Books do furnish a room

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor One of my favourite books this year. 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. As a plot structure it is interesting and here’s how McGregor explains it: “As a writer, any time something dramatic happens, your instinct is to spend a number of pages on that incident. But when I was writing, say, February, I kept finding, This couple is going to get married, this couple is going to split up, this boy has fallen off a rock, but I’ve only got two pages to tell those stories. I had to leave it, and wait a year, and see what they looked like a year later. And that became a really interesting way of looking at narrative. These things in our lives sometimes take years to play out, and I hadn’t really thought about that before. I tricked myself into seeing it.” Much of the first year revolves around the disappearance of the girl, inevitably. Over time the reader becomes more focussed on the lives and loves of the villagers. Over the years you see the teenagers in the village grow up, go to university and return again. Some die, some move in, others move on. There are gettings together and breakings up, minor crime and vandalism, an arrest for child pornography, the closing and opening of shops. Some events are set and the year revolves around them; the New Year fireworks, the annual cricket match with a nearby village, the well dressing and so on. All aspects of life are cleverly run together and humour and tragedy sit easily side by side. As the New York Times review says, McGregor mixes “the mundane and the ecstatic”. You also get a strong sense of transition and change: “There were cowslips under the hedges and beside the road, offering handfuls of yellow flowers to the longer days.” It is very much a novel of voices and in that respect it reminded me a little of The Waves by Virginia Woolf. The voices can also be collective and the village itself seems to have a voice at times, for example when the local butcher and his wife break up: “There was talk she was planning on opening a shop of her own. Organics. They went for that type of thing in Harefield. It was noticed that Martin was often away from the house. He was in the Gladstone or he was walking through the village, down the lane past Fletcher’s orchard to the packhorse bridge.” This isn’t a neat novel which ties up all the loose ends, lives are left mid-stream at the end; McGregor does not seem to feel the need to provide that most modern of things, closure. There is a strong sense of the natural world, the seasons and rhythms of nature: “As the dusk deepened over the badger sett at the far end of the woods, a rag-eared boar called out a sow … The woods were thick with the stink of wild garlic and the leaves gleamed darkly along the paths. Jackson’s boys went out to the fields and checked the sheep.” McGregor is also quite at ease employing a little local language and dialect: “Jackson’s sheep had taken the fear and scattered through a broken gate, and he’d been up all hours bringing them back.” There is a great sense of rhythm about this book and I think in its own way it’s a masterpiece (according to the Irish Times, a “humane and tender masterpiece”). There may be those who are irritated by the structure, but for me it carries the book along and McGregor makes the narrative stretch and shift its focus: “There was a fight in the Gladstone, and talk it had something to do with Facebook. On the television there were pictures of explosions, fires, collapses, collisions. Broad beans started coming off the allotments by the carrier-bagful, and were shucked into saucepans from their softly-lined pods. The gentle cushioning of the broad-bean pod was one of nature’s senseless excesses. The work was a tedious delight. In his studio Geoff Simmonds took each newly fired pot from the tray and smashed it against the floor. He worked at a methodical pace. The rhythm was soothing.” The novel starts with a horrifying event, but moves on and documents the life and lives of the villagers and pulls the reader away from the expected focus of the novel (without diminishing the horror) and says look over here at what is happening. Life goes on. 9 out of 10 Starting Fen by Daisy Johnson

At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor This is Taylor’s first novel, published in 1945 and is a closely observed portrait of family life during the war, although the war is very much in the background. Roddy Davenant, his wife Julia and young son Oliver and Roddy’s cousin Eleanor move from London s Roddy has been posted away from London (he is in the RAF). They rent a house from a widow called Mrs Lippincote (hence the title). It still contains all her furniture and many personal possessions. The novel charts their life in the house. It isn’t a happy marriage: Roddy is a conventional man, however he has realised that Julia isn’t quite what he expected: “She exasperated him. Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behaviour of women. One accepted them and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe. When he had married Julia, he had thought her woefully ignorant of the world; had looked forward, indeed, to assisting in her development. But she had been grown up all the time; or, at least, she had not changed. The root of the trouble was not ignorance at all, but the refusal to accept. ‘If only she would!’ he thought now, staring at her; ‘If only she would accept.’ The room was between them. She stood there smiling, blinking still in the bright light. He was still fanning the air peevishly with his hand.” Eleanor adores her cousin Roddy and rather disapproves of Julia. She is an interesting character as she becomes involved with a group of Marxists and Communists in the town, they provide an interesting counterpoint to the Davenant household. Eleanor is accepted by the group and treated as a person in her own right. All of the secondary characters are well developed and this is one of the strengths of the novel. Roddy and Julia’s son Oliver with his bookishness. The wing commander (Roddy’s boss) with his growing affection for Julia, Eleanor’s various friends and others. Oliver would have loved this site: “Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of the words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.” Julia for me is still the most interesting character in the book. She knows the situation between herself and Roddy much more clearly than she intimates throughout the book and she begins to show an independence that shocks Roddy, who is shown to be hypocritical and Julia begins to care less about some of the conventions Roddy holds dear: “Julia had a strange gift of coming to a situation freshly, peculiarly untarnished by preconceived ideas, whether of her own preconception or the world’s. Could she have taken for granted a few of those generalizations invented by men and largely acquiesced in by women (that women live by their hearts, men by their heads, that love is a woman’s whole existence, and especially that sons should respect their fathers), she would have eased her own life and other people’s.” Taylor is a sharp and perceptive novelist who dissects her characters and shows their true colours mercilessly but with some affection. This is a character driven novel, very little out of the ordinary actually happens. Everyday life is on show, laid bare. It is everyday life under the stresses of war; hardly on show, but ever present. Oh and there are a few Bronte sidelines as well: “Julia lit a cigarette and picked up Oliver’s books from his chair. “I haven’t read Jane Eyre for years, have you, Eleanor? There’s something about those girls that gives me the creeps.” “What girls? Oh, Brontë girls!”” I’m looking forward to reading more Taylor 8 out of 10 Starting The Bishop of Hell by Elizabeth Bowen

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese A very slim novella which could be read in one sitting. It was written in 1940. It was published together with two other novellas just before Pavese died. Pavese was not only a novelist, but a translator, literary critic and poet. He was also an active anti-fascist and after the war was a member of the Italian Communist Party. Disillusionment and a failed love affair leading to depression resulted in Pavese taking his own life in 1950, he was only forty-one. The English translation in the new penguin edition dates from 1955 and now feels a little out of date. It is a sort of coming of age novel and the main protagonist Ginia is sixteen and living with her brother Severino. As her brother works nights, she is very much left to her own devices. The novella focuses on Ginia’s friendship with Amelia who is an artist’s model. There is plenty of bohemianism and a focus on loss of innocence. There is also a sense of the freedom and vibrancy of youth: “Life was a perpetual holiday in those days. We had only to leave the house and step across the street and we became quite mad.” Her friend Amelia is a little older, more experienced and more carefree and this creates tensions for Ginia who is a little more cautious. Amelia poses nude and tries to persuade Ginia to do so as well: “They argued as far as the tram and Amelia asked her what she thought she had under her clothes to preserve like a holy of holies.” Ginia falls in love with Guido, one of the artists, and has her first love affair. Amelia is bisexual and has affairs with women as well. There is certainly sexual tension between Amelia and Ginia and they do kiss at one point. I did also wonder about the relationship between Guido and Rodrigues. On the surface this is a simple coming of age and loss of innocence tale, but there is always an undercurrent which occasionally breaks the surface, a sense that life is not so simple and hidden dangers lurk. Pavese has many fans and Italo Calvino in particular was one of them: “Pavese’s nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and are also...the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings...Each one of Pavese’s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say.” Very brief, but there is more to this than meets the eye and at some point I will read more. 7 out of 10 Starting Resevoir 13 by Jon McGregor

