months’ unrequited affection.” There is a great deal of violence in this novel and some have found it too much. The violence is clearly there for a reason and illustrates male violence and their lack of control, along with the resilience of women. Not a new theme, but it is powerful and the story takes the reader along. I think I would have liked a bit more exploration of the interior lives of those involved, but that’s just me asking for a longer novel as usual. Some of this is difficult to read. The title of the novel illustrates one of the novel’s dilemmas. How to carry on living when you have been so damaged by life and those you have loved. 7 out of 10 Starting Lud in the mist by Hope Mirrelees

The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla “good immigrant and bad immigrant, refugee and benefit scrounger. This keeps us in our place, humans bickering, focusing on their differences, distracted, and at each other’s throats, competing and separating” A set of twenty-one essays edited Nikesh Shukla which look at the issue of race and immigration from an ethnically diverse group of people. This was a crowd funded project. The essays address the current culture and an increasingly potent post-imperial nostalgia and some of the author’s frustrations with this. Here is Chimene Suleyman reflecting on historical violence: “It is there in the white men and women who do not understand, to the point of frustration, why we still walk with the noose of our ancestors around our necks, as we cannot comprehend how they do not carry the indignity of their ancestors tying it there.” Many authors also look at the issue of blackness; as Reni Eddo-Lodge says: “It is up to you to make your own version of blackness in any way you can – trying on all the different versions, altering them until they fit.” The essays cover a wide area including take away food, relations with the police, life in a small village, comedy, acting and getting parts, Kendo Nagasaki (well done if you get the reference, I didn’t), terrorism, school life, family life, airports, everyday racism and the difference between a good and a bad immigrant (win an Olympic gold to be a good one). The authors make some very pertinent points. The actor Riz Ahmed makes this point: “The pitfalls of the audition room and the airport interrogation are the same. They are places where the threat of rejection is real. They’re also places where you’re reduced to your marketability or threat-level, where the length of your facial hair can be a deal-breaker.” He played a terrorist on film and describes the inability of airport staff to distinguish between film and real life leading to some long stays at the airport. These essays are a useful light shining onto a society which is becoming increasingly racist and xenophobic. There are now US and Dutch versions. Some of the essays are inevitably stronger than others, but it’s an interesting collection and I like the way the mainstream publishers were side-stepped. 8 out of 10 Starting I Claudius by Robert Graves

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.” “It came over him now that the unexpected favors of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us. They may exercise or divert us for a time, but when we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.” The second in the Great Plains trilogy, and for me this was stronger than O Pioneers. It is said to have some autobiographical elements, although it is also loosely based on the opera singer Olive Fremstad. It is the story of Thea Kronberg, born in a remote Colorado town. It follows her life from the age of six to about thirty and revolves around her musical talent and her passion for music. At the start of the journey she is a talented pianist potentially to concert standard, but does not love the piano. It is discovered that her real talent is her voice and we follow her development towards the heights of the opera world. This is very much a story of the struggle to harness and use a talent from humble origins and the sacrifices involved. Again Cather’s descriptions of the natural world have power: “Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear.” One strand of the novel is Thea’s determination to succeed. She has her usual share of admirers, but none of them get in the way of her ambition. Cather seems to be debating whether the sacrifices necessary to fulfil ambition are worth it. There’s no sentimentality and it’s an honest account of the development of talent. The admirers remain devoted, but at arm’s length. There is a quibble. Native Americans are referred to as pretty much a dead race of only archaeological interest, which of course they were not. This is odd because Cather has been rightly praised for documenting cultures that were dying away and being subsumed into a greater whole, but these tend to be European cultures. The other native (non-white?) cultures seem to be inconsequential. The exploration of the creative process is fascinating and Cather does create some memorable and nuanced characters, even the admirers hold up and aren’t two dimensional. On to the third in the trilogy. 7 out of 10 Starting My Antonia by Willa Cather

