Books do furnish a room

Shorts and Thoughts by Maggie Fogarty This is a set of short stories designed to make you think and to have an edge, creating a little disturbance with a twist along the way. The themes are obsession, life changing decisions, growing old, loss, life changes and the lonely and isolated. There are eight in all. What drew my attention to the collection was the fact that the author is donating half the profits to the Social Work Benevolent Fund. Being a social worker myself, how could I resist! Maggie Fogarty worked for Social Work Today in the 1980s and has reported on social affairs issues for many years. She has worked as a TV producer and journalist, but also writes. She has written a novel and some novellas. This collection was put together to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the British Association of Social Workers. The stand out story for me was Two Doors, partly because it resonated for me personally. It is about a Child Protection social worker who has a decision to make; there are two urgent visits that need to be done, but which one does she prioritise. Inevitably she prioritises the wrong one and a child dies. She is vilified in the press and has to leave her job and change her identity. The story is brief and looks at her new life whilst reflecting on her old one. Although I work with adults and not children I face decisions like that several times a week. Although I manage a team of social workers I make sure the buck stops with me. I have more work to allocate than people to allocate to. So I have to decide who gets seen and when. It is difficult and often there are no right answers, just the lesser of the evils and no one notices when we get it right. Other stories of note involve a woman finally confronting her father who was responsible for a childhood trauma, a woman with an acquired brain injury who wakes up every day with no memories of the day before and relies on notes and diaries to start again (yes, I know this has been done before, but this is shorter and more effective). There is a man recalling his life with his wife, a radio agony aunt who gets very involved in a domestic abuse situation. A woman who was an ex surveillance officer in the police force carries on what she did as work into her daily life without work; she researches the lives of those she comes across and “tries to help” with somewhat disturbing results. Unravelling Freddie is about a group of council workers whose job it is to dig into the lives of people who die alone and try to find family friends and connections. Deadline is about a woman who sits on a government committee whose task it is to think the unthinkable. Her area is end of life. This is a good collection of stories which grew on me because they stay with you after reading and they do make you think. You may find things to question ore disagree with, but you do have to react. Recommended and cheap (at £3.99) with enough edge to satisfy. 9 out of 10 Starting A Lost Lady by Wi;;a Cather

Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz Keshavarz wrote this as a response to Reading Lolita in Tehran (RLT) and I have read the two books together. She was concerned that Nafisi had misrepresented Iran and Iranian culture, but especially Iranian women. As Keshavarz says herself: “The greatest omission in the content of Nafisi’s book is that it overlooks the agency and presence of Iranian women in the social and intellectual domain. That is ironic particularly because the book’s main claim is to tell the untold story of women in post-revolutionary Iran. If Reading Lolita in Tehran is the only book you have read about Iran, you would not be able to imagine that vibrant Iranian women writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Simin Behbahani, and Simin Danishvar ever existed, let alone imagine that they wrote during the same period that Nafisi’s book covers. You would not guess that post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has women writers and directors as outspoken as Tahmineh Milani and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, or that women activists such as the Peace Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi spoke and wrote about women and children’s rights during the same period. And these are only a few examples.” This is not a negative book. Keshavarz looks at Iranian culture and literature pre and post revolution including poets and mystics. There is a close reading of Shahrnoush Parsipur's Women Without Men (1989), she describes the effect on her classmates of the early death of the poet Forrough Farrokhzad. There are poets, mystics, novelists, film makers, philosophers and many more. The arguments are convincing and she goes through RLT in detail pointing out inconsistencies and the flatness of many of the players. Keshavarz draws on New Orientalism perspectives to make her point; she also points to the Westernization of goodness in RLT, an unqualified attribution of good things with the West. One of the problems is that readers, especially in the West, tend to bring many preconceived ideas with them about Islam and the situation in the Middle East and RLT just reinforces them with no thought or analysis. Keshavarz sets the record straight and as a result my to be read list has suddenly grown a little longer! 8 out of 10 Starting The long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi I read this in conjunction with Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz. The second is a reaction to the first and I found reading them in conjunction very helpful. The publicity blurb for the book is helpful: “Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.” This is primarily a memoir. Nafisi describes her experience in Iran from the Revolution until she left for the US in 1997. For some of that time she taught literature at Tehran University. The class described above took place in the last two years before she left. The memoir jumps around a good deal and ranges around the 1980s and late 1970s. The discussions around books mainly revolve around Nafisi’s lectures. The Thursday meetings seem to revolve around more mundane matters like food, relationships, and issues around wearing the veil. Much as I disapprove of the Iranian regime, as I disapprove of any regime based on religion, I found many of Nafisi’s criticisms rather short-sighted and simplistic whilst not minimizing the problems she faced. I could also have done without the teaching on James and Fitzgerald! There are more important concerns. Much of the criticism of this book centres on what is called New or Neo Orientalism. Hamid Dabashi accused Nafisi of playing the role that Thomas Macaulay had asked of the class of Indian civil servants in the Raj: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.' It is based on Said’s original concept which examined European justifications for being involved in the Eastern Hemisphere. New Orientalism scapegoats Islam for many ills and negates all nuanced interpretation. It has a tendency to prefer Western culture and politics. Keshavarz argues that often this New Orientalism is cloaked in an insider perspective as in this narrative. She names a number of others as well. There is a danger that books like this feed into the vehemently anti-Islamic and anti-anything but the West narratives and feelings in Western culture. There is a hostility in our culture to otherness and I think this is in danger of feeding that. That doesn’t negate the author’s experience, but reading the two books together was illuminating. Reviewing them separately is trickier! Keshavarz seemed much more sympathetic to the Iranian people and I learnt more from her account (review to follow). 5 and a half out of 10 Starting Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway

