A Book blog 2021 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

Thank you for the kind words Hayley. I did quite enjoy Company of Liars.

Mr Godley's Phantom by Mal Peet

Mr Godley’s Phantom

This is Mal Peet’s last novel and it is published as it was when he died. It is in actual fact a novella and could easily be read in a sitting. It is part ghost story, part thriller/crime story, part love story and part reflection on the effects of war. It is set after the Second World War and the protagonist is Martin Heath. He has fought in Italy and was one of the soldiers that liberated Bergen/Belsen. As a result he has what would now be called PTSD and is having problems settling into civilian life.

Martin takes a job at a remote house in moorland Devon. His employer is the Mr Godley of the title, he lives in a manor house alone, having lost his son in the First World War. There are a couple of female employees, one of whom lives in and an elderly gardener. Martin’s duties include being a general handyman and driver. The car is a Rolls Royce phantom (as in the title), which plays a significant role in the novel.

Martin’s PTSD is significant:

“The projector whirred. The images flickered, steadied. He could not stop them….The silent skeletons, who yet moved on legs of bone, walking towards him, slow as dreamers but all eyes. The others, heaped, skulls muddled with shin bones, claws, shrunken genitals. shhhhhhh and slurry and decomposition. Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. Rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that and having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again”

Mr Godley, now very elderly has had his own losses. His son and later his wife (who drowned herself). Peet had completed the manuscript before his death, but left a few side notes. These have been used by the publisher as the titles for the various parts of the book. One in particular resonates when considering the relationship between the two men:

“You fit my wounds exactly”

I got a bit more from this than I expected. As a novel it’s never quite sure what it wants to be, but Peet does combine the various elements well. A brief Halloween read.

7 out of 10 

Starting Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood

[Books do furnish a room]

Thank you for the kind words Hayley. I did quite enjoy Company of Liars.

Mr Godley's Phantom by Mal Peet

Mr Godley’s Phantom

This is Mal Peet’s last novel and it is published as it was when he died. It is in actual fact a novella and could easily be read in a sitting. It is part ghost story, part thriller/crime story, part love story and part reflection on the effects of war. It is set after the Second World War and the protagonist is Martin Heath. He has fought in Italy and was one of the soldiers that liberated Bergen/Belsen. As a result he has what would now be called PTSD and is having problems settling into civilian life.

Martin takes a job at a remote house in moorland Devon. His employer is the Mr Godley of the title, he lives in a manor house alone, having lost his son in the First World War. There are a couple of female employees, one of whom lives in and an elderly gardener. Martin’s duties include being a general handyman and driver. The car is a Rolls Royce phantom (as in the title), which plays a significant role in the novel.

Martin’s PTSD is significant:

“The projector whirred. The images flickered, steadied. He could not stop them….The silent skeletons, who yet moved on legs of bone, walking towards him, slow as dreamers but all eyes. The others, heaped, skulls muddled with shin bones, claws, shrunken genitals. shhhhhhh and slurry and decomposition. Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. Rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that and having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again”

Mr Godley, now very elderly has had his own losses. His son and later his wife (who drowned herself). Peet had completed the manuscript before his death, but left a few side notes. These have been used by the publisher as the titles for the various parts of the book. One in particular resonates when considering the relationship between the two men:

“You fit my wounds exactly”

I got a bit more from this than I expected. As a novel it’s never quite sure what it wants to be, but Peet does combine the various elements well. A brief Halloween read.

7 out of 10 

Starting Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood

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Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley

I really enjoyed Mozley’s first novel Elmet, I didn’t enjoy this one. It is set in a run-down section of Soho. The word stew in old English means brothelIt concerns a clash of cultures. The novel centres around an old building in Soho, the top floors of which are a brothel. The owner of the building has inherited her father’s wealth and property at a young age (he is a deceased criminal/gangland figure). She wants to tear the building down and redevelop it as upmarket flats/restaurants etc. There are nods to the history of the place and the changing nature of the population:

“After the war, the concrete came, and parallel lines, and precise angles that connected earth to sky. Houses were rebuilt, shops were rebuilt, and new paving stones were laid. The dead were buried. The past was buried. There were new kinds of men and new kinds of women. There was art and music and miniskirts and sharp haircuts to match the skyline.”