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee This is the follow on to Cider with Rosie. It follows Lee as he leaves. It charts his leaving the Gloucestershire valley where he was brought up. He spends some time living in London working on a building site and then goes to Spain. He knows virtually no Spanish at first. He learns the language as he walks around Spain with his fiddle, earning money by playing music. Lee can certainly write and his descriptions of the climate, pastoral settings and landscape are stunning. “There, under the mulberry trees, where some thin grass grew, I sat watching the slow green flow of the water. The shade from the trees lay on my hands and legs like pieces of cool wet velvet, and all sounds ceased, save for the piercing stutter of the cicadas which seemed to be nailing the heat to the ground.” “Green oaks like rocks lay scattered among the cornfields, with peasants chest-deep in the wheat. It was the peak of harvest, and figures of extraordinary brilliance were spread across the field like butterflies, working alone or in clusters, and dressed to the pitch of the light.” Lee is also an observer of people. The first few chapters involve his walk to London and his experiences there. It is 1934 and there is still a depression. Lee recalls men who: “went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-30s.” Lee walked pretty much everywhere in Britain and in Spain, mainly on back roads and there are lots of descriptions of small, poor Spanish villages. Another impression is of the generosity of the people. Lee also describes the food he eats along the way, most of it he shared with those who let him sleep in various parts of their homes in exchange for some music. The tone becomes bleak towards the end when Lee charts the start of the civil war. He leaves Spain at that point but returns shortly afterwards to fight with the International Brigade against the fascists. What to make of it. I loved Cider with Rosie. Does this compare with Patrick Leigh Fermor? Well no. Lee is a young man and certainly isn’t chaste, but there were some issues, particularly in relation to women. There was an instance where Lee describes an incident when a drunken father attempts to rape his daughter: Lee steps in to protect him from the mother! How about this description of a girl: “black-eyed Patsy, a sexily confident child of eight” Really? And following on: “She’d pay another brief visit before going to bed. ‘Ma says anything else you want?’ Squirming, coy, a strip of striped pyjamas, Miss Sweater Girl of ten years later – already she knew how to stand, how to snuggle against the doorpost, how to frame her flannel-dressed limbs in the lamplight.” No excuse for that. It reminded me of Jimmy Saville and his camper van. Shame because much of it was pretty good. 4 out of 10 Starting The Raj: An Eyewitness History by Roger Hudson

Yes it is a great quote Madeleine' I think Hayley, that is one of the better quotes, it can be quite dense and theological. The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews “She is awake. And I must remind myself of how it began. The end of all things. It was a time of witches, it was a time of saints, a time when rabbits hunted foxes, when children came into the world without their heads, and kings lost theirs on the scaffold. The world was turned upside down, or so some said … now, less than a hundred years after men and magic began to drift apart, we walk a new earth. We have become reasonable, and cleave to our certainties as once we cleaved to our kings. Now, the buried stories are dismissed as old wives’ tales, exaggerations, falsehoods. But still they bubble through the cracks, clinging on, refusing to go down into the dark. They develop strange qualities, words stored for too long. In the dim light of my small study, never bright enough now, I lay them down in honest black ink, but they are past their bloom…” This is certainly a mess of pottage with lots of elements within. Andrews seems to have thrown the kitchen sink at this. It is set in 1643, during the Civil War with jumps forward to 1703. It is certainly gothic with a touch of horror and the supernatural. The penchant for finding a witch around every corner is there. If you understand the title then you will guess another element. Throw in some Egyptian and Babylonian myth, a bit of the Book of Revelation, a bit of possession, some atheism and a certain John Milton (yes him!) and there you have it. Oh, I am forgetting the woman in the attic trope as well. It’s set in Norfolk. Unfortunately the author’s habit of periodically jumping forward sixty years gives most of the plot away. It fits quite neatly into the current trend for historical novels with a gothic edge. It’s written in the first person as we follow Thomas Treadwater as he returns from fighting in the war and discovers all is not as it should be at home. It is well written, but I didn’t really get a strong sense of place, nor of the upheaval that the Civil War caused. There are significant holes in the plot, such as the disappearance of a major character without much comment. The inclusion of Milton seemed pointless. The Leviathan aspect doesn’t fit and feels like a bit of an add-on. The ending is confused. Some will love this. For me it was too disjointed and lacked a sense of place and time. 6 out of 10 Starting Emergency by Daisy Hildyard