Red Shelley by Paul Foot Of all the upper and middle class white boy poets of the early nineteenth century: Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Coleridge etc, for me there has only really been one that mattered: Shelley. Paul Foot has eloquently reminded me why. It was Marx who allegedly said that if Byron had lived he would have become a bourgeois reactionary (like Wordsworth), but if Shelley had lived he would have remained radical and been in the vanguard of socialism and revolution. This may come as a surprise to some who may be used to reading the Shelley they find in the anthologies and peddled by the Shelley society. Foot looks at all of Shelley’s writing and shows that his prose is as important as his poetry and that his views were truly radical for the time. He also expressed his anger eloquently. Take the beginning of The Mask of Anarchy, for me his most important poem, where he reacts to the Peterloo massacre. Castlereagh is the prime minister of the time and Shelley was in Italy: I As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy. II I met Murder on the way - He had a mask like Castlereagh - Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him: III All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew. Foot deals with a number of aspects of Shelley’s thought. His atheism is pretty straightforward and stayed with him throughout his life. Those who have tried to tame Shelley have tried to argue he moved towards religion in later life, but Foot deals with this effectively. His republicanism is again incontrovertible. Foot also deals with his attitude to women and his attitudes to reform and revolution. Shelley was always aware of injustice. This is from a pamphlet called “Address to the people on the Death of Princess Charlotte”: “Thus much the death of the Princess Charlotte has in common with the death of thousands. How many women die in childbed and leave their families of motherless children and their husbands to live on, blighted by the remembrance of that heavy loss? How many women of active and energetic virtues—mild, affectionate, and wise, whose life is as a chain of happiness and union, which once being broken, leaves those whom it bound to perish, have died, and have been deplored with bitterness, which is too deep for words? Some have perished in penury or shame, and their orphan baby has survived, a prey to the scorn and neglect of strangers. Men have watched by the bedside of their expiring wives, and have gone mad when the hideous death-rattle was heard within the throat, regardless of the rosy child sleeping in the lap of the unobservant nurse. The countenance of the physician had been read by the stare of this distracted husband, till the legible despair sunk into his heart. All this has been and is. You walk with a merry heart through the streets of this great city, and think not that such are the scenes acting all around you. You do not number in your thought the mothers who die in childbed. It is the most horrible of ruins:—In sickness, in old age, in battle, death comes as to his own home; but in the Season of joy and hope, when life should succeed to life, and the assembled family expects one more, the youngest and the best beloved, that the wife, the mother—she for whom each member of the family was so dear to one another, should die!—Yet thousands of the poorest poor, whose misery is aggravated by what cannot be spoken now, suffer this. And have they no affections? Do not their hearts beat in their bosoms, and the tears gush from their eyes? Are they not human flesh and blood? Yet none weep for them—none mourn for them—none when their coffins are carried to the grave (if indeed the parish furnishes a coffin for all) turn aside and moralize upon the sadness they have left behind.” I could add similar quotes on Ireland and on other subjects: Shelley’s prose surprises. So does his poetry. This is called A Ballad and wasn’t published until 120 years after his death. I wonder why? A woman came up with a babe at her breast Which was flaccid with toil and hunger- She cried- “Give me food and give me rest We die if I wait much longer- The poor thing sucks and no milk will come; He would cry but his strength is gone – His wasting weakness has left him dumb - Ye can hardly hear him moan. The skin round his eyes is pale and blue – His eyes are glazed – not with tears – I wish for a little moment that you – Could know what a mother fears. Give me a piece of that fine white bread; I would give you some blood for it – Before I faint and my infant is dead – O give me a little bit. Shelley didn’t stop at the observation of poverty, he wanted to know why people are poor and what could be done about it. He even developed a form of what became known as The Labour Theory of Value and talked about liquidating landed wealth and privilege in his notes on Queen Mab. This is Shelley asking what freedom is from The Mask of Anarchy: “Thou art not, as impostors say, A shadow soon to pass away, A superstition, and a name Echoing from the cave of Fame. `For the labourer thou art bread, And a comely table spread From his daily labour come In a neat and happy home. 220 `Thou art clothes, and fire, and food For the trampled multitude-- No -- in countries that are free Such starvation cannot be As in England now we see.” Although Shelley argued for universal suffrage, he also warned that the granting of it would not solve the problems we faced as power and privilege would remain. How right he was. His approach to marriage was clear. This is from The Revolt of Islam: “Well with the world art thou unreconciled; Never will peace and human nature meet Till free and equal man and woman greet Domestic peace; and ere this power can make In human hearts its calm and holy seat, This slavery must be broken” And this: “Can man be free if woman be a slave? Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air, To the corruption of a closèd grave! Can they, whose mates are beasts condemned to bear Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare To trample their oppressors? In their home, Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear The shape of woman--hoary Crime would come Behind, and Fraud rebuild Religion's tottering dome” His approach to society is clear in Men of England: Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? … The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears. … Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap: Find wealth—let no imposter heap: Weave robes—let not the idle wear: Forge arms—in your defence to bear. There is much more in this and similar vein in The Revolt of Islam, Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy, Swellfoot the Tyrant and Peter Bell the Third. Foot does not hero worship or idolize Shelley; he delineates his faults and inconsistencies. What he does do though is show that at heart he is a radical who believed in radical solutions (for the time) to society’s problems. Some of those solutions would still be radical for our times sadly. For me there is only one of that group of poets who stays with me and that is Shelley. 9 out of 10 Starting Seahenge by Francis Pryor

Glitter of Mica by Jessie Kesson This is the third novel I have read by Jessie Kesson. It tells the story of an isolated community in rural Scotland over a period of 30 years, mainly through the eyes of the head dairyman on one of the farms, Hugh Riddell. The novel does periodically switch to other points of view: to Hugh’s wife and daughter and other local residents. The community of Caldwell seems unchanging and insular, but modernity is creeping up. The setting is post Second World War, but the narrative is not really linear. There is a particular incident referred to near the beginning of the book and taking place near the end round which the whole thing revolves. There is a social hierarchy which the War has begun to loosen, but it is still there and Kesson is charting the start of its downfall. At times the book feels as bleak as the landscape. There is the occasional flash of humour: “for she was a tight woman and had she been a ghost she would have grudged giving you a fright”. And the character of Sue Tatt brings a certain humour, but her portrayal is as poignant as it is amusing. There are times when the dialect is a little difficult and for me I enjoyed Kesson’s other two novels I have read more. But if you like bleak then this may be for you! 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Shorts and Thoughts by Maggie Fogarty