The rampant capitalist is called Agatha, she inherited her father’s minder (Roster) and has a rather elegant Borzoi (there is a very unpleasant incident with a Yorkshire Terrier in this which seemed entirely gratuitous). The brothel consist of a number of women, but the main players are a Nigerian sex worker called Precious and her maid Tabitha.  There are also a number of people who primarily live of the streets who congregate in the basements and on the streets around. Two of them have the sobriquets Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. The local pub the Aphra Benn also features and in particular Robert, an aging ex-enforcer who is a regular at the brothel. Floating around all this are a group of twenty somethings who are just starting to make their way in life. Their links to the central participants are very tangential and it isn’t at all clear why they are actually in the novel.

There is a fair amount of what is meant to comic ribaldry. I felt that the attempts to introduce a comedic element did not work. The portrayal of the sex workers is really problematic and a lot of the humour of the novels comes from them, but also feels like it is at their expense. When Vollmann writes about sex workers he gives them agency (or has in those of his works I have read), but here I’m really don’t think that happens. They are the underdogs and the reader is meant to feel sympathy, but they are also the butt of the jokes.

There have been issues like this in Soho over recent years with police raids and the like and protests from sex workers; all this is well documented. Mozley uses this, but this is far from a plea for the marginalised and the issue of trafficking is not addressed at all. What happens here is that a story about gentrification is spiced up by the addition of sex workers who make jokes about “blow job counters at Tesco”. I think Mozley misrepresents genuine dilemmas and a genuine history of protest. And the ending is a complete mess.

3 out of 10

Starting Bone China by Laura Purcell

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King Rat by China Mieville

This is Mieville’s first novel and can be described as urban fantasy, set in 1990s London. It also has the feel of a graphic novel. There is an element of fairy tale as it is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Inevitably the plot stretches credulity and the language is strong.

Saul shares a flat with his father. He returns one day and his father has been murdered. His is arrested for the crime. Whilst in custody he is broken out by a character called King Rat and sees a whole new side of London. He also discovers he is half rat ad learns about his new abilities. The reasons for his situation gradually become clear, there is danger from the Ratcatcher. Saul also meets the King of Birds (LopLop) and the King of Spiders (Anansi). The danger comes in the form of a chap called Peter who plays the flute. The Music can charm any species and he is after King Rat, who escaped him in Hamelin. Because Saul is part rat part human he is immune to the music. The piper wants to kill him because he is immune and King Rat wants to use him to kill the Piper. The Piper begins to work his way into the lives of Saul’s friends.

The plot has plenty of holes in it and there are characters that are underdeveloped and barely used. As a result this does feel like a first novel. There is a strong sense of place and the background of jungle and drum’n’bass music gives a sense of time as well. There are a few clever ideas. The idea that invisibility is more about people choosing not to see you than you being invisible is pertinent. There is also an earnestness about this which doesn’t sit easy with the subject matter; the character of the Piper is one dimensional. The strongest character is King Rat himself:

“I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief, I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my wee. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king.
(…)
I’m King Rat.”

Mieville’s politics show through a little clumsily, which didn’t worry me as I mostly agree with them. There ae flaws but Mieville is always worth reading.

6 out of 10

Starting Chatterton Square by E H Young

[lunababymoonchild]

I love China Mieville but not read this, yet.

[Books do furnish a room]

It's worth a look!

The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison by Ann Morley and Liz Stanley

An unconventional biography published by the Women’s Press in the early 1980s. It debunks some of the myths around Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who died when she stepped out in front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby.

The first part of the book is a reprint of The Life of Emily Wilding Davison by Gertrude Colmore; written hastily after she died and long out of print. What Morley and Stanley have also done is access many records in the various archives and suffragist records and newspapers that had not previously been used. They set out to dispel the myth that Davison was a suicidal fanatic and do so by setting her in her proper historical context. They set her in the context of a remarkable network of women and show that her struggle was not just for the vote, which was only a starting point but for a wider socialist and feminist agenda. Davison’s beliefs covered vegetarianism and animal rights as well.

There is an interesting analysis of the leadership of the movement and their relationship with some of the more radical elements of the movement. There are also accounts of periods of time in prison and Davison was force fed quite a number of times following hunger strikes. Morley and Stanley also research the women around Davison, many of whom are less well known and they turn up some interesting characters, Mary Leigh in particular.