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor A fairly thick slice of Southern Gothic packed with symbolism and religious imagery. The title is taken from the Bible: Matthew 11:12. From the Douay Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate and commonly used in Catholic churches: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” There are a limited numbers of characters and all of the main ones are male. There are spoilers ahead, necessary to discuss the novel effectively. Fourteen year old Francis Tarwater lives with his great-uncle Mason Tarwater. His great-uncle has a clear vision that Francis, like him, is to be a prophet. He has raised Francis in a backwoods cabin, without outside assistance or school. When the old man dies, Francis travels to his uncle Rayber. He has had no contact with him since early childhood. Rayber is a secularist and he has a disabled son called Bishop. The disability is not made clear, but may well have been Down’s Syndrome. Before his death Mason had charged Francis with baptizing Bishop and so save his soul. The three spend some time together, Rayber and Tarwater both battling with their destinies. Rayber wanting to civilize and educate Tarwater and Tarwater battling with whether he should be a prophet or not. Neither character is likeable and the violent act towards the end of the book confirms this. Tarwater hears a voice which turns out to be the devil. The voice tells him to drown Bishop: he does so, but accidentally baptizes him in the process. The book ends with Tarwater deciding he should be a prophet after all. O’Connor was a devout Catholic and this novel does highlight what she felt about secularism and Protestant fundamentalism. The real message is that secular intellectualism will always fail. There is also the approach to disability and mental illness to take into account. O’Connor weaves together mental illness and a certain type of fundamentalism. Disturbingly neither character is guilt-ridden or concerned about the death of Bishop; Rayber faints because he realizes he feels nothing in relation to the death. There is a lot of ambiguity in the novel, but in that ambiguity the differentness of religion and disability become linked to physical violence and one is left with negative stereotypes. Destiny is also a theme and there is a feel for that you really cannot escape it. The reader also has to consider the attitudes to race, O’Connor documents the white south very well. There is a great deal going on in this novel and it is in turn striking, shocking and disturbing. The strength of O’Connor’s own faith is obvious and I didn’t agree with one of her central messages. I found the use of mental illness and disability as tropes unpleasant, but it was an interesting and challenging read. 6 out of 10 Starting The Little Company by Eleanor Dark

Poor People by William Vollmann Vollmann is a bit of an enigma, but one thing that certainly can be said is that he has travelled a great deal in his various roles and taken copious notes. This work is told in the first person, so Vollmann manages to keep the focus off himself when he chooses to, but he has a clear focus, poverty. He simply asks people why they are poor and notes their responses. The rather raw photos are all taken by him as well. Vollmann states his parameters well: “Because I wish to respect poor people’s perceptions and experiences, I refuse to say that I know their good better than they; accordingly, I further refuse to condescend to them with the pity that either pretends they have no choices at all, or else, worse yet, gilds their every choice with my benevolent approval. Once again I submit the obvious: Poor people are no more and no less human than I; accordingly, they deserve to be judged and understood precisely as I do myself.” He struggles with a definition of poverty as some of those he interviews do not really perceive themselves as poor, although by most definitions they would be. The United Nations definition seems as good as any: “Poverty: a human condition characterized by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security, and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights.” One of the other issues at the start of the book is a throwaway remark by Vollmann, “Poverty is not political”. This clearly isn’t true and Vollmann obviously doesn’t really believe it either as he goes on to show it is entirely political over nearly three hundred pages! Vollmann does equate poverty with wretchedness and concedes that poverty is a series of perceptual categories. It is easy to criticize Vollmann, as many critics have for naivety or for o ver analyzing but one thing is clear. This isn’t reportage from an armchair critic or reporter, Vollmann has really been there. The list of places and people is impressive. He does look very close to home towards the end of the book, but there are interviews and characters from Thailand, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, The Philippines, India, Colombia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Burma, Vietnam, Hungary, Serbia, Congo, Kenya, Iraq, Australia, Bosnia and various parts of the US. He also