What's it Like Out by Penelope Gilliat This is a collection of nine short stories written in the mid-1960s when Gilliatt was married to the playwright John Osborne. Gilliatt also wrote a few novels. Interestingly, one of them was about London during a pandemic. The stories were originally published in the New Yorker magazine. Gilliat picks up on the odd and unusual and has a good eye for dialogue. The characters are portrayed warts and all and often communication and connection are the key and character is crucial. Gilliatt is also very good with one liners. An older couple who have ceased to speak to each other: “No one understands loneliness if they haven’t been married,” The Redhead covers a whole life and Harriet is the redhead of the title. She is very tall and does not look conventional and her mother doesn’t like her: "Mrs. Buckingham's dislike gave Harriet a sort of bristling resilience. She had from the beginning an immunity to other people's opinion of her, which isn't a characteristic that is much liked in women." And also when she was an orderly in the First World War: “Boadicea with a bedpan” A review in the New York Times noted: “All the stories deal with separation and disintegration: marriages break up, partnerships split; people grow away from each other, even as they fear the pain of parting.” On the whole the stories are enjoyable. There were some tropes which were too obvious and a few issues with language. The novel about the pandemic looks interesting, but only because we are in one! 6 out of 10 Starting Glitter of Mica by Jessie Kesson

Music Upstairs by Shena MacKay This is Mackay’s first novel published in 1965 when she was nineteen and is set in 1960s London. I have read Orchard on Fire, which was excellent, but that was thirty years later. The novel revolves around Sidonie O’Neill, a young woman living in London bedsitland. Along with her friend Joyce she takes a room in a house with Lenny and Pam Beacon. Sidonie drifts around London during the novel, mostly without work, and has affairs with both Pam and Lenny. There is a disjointedness to this and things tend to happen to Sidonie, she is reactive rather than proactive. There isn’t a lot of plot here and can appear incoherent, but Mackay does provoke thought and captures the rootlessness of bedsit society. There are oddities. The Beacon children are almost anonymous, but always around. It is difficult to work out how many there are, probably about four. There are few traditional notions of motherhood here. Pam and Lenny are both needy but Lenny is an unpleasant character and clings on to Sidonie in a rather smothering way. Sidonie spends some time with a variety of men who just seem to latch on to her. She had a lack of agency which was disturbing, although when Lenny decides he is actually in love with her the atmosphere changes and the ending is quite bizarre. It is an interesting slice of mid 60s London, but I didn’t find any of the characters particularly engaging. 6 out of 10 Starting What's it Like Out by Penelope Gilliat

Thank you Athena The Silence of the Girls A retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of the women involved, particularly Briseis. As in the Iliad Briseis is the wife of Mynes, son of the king of Lyrnessus. At the beginning of the novel the city is sacked by Achilles and all of Briseis’s male relatives were murdered and she was given as a prize to Achilles. The novel follows the plot of the Iliad with the ending taken from The Trojan Women by Euripedes. The usual suspects are all present: Agamemnon, Nestor, Ajax, Odysseus, Hector, Paris, Priam, Helen, Andromache and so on. The narration is mainly by Briseis, but particularly in the second part, it switches to Achilles. The novel, especially the first part, tells the story of the women of the Greek camp and is a very effective counterpoint to the usual tales based on the male combatants. The voice of Briseis is a strong one and when Barker uses the quote from Homer (also used in the film Troy) put in the mouth of Priam: “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Briseis has a counter point to this: “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do, I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.” Barker is giving a voice to women who have been mute. Mary Beard has pointed out that the exchange in the Odyssey where Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to be quiet in a room full of men is: “the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up.”” Barker is pretty faithful to the source material, but portrays Briseis as being aware enough to know that she will be a footnote in history, unlike Achilles: “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps?” The portrayal of Achilles is more nuanced than many. He is no glorious hero and Barker portrays him as a brutal and troubled soul: “Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.” Patroclus is a more sympathetic character and Barker looks closely his relationship with Achilles, where he plays more than a supporting role. Barker uses quite a few contemporary phrases and idioms which jar slightly, especially some of the drinking songs and terms the men used. However I suspect Barker was making the point that male braggadocio is male braggadocio is pretty much the same throughout history. I did prefer the first half of the book to the second, as the second was more focused on the conflict. I am not sure that comparisons with Miller’s Song of Achilles are helpful, they are very different books and this is about the women in the camp. “Yes, the death of young men in battle is a tragedy – I’d lost four brothers, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. A tragedy worthy of any number of laments – but theirs is not the worst fate. I looked at Andromache, who’d have to live the rest of her amputated life as a slave, and I thought: We need a new song.” 8 out of 10 Starting The Boy with the perpetual nervousness by Graham Caveney

Symposium by Muriel Spark This is a late novel by Spark, published in 1990 and the whole thing centres on a dinner party. It’s a bit like a jigsaw being put together before your eyes. It is very funny in a bleak way and certainly macabre as the plot (such as it is) revolves around a number of murders and unexplained deaths. There is no point running through the characters in detail, they are all fairly wealthy yuppie types and the servants busily waiting on them are part of a gang robbing those whose houses are empty. One of the guests is the newly married Margaret Damien (previously Murchie) whose past history and links to various deaths is gradually explained. As she is Scottish, there is a touch of Macbeth about it all. She has an uncle who is an asylum and who is her firm friend, to the consternation of the rest of her family. Margaret’s new husband has a very wealthy mother. Need I say more! As an aside there are a bunch of Marxist nuns who provide some comic relief until one of them is murdered. Margaret is one of the nuns (briefly before she decides to find an eligible husband from the list her uncle has drawn up). Spark can set a scene: “So it happened that shortly after Margaret Murchie had joined the community as a novice the BBC duly arrived. Miss Jones, a team of five and their cameras. The first thing they did was to change the lighting arrangements in the recreation room and the refractory, clobbering through the hall with their unnecessarily stout boots. Sister Marrow appeared in the hallway. "What the f***ing hell do you think you're doing?” She enquired of the chief cameraman, who was immediately joined protectively by the other four technicians.” This was well received critically and reviewers seem to have enjoyed it. The title of course comes from Plato and the idea is the same, we learn through the dialogue. Of course it is important to remember that Spark is a theological writer and the doctrine of pre-destination is scattered all over this. For me there is a big but. It’s the old trope (well used here) of mental ill-health leading to murderous intent. Obviously, if you escape from the asylum in which you are incarcerated, the first thing you are going to do is travel to another city and murder a total stranger in their bed. Margaret’s uncle Magnus is another example who is used as a foil for Margaret and an agent provocateur. The stereotype that anyone with mental health problems tends towards violence is dangerous and leads to victimisation by society. It’s sloppy and unnecessary. 4 out of 10 Starting Music Upstairs by Shena Mackay