This is an interesting and innovative biography which challenges the myths about Davison, sets her in the context of a militant movement, and explains the level of state violence used against the suffragists.

8 out of 10

Starting The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald

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Natives by Akala

This is a combination of memoir and polemic about class and race and its intersection. It is analytical and looks at the history of empire. It has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X (by David Olusoga amongst others). Akala is a rapper, poet, activist, author, Corbyn supporter, MOBO award winner, founder of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company amongst other things. His older sister is the rapper Ms. Dynamite. Akala has a Jamaican father and a Scottish mother.

The memoir parts are particularly poignant and he makes his motives clear:

“I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its privileges forced me to search for answers. I did not particularly want to spend a portion of a lifetime studying these issues, it was not among my ambitions as a child, but I was compelled upon this path very early.”

He does not pull any punches when it comes to the police and to the fate of many of his peers:

“Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard, they are still having the same cocaine parties that they were having twenty years ago and they still have not ever been searched by the police once, let alone had their parties raided or been choke-slammed to death”.

 

Akala went to schools where he knew his teachers disliked him, He was sent to a Pan-African Saturday school where he was taught black history. The school stories illustrate how bad things were in the 1980s. At the age of seven he was put into a class for those who had special educational needs (he was reading Lord of the Rings at the time!). He also shocked his teacher when she told him Wilberforce had ended the slave trade and he responded by challenging her, using what he was taught at the Saturday school. He first stopped by the police aged twelve, became involved with gangs and carried a knife. His life did change through music, learning and support from others.

In between the memoir parts is analysis of class, racism and black history. Akala looks at the socially constructed nature of race, with sections on the slave trade, the British atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s, Windrush, comparisons with the US, Cuba and South Africa, whiteness and much more. The section on Haiti is particularly good. He isn’t greatly optimistic about the future either:

 

“I am not particularly optimistic about the future and I hope to be proved spectacularly wrong. I fear the only question for the life of someone like me born in 2018 is how extreme the tragedies and carnage they will surely live through will be….tragedies will inevitably occur…many of these coming tragedies will be racially charged…” 

This isn’t an easy read and Akala debunks a lot of myths, including the one that despite it all things are getting better.

9 out of 10

Starting Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre by Julie Hollege

 

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Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood

Something of a Christmas ghost story. There are very few characters. The primary character is Leah and her point of view makes up the novel. Leah has recently lost her son and husband and is still coping with her grief. They had been looking at a farmhouse to purchase which coincidentally used to be in Leah’s family over a hundred years ago. After her loss Leah sells up and purchases the remote farmhouse, which is on the Yorkshire Moors. It is rapidly approaching Christmas and there is snow on the ground.

The farm and house are old and there is an orchard with lots of mistletoe on the trees and Littlewood finds lots of ways to describe snow:

“The snow was constantly changing: now rose-tinted or grey, now golden or lavender, made new with every dawn or noon or evening and yet just as cold.”

The haunting starts almost as soon as she arrives and consists of Leah suddenly finds herself in the past watching scenes from long ago when her ancestors ran the farm. She discovers some rather sinister history which begins to play out. There are a few surly locals and another local farm where Leah gets to know the occupants a little: their ancestors were also local.

It’s pretty gothic, the plot is obviously unbelievable, but Littlewood makes good use of the natural world. As ghost stories go it’s ok, good for a dark winter night and Littlewood weaves in some folklore elements as well.

6 out of 10

Starting The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel

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The Gallows Pole by Ben Myers

My second novel by Ben Myers. This is a historical novel set in eighteenth century Yorkshire, on the moors. It is the story of the Craggy Vale Coiners. Coiners clipped a small amount of metal from a coin and melted down the clippings to make new coins. The characters involved are historical and centred around the leader of the coiners “King David” Hartley, as described by Myers:

“appeared of the earth, of the moors. A man of smoke and peat and heather and fire, his body built for the hills.”

There is a museum to the coiners and Myers spoke to the descendants of Hartley whilst researching the book.

This is a brutal, violent and very masculine book, there are very few female characters. As the Guardian review comments, just imagine the worst that can happen to a character, what Myers has in mind will be worse. The enemies are the oncoming Industrial Revolution and all representatives of The Crown and authority. The motto “Clip a coin and fudge the Crown” pretty much sums it up. There is a nod back to old legends like Robin Hood:

“He who had poached and butchered a nobleman’s stag ... Hunger then it was that had led this poor soul to the gallows steps – a hunger for warm meat rather than cold-blooded murder. Not greed but necessity.”