A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.” “I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.” And so the whole thing rolls on! In this one Martin abandons most of the main POV characters and introduces a few new ones, some of whom are definitely antagonists. Although, as always Martin does add nuance. In terms of the grand sweep of previous books, less happens, but again it’s all preparation for what comes next no doubt. It’s all strangely compelling (a bit like trashy TV) and as one of the few bookish characters says: “He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I’ll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I’ll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I’ll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he’d think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.” I think many on here could relate to that!! Another truism illustrated is that it is easier to gain power than to keep it. It’s more of the same and I can confirm it’s an easy read for hospital waiting rooms!! 7 out of 10. Starting the next one in the series

The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland “And on a May morning, on Malvern hills, Strange fancies befell me, and fairy-like dreams. I was weary of wand'ring, and went to repose On a broad green bank, by a burn-side” I was thankfully spared from studying this at school. It was written by William Langland, most likely, in the 1370s, in Middle English. There are three different versions (inevitably a, b and c texts) and over fifty surviving manuscripts. This makes establishing a definitive text difficult, although modern translations are based on the B text. There is disagreement as to whether it is finished or not. It is split into twenty sections, known as Passus. The Passus are split into eight visions. It is effectively unrhymed poetry, alliterative verse. We know very little about Langland. Unlike Chaucer, Langland’s influence was more of an underground one. It was certainly cited during the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 by John Ball and was a point for radical and reformist tendencies until well into the sixteenth century. It has also been postulated that the figure of Piers the Plowman predates Langland and Ball and that both made use of him. It has been ignored for long periods, but there has been a resurgence recently. There is a great deal about the culture, structure and practice of the Church. That is a given and I suspect a decent knowledge of how the medieval church worked does help. There are periodic and much more interesting (for me) glimpses of everyday life and nature. It is well known that the author had a knowledge of the Malvern Hills. There is also one of the earliest written references to the Robin Hood folklore. It is certainly a critique of the medieval Church, with strong attacks on the industry around purchasing pardons, corruption and wealth. There is also comment about those without power: “poor men have no power to express their needs even though they are hurting” There is a celebration of the honesty of those who labour for a living and much criticism of those who keep them poor and wanting. The strongest and most positively portrayed character is Piers Plowman, an honest labourer who is shown as a good Christian soul, dismissive of the pomp and ceremony of the Church. Labour itself represents an act of faith. Piers insist that any who want to go on pilgrimage with him Plough half an acre of land. It is easy to see why he appealed to the rebels involved in the Peasant’s Revolt. It was written in a period of rapid change following the plague years mid-century and it engages with the religious and social issues of the time. Without some basic understanding of medieval England and the Church this could be very tedious. There are clearly radical tendencies within it and I don’t have enough knowledge to understand whether the translations maximise or minimise that tendency; although I could probably guess. 7 out of 10 Starting As I walked out one Midsummer morning by Laurie Lee

I must admit Hayley that I can't resist folklore either. Funeral Games by Mary Renault "It is for the scholars of each generation to purge it of its errors, before they infect the next." "All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too." This is the last of Renault’s Alexander trilogy and her last novel as well. It covers the years following Alexander’s death, charting what happened to the vast empire that he built up. It follows the fortunes of an array of characters who had served Alexander and wanted a piece or all of his power and territories. It is inevitably a tale of mischief, mayhem, duplicity, treachery and brutality. It does lack a stand out main character like Alexander or Bagoas. Again the writing is great. This isn’t really a stand-alone and it helps greatly to have read the previous two. This is fiction, but it is hung on the historical bones. Does the trilogy chart how Alexander managed to do what he did and how those who followed him could not replicate it? That’s the key and I think Renault goes a fair way to doing it. One of the main issues is that this does feel somewhat disjointed, partly because of the multiplicity of competing characters. It could have comfortably been twice the length and would have felt less rushed. There are stronger female characters in this novel and that is definitely a plus. This is not a cheery tale and the only character who does well out of it is Ptolemy, mainly because he narrows his ambitions and settles for ruling Egypt. 7 and a half out of ten Starting The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla

Wychwood by George Mann A cross between a detective/crime novel and a supernatural thriller which manages to miss significant parts of both genres. There does not seem to be any twists and the antagonist is fairly easy to spot. There is a significant folklore element (hence the attraction) which focuses on a Saxon myth, the Carrion King. It is set in rural Oxfordshire. The plot is standard. Young female journalist gets fed up of life in the big city and following a relationship break up returns to rural Oxfordshire to her mum for a period of reflection. She lives very close to the Wychwood and as she arrives there is a murder in the wood. The victim is set out in a ritualised fashion and there follows a series of related murders. Add to the mix meeting a childhood friend who is now a policeman on the investigation. And yes, there is a will they, won’t they vibe going on. Inevitably she gets involved in the investigation. There are the usual tropes and it’s all pretty predictable. There is also plenty of tea drinking: “And what did you do after you had sex?” “I made some tea.” Lots of tea drinking. It’s pretty standard stuff and predictable, with some interesting folklore elements. 6 out of 10 Starting The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey Set on a small island in the Caribbean this is a modern day fairy tale with inevitable magic realist elements. The timeline is split between 1976 and 2016. It revolves around a local fisherman David Baptiste. When out fishing he sometimes sees a creature in the water, which he eventually realises is a mermaid. The mermaid is caught by American tourists and put on display in the harbour. David sees her and at night cuts her down and takes her home where she gradually recovers and becomes more human again. Then things start to become difficult and complicated. This is a fairy tale, but Disney it most definitely is not. No well-groomed Ariel: “She looking like a woman from long ago, like old-time Taino people I saw in a history book at school. She face was young and not pretty at all, and I recognise something ancient there too. I saw the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past, shining at me. I saw she breasts, under the fine scaly suit. I saw webbed fingers and how they dripped with sargassum seaweed. Her hair was full of seaweed too, black black and long and alive with stinging creatures — like she carry a crown on her head of electricity wires. […] Then there was her tail […] Yards and yards of musty silver. It gave she a look of power, like she grow out of the tail itself. I think, then, that this fish-woman must be heavy as a mule. Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. Her torso was sturdy and muscular, finely scaled over, as if she wore a tunic of sharkskin. She was crawling with sea-lice. They saw that when her diaphragm heaved, it revealed wide slits which were gills and they looked sharp enough to slice a finger off. All the men backed away. Her spine spikes were flat, like the spokes of a folded umbrella, but when they flared and spread, they revealed a mighty dorsal.” The transformations in the novel are messy and difficult and often general mermaid lore is turned on its head. There is a curse, but it is not one that is easily broken. Instead of the necessity of keeping something belonging to the mermaid, David gives the mermaid (named Aycayia) a pair of sneakers to help her walk. She is taught language by a good friend of David (Arcadia) and befriends Arcadia’s ten year old son Reggie who uses sigh language as he is without hearing. The catching of the mermaid is pure Hemingway with the father and son US tourists fishing for marlin and the struggle to land her is long and messy and brutal. The older man is angry when his catch disappears: “He wanted the mermaid back. If not millions, and an auction to a museum, he wanted the bloody thing stuffed and mounted on his wall. He had caught her fair and square. He had papers, a licence to keep what he’d caught.” She is seen as property not as a person. Aycayia turns out to have thoughts and opinions of her own. Arcadia, the only white woman in the book tells her of local history and Aycayia responds: “I ask why everybody in Black Conch is black skinned She told me how black people came I ask her where are the red people like me She told me they were mostly all dead and gone, murdered I learn from Miss Rain how the Castilian Admiral MURDER all my people in a very short time My people long dead I sobbed She told me many black people were murdered too I ask if the Spanish Christians own everything now She said not any more and turn red in her face Like the whole thing happen in a short time Only five hundred years when the world is very old This all happen quickly My family own all of this part of the island she say Land is not to be owned I tell her.” The prose is literary and poetic and there are layers of meaning. I had some questions. The main black female character is one of the antagonists with no redeeming features. There are lots of threads: toxic masculinity, land ownership following slavery, folklore and myth, jealousy, community tensions, patriarchy, the nature of romance, the unfinished history of colonialism and so on. Here no one can escape the past and its legacies and the novel draws on demands of the marginalised for dignity and respect. David writes in his journal: “That mermaid be a revolutionary.” And that would be no bad thing. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting How the one-armed sister sweeps the House by Cherie Jones