Strangers by Antonia White This is a collection of eight short stories and two poems. Like all White’s writing there is a strong autobiographical element. These are more like brief fragments rather than extended stories: she did this in her novels starting with Frost in May. The general focus of the stories are the issues that White focuses on as a rule. These include religion, Roman Catholicism to be specific and convent life. Mental health is central to a number of the stories and some reflect White’s time in an asylum in the 1920s. White had a number of terms she used for her own mental ill health: “neurasthenia”, “accidie”, “the beast” and “a mental crash”. She had several years of Freudian analysis and fell out with and went back to the Church. The stories that relate to White’s mental health are powerful, especially The House of Clouds where she describes some of her experiences: “The nurses caught and dragged her along a passage. The passage was like a long room: it had a shiny wooden floor with double iron tracks in it like the tracks of a model railway. A young man with a signet ring was bending over her, holding a funnel with a long tube attached. He forced the tube down her nose and began to pour some liquid down her throat.” Surprise Visit is also quite striking. It concerns a 38 year old woman, well respected and in an important job in publishing. In her early 20s she had spent some time in an asylum. She stumbles across the asylum on a lunchtime walk, it is now the Imperial War Museum. The story describes her reactions as she decides to go in. White is good at setting a scene: “Sad men in Norfolk jackets dropped in at intervals, poured themselves out cups of strong tea, drank them hastily, and departed as if to catch imaginary trains. A waitress peeled off the checked cloths and exposed the tables in their iron nakedness; the plain, unvarnished clock ticked on, the scum settled in my half-empty cup, and still Miss Hislop talked.” There is a good deal to interest. The Rich Woman has a gothic, malevolent and slightly ghostly edge. Relationships with men are always fraught with tension and lack of understanding. In her biographical quartet of novels White uses a quote from Blake which is apposite here: "Why should I be bound to thee/ Oh my lovely mirtle tree?" There is always a sense of looseness and instability in marriage, reflecting White’s own experience. White battles with female identity and is always interesting. She is a middle class Catholic Englishwoman and her stories reflect that, but her depiction of mental health and the asylum system is powerful and holds the attention. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Symposium by Muriel Spark

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli A brief novella set in Poland in World War 2. It’s a pretty straightforward story, but has a certain moral complexity. It concerns three German soldiers: two named and an unnamed narrator. It is winter with snow on the ground and very cold. The three soldiers are part of a unit which hunts for Jews and then executes them. The men don’t enjoy the executions and have managed to get out of execution duty by going out to hunt for more Jews. They do find a young Jewish man and take him prisoner. They take refuge in an old and abandoned cottage. They have some basic food, frozen bread, an onion, cornmeal and a little salami. They manage to light the old stove and burn many of the wooden fixtures and fittings of the cottage to heat the stove and make soup. A polish hunter arrives and after some negotiation joins the group and adds some potato alcohol to the soup. Relationships are strained but they eventually share a meal together. Then comes a decision for the three men. Do they now take the Jewish prisoner back to be shot now that they have shared a meal together? It is written simply and the language is spare: there are no chapters or headings, but a depth of feeling is communicated: “We came down from the hill where we had smoked. Bauer whined like a dog that he should never have sat down in the snow, that he felt cold all over now. Emmerich told him to stop, though he said it lightly, not really meaning it. Bauer yelled at us that he’d decided to whine until dark. We found another road and stayed on it for a while. It was a relief not to sink into snow at every step. On the whole, we preferred the frozen potholes, even if they were dangerous. I was beginning to feel hungry, but I didn’t dare bring the subject up yet. None of us had dared mention it since we left that morning. My stomach ached. Sometimes, when I turned my head too quickly, I felt dizzy. It must have been the same for Emmerich and Bauer” The descriptions surrounding the meal are also very evocative: “The soup looked good and smelled good. The slices of salami floated on the surface, carried there by the cornmeal, now cooked. The melted lard was still boiling. We turned away from the stove, and the heat caressed our backs. We watched steam rise from the soup. My head was spinning. We looked at the slices of bread. The soup was continuing to simmer. The edges of the bread were toasted, reminding us of things past.” There are passages where the difficulties of what they were tasked to do were stark and Mingarelli shows the way the three men struggled within themselves: “Because if you want to know what it is that tormented me, and that torments me to this day, it’s seeing that kind of thing on the clothes of the Jews we’re going to kill: a piece of embroidery, coloured buttons, a ribbon in the hair. I was always pierced by those thoughtful maternal displays of tenderness.” This is fairly slight but a powerful perspective on the atrocities related to the holocaust and it poses some very human dilemmas. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Strangers by Antonia White

Arrest Me for I Have Run Away A collection of short stories by Stevie Davies and they are of good quality and are broad in scope, but focus on small specifics as well as the bigger issues. I will let Davies herself explain: “My own interest in writing short story came late: as a novelist I’ve loved the complexity, magnitude and duration of the novel’s imaginative world. Sometimes episodes have broken away from a novel’s narrative and taken their own direction: I could neither use nor lose them. ‘Oud, 1942’ concerns expats in wartime Cairo and was dreamed up while writing my novel set in Egypt, Into Suez, as was ‘Red Earth, Cyrenaica’, the aftermath of a man’s wartime experience in the desert, and the anomalous love that has haunted him ever since. His wife knew nothing about it. Or did she? Short story thrives on small epiphanies, twists and divagations. I notice that they {the stories} are often concerned with magnitude and the infinitesimal. Perspective zooms in and out: the microscopic appears in close-up, in, for instance, the monologue ‘Pips’ in which an elderly widower in a dentist’s waiting room focuses on a pip lodged between his teeth. The pip is nothing and everything: he has taken his entire life along with him into that waiting room, as we do. In ‘Bead’, a child’s plastic bead becomes a figure for memory and its equivocations. In ‘Woman Recumbent’, Libby has fallen catastrophically and spends the night helplessly on the floor. Into her ken comes an ant, ‘the most minor of miracles. A creaturely presence’ which ‘no longer seemed as minuscule, but a companionate presence which she tacitly saluted. And there beside it, one human hair.’” Davies looks at grief in a couple of the stories, in one focussing feelings through a musical instrument (a cello). Musical instruments also play a role in other stories. The role of parenting runs through many of them and the links with abuse. There is great psychological depth and wisdom here. As always with Davies I was not disappointed and Woman Recumbent is a masterpiece. 10 out of 10 Starting The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