There is a definite harking back in the face of industrial development:

“we lived as clans … protection was our purpose – protection from any incomers. That and the providing of food and fire, and seeding your women. You hunted and you defended and you fought for your corner of England under the great green canopy. You lived proud and you celebrated your fathers that spawned you and honoured your mothers that birthed you.”

The narrative is interspersed with extracts from a diary written by Hartley whilst in jail in York (imaginary I think). There is a six part TV series being filmed for the BBC.

Myers writes landscape and nature rather well and his turns of phrase are excellent. He also uses folklore and wildlife lore which is woven into the narrative.

It is an analysis of power and where it really lies and a fable about standing against the growth of imperial power:

“It’s time to split the coins proper and make the money that is ours. It’s time to clip a coin and fudge the crown. It’s time to let the 'persons of dubious parentage' know that the only law is our law… valley man fight and valley men sing and valley men bow to none …. fudge the king because you can be sure the king is already fudgeing you … A hand loom in a wool loft never killed a child. Only the men from the cities with their stone cathedrals of mass production killed children,”

It will be interesting to see how the TV production fares.

 8 out of 10

Starting The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

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Bone China by Laura Purcell

There’s a definite nod to Du Maurier with the Cornish setting, the house on the cliffs and the gothic nature. The protagonist is Hester Why (I found myself asking that question on a regular basis). She is fleeing London after a misunderstanding with a previous employer and taking up a post looking after an older woman, Miss Pinecroft. There are three different timelines and we see Miss Pinecroft in her youth. One of the themes is the search for a cure for TB. Miss Pinecroft’s father had bought the house for the caves underneath as there was a time when it was thought that cave and sea air was good for TB.

Purcell introduces superstition and the folklore of fairie with the inevitable changeling myths. Cornish folklore is central to the story. Add a few doses of laudanum and gin, some odd goings on with china (possibly something to do with the title no doubt) with the bone part being a bit literal, lots of things going bump in the night and some gloomy corridors. There’s plenty of melodrama and odd goings on and atmosphere:

“The wind howls and ravens about the house, crashing the branches of the ash trees together. The waves roar back. They are wild creatures, these elements. They will tear one another apart.”

The whole thing is a bit of a mess as the strands somehow don’t hang together. The story rattles along at a good pace and if you like gothic tales that don’t make sense you may enjoy it. The ending is rushed and doesn’t make much sense (what am I saying!). I also won’t be able to look at bone china in quite the same way again!

 5 out of 10

Starting The Mercies by Kiran Hargrave

 

[Hayley]

20 hours ago, Books do furnish a room said:

The whole thing is a bit of a mess as the strands somehow don’t hang together. The story rattles along at a good pace and if you like gothic tales that don’t make sense you may enjoy it.

For the last few days I've been torn between starting this or the next Ransom Riggs book. Maybe this is a sign 

 

20 hours ago, Books do furnish a room said:

Starting The Mercies by Kiran Hargrave

I also have this on my shelf. I hope you enjoy it more!

[Madeleine]

I preferred Bone China to Shape of Darkness, now the ending of that one really is a mess.

[Books do furnish a room]

I have that Purcell as well Madeleine. I will delay it a while! Hope you enjoy the Ransom Riggs Hayley

The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald

This is allegedly a novel (it doesn’t feel like it). It has a first person narrator and it an account of and reflections on a walking tour in East Anglia (mainly Suffolk): from Lowestoft to Ditchingham. It describes places and people along the way, mainly people living in fairly large country houses! There are lots of tangents with passages on silkworm rearing and its history (there is a history of it in East Anglia), the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the history of herring fishing in the North Sea, colonialism in the Congo with Conrad and Casement prominent, the description of a dissection viewed by Browne and Rembrandt, forays in Chateaubriand, Swinburne and Morton Peto follow. It does look at our relationship with the environment and makes a few pertinent points:

“Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.”

There is a general feel of desolation and decline with reflections on the effects of Dutch Elm disease. One of Sebald’s own friends Michael Hamburger also makes and appearance. The narrative feels restless and Sebald often writes in sentences that are lengthy and discursive. His descriptions of Browne’s sentences mirror his own:

“In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.”

