Books do furnish a room

Zami: A new spelling of my name by Audre Lorde “Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.” “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” Lorde refers to this as a biomythography, which is a combination of biography, myth and history. Lorde says that the word Zami is a Carriacou word (Carriacou is a small island in the Caribbean where Lorde’s mother was born) which means women who work together as friends and lovers. This is, amongst other things, a book about love. It follows Lorde’s formative years and takes us up to around 1960. There is a great deal about racism, being a lesbian in 1950s America, friendship and community and Lorde’s difficult relationship with her mother. “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.” This is not an easy read and repays time and careful reading. It is a great book, one that really should be much more widely known, especially here in the UK. Lorde expresses herself very well: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the Kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. Just as there were no rings to make tangible the reason for our happy secret smiles, there were no names nor reason given or shared for the tears that messed up the lab reports or the library bills. We were good listeners, and never asked for double dates, but didn’t we know the rules? Why did we always seems to think friendships between women were important enough to care about? Always we moved in a necessary remoteness that made “What did you do this weekend?” seem like an impertinent question. We discovered and explored our attention to women alone, sometimes in secret, sometimes in defiance, sometimes in little pockets that almost touched (“Why are those little Black girls always either whispering together or fighting?”) but always alone, against a greater aloneness. We did it cold turkey, and although it resulted in some pretty imaginative tough women when we survived, too many of us did not survive at all.” Lorde writes very well and has the ability to sum things up in a rather pithy way, as she sums up the 1950s: "The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation." Lorde writes about her lived experience of marginalisation and she really is a pioneer. One of my favourite reads. 9 out of 10 Starting Underland by Robert Macfarlane

West by Carys Davies This feels like an extended short story and could easily be read in one sitting. The setting is the US in the early nineteenth century. It feels a bit like a fable and consequently the reader has to suspend a certain amount reliance on historical accuracy. Cyrus (Cy) Bellman lives in Pennsylvania where he breeds mules. His wife has died and he lives with his daughter Bess who is ten years old. He reads reports of an expedition to the Midwest (largely unexplored) where the remains have been found of very large creatures, presumably dinosaurs or possibly mammoths. Bellman speculates that these creatures may still be living out there. Bellman decides to go looking for them. Bess is to stay where she is, to be watched over by his sister Julie and the hired hand on the farm Elmer Jackson. There are no prizes for parenting here. Bellman buys himself a stovepipe hat and takes lots of trinkets and tools to trade with the locals. A French trader provides him with a young Native American guide when he reaches a trading station and off he goes into the wilderness. Time passes, two years and Bess is growing up whilst Elmer Jackson is turning into a stalker. Bellman does question what he has done: “You had so many ways of deciding which way to live your life. It made his head spin to think of them. It hurt his heart to think that he had decided on the wrong way.” The narrative switches between Bellman and his daughter. Bellman is searching for monsters that don’t exist whilst his daughter is navigating her way around those that do. The writing is spare and luminous but I found myself not really engaging with the wilderness part of the narrative: “The intermittent appearance of natives now, though he’d come by this time to expect it, amazed him: the presence of people in the vast wilderness around them. Even though he was used to the rhythm of their journey – that he and the boy could travel for a month and see no one, and then without warning encounter a large camp, or a group of savages walking or fishing. Noisy children and men whose bodies gleamed with grease and coal, women loaded like mules with bundles of buffalo meat. A whole mass of them together, undifferentiated and strange, and present suddenly amidst the course grass and the trees, the rocks and the river, beneath the enormous sky. All of them wanting to touch his red hair. Half of them enthralled by his compass, the other half trying to examine his knife and the contents of his tin chest. All of them fearful of his guns and eager to traffic a little raw meat for some of his treasures.” Bellman is out there for over two years in winters where he would have frozen to death meeting people who had no reason to welcome settlers who displaced them from their lands. There is a whimsicality to this, which is fine, but I struggled with the juxtaposition to the sheer unbelievability of half of the tale. 6 out of 10 Starting Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

Star Rider by Doris Piserchia I have had this science fiction novel on my shelves since the late 1980s. It was part of a series published by the Women’s Press. It was Piserchia’s second novel published in 1974. It is set in the very distant future. Humanity has gone in three different directions. There are jaks who are nomadic and often solitary. They have developed along with the ancestors of dogs and the two have a strong psychic link. Jaks are able to move great distances almost instantaneously across the galaxy by means of something called jinking (it’s best not to overthink it as it doesn’t really make sense). There are gibs, who live on a planet called Gibraltar. They are more similar to humans as we know them and are pretty much oppressed and do as they are told. Then there are the dreens who are effectively a policing and monitoring class who manage the gibs and who believe in order. They seem to fit neatly into modern notions of order and oppression. The Varks are a separate species who are effectively humanity’s guardians and have to see that they don’t get into too much trouble. I must admit, it took me a while to connect with this and to suspend logic and follow the story. It is narrated by Lone (later called Jade), an adolescent female jak. Like all jaks, she is looking for a planet called Doubleluck, which is supposed to by a sort of utopia: an El Dorado type search. This turns out to be earth which is uninhabited and a bit of a mess. Jade has a series of adventures with her mount Hinx and spends most of her time wondering why everyone wants to lock her up, contain her, marry her, limit her powers and the reader (and she) gradually learns why. The ending has a bit of a communal, if we work together it might work out ok feel about it (very 60s). There is something of a feminist feel to this and Jade has to resist various types of male attention. Jade turns out be very independent. It’s a bit fuzzy and optimistic at times and who wouldn’t want a loyal telepathic dog for a companion and sidekick! It wasn’t a challenging book, but it was quite fun. 7 out of 10 Starting The Quickening by Rhiannon Ward

Emma by Jane Austen I seem to have been reading an Austen a year recently and this year it’s Emma. The plot is well known and there have been numerous TV and film adaptations. It has been reviewed or commented on by most well-known critics and novelists since. The range of those disliking her includes Nabakov, Conrad, Lawrence and Charlotte Bronte. On the other side are Beckett and Woolf, to name a couple. Despite this being as Austen said a novel about “three or four families in a country village” it is revolutionary. As John Mullan says in a Guardian article, although the narration is in the third person Austen developed what is now known as free indirect style, combining the internal and external. There are plenty of well-developed characters in the novel and Emma herself is certainly not as likeable as other Austen leading characters. Although Emma learns and grows throughout the novel. But this is not The Taming of the Shrew because Emma is not mastered by a man and learns from her own mistakes. Emma has been debated over and analysed by a whole range of critics and there are acres of print devoted to her. It was Woolf who said that Austen was: ‘a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.’ I would tend to agree and there is much more going on than meets the eye. One interesting aspect is the incident with the “gypsies”. In the two hundred years since the tropes don’t seem to have changed. They are still an underclass associated with thievery, violence and general criminality. On the whole I enjoyed following the alleyways of the plot and the even more labyrinthine alleyways of the later critiques and analysis. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting West by Carys Davies

The Reef by Edith Wharton This novel revolves around four characters. Anna Leath is a widow who now resides in a French Chateau with her nine year old daughter Effie. Owen Leath is her step son. George Darrow is an American diplomat in London who knew Anna prior to her marriage and they are now planning to get married. Sophy Viner is Effie’s new governess and she and Owen wish to marry (this is a problem because of the difference in class). At the start of the novel Sophy and George meet (before she takes up her post as governess) and they spend a few days together. When Darrow goes to the chateau he discovers Sophie is working there. They decide to keep their liaison quiet. The novel works through the drama which follows. Apparently this is supposed to be partly autobiographical with Sophy and Anna representing different aspects of Wharton. It was also at this time that she discovered her husband was having a string of affairs and she also had an affair. A great deal of the novel focuses on the interior life of the characters and as a result has been compared to Henry James’s work. This narrowness does make the novel feel rather claustrophobic. The two proposed marriages both run into some difficulties. Anna in particular realises that she will be marrying the former lover of her stepson’s wife and Owen, her stepson, would be marrying his stepfather-in-law’s former mistress. Sexuality is crossing generational boundaries. Observant readers will have recalled that at the beginning of the book, when George introduces Sophy to Paris theatre, the play he takes her to see is Oedipus. The title implies that sexuality is like a reef which will damage unwary boats. It is beautifully written, but the whole cast managed to irritate me intensely; and then there are paragraphs like this: “That bliss, in the interval, had wound itself into every fold of her being. Passing, in the first days, from a high shy tenderness to the rush of a secret surrender, it had gradually widened and deepened, to flow on in redoubled beauty. She thought she now knew exactly how and why she loved Darrow, and she could see her whole sky reflected in the deep and tranquil current of her love.” Of course it is about disillusion and there is depth and subtlety here, However as I was reading it I kept remembering a quote from Colson Whitehead when he was asked about why he wrote so much about slavery: “Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one? A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.” My irritation with this continued with the rather odd ending. 6 out of 10 Starting Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Sounds and sweet airs by Anna Beer This book accompanied a Classic FM series a few years ago and focuses on eight women composers who you may not have heard of. I must admit that I had only heard of four of them. Francesca Caccini 1587-1641; Barbara Strozzi 1619-1677; Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre 1665-1729; Marianna Martinez 1744-1812; Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel 1805-1847; Clara Wieck Schumann 1819-1896; Lili Boulanger 1893-1918; Elizabeth Maconchy 1907-1994. Beer gives a potted biography of each one, looking at their life and work, the barriers they faced, which were many and predictable. It is worth noting that some of the women in the early modern period had more freedom than those from later periods. At the end of the book Beer provides a suggested playlist and where recordings might be found and a few suggested websites. It’s written with passion and enthusiasm. There are a couple of supportive husbands, an unsupportive husband (Robert Schumann) and a rather paranoid brother (Felix Mendelssohn). There are also Medici patrons and unsupportive musical establishments: plenty of struggles against the odds. I know the title comes from Shakespeare (The Tempest I think), but sweet airs doesn’t sound right. All the composers are white European, but this is certainly a step in the right direction. There’s plenty of scope for follow up volumes as there are plenty of gaps (no medieval composers). Despite the gaps this was well researched and a good introduction to composers who should be better known. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Still Life by A S Byatt

Don't look at me like that by Diana Athill This is Diana Athill’s only novel and was written in the mid 60s (set in the 1950s). She wrote a few short stories and several volumes of memoirs in her long life. Her main work was in publishing and the list of authors she worked with is impressive. Her personal life was also very interesting and much too complex to examine here! The novel revolves around a young woman called Meg Bailey. She has a cloistered upbringing, the daughter of a clergyman who is as impecunious as the mythical church mouse. When grown, following art school, she moves to 1950s London and has some of the usual adventures of youth, but in particular an affair with her best friend’s husband. The opening and closing of the novel are striking: “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me” “There’s something almost enjoyable in having one person in the world I can truly hate.” At one level this is a simple coming of age novel that focuses on belonging: “I wanted to rush on into unknown territory forever, safe in the warm intimacy of the car, the blanket rough against my chin, the men singing and joking, Roxane reaching into the back from time to time to feed me a chocolate, and neither of the two in front knowing that my hand was fast in Dick’s. I was eighteen and no one had ever held my hand before. Wilfred had always been too shy to attempt physical contact beyond bumping into me occasionally. This was a new move in the game, and a big one.” It is also an examination of women of a certain type and class and at one level not a great deal happens, but with Athill there are twists. One of the significant characters in the book is Egyptian. The novel covers the period of Suez and Nasser and Jamil’s reaction is nuanced and complex. On the whole this is fairly short, easy to read, though a little flimsy, but the ending is interesting and it evokes 1950s London. 7 out of 10 Starting Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry

The Saga of Gosta Berling by Selma Lagerlof This was Selma Lagerlof’s first novel, published in 1891. Gosta Berling is a defrocked Lutheran minister. His life is saved by the mayor of Ekeby. She allows him to become one of the pensioners living in the manor of Ekeby. The group go on to have lots of adventures. Lagerlof employs all the vagaries of the natural world and climate as well as folklore and fairy tale. There are plenty of good people and plenty of villains and the whole does have a gothic feel in the sense that there are plenty of exaggerations and much that is absurd. It is written with gusto and there is a comic side to the absurdity, but there is also strong seam of sadness too. There is a silent film (Garbo’s first I think), which is an immense three hours long. The novel itself is a series of shorts, all linked together and from a variety of viewpoints. There are plenty of interesting devices employed and I found it interesting and enjoyable. 8 out of 10 Starting Star Rider by Doris Piserchia

Black and British by David Olusoga The contents of this book should really be on the school curriculum. It really is essential reading and only starts to fill a gaping gap in British historiography. It also accompanied a TV series, which I remember being pretty good. The book is on a different scale to the TV series, being over five hundred pages, meticulously researched and much more detailed. It starts in Roman Britain, up near Hadrian’s Wall where a regiment of black Romans were stationed. It also uses new evidence provided by DNA and advances in archaeology to identify black Britons from burials in York and on the South coast. Their numbers are entirely unknown and inevitably some must have settled in Britain and their descendants probably still live here. The book moves on to the Tudor period where there are a number of well documented cases of black residents of Britain. There is a large gap between Roman Britain and Tudor Britain where, at present, we simply have no evidence either way as to whether there were any black Britons resident in between. Olusoga takes the reader through the era of the slave trade and its abolition: well-worn territory, but he sheds new light on it and the detail is impressive. There is always something to learn and the eighteenth century legal battles relating to whether black residents of Britain could be slaves was new to me. Those legal decisions gave impetus to the abolition movement. Olusoga also tells the parallel story of the slave ports in Africa and the plantations of the West Indies. Moving into the nineteenth century there is an account of the effects of the Civil War in the US and the links between the anti-slavery movements in both countries, and indeed the links between American pro slavery elements and industry in Britain. Olusoga identifies a distinct change in attitudes to race in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of Social Darwinism and racial theories. There is an account of the virulent racism espoused by Thomas Carlyle, which many of his fans these days neglect to remember. Other writers are also quoted. Trollope wrote: “The negro’s idea of emancipation was and is emancipation not from slavery but from work. To lie in the sun and eat breadfruit and yams is his idea of being free.” Dickens wrote passionately against slavery, but still used the racial caricatures common at the time. The racial theorists, whose ideas became popular, even went as far as to discuss philanthropic massacres. Olusoga covers both world wars and the role of Empire and brings the story forward to the present. There are inevitably gaps, even in a five hundred page history. This is a start in a missing historiography, which I am sure will be gradually built up. It is essential reading. In an interview with the Guardian Olusoga says hostility to his work has been growing: "to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these national myths are so important to them and their political projects, or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about the historical truths behind them... They have been able to convince people that their own history, being explored by their own historians and being investigated by their own children and grandchildren, is a threat to them." There is still a great deal to do. 9 out of 10 Starting Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

Joanna Godden by Sheila Kaye-Smith This is a novel of place and that place is Sussex, more specifically the marshes around Rye and on the Kent border. Kaye-Smith is a Sussex author and her novels find their centre there, as Hardy’s do in Wessex. This is another book from Virago and from an author I haven’t read before. The novel was published in 1921. The sense of place is so strong here that Kaye-Smith records the speech patterns of the marshes and I think this adds to the whole. The plot is fairly straightforward In 1897 Mr Godden dies leaving two daughters: Joanna the elder and Ellen, the younger. He leaves the family farm to Joanna, and significantly he adds no clause saying she must marry to inherit. It is expected that she should marry fairly promptly so a man can run the farm and there are plenty of suitors. She shocks local opinion by deciding to run the farm herself and everyone expects her to fail: she doesn’t. But underlying everything is Kaye-Smith’s social and moral conservatism: “She forgot her distrust of the night air in all her misery of throbbing head and heart, and flung back the casement, so that the soft marsh wind came in, with rain upon it, and her tears were mingled with the tears of night. ‘Oh God!’ she moaned to herself – ‘why didn’t you make me a man?” Although Joanna Godden is on the whole a success as a farmer, even she still feels she lacks a man and there are a couple of men throughout the book who enter her life, one good, one not. I felt there were contradictions in the characterisation and the ending was ambiguous (not necessarily a fault), but it felt like a betrayal and some earlier established principles. Women can break some conventions, but not all of them. There is an instance of blatant and unpleasant racism towards the end. Kaye-Smith has created an irrepressible and larger than life character and there is certainly much of interest, but there are issues and it feels like Kaye-Smith having created her character spends much of the novel trying to rein her in. 6 out of 10 Starting Don't look at me like that by Diana Athill

Black writers in Britain 1760-1890 This is a collection of writings by black people in Britain. Nineteen people or groups are in the collection, three of them women. There are a couple of accounts that were transcribed by others and one from a group of settlers from Sierra Leone. It isn’t fiction: there are autobiographical accounts, many relating to escapes from slavery, letters of request for assistance, support or thanks, accounts of what it was like to be black in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, accounts of the campaign against slavery, descriptions of the colony for liberated slaves in Sierra Leone, some religious questions. There are some stand out pieces of writing. Mary Seacole’s account of her time in Crimea is probably fairly well known now. Mary Prince’s autobiography (published 1831) is a very powerful account of the brutality of slavery and I think is the first substantial account of slavery written by a woman. Olaudah Equiano is there as you would expect. Towards the end of the collection there are a couple more political pieces by JJ Thomas and Edward Blyden. Blyden, in particular, influenced Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad. This collection is interesting and there are leads to other works and to the primary works sampled here. 8 out of 10 Starting Europe Central by William T Vollmann

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin My first foray into Le Guin, something I should have done in my teenage years when I read Tolkein. This is different to many of the other fantasy worlds, for a start this is less than two hundred pages long. The principal character, Ged, the apprentice wizard, is a youthful and flawed character. He doesn’t come mature and complete like Gandalf, so inevitably there is a coming of age element. The world building is pretty competent and I’m sure that will develop as the series continues. The world is an archipelago with many and varied islands and races. There are also dragons! There are a variety of themes apart from the obvious coming of age. Balance is an important concept in the magic of Earthsea. As Ged is taught at mage school: “But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow” The wizard school idea has been taken up by others, I don’t need to mention who! Naming is also important and to know someone’s true name is to have power over them. Ged is generally known as Sparrowhawk. One thing Le Guin does under the radar is to make most of the cast non-white. There are very few white characters, most are various shades of copper, brown and black. Le Guin doesn’t play with the gender dynamic in the same way she does with race. There is no primary villain, Ged’s real opponent is himself and the consequences of his actions. The world is secular, there is no priest caste. Wizards have to work mostly and most towns have one. This is told in epic style. On the whole there are positives and negatives, the pace and style are good and a mostly non-white cast was unusual for the 1960s. It all seems a bit rushed sometimes and that may be the shortness of the whole. There are plenty of well used tropes form fantasy literature, but many of them stem from this series. This is the first fantasy I’ve read in a while. It was enjoyable rather than memorable. 7 out of 10 Starting Zami: A new spelling of my name by Audre Lord

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste An account of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, very loosely based on the experiences of the author’s grandparents. Mengiste focuses on the role of women soldiers. Haile Selassie plays his part as does a look alike. This is about the importance of memory. It starts and ends in the 1970s, although most of it is set in 1935-7. Mengiste’s characters are powerfully drawn, even the two primary Italian characters. The story of war is often masculine, but this was not true for Ethiopia in the 1930s. As well as portraying women at war Mengiste also shows that being a woman in the world can be a type of warfare in itself. We are guided through the novel by Hirut. She is a servant who has been orphaned and has a complex relationship with her employers Kidane and Aster. Another significant character is Ettore Navarra, an Italian soldier who takes photographs of everything, including prisoners and executions. The photographs take on symbolic meaning. Ettore is Jewish and the increasingly difficult situation for Italian Jews becomes obvious as the novel proceeds: “The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things” This has been called a modern day Iliad, and I get that, this is an often forgotten struggle and there are now Ethiopian voices addressing yet another European imperialist past. This is a very good historical novel which gives some life and agency to those who have been written out of history and their past is being reclaimed. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting The Reef by Edith Wharton

Once upon a time in the East by Xiaolu Guo This has been compared to Wild Swans, unfairly I think. Guo is a Chinese born writer now living in the West and she has won awards for her fiction. This is an account of her early life. She lived with her grandparents for the first six years of her life in a fishing village in great poverty. Her grandfather was abusive and eventually killed himself. She met her parents when she was six and moved with them to a growing town inland where she lived in a compound. She later moved Beijing, winning a place in a film school. She then worked as a scriptwriter for a while before winning a scholarship to come to Britain. The whole, as many reviewers have pointed out, reads like a fable. Guo had always wanted to be an artist and she recalls a day when she was very young and met, on the beach near her home, a group of student artists from a nearby town: “Those young artists had snatched my heart. I knew I could no longer stay in the village… That afternoon, an hour after they left, a sunset danced above the kelp-tangled beach. The colours had been taken out of the girl’s picture, a scarlet red on a deep blue sea. I stood on the sand and watched as it trembled almost imperceptibly above the contours of the lapping waves. It was astonishing. Those art students has seen what I was unable to, even though I knew the village and the sea much better than they did.” Guo is angrier than some of her forbears who have written about China. She describes the poverty, the routine sexual abuse from men and the often impossible task of being an artist or writer within the constraints of what is permissible. The anger stretches to the rapid development changes she saw in China. This was following a visit to her father in hospital (he had throat cancer): “The sheer number of patients was shocking… women and children who had never smoked in their lives were dying of lung cancer. Most likely because of the pollution – Zhejiang was a fast-developing industrial province with countless large-scale factories… So much of what the ‘New China’ is about is getting rich at any cost. And what’s waiting for us? Cancer on a national level.” Guo’s account is gripping and it is clearly written from the heart. She is just as hard on the West when she arrives! This is an absorbing account of her journey by a talented writer 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Sounds and Sweet Airs by Anna Beer

Oh Happy Day by Carmen Callil Carmen Callil here charts her ancestry and how her forbears ended up in Australia. Her family tree consists of people from Lebanon, Ireland and the Midlands of England. The sections on her Lebanese and Irish ancestry are very short and Callil choses to focus on her English ancestors. These ancestors are from Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. This gives Callil the scope to analyse and research a number of issues. These include the textile industry and its decline because of industrialisation, the resulting unrest and riots, the role of the workhouse, the effects of religion, the nature and types of work, infant mortality, the courts and the justice system, the nature of punishment, transportation, conditions on the hulks where prisoners waited to be transported, the conditions on the passage, flogging amongst others. Once in Australia Callil looks at how convicts were treated, the growth of the settlements, tensions between convicts and settlers, relations with Indigenous Australians and how they reacted to settlement, various gold rushes and the growth of modern Australia. There is an epilogue which considers the evils of colonialism, the effective genocide/ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Australians, the nature of Empire, class and industrialisation. Callil covers an awful lot of ground and provides a fair amount of detail about her English ancestors. Inevitably she is unable to cover every issue comprehensively and there is a bit of a dash through industrialisation and the decline of traditional industries and all the rest. Nonetheless it is interesting and there is a good bibliography to follow up on specific topics. 8 out of 10 Starting A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor This is a follow up to Reservoir 13 and was originally commissioned for radio as a series of fifteen monologues. You do need to have read the original novel, this is not a standalone. Here is a brief precis of the novel from my review: The novel is set in a village in Derbyshire, the Peak District (the well dressing gives that away). It starts at New Year in the early 2000s with the disappearance of a thirteen year old girl, staying in a holiday rental with her family. The village is a tourist spot close to the moors and the title refers to a series of reservoirs in the hills above and beyond the town. The narrative consists of thirteen chapters, each of them covers a year, the chapters being split into smaller passages covering each month or so. There are snippets from the lives of the villagers, all ages and statuses and the reader gradually gets to know each of them. This follow up as a less collective feel to it as we get inside the heads of some of the main players in the original. The monologues cover the time period before and after the disappearance. The girl who disappeared, Becky, is present in some of the monologues and the reader gets a sense of her as a presence rather than an absence. There are also sinister twists and undertones to some of the monologues which are in the form of interviews (without an interviewer). McGregor again resists the temptation to explain the disappearance. This is just an extension of the layers of ambiguity, the reader is no clearer about what really happened. You do get into the minds of the fifteen but on a few occasions you wish you hadn’t. There are secrets, abuse, brutality and quite a few surprises. The portraits of the men are much starker and there is real menace. McGregor uses humour well and has a way of starting the monologues that draws in: “The important thing to remember, Graham always said afterwards, was that no one actually died.” “If he’d known the day was going to end with blood and fire, Liam would probably have got up earlier.” “It wasn’t even a llama, for starters.” The whole does work, even the one sided conversations and this does add rather than detract from the original novel. 9 out of 10 Starting Joanna Godden by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich This is Erdrich’s debut novel. It follows three interlinked families the Lamartines, Morrisseys and Kashpaws and is set on fictional Ojibwe reservations in North Dakota and Minnesota. The narrative focusses on the points of view of a variety of characters (all interlinked) from the 1930s to the 1980s. The characters are presented sympathetically with real human warmth and with humour. The quote from Toni Morrison is telling: “The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely destroyed by its power” The book is about identity, loving and surviving. The prose is wonderful and there is an element of magic suffused with tradition, history, injustice and betrayal. The reader needs a level of alertness to follow the narrative and put it all together, but it is worth the effort. Erdrich is mixed race Native American and her own experiences have obviously influenced her writing: “It is where I’m from; literally there’s no other way than this that I can write. I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures. Knowing both sides of my family really infused my life with a sense that I lived in many times and in many places as many people. It was never just me. I was always filled with the stories, the humor, the loss. Because, of course, we are all part of this great loss that occurred.” Erdrich has the ability to write about the natural messiness of life and make it feel real and radiant. The whole is suffused with memory and metaphor, including the love medicine of the title: “Like now. Take the love medicine. I don’t know where she remembered that from. It came tumbling from her mind like an asteroid off the corner of the screen. But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.” Erdrich’s portrayal of her people is thoughtful and considered and yet has humour and passion. It’s a novel with a great deal of heart, but which does not shy away from making its point about the history of a people and the injustice therein. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting The Saga of Gosta Berling by Selma Lagerlof

Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens Boyce usually writes about imperialism in Australia, but here he turns to imperialist ventures in England itself and specifically the fens which stretched through South Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and bits of surrounding counties. He also includes the Isle of Axholme in North Lincolnshire. Boyce explains his approach: “A more direct source for this book was my research on the Australian frontier…When I began to read histories of the Fens, I was struck by some largely unacknowledged similarities with the colonial frontier. Here too was a multi-faceted defence of country, a transformation of the land, the introduction of foreign settlers and a confrontation between two worlds. While researching Australian history, I began to wonder, did the fact that the Fens was part of England justify such a radically different approach to writing its past?” It is not easy to be precise about the extent and borders of the fens as streams and masses of water ebb and flo. Boyce identifies the Fennish (as he terms them) as an indigenous people: “All cultures undergo times of upheaval as well as long periods of evolution. What characterises an indigenous culture is neither its uniformity nor immutability, but that it remains rooted in country as it experiences continuity and change.” Boyce goes back about four thousand years and tracks the various invaders, who all tried to manage the fens and its people. It also describes why the fens were so unique. The common lands, as the fens were, provided so much food for its inhabitants that even in years of poor harvests food was plentiful. There was a great variety of fish and most especially eels. The wildfowl and bird life of the area was also very plentiful and edible. People raised geese for eating and eggs. The grass was always lush and provided fodder the year round for cattle and sheep. Sedge and turf-cutting provided livelihood for some. Of course the area was very wet and flooded regularly, but that was part of the deal. The very geography made it difficult for outsiders to tame the land and its inhabitants. The Romans mainly avoided them. Dio Cassius tells how the Romans “wandered into the pathless marshes and lost many of their soldiers”. The Vikings just went round them and avoided them. William the Conqueror made more of an effort and hence grew legends like Hereward the Wake. It is also true to say that cavalry don’t do well in mud! The Church was more pragmatic and tried to move in by creating small monastic houses. Tis had some partial success but the Fennish have never been very religious. After the dissolution of the monasteries the Church lost its foothold for several centuries, until the advent of non-conformity and particularly Methodism which based its structure on local people and imposed less from the outside. John Wesley’s father Samuel was a Church of England Rector in the Isle of Axholme, he estimated that only about 2% of his flock actually attended Church. As I said the Fennish were not a religious lot. There is also an interesting strand in Fennish history related to the Roma people, who were able to use the fens as a refuge, a place to get food, replenish stocks and be safe with support from the locals. That seems to be a little told story in itself. The real threat to the fens came from the early seventeenth century onwards and the advent of enclosure when there was a determined attempt to take over common land. It is here that Boyce perceives that colonization was a process wielded in Britain as well as by Britain. The battle to tame the fens lasted over two hundred years. Enclosure succeeded in the southern fens in the seventeenth century. However in Lincolnshire (south and north) it failed. There was violence, persecution by the law, destruction of new ditches with similarities to the later Luddite and Captain Swing unrest. South Lincolnshire and the Isle of Axholme held out until the late eighteenth century when the industrial revolution provided steam driven machines much better at drainage. “The Fennish story is an integral part of the troubled history of the imperial age. As elsewhere in the empire, an indigenous people fought the land grab through every means available to them, including force, until the subversive power of the modern state and the technological power of the Industrial Revolution achieved what seemed to be a final victory.” Boyce turns on its head the idea that the draining of the marshes was a triumph of engineering and progress, but was rather the dispossession of an indigenous people. Many of the dispossessed took to poaching (hence songs like The Lincolnshire Poacher), which still thrives today. What can be noted is that the result of drainage is that much of the resulting farmland is slightly below sea level and any rises in sea levels would have some interesting results. This is an interesting and innovative history which spoke to me because one strand of my family history goes back into the fens. 9 out of 10 Starting The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor

Pornography by Andrea Dworkin Dworkin was a radical and uncompromising feminist. Her views are clear. This is from a speech in 1983: “The power exercised by men, day to day, in life is power that is institutionalised. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.” The most common approach to Dworkin’s arguments have been abuse and ridicule. She has been variously called a man hater, anti sex, ugly, overweight, hating sexual freedom, insane and following her death, a “sad ghost” that feminism needs to exorcise. I have read a few reviews of this book and can confirm this. Dworkin believed that pornography led to violence against women: “a celebration of rape and injury to women.” “Pornography incarnates male supremacy.” Dworkin manages to draw from literature and art in this analysis. Here is a quote from D H Lawrence: “And it is this that makes the cocksureness of women so dangerous, so devastating. It is really out of scheme, it is not in relation to the rest of things. So we have the tragedy of cocksure women. They find, so often, that instead of having laid an egg, they have laid a vote or an empty ink-bottle, or some other absolutely unhatchable object, which means nothing to them.” Dworkin spends a whole chapter looking at De Sade. She shows he is still much admired by all sorts of thinkers, male and female. Dworkin portrays him as an Everyman type: “Sade’s importance, finally, is not as dissident or deviant: it is as Everyman, a designation the power-crazed aristocrat would have found repugnant, but one that women on examination, will find true. In Sade, the authentic equation is revealed: the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.” She also analyses Sade’s writings and the sort of things he ended up in prison for. Here is De Sade defending himself to his wife in relation to five fifteen year old girls whom he abused. He had procured them from a woman of his acquaintance: “I go off with them: I use them. Six months later, some parents come along to demand their return. I give them back {he did not}, and suddenly a charge of abduction and rape is brought against me. It is a monstrous injustice. The law on this point is …. As follows: it is expressly forbidden in France for any procuress to supply virgin maidens, and if the girl supplied is a virgin and lodges a complaint, it is not the man who is charged, but the procuress who is punished severely on the spot. But even if the male offender has requested a virgin he is not liable to punishment: he is merely doing what all men do. It is, I repeat, the procuress who provided him with the girl and who is perfectly aware that she is expressly forbidden to do so, who is guilty.” For De Sade raping a fifteen year old virgin was not an offence. Dworkin draws the links to modern pornography and provides examples in passages of descriptive analysis. The availability of pornography has changed since the advent of the internet, but maybe not its nature. For Dworkin pornography stems from patriarchy and the nature and role of men and this is also from the 1983 speech: “Equality is a practice. It is an action. It is a way of life. It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. It can’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t have it in your home if, when the people leave the home, he is in a world of supremacy based on the existence of his cock and she is in a world of humiliation and degradation because she is perceived to be inferior and because her sexuality is a curse.” Dworkin is also very critical of the left: "The most cynical use of women has been on the Left—cynical because the word freedom is used to capture the loyalties of women who want, more than anything, to be free and who are then valued and used as left-wing 'ladies of the night': collectivized cunts" Ultimately I think that Dworkin is right in her assertion that until the fundamental inequality and injustice between men and women is addressed, nothing else is sorted out. 8 out of 10 Starting Black writers in Britain 1760-1890

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe A hefty slice of eighteenth century gothic famously satirised by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. It is set in the late sixteenth century and follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of Emily St Aubert. It is set in southern France and northern Italy and there are lots of descriptions of majestic landscapes, all of which came from travel books as Radcliffe never went to the areas she described. Here’s a description of a castle, which looks, well, very castley: “Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.” There is a significant cast of characters with suitably villainous villains and the noble and good are very much so. There are plenty of crumbling castles with hidden corridors and tunnels, gloomy tombs aplenty, a few humble cottages (populated by humble cottagers), sinister portraits, nuns, a touch of what might be the supernatural (although as Radcliffe herself says it is more terror than horror). Theses bits I am afraid reminded me a little of a cartoon series from my youth called Scooby Doo. Emily’s servant Annette provides the comic relief. There is a bit of redemption for the villainous female characters, but most of the male villains meet nasty ends. There are strong female characters here, even though Emily spends a significant proportion of the novel crying and fainting away and as always good triumphs, eventually. The male lead Valancourt is certainly the most irritating character. It has often been said that it is easy to create flawed characters and difficult to create convincing good ones. One piece of advice, skip the poetry. Although if you do you will miss the immortal line: “Hail! Mildly pleasing solitude!” There is a certain entertainment value to this, but it is very long. I recognise that it was ground-breaking and there were strong female characters, but I do understand why Jane Austen parodied it. 5 and a half out of 10 Starting Emma by Jane Austen

Genius and Ink by Virginia Woolf A collection of articles by Woolf, all published in the Times Literary Supplement anonymously (as all articles were). They range over twenty years and some have appeared in other collections. There are essays on Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Conrad, Hardy, Marryat, James’s letters, Montaigne, Elizabethan plays, re-reading novels and a few others. Inevitably there is some variability and things to disagree with; I don’t have Woolf’s appreciation of Conrad’s earlier novels for example. But there is much to ponder and comment on: “There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.” This also contains her brief and now rather famous assessment of Ulysses: “a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster” She can also be sharply perceptive, looking at Eliot and issues relating to gender and women writers: “In fiction where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, of the opposite sex have resented, half-consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.” Her criticisms are generally balanced, she talks about Hardy’s uncertain genius and focuses on his early novels. She also suggests his rural scenes and minor characters are his real strength, warning against sentimentality. She clearly sees Jude the Obscure as problematic (an understatement I think), but glosses over the problem pretty briefly. Nevertheless she made me think I ought to revisit Hardy’s early works. The essay on the ridiculousness of Elizabethan plays is very funny and well worth reading. All in all a pretty good collection and it’s interesting to see the development over twenty years 8 out of 10 Starting Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens James Boyce

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane Molly Keane had two careers as a writer. She took up writing out of sheer boredom at seventeen when she was confined to bed with an illness in the early 1920s. She wrote as M J Farrell, a name she had seen over a pub door. She wanted to keep her writing secret as it would have been disapproved of in her social circle in Ireland: "for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow." Keane was part of the decaying Anglo-Irish aristocracy/middle class. She wrote until 1946 when her husband died, and didn’t start again until 1981 when this novel was published and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. When this came out Keane spoke about her upbringing in an interview: “Mother’s father governed various little islands like Mauritius and she came back from there to marry my father. She loved her sons but she didn’t love me. I was jolly hard to love. Totally disobedient. She feared for me as she would if I had been a hippy and taken drugs. She never stopped being a Victorian. It was a class thing I grew up with, good behaviour. Don’t whine and don’t make a fuss. If you broke your neck you must pretend you hadn’t.” This novel at its heart has conflict between mother and daughter and starts with murder by rabbit mousse! It concerns the St Charles family and particularly the daughter Aroon. This is the 1920s and Aroon is tall, clumsy and by societal norms unlovely. It is narrated by Aroon and has one reviewer has said: “..everything is explained and nothing is said.” So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. But nothing is directly named. The satire is sharp as is the dissection of emotional relationships: “Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to freeze each other deeper in misery.” The title is important and Kean has a way of using words effectively to put across a feeling with sinister undertones: “I had time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as these. And I do know how to behave –believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.” I was pleasantly surprised by this one as I am always wary of books portraying impoverished aristos these days, but there is an edge to this. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Once upon a Time in the East by Xiaolu Guo

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Set in an unnamed South American country with the usual magic realism, an assortment of generals and dictators, a good dose of sensuality and an eclectic cast of characters, the novel moves from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is told in the first person and is the story of Eva Luna, told in parallel with the much less detailed story of Rolf Carle. It is the story of a storyteller and has lots of twists and turns. It has been described as picaresque. Allende challenges the usual male hegemony she finds through her storytelling. The characters do jump off the page and even the less sympathetic characters have some humanity. But it is the women are strong: “I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful for the simple reason I wanted to be. And then never gave the matter another thought.” There are elements of Scheherazade in Eva and this is followed up particularly in the volume which follows this, The Stories of Eva Luna. I didn’t love this as much as The House of the Spirits. The ending felt rather rushed and forced and somewhat melodramatic. The opening is certainly strong: ‘My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of these things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory’. Eva combines fiction and life and through the section on the escape of the guerrillas from prison towards the end Allende illustrates a device often used in oppressive regimes, telling the truth in a work of fiction. Allende charts the birth of a writer: “I awakened early. It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. I took a clean white sheet of paper-like a sheet freshly ironed for making love-and rolled it into the carriage. . . . I believed that that page has been waiting for me for more than twenty years, that I had lived only for that instant.... I wrote my name, and immediately the words began to flow, one thing linked to another and another. . . .1 could see an order to the stories stored in my genetic memory since before my birth, and the many others I had been writing for years in my notebooks” Memory sustains life and this is certainly a life enhancing novel, despite the loss of focus at the end. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Merle and other stories by Paule Marshall This consists of a novella (Merle), an essay and a few short stories. The essay is “From the poets in the kitchen”. Here Marshall talks about her influences, the women who raised her and taught her the power of words. The short stories range over her whole career and although interesting are overshadowed by the novella. The protagonist, Merle, also appears in Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. This is in fact a condensed version. It is set on a fictitious island in the Caribbean. Merle is the daughter of one of the last plantation owners, a servant who is a bit of an enigma. She has some English education, a husband and child estranged and in Africa. She is a victim of colonialism and is bitter, having experienced the racism of England. She meets a Jewish anthropologist (Saul) who has come to Bourne to survey and to look at ways of improving the lot of the inhabitants. An affair follows. This sounds trite but isn’t as Marshall creates complex characters and interesting juxtapositions. Marshall creates a tension between the shadows and inheritance of colonialism and the very present threat of dollar imperialism. Marshall also conveys Merle’s voluble support for those who are poor and oppressed and her own problems with her mental health; holding the tension between the two well. It also gives the sense of the radicalism of the late sixties and early seventies, which is destined to fail. Marshall in her own expositions of Merle says she does intend the juxtaposition of black and white feminism as portrayed by Merle and Harriet. She also admits to using the Prospero/Caliban trope and extends it to illuminate how the tensions within feminism are linked to issues of white supremacy. This is certainly worth reading and for myself I am convinced that I ought to read the longer version (over four times as long). 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

It seems to have created some discussion and I have found that there are varying opinions about it. I do think I wanted to like it better than I did. My name is why by Lemn Sissay Lemn Sissay is a poet, author and broadcaster. He was the official poet of the London Olympics. He is fairly regularly seen on British TV. He now also advocates for children in care and is involved in a number of organisations concerned with their welfare. This is a memoir of his childhood in the care system: in a foster home until he was 12 and then in a series of children’s homes. Coincidentally as I write this he is on Mary Beard’s culture show talking about memory. Sissay’s mother was from Ethiopia and had come to Britain to study. After he was born, his mother had to go back to Ethiopia to see her dying father. Sissay was taken into care and his name changed to Norman Mark Greenwood. His mother wrote to try to get him back, but to no avail. He was 16 before he discovered his real name. Sissay only managed to get hold of file from social services in Wigan n 2015, after thirty years of asking. He used what was in his file to help tell his story and there are extensive quotes from it in the book. Sissay also intersperses the book with poetry: “I am not defined by darkness/Confided the night/Each dawn I am reminded/I am defined by light” This is a searing indictment of the care system and the way children are treated. Of all the professionals in the book, there was only one who really tried to help Sissay and he was usually over-ruled by his superiors. There is a history of neglect and racism. The foster family were very religious and initially things went ok until they had children of their own and things went gradually downhill. Sissay also records how the care homes he lived in affected his mental health and identity: “Memories in care are slippery because there’s no one to recall them as the years pass. In a few months I would be in a different home with a different set of people who had no idea of this moment. How could it matter if no one recalls it? Given that staff don’t take photographs it was impossible to take something away as a memory. This is how you become invisible. It is the underlying unkindness that you don’t matter enough. This is how you quietly deplete the sense of self-worth deep inside a child’s psyche. This is how a child becomes hidden in plain sight.” Race obviously played a central role in Sissay’s upbringing and he charts how he was affected by it, even it subtle ways: his foster family nicknaming him Macavity (after Eliot, Macavity was quick, dark and a thief). Some of this is heartbreaking and difficult to read, but it clearly shows how a child can be lost in the care system. Read it and weep. 9 out of 10 Starting Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read