No Signposts in the Sea by Vita Sackville-West This is Vita Sackville-West’s last novel, written in the late 1950s. It is set on a cruise and was also written on one. It concerns a political journalist, Edmund Carr, who discovers he has about four months to live. He has no family or close ties and decides to go on an extended cruise, partly because a woman he knows a little is also going on it. Inevitably the book focuses on the nature of life and love and reflections on death. Carr is also an acerbic commentator on his fellow passengers and his own idiosyncrasies as he becomes closer to Laura, a woman he already knew. Carr is quite clear about the reasons for spending his last days on a cruise: “I want my fill of beauty before I go. Geographically I do not care and scarcely know where I am. There are no signposts in the sea.” It is obviously quite handy that he has the sort of terminal illness (unnamed) that shows no symptoms and from which you die quite suddenly with little notice. The book itself appears to be Edmund’s random jottings in his journal. Sackville-West makes her views on relationships on relationships and marriage pretty clear and these reflect the openness of her own marriage. She and her husband, Harold Nicholson both had male and female lovers. The reviews generally heap praise on this. Haunting, compelling, exquisite, elegiac and so on. There are certainly some good descriptive passages and reflections on life and its end: “Then come mysterious currents which rock the ship from below without much visible convulsion. Where do they come from, these secret arteries of the sea, tropical or polar? They are as inexplicable to me as the emotions which rock my own heart. I do not let them appear on the surface but am terribly aware of them beneath. Sometimes, churned by a gale, the waters grow angry and the blue expanse turns black and white, tossing us remorselessly, the waves crashing with a sound as of breaking biscuits, the rain hissing as it obliterates all vision, and again I draw the parallel between the elements and the surprising violence I have discovered in myself.” However much I appreciated the reflective nature of the novel there were some serious issues for me. These related to race and disability and were very marked, particularly those related to race. These were persistent as the ships moves from port to port. Carr is also supposed to have come from humble working class roots, but this doesn’t sit easy with his character and attitudes. These were issues I could not overlook. “I realised for the first time how greatly our apprehension of people depends on the variation of conditions under which we see them, and thought it possible that we may never truly perceive them at all.” 6 out of 10 Starting A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe This is a novel about a missing fourteen year old girl and consequently it is bound to draw comparison with Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. It is also set in Lincoln where I live. I remember reading Ulverton many years ago, but have read nothing else by Thorpe. The geography of the area is a bit hit and miss. Fay lives on the Ermine estate, well known in Lincoln. He characterises it as being a typical run down white working class housing estate which you would find in many cities. This is a bit of an over simplification and there are a few other liberties with the geography, including the addition of a street of shops which doesn’t exist! We hear a set of voices including Fay’s. She is portrayed as a tough streetwise fourteen year old with a sharp tongue and a troubled home life: still very vulnerable and inseparable from her dog (who goes missing with her). The other voices include a very irritating tourist and his family on the Lincolnshire coast, a retired steelworker, a second hand bookshop owner, the manager of a children’s clothes shop, a Rumanian care worker and a postulant monk in a nearby monastery. We also periodically hear from Fay. The polyphonic nature of the novel is at the same time a strength and a drawback. The first and the last voices I found particularly annoying. In fact, although the characters are well drawn, I found them pretty stereotypical. The bookshop owner in his 50s was portrayed as slightly creepy and a little desperate (very unfair on the bookshop owners I know). The clothes shop manager was a late 40 something woman looking for love and again appearing as slightly desperate. There are links between the characters, some rather tenuous. Fay does work experience in the clothes shop and steals a book (on dogs) from the bookshop. The care worker finds Fay’s abandoned coat. A couple of the characters only see the missing posters. The last voice (apart from Fay’s) is the postulant monk and there are a couple of oblique suggestions about Fay’s fate, but nothing substantial. The ending is open so the reader is left to wonder what happened. Thorpe tells a story well and all of his characters are flawed and rather sad. It is set in 2012, so before the Brexit fiasco, but there are hints of the area being somewhat hostile and xenophobic. I wonder what the story of Fay adds to the novel and as I said there is an element of stereo typing as well. It just felt unconnected and the messing about with some of the geography irritated me. 6 out of 10 Starting No Signposts in the Sea by Vita Sackville-West

I agree Willoyd, I think she should have been the outright winner. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell This is a first novel, one of the things remarkable about it. It is, effectively an alternative history of England set in the early nineteenth century. It is about magic and the assumption is that magic once existed in England. It had been lost but is now returned in the forms of Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. This fits into a bewildering variety of genres. There is an element of the historical novel. The whole business of magic is treated as serious and scholarly and there are footnotes, lots of footnotes (almost DFW and Gaddis territory). There is an element of fantasy about it, but being set in the early nineteenth century there are links to the Romanticism of the period (Byron takes some part in this) and there are pastiches of many different styles. I can see elements of Austen and Dickens as you would expect and it’s certainly gothic. The world building/adjusting is impressive. There are a number of themes and issues addressed. The central relationship between Strange and Norrell runs throughout and their relationship/friendship runs through the book even when they are in opposition. There is also a sense of there being a relationship between mental illness, magic and the world of faerie which is interesting. Clarke also looks at Englishness and the relationship (and differences) between the north and south of England. These differences do exist: I come from the north and have lived in the south (for a while): it is almost a different country. The novel creates atmosphere in bucketloads and it has been televised (haven’t seen it), won lots of awards and even been turned into a board game! I’m not going to drag you all through the plot, it’s a little complex and would take too much space and time. The book itself, all 782 pages of it almost seems to finish in a rush and too soon (I rarely say that). It’s not really a book to quote and in some ways it feels like an introduction to the world. I was puzzled by the maleness of the magicians, but a follow up set of short stories has righted this and Clarke has outlined her reasons for keeping the two separate. This was an enjoyable fantastical journey through early nineteenth century England and I was surprised to enjoy it as much as I did. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Kehavarz