Alan Bennett’s general point about Sebald resonates as well:

“I persevere with Sebald but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate. ‘It was already afternoon, six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long streets.’ . . . The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance.”

In themselves some of the observations and reflections are interesting despite (or because of) their melancholy. I now know a bit about herring fishing and Sir Thomas Browne, amongst other things! Will I persevere with Sebald? Not sure, but I won’t be in that much of a hurry to do so.

6 out of 10

Starting Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon Mcgregor

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Underland by Robert Macfarlane

This is much lauded and praised and now much translated. The title is self-explanatory, it is an exploration of earth’s underworlds (natural and created). There are caves and caverns, various underground systems including the many different underworlds of London and Paris. One point to make, all of the underlands in question are all in Europe or Greenland, so it is a very Eurocentric account, interesting though it is and well as Macfarlane writes. The descriptions of his perils and adventures (and he does take risks) lead to reflections about humanity and our effect on the landscape. I was reading this at the same time as Sebald and was struck by the similarities, both go off at tangents, although Macfarlane is not as narrow in range as Sebald.

Macfarlane does try to connect with early humans and reflect on time:

“The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.”

And:

“Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.”

He also reflects on the nature of early human history:

“In a cave within a scarp of karst, a figure inhales a mouthful of red ochre dust, places its left hand against the cave wall – fingers spread, thumb out, palm cold on the rock – and then blows the ochre hard against the hand’s back. There is an explosion of dust – and when the hand is lifted its ghostly print remains…The prints will survive for more than 35,000 years. Sign of what? Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?”

Macfarlane is eminently quotable as can be seen, although once you have heard one description of getting wet and cold in impossible deep spaces, you have probably heard them all. Macfarlane does delve into myths about the underworld (Gilgamesh et al), but again Eurocentric.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the part where Macfarlane talks about recent scientific thinking about the ways trees communicate and cooperate; inevitably named the “wood wide web”. He outlines an underground social network in the forest, based on mycorrhizal fungal species linking trees, not only of the same species, but between different species. This has been mapped using carbon isotopes. It appears that resources can be moved around in a wood in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. As Macfarlane says:

“Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that it should up-regulate its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of diffusible hormones. But such airborne warnings are imprecise in their destinations. When the compounds travel by fungal networks, both the source and the recipient can be specified. Our growing comprehension of the forest network asks profound questions about where species begin and end, about whether a forest might be imagined as a super-organism and about what “trading, “sharing” or even “friendship” might mean between plants”

There is much of interest here, but there is also a good deal of descriptive repetition and there is a complete omission of anything outside Europe.

7 out of 10

Starting Women in thirteenth century Lincolnshire

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Innocent Flowers: women in the Edwardian theatre by Julie Holledge

This is a virago publication from 1981 about women of the Edwardian theatre, looking at the significant tensions between onstage and offstage roles and the impact of the Suffrage movement. I managed to find out a little about Julie Holledge (as I was unaware of her previously). She worked in the alternative theatre in the 1970s and moved to Australia in the early 1980s, spending the rest of her career teaching at Flinders University. She I an acknowledged expert on Ibsen and that also shows in this book as she charts how his plays were first received in the UK.

There is a considerable section on the links between the theatre and the suffrage movement and at the end of the book three mini plays used as propaganda for the movement.

Holledge looks at the life of Edith (Edy) Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry. This, of course involves the history of the Pioneer Players and Craig’s interesting home situation (a menage with Christabel Marshall and Clare (Tony) Attwood).

Holledge makes extensive use of source materials and the book is well researched. The role of the actor managers meant that roles for women could be very limited and Holledge looks at the growth of independent theatre companies where women had more freedom.

I also rediscovered Elizabeth Robins:

“we had further seen how freedom in the practice of our art, how the bare opportunity to practise it at all, depended for the actress on, considerations humiliatingly different from those that confronted the actor. The stage career of an actress was inextricably involved in the fact that she was a woman and that those who were masters of the theatre were men. These conditions did not belong to art: they stultified art. We dreamed of escape through hard work, and through deliberate abandonment of the idea of making money”

Which reminds me I must read The Convert soon.

It is a story of struggle and difficulty rather than glamour, but it’s interesting and well written.