draws on some historical quotes and descriptions. It’s an impressive list and Vollmann has not been averse to going into difficult and dangerous places. He also introduces the readers to many of those he interviews and paints vivid portraits of them, so that the reader does become engaged. He is also self-critical analyzing his own thoughts, feelings and actions. He gives money to some and sometimes assists where he can, whilst recognizing how ineffective that really is. It is easy to be critical of Vollmann, but unlike the rest of us, he has been there. After looking at the nature of poverty initially Vollmann has his own ideas of what defines poverty and how it is broken down. He has chapters on Invisibility, Deformity, Unwantedness, Dependence, Accident-Proneness, Pain, Numbness and Estrangement. There is even a chapter on dirty toilets. The people interviewed, however briefly, although all poor are quite varied. Some are homeless and living on the streets in varieties of ramshackle shelters (or none at all), others are alcoholic or drug addict, prostitutes (as you would expect from Vollmann), older people, the unemployed, the disabled and the poorly paid and exploited. The answers given vary as you would expect. Some blame the rich or the system, for some it’s Gods will or fate, for some they are at fault themselves, others blame lack of prospects or decent work, and for some it’s their appointed place in society or just mere chance. Vollmann does have a warning for us all: “I have observed the sufferings of human beings, done a little to alleviate them, and left them behind. My sensations in doing so are sometimes as smelly as San Francisco's rainy uriney Tenderloin streets, where in a sunken subway plaza homeless ones are reading, snoring or snarling in sodden sleep bags; infected by misery, I look away, but my eyes meet a man's red-eyed glare on those rainy steps in the dark; I could remember him or I could remember the woman sitting on those steps, singing; her pants and her jacket are soaking wet in that night rain and water runs out of her hair into her eyes; her titanic thighs are blotched with eczema and she keeps scratching them; she reeks, but she is smiling as she sings; of course the only honest thing to do is remember them both -- in my tent. I am a rich man. I'm one with the man in Bogotá who said: I'm scared about the poor people coming to take everything from me.” This is powerful stuff and Vollmann lays it out and leaves it there for us to consider. 8 out of 10 Starting The Raven's Head by Karen Maitland

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi It was all going pretty well until the very end when the author threw in a hand grenade and for me changed the whole nature of the book. It is impossible to review this book effectively without discussing the end and so there are spoilers ahead. A warning in case you intend to read it. It is a retelling of the Snow White story set in the America of the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on racism and passing. In this context passing relates to a member of one racial group passing as a member of another racial group. In this novel as in Passing by Nella Larsen it involves people of an African American heritage passing as white. The plot: Boy Novak lives with her abusive father Frank; he is a rat catcher and is abusive in very cruel and unusual ways. At twenty she leaves home and moves to the small town of Flax Hill. There she eventually marries Arturo Whitman, a widower with a young daughter called Snow. They have a child whom they name Bird. This child is born black and Boy discovers that some of Arturo’s family were indeed African American. There are two main narrative voices. Boy narrates the first (and best) part of the book. Her daughter Bird narrates the second part of the book and Boy the final part. When Bird is born Snow (who is blonde) is sent to live with an aunt. Bird as she grows up becomes aware she has a half-sister. It is really well written and the characters are engaging (apart from Frank the rat catcher). There is humour and a serious examination of racism almost through the medium of fairy tale. The plot is intriguing and who can resist a beginning like this: “Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.” Then there are perceptive comments on Passing: “I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this.” It’s all stimulating and what I would expect from Oyeyemi, but then comes the ending. A journalist friend of Boy’s researches into her past and makes a discovery. Her mother was called Frances and was a lesbian. She was raped and gave birth to Boy. And then: “Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established he was there to stay, she named him Frank.” Boy’s mother was transgender. At the end of the novel Boy, her friend, Bird and Snow set off to see Frank because they are convinced Frances is still in there somewhere. As one reviewer has rather scathingly summed up the ending and the attitude to someone who is transgender: Transgenderism is the result of trauma. Transgenderism is something that can (and should) be “cured.” Being transgendered