Girl. Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo Joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and a host of other accolades. It is almost a set of short stories and involves 12 women, black and British, moving through the decades of the twentieth century. Evaristo says of the novel: “I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well.” Evaristo looks at gender, sex, race, class, patriarchy and history, linking all the stories together through the first night of a play written by one of the characters. There is variety in the characters in terms of class, sexuality, politics and the whole holds together rather neatly. The oldest character is 93 and the youngest in her teens. The tone of the whole is well set by Evaristo’s dedication: “For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren & the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn & our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs & our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.” There is great humour, warmth and lightness to this. It has been described as polyphonic. It is worth noting that not long after the ceremony a BBC news presenter referred to the other joint winner of the Booker, Attwood, by name, but referred to Evaristo as “another author”. Evaristo commented on Twitter: “How quickly & casually they have removed my name from history – the first black woman to win it. This is what we’ve always been up against, folks.” A pertinent comment. The characterization is rich and deep and is almost a history of Black British women charting the racism of the 50s and 60s and moving to the present. Each woman is portrayed warts and all, but also in relation to each other. Evaristo gives black women a voice and the voices are varied: ranging from one who has recently voted for UKIP to the debates about trans within feminism. This book is a joy to read and is life-affirming and certainly deserves the accolades it has had. 9 out of 10 Starting Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins Set in the early nineteenth century, culminating in 1826, this is another in a number of recent novels which take a look at the slave trade. It is certainly gothic and rather bleak. Frances (Frannie) is a slave girl with a black mother and a white father on a plantation in Jamaica. At the start of the book she is in prison in London accused of the murder of Mr and Mrs Benham where she worked as a maid. In the novel she describes the journey from the plantation to London and eventually to prison. The book ends with the trial. The artwork on the cover is striking and this is a first novel. There is a good deal going on here and very few likeable characters and some horrifying moments. There is an element of Jane Eyre, some insights into how the anti-slavery movement developed between the abolition of the trade, the hypocrisy of those involved in the movement, the speculations of those trying to work out whether the various races of humanity were substantially the same or not. There are contrasts made, when Frannie is brought to London and given to the Benhams to work as a maid, she is technically free, which leads to comparisons between the servant classes and slaves on a plantation. Frannie has been educated and reads when she can: enjoying Moll Flanders amongst other works. Candide makes an appearance and the links to Frankenstein become obvious as the novel goes on. There is a Paradise Lost element as well, the name of the plantation was Paradise. Throw in a lesbian affair and a brothel called The School specialising in birching, flogging and spanking: very English. Occasionally a bleak shaft of humour shows through, Frannie reflects on one of her clients: “Men like him were the ones who wanted scarring, always happier to let themselves loose under the whip hand of a black. That put the white girls’ noses out of joint. But we’d already been in the bondage business, no matter that it had been at the other end.” There is prizefighting and the rowdiness of 1820s London. There is no saintliness here and suffering does not improve. It is a bleak and nasty gothic novel in its intention. The reveal of what actually happened is a slow gradual one over the course of the whole book. The gothic is overarching, but there are also elements of slave narrative, romance, murder mystery and prison novel. I liked the way reading was portrayed as a transformative experience. I also appreciated the way that what united some of the women, black and white was anger in response to oppression and the denial of an outlet for their abilities. Collins writes of her character: “I wanted Frannie to say the things many people in her position would have been afraid to say. I wanted her to be irreverent and to comment on her masters’ inability to see their own mistakes.” This Frannie does and that can make the narrative seem a little stretched at times and leaves the reader questioning whether this could have happened. Frannie narrates as she writes in prison awaiting trial: “I write this by tallow light, having now paid sufficient guineas to be moved to a cell of my own. No law says I can’t read and write here, but for all I know the turnkeys would throw these pages away if they caught me at it, same as they did with Madame’s letter when I was first brought in. One click of a key, one turn of the knob, and I’m ready to shove paper, pen and ink under my skirts. They’re always spying, which means I must speed my pen. Now it’s a case of gobbling backwards. As if I spent my whole life putting those words in, and now I’m spitting them back out.” On the whole I think this is a good gothic novel. It sometimes challenges the readers’ preconceptions of what a gothic novel should be and nothing is ever quite as it seems. There were some niggles, but not enough to put me off entirely. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Women who Blow on Knots by Ece Temelkuran

Walking Naked by Nina Bawden One of Nina Bawden’s lesser known novels it takes place on one day. It concerns Laura, a writer and her husband Andrew. The day is split into four parts. The first part consists of going with her husband whilst he plays a game of real tennis with a client. The second part is a lunch time buffet at a close friend’s house (to celebrate the boat race). Thirdly a visit to prison (Wormwood Scrubs) to visit Laura’s son from her first marriage who is serving six months on a drugs charge. Finally there is a visit to Laura’s parents as her father is unwell. Each of these events is linked to a set of memories from Laura’s past and gradually a picture is built up over the day which gives the reader an insight into Laura and her life. On the surface Laura is happily married and successful; the day strips away the veneer. It is set in the 1970s when Laura is in middle age. There is a strong cast of secondary characters who are gradually revealed and on the whole Bawden is pretty good at character building. The characters and settings are thoroughly middle class and that can be a bit wearing, but there is a knowingness about it and Bawden always makes her characters flawed and believable. Laura is a flawed narrator and in terms of evaluating a situation, not always reliable. The narrative voice occasionally switches and there are the occasional knowing asides which I found rather irksome. There is also a portrayal of serious mental health issues in one character which were a little predictable as was the selection of which character in the novel to drop it on. Of course they are going to be alone, unable to hold down a job and with a tragic history. Not really convincing. This was ok, but didn’t really hold my attention. 6 out of 10 Starting Arrest me for I have run away by Stevie Davies

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis Mike Davis focuses on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, looking at the extreme climatic conditions of the times which led to droughts, floods and famines. He looks at the El Nino events and there is a good deal of meteorology in the book. Davis focuses on India, China and Brazil in particular, but also partially on Southern Africa, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The death tolls are immense 12 million in China and 6 million in India in 1876-8 alone. Davis provides a detailed analysis which shows that the real problem was the way the Imperial powers managed the problem, sticking to the principles of free trade leading to hikes in grain prices and very little famine relief. The European powers (particularly Britain) are the main culprits, but also to a lesser extent the US and Japan. Davis concludes that the imposition of free market economics was cultural genocide and it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion. Davis points out that there was no increase in India’s per capita income between 1757 and 1947 and the British systematically dismantled the Indian manufacturing sector. In the mid eighteenth century the average European standard of living was slightly lower than the rest of the world and India actually produced a quarter of the world’s manufactures. The Raj soon changed all that! There is a political history and a scientific history contained within this book and Davis has done his research. The total death toll due to famine in India, China and Brazil 1876-1902 was around sixty million. Two points stand out: “They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.” And “Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion.. there were almost always surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.” Of course the railroads were a possible solution, but: “The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.” The pictures of famine victims look similar to those of people in later concentration camps. This completely blows any illusion that Empire was in any way “good” for colonized peoples and should dispel any nostalgia for a lost imperial past. One small niggle: a chapter to round it all up at the end would have been helpful. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Red Shelley by Paul Foot