7 out of 10

Starting The Holiday by Stevie Smith

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Chatterton Square by E H Young

My first novel by E H Young. Young seems to have been an interesting character. Her writings centre on the Clifton area of Bristol, called Upper Radstowe in the novels. She was a supporter of suffrage and a keen climber and mountaineer. She had a lifelong relationship with Ralph Henderson, a friend of her husband’s. After her husband’s death in the War she moved in with Henderson and his wife. 
Chatterton Square is the story of two families who live next to each other, one relatively happy and one relatively unhappy. The Blacketts are a married couple with three teenage daughters. They are the unhappy family, although Mrs Blackett thinks they are perfectly content (because he is perfectly content). The Frasers are happier, possibly because there is no man at the head of the house. Mr Fraser has left his wife and five children and Mrs Fraser seems generally content with her lot and has a very different approach to bringing up her children than does Mr Blackett. Living with the Fraser’s is Miss Spanner, an older unmarried woman and a friend of Mrs Fraser. Young shows three of the options open to women at the time (this was , written in 1947): unhappily married, separated and unmarried. It is set in 1938 with the threat of war looming and in the build up to the Munich agreement. 
This is an analysis of families and the role of women within them. There is no real “action”, because we know that is coming within the year: there is no real ending either, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The whole is character and interaction driven. Young’s portrait of Mr Blackett is very telling. He isn’t violent or abusive, the cruelty is more subtle and Mr Blackett wouldn’t, of course, recognise it as such. His sense of his own worth and maleness is well drawn:
“He pitied widows but he distrusted them. They knew too much. As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage, and when it was combined with beauty, and air of well-being, a gaiety which, in women over forty had an unsuitable hint of mischief in it, he felt that in this easy conquest over, or incapacity for grief, all manhood was insulted, while all manhood, including his own, was probably viewed by that woman as a likely prey.”
Unfortunately for him, his wife understands him and has learnt to manage his idiosyncrasies, as  per this exchange when discussing whether Mr Blackett should take his eldest daughter on holiday to Europe:
“I think you might feel quite different when you came back. Your mind would be refreshed. You would have other things to think about.”
“But I don’t want to feel different!” Mr. Blackett exclaimed irritably. “And as for my mind, I wasn’t aware that it showed signs of flagging.”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Blackett said pleasantly, “it’s too active,” and she gave him one of her rare, full looks. “Like a squirrel in a cage,” she added and carried away the tray before he could reply.”

This is a look at a society which is about to undergo great change, but Young’s focus is also on relationships and women’s role. The interactions between the teenagers seem to be overshadowed by what we know is coming. 
This is a subtle and interesting novel, Young’s last, and would certainly prompt me to read more. 

8 out of 10

Starting The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

[Books do furnish a room]

The Woo by John Lewis-Stempel

For four years John Lewis-Stempel managed the three/four acres of Cockshutt wood in Herefordshire. In his last year he kept a diary, and this is it. He used traditional methods including coppicing and allowing livestock (especially pigs) to root around in the wood. The writing relies heavily on poetry and folklore. There are occasional recipes for the produce of the wood and lots of observation and descriptions of the wood, its plants and animals. Lewis-Stempel describes himself as a countryside writer rather than a nature writer.

“It is a modern fallacy that woods should be museums of trees. Woods are to be used and are the better for it. A managed wood is better for wildlife. Cockshutt, aside from providing woodcock for the table, has, down the centuries, supplied alder for charcoal, oak for timber, forage for pigs, holly for sheep fodder, coppiced hazel for hurdles, ash for farm implements. A typical English wood, then.

A wood is always in the past tense. There was a slight breeze through the tracery of the silver birch. This, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted, is the most beautiful of trees, ‘the Lady of the Woods’, but it’s tough. It was the first tree to colonise Britain after the last Ice Age, so the sound of the wind in the birch’s naked branches was the sound of England’s February 10,000 years ago.”

On the whole it’s a pretty good observational piece, somewhat disjointed at times, but the poetry is good and there are lots of interesting pieces of information.

“I thought the trees and birds belonged to me. But now I realise that I belonged to them.”

7 out of 10

Starting Anna Duchess of Cleves by Heather Darsie

[Books do furnish a room]

The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

Sam Browne’s wife has left him, not because they are unhappy, but because she feels they could both be happier. He is also disillusioned with his job as a merchant banker (well obviously, who wouldn’t be). He feels his life is falling apart. He purchases an eight volume edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Inside one of the volumes is the following advertisement:

WANTED

Diligent volunteer to carry out two months’

Painstaking archival work for private library.

Board and lodging provided;

Curiosity and imagination rewarded.

Please telephone Miss S, Synder on

01902 650 0000

Well, who could resist. Sam certainly could not. The novel sort of meanders along at a gentle pace with an interesting, but small, cast of characters. It has a modern setting, but really could have been set at any time in the last hundred years or so. there are plenty of literary references, a country setting, a family puzzle going back to the eighteenth century, a garden with a hidden temple (a temple to reason), a typical rather old country house and a magnificent library. As one review says, it is a bit of a “gothic pastiche”.There is one glorious description of the library:

"My first glance through the doorway revealed two vast windows overlooking a perfect lawn, white with frost. I advanced into a much larger room, looked around, and up, and back. What I saw was books. I was standing in a cathedral to books.

There was a fireplace at each end of the room, nearer the window side, with a narrow green carpet running from one hearth to the other, perhaps twelve yards, in front of the window. Above each fireplace hung a large and age-darkened portrait in a heave frame. A gallery with slender iron railings, reached by a spiral stair in the corner, ran along the long back wall and part of another wall at half height, and near the centre of the dark oak floor stood a huge folio table. Two iron chandeliers hung from the distant, ghostly expanse of coiling plasterwork, and a squat leather armchair stood at each window.

With the exception of the object I have mentioned so far, it was all books”

Eighteen thousand in all and the task was to find a lost letter hidden somewhere in one of them. The book is meditative, sometimes rather sad and it meanders along at a fairly slow pace. I didn’t like the ending because it felt far too knowing and the main character Sam was a bit tiresome at times. The world Sam enters feels entirely self-enclosed, something apart from reality. That attracted and repelled me at the same time. There was a lyrical and haunting quality about it, but I felt a certain amount of ambivalence.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting Once upon a river by Diane Setterfield

 

[Books do furnish a room]

Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon McGregor

I have been a fan of Jon McGregor for a while, since I read Even the Dogs. That novel used a shared narration and had a more collective voice, as does this one in the group sessions.

Robert (Doc) Wright works in the Antarctic for part of every year and had done for over twenty years. He and two other men are surveying and taking photos. The other two are younger and it’s their first time. A sudden and ferocious storm hits when they are outside and they are separated. Robert manages to get back to the shelter, but has a stroke when he gets there and struggles to call for help. One of the young men dies. Robert ends up in a hospital in Santiago and his wife Anna has to come to fetch him home. Robert has aphasia; a condition I am familiar with through my work and is common in those who have had strokes. It’s also something that happens to most people in a lesser way as they age. Aphasia means that one struggles to comprehend and process language. It is most commonly associated with word finding difficulties. The rest of the book follows the slow recuperation and focuses on an Aphasia support group which Robert and his wife attend. There is a focus on Anna’s change of role from only seeing her husband for half the year to being a carer and the associated difficulties. McGregor has done his homework about Aphasia and spent time with a support group in Nottingham. He was also writer in residence on a station in Antarctica in 2004.

McGregor examines the language of identity, our use of language and care. Anna is taken through the process of being recognised as a carer, including all the form filling and McGregor looks at what underlies it all. Anna not only questions whether she is able to do all this, but whether she wants to. The jumbled and fractured words (with the usual added swearing) of the members of the support group are captured well, as are the deficiencies of the system. It is clear that speech therapy in some sort of ongoing form would have helped all of them, but it is only available for a brief time at the beginning.

It becomes clear that the real focus of the novel is Anna, a notable academic in her own right whose life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Becoming a carer is a common everyday occurrence and is often overlooked and forgotten. McGregor throws light onto an area we often ignore and its mundaneness:

“She had to get some food into him before his blood sugar dropped too low. She had to leave him in the armchair while she went down to the kitchen, and she had to make him promise not to move. She had to listen out for any crashes or noises whilst she sliced an apple, and spread toast, and made tea. She had to ignore the phone while she ran the breakfast tray upstairs. She had to cut the toast into small pieces so he could eat it.”

It is a compelling and compassionate novel, leaving plenty of loose ends and unknowns and worth the effort. The descriptions of aphasia are pretty good.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Cannonball by Joseph McElroy