causes you to turn into an abusive sociopath and shove starving rats in your child’s face. This may be doing Oyeyemi a disservice, but the ending is problematic and I can see why many (including me) find it offensive. This is a shame because the rest of the book works well. 5 out of 10 Starting Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel This is my first proper graphic novel and is part of a reading challenge for this year. It’s by Alison Bechdel and I hadn’t initially realised I knew her name from the Bechdel test. This is a way of looking at the way women are portrayed in fiction and film. The test is whether a work features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. This goes back to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own: “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters.” This is a coming of age tale about Bechdel’s own childhood and adolescence and especially her relationship with her father who died just after she came out as a lesbian whilst at college. The structure of the whole is quite complex and Bechdel has described it as a labyrinth, "going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story." Bechdel’s father, Bruce, was an English teacher and part time undertaker, who it transpires was gay (having relationships with young men, sometimes his students). The thread running through it all is literature and the way Bechdel uses it in the memoir, this for me, was the strongest part of the book. Bechdel weaves in a number of works in a way that does not feel forced or contrived. It is quite likely that Bechdel’s father took his own life and this provides one of the focuses as Bechdel looks at Camus and suicide. She also has a lot of fun with Joyce, Ulysses and the Greek myths, looking at fathers (spiritual and temporal). Colette is inevitably referenced with an exploration of the homosexual milieu, as of course is Wilde. Fitzgerald and Shakespeare figure as does Proust. It’s all clever and interesting stuff and is well written. We learn very little about Bechdel’s mother or siblings, the focus is on her father and their relationship and on her own growing awareness of her own sexuality. At times the young Bechdel does appear a little self-aware, but this is a minor niggle. On the whole I enjoyed this and it was well written and put together and made me think. 7 out of 10 Starting Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter This is a brave and quite original angle on grief, which is so much a part of the human condition, something we all experience. The plot is very simple, a mother of two young boys dies very suddenly and this is a poetic record of their and their father’s struggle with grief. The father is a Ted Hughes scholar and the surprise package is Crow from the poem by Ted Hughes, who moves into the family home to help with the grief process. Porter has said that part of the impetus for this was the death of his father when he was six. The title also has a nod to Emily Dickinson (Hope is a thing with feathers). We all know grief in one way or another. I have encountered it in my work. Taking funerals as a vicar and then as a humanist celebrant. I have probably taken a couple of thousand funerals. I remember all the children, all of them and their parents. Grief isn’t a thing with feathers, it is crushing compressing and all-embracing. I remember one single mother whose eighteen month old child had died of meningitis. As I talked to her she told me about her child, but also about the domestic abuse she had experienced from the father. She railed against the injustice of life, which had taken her little boy away from her just as she and he had started to make something of their lives. I could only listen. I also remember when working as a care assistant in a nursing home and talking to residents, some of the rawest memories were about grief. One women spoke about a child she had lost over eighty years earlier, who she still thought about every day; the grief was still present. As I said, this is original and very brief; it could easily be read in one sitting. I am not a great fan of Ted Hughes or of the poem that originated the idea, so it didn’t really work for me, but I am glad I read it and I’m sure it will work for some. The individual sections are entitled Dad, Crow or Boys. It is interesting and Crow, as befits the bird is a little unsavoury and crude. At one point Dad thanks Crow for retrieving some of his wife’s memories of her childhood: “‘Thank you Crow.’ ‘All part of the service.’ ‘Really. Thank you, Crow.’ ‘You’re welcome. But please remember I am your Ted’s song-legend, Crow of the death-chill, please. The God-eating, trash-licking, word-murdering, carcass-desecrating math bomb motherfudgeer, and all that.’ ‘He never called you a motherfudgeer.’ ‘Lucky me.’” I think the reader’s reaction to this book will be very much determined by how they react to the idea of Crow. It wasn’t really for me, but it’s a good read. 6 out of 10 Starting The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese

Tea and Tranquillisers by Diane Harpwood I found this in a job lot of virago books I picked up very cheap on e-bay. It was published in 1981 and is set in the late 1970s. It is written in the form of a diary covering one year by Jane Bennett, a wife, mother and housewife. It describes her life, or lack of it: “I start my day the Valium way, at 7:20 am when my departing husband brings me a mug of tea and a Diazepam tablet…I need Valium to numb my rebelling mind into insensibility…I hate taking it but am a dependent, nervous, miserable wreck without it.” It’s a straightforward account of life in a small East Anglian town. Jane’s life is narrow and constricted and she hates housework. She struggles with her children and keeping the house clean, money is short and cooking is a problem. Jane has a group of friends who are in similar circumstances. She loves her husband David as a man, but not as a husband. He helps her very little, the house is her job. They have the usual rows and make ups and life goes on as seventies life did. It’s in many ways mundane, but illustrates the lot of women and the restrictions on their lives. In parts it is also amusing and poignant. For me nostalgia was also an attraction. I remember those Sundays in the 1970s when absolutely nothing was open and there was nothing to do (apart from read of course). Ford Cortinas, trips to the seaside, fish fingers, TVs and other electrical appliances that often didn’t work and lots more that I recall. Jane takes the Valium just to cope with daily life, otherwise it overwhelms her, she can see nothing in her future that she wants to do or be. There is a theme running through relating to how fragile mental health can be and how patriarchy can crush and dehumanise women. 7 out of 10 Starting Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Set in the American South, published in 1946 and set in 1923. It is about a wedding and revolves around the plantation of the Fairchild family and a family wedding. There is no real plot and very little happens. This is deliberate and Welty says she picked 1923 because it was a year when very little happened in the delta. The cast of characters is extensive and working out the relationships between the various members of the Fairchild clan isn’t straightforward. There are no skeletons in cupboards, no major family dramas (some minor quarrels), no bitternesses on the surface. The social structure is clear, it is a plantation and the servant class is black, but there are no resentments here either. The shadows of the Civil War, Reconstruction and Slavery don’t seem to exist here. The plantation is thriving and productive and the problems relatively minor. This certainly isn’t Faulkner or O’Neill. What is important to Welty is place and family. She captures place very well. The whole plot is the run up to a wedding, the last few days of preparation and the day itself. The writing does have a depth to it. Some of the novel is seen through the eyes of Laura, a young girl (about 8) who is a cousin to the Fairchild’s. Laura’s mother has recently died and she is going to stay with the family for the wedding: “Laura from her earliest memory had heard how they “never seemed to change at all.” That was the way her mother who had been away from them down in Jackson where they would be hard to believe, could brag on them without seeming to. And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness. Laughter at something went over the table; Laura found herself with a picture in her mind of a great bower-like cage full of tropical birds her father had shown her in a zoo in a city – the sparkle of motion was like a rainbow, while it was the very thing that broke your heart, for the birds that flew were caged all the time and could not fly out. The Fairchilds’ movements were quick and on the instant, and that made you wonder, are they free? Laura was certain that they were compelled – their favorite word.” As a reader you do become immersed in the story and the texture of it. That immersion I didn’t find entirely pleasant because of the almost total dislocation from the society around and my inability to connect with the characters. I felt this would have worked better as a short story. 6 out of 10 Starting Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

First in the World Somewhere by Penny Pepper This is a marvellous memoir from the irrepressible Penny Pepper. Her description of herself from the front of the book is Scribbler, Siren, Saucepot and Pioneer. She is a disability rights activist, feminist, musician in the punk tradition, writer of short stories and erotica and general thorn in the side of the establishment and inspiration to the rest of us. A word first about the publisher, Unbound. Unbound is a publishing house where books are crowdfunded. You pitch a book idea to Unbound, if they accept they put the book idea with information on the site and people can pledge money towards publication. If you pledge money, once the book is published your name is listed in the back. A simple idea, but obviously very effective. This is a very honest memoir, there is lots of laughter and humour, but sadness as well. Penny was born with Stills Disease, which she refers to as “the lurgy” throughout. It