Willoyd: I agree with most of your list. Would struggles with Stopes because of her views on Eugenics. The Three Sisters by May Sinclair It was May Sinclair who coined the term “stream of consciousness” when reviewing Dorothy Richardson. Sinclair was a suffragist and modernist who also was influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. This novel was published in 1914 just as war started. This novel is set in Yorkshire. The three sisters of the title are the three daughters of a vicar. They have moved to a parsonage on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Sound familiar? Well Sinclair had just completed writing introductions to the Bronte novels and written about the sisters in The Three Brontes. This is a sharp look at the role of women in the late Victorian era and a critique of marriage. There are no Byronic heroes here to rescue maidens and the role of men is also under scrutiny. The Vicar of Garth is a patriarchal bully who tries to control his daughters. Their reaction and revolt make up the central thrust of the novel. There is a contrast between the one eligible male, the local doctor, Rowcliffe and Jim Greatorex who seems to be a combination of Heathcliff and Branwell Bronte. The novel looks at the struggle for self-development that Victorian women. The reader can see Sinclair struggling with how to represent the conscious and unconscious and female sexuality. This is a tension she later resolves when she adopts the stream of consciousness mode of writing. There are some issues, the dialect being one. The Yorkshire accent of the local villagers is very heavy and not easy to understand. The focus on trying to make sense of the storms of inner life can feel a little clunky at times, but there is a clear commitment to exploring the lives of women and the breakdown of Victorian social and moral certainty. The interplay between the classes is interesting as are the reactions to the marriage across the class divide. All three sisters are looking for a space of their own and all three have to face the reality that they have to get that through a male, be that a husband or father. The picture of religion is pleasantly unflattering and Sinclair even manages to add the Church of England/Methodist rivalry and the tensions in the Established Church when a high church curate arrives from the Additional Curates Society. This is an interesting early modernist novel which deserves to be better known and raises some interesting talking points. It almost feels suspended between the Victorian classic novels and modernism. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Willoyd: I wouldn't want to include Thatcher, but would have done so. Probably no royalty. There was too long a gap between Boudicca and Elizabeth I. The only living women: Quant and Sturgeon? Probably not, but maybe Westwood. I might have included Nusrat Pinky Lilani, who is very influential, but not well known. I may have considered someone like Vera Lynn, Dusty Springfield or Vera Brittain. There are lots of possibilities. Isobars by Janette Turner Hospital This is the first time I have read anything by Janette Turner Hospital. Australian by birth, her fiction moves between Australia, Canada and the US, following her moves. The themes are universal ones: loss, memory, the nature of desire. The stories tend to focus on moments of tension and crisis and Hospital seems to be able to focus on the mess of human existence. Past and present collide: in one story a professor sees his first wife on the New York subway on the day she dies in Australia. In another a town that was flooded following the building of a dam surfaces following a drought: this triggers memories in an older woman who was raped in the town many years before. Many of the stories involve acts of violence against women, but also acts of caring between women, a sense of sisterhood. Many of the men in the stories are older and seemingly well intentioned, looking for something redemptive. Others are younger and more unpredictable. There is often fragmentation and lack of resolution. Hospital addresses the issues of post-colonial cultures, particularly in Canada and Australia, although there is a story about the Indian diaspora in Canada. Racial tensions are examined in “Bondi” and reveal some of the ugliness that lies beneath the Bondi hedonism following an incident on the beach: “It’s the wogs. The wogs started it. They were bothering a white girl, they threw sand in a white lady’s face, they kicked a football right into a little kid’s head, a little white kid, he’s got concussion. Theories fly as fast as punches, as thick as blood. Go get ‘em, send the buggers back to where they bloody well came from.” A refrain I have heard many times, as I am sure many of you have too. One of the stand out stories is “The Last of the Hapsburgs” about a school teacher (Miss Davenport) teaching far away from home (exiled because of an unnamed scandal) in Northern Queensland; she feels displaced. As a result she identifies with two of her pupils. There is Hazel who is an Indigenous Australian and displaced in her own land and Rebecca, whose parents are survivors of the Holocaust. Two of the three have escaped to Northern Queensland, one is already trapped there. The finale of the story shows they are all trapped there. There is a very good modern ghost story linked to terrorism. On the whole this is a very sharp and perceptive set of stories with enough to challenge and maintain interest. There are a few language issues but this is an author I will return to at some point as I would like to read some of her longer work. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Walking Naked by Nina Bawden

A History of Britain in 21 Women by Jenni Murray This pretty much does what it says on the cover and provides a pen picture of twenty-one significant women in British history. These are only pen pictures, ten to twelve pages; she has done a similar book for world history. The list is Boudicca (Murray insists on Boadicea), Elizabeth I, Aphra Behn, Caroline Herschel, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstoncraft, Jane Austen, Mary Somerville, Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ethel Smyth, Constance Markievicz, Gwen John, Nancy Astor, Barbara Castle, Margaret Thatcher, Mary Quant and Nicola Sturgeon. It is a list that can be debated. The only two living women are Sturgeon and Quant. There is no Virginia Woolf, only one black woman (Mary Seacole) and no Asian women. And would I have included Thatcher? There is a focus on the struggle for the vote with suffragettes and suffragists. Nancy Astor is included as the first female MP to take her place in the Commons. Also included is Constance Markievicz who was the first woman elected. She stood in Ireland for Sinn Fein and even then Sinn Fein had a policy of not sitting in parliament. What stands out if Fanny Burney’s account of a mastectomy she had without anesthetic at the age of 59. It is a vivid and horrific piece of writing. This also reminded me that I must read Ethel Smyth’s memoirs. It was Carlyle who said: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and Murray provides a good counterpoint. One grumble is that there is no bibliography. This is a simple straightforward introduction to the lives of 21 women. Information and analysis is limited and I didn’t agree with all of her choices. A book club read. 7 out of 10 Starting Isobars by Janette Turner Hospital

Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann This is scholarly and well researched: a continuation of Kaufmann’s PhD thesis: in other words a proper history book. There is a myth that there were very few people of colour in England in the Tudor period and that Elizabeth 1 made an effort to get rid of those that were. Strictly Kaufmann extends her range to the mid-1620s. Here ten particular men and women are identified and their stories told. Kaufmann does have a tendency to wander off the point and give background detail, probably because her source material is fairly thin. The main sources of evidence are parish and court records: deaths, baptisms, court cases of variable kinds. We start with a trumpeter at the early Tudor Court, John Blanke who was present at Henry VIII’s coronation and end with Cattalena of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire whose possessions at her death were recorded (including her cow) in the early seventeenth century. She was a free and single woman, living alone in an English village: supporting herself. Another woman, a widow was designated as her executor. We know there were Africans living in England in the Roman period. By the end of the Tudor period there were communities in most of the ports, but especially in London. Kaufmann has identified 360 people identified as being black in records of the time. As records are only partial there were likely a significant number more. She also identifies that the very confusing Admiralty records have been little researched and they will have much more information as a number of those identified were certainly sailors. This is before the slave trade (apart from a couple of abortive voyages by Hawkins in the 1560s) and before there were any major colonies. Some were here as a result of trade with the West African coast; others were liberated from Spanish or Portuguese ships; some came with particular skills like Jacques Francis who was part of a team of divers who were charged with swimming down to the wreck of the Mary Rose and salvaging what they could. Kaufmann has an awareness of the times in which she writes: “as debate about immigration becomes even more vituperative and divisive, it is vital to understand that the British Isles have always been peopled by immigrants. The Black Tudors are just one of a series of different peoples who arrived on these shores in centuries past.” The science of DNA has added to weight of evidence as well. A man in Wales was able to trace his family tree back to Tudor times and a black servant in one of the great houses. This man, known as Jetto has descendants in many parts of the Britain and even as far as Australia. By the nature of humanity many of those who settled here married as well. All of these migrants were free; slavery wasn’t legal at the time, not in England. There is evidence that many of the pirate ships had crews that were often up to half black, mostly escaped slaves from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. This is a fascinating account and being a historian by original training I appreciated the scholarship that went into it. This is very much a starting point and I am sure research will develop the story. There were a few niggles and a few tangents, but on the whole this is a good counterpoint to some traditional Tudor histories. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe

Life, End of by Christine Brooke-Rose Life, End of It’s a bit ironic that as I have read this the Covid 19 pandemic has taken hold: it was entirely coincidental. This is Brooke-Rose’s final novel, semi-autobiographical about a writer struggling with the limitations of old age and changing relationships with those around her. The novel is very much bound by the physical limitations of the body as it begins to stop working. I haven’t read much be Brooke-Rose. I sort of enjoyed Textermination, but my thoughts at the time I think were a little over enthusiastic and subsequent reflection has somewhat adjusted them. That being said Brooke-Rose certainly has a way with words and she plays quite effectively with the language of the illnesses of older age: polyneuritis, Zimmer frame and cardio-vascular. However I did have some problems with the throwaway comments and judgements. Like this one when talking about the struggles with eyesight fading her character has: “Oh of course blindness is nothing, thousands of people are blind, even children. But are there many both blind and very lame? The two don’t go together. A blind person needs legs to learn from touching walls and furniture; a lame person needs at least one eye to guide the zimmer or the wheelchair. The two together mean total dependence, even guiding a fork to the lips or tea to the cup.” This is quite a negative approach to disability and at odds with the strengths based approach that social work takes today. There are better bits. The descriptions of trying to complete ablutions at a sink when one can barely stand. Some reflections on American imperialism (The Unilateral States of America). Cardiovascular problems becoming a play on Vasco da Gama: de Harmer, then Charmer, Qualmer, Alarmer and so on. The narrator splits everyone into two groups T.F.s (True Friends) and O.P.s (Other People). Inevitably the O changes into other, otiose, obstreperous, obsolete, over-sensitive, obtuse, obdurate, oxymoronic and so on. There is lots of this punning, so of it multilingual, some of it very funny: on discovering an eye can have an infarction “How can the eye have a heart-attack? Because it loves, it loves”. And then the end of the novel with the punning about Descartes: “Dehors before the cart, after all. A cruising mind, as against the mere word-play fun. Meanwhile: Les jeux de maux sont faits” Parts of this were good and hit the spot, other bits really irritated me, so a mixed bag. 6 out of 10 Starting The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Newfoundland by Rebbecca Ray This is a long book; at over a thousand pages. Most books of a similar length tend to have an epic sweep about them: Les Miserables, War and Peace and the like. This one doesn’t. It focuses on an imaginary Welsh small town near Aberystwyth called Ynys-morlan. It is a seaside town that is gradually crumbling; hit by decline, by holidays taken abroad and a lack of investment. The cast of characters is limited, not many more than a dozen significant ones and we spend a thousand pages with them. Into this mix comes an American woman, Charlotte Weyland, who buys a house on a hill near the town and does it up. She strikes up a friendship with a local woman, Ruth Lewis, who helps her in the garden. Charlotte has a legacy from her mother which she does not want. It is £33 million and she decides to give it to the town to renovate it. That is the plot, the effects of suddenly getting what you always wanted for your house/business. Beware of what you wish for. Ray looks at the effects on the community and on the relationships of the main characters. This is not a book with humour in it. The effects of the money are mainly negative for the relationships of the current occupants, although good for the infrastructure. The pace of the novel is slow and some of the slow build tragedies reminded me a little of Hardy. There is a very good exploration of domestic abuse and Ray tries to get into the minds of both parties with some success. Ray’s attempt to explain and understand the mind of the abuser struggles a little with brutal masculinity and attempts to redeem it by explanations of misplaced love and aimless life. Maybe, but I wasn’t convinced, maybe he’s just a brutal thug. Although this is set in Wales, it does not feel Welsh, the sense of place isn’t that strong, and that’s not entirely true, there is a sense of bleak abandoned seaside town. With the houses that "looked like a line of driftwood that had been piled here by the sea". There are a few loose ends, a few happyish endings and more tragedies. There are also things which took place which made me think: “That would never happen”, particularly a couple of the sexual encounters. It’s a character driven novel with deeply flawed characters that you get to know very well because you spend a thousand pages in their company. If you like that sort of thing then this may be for you. I wanted to like it more. 5 and a half out of 10 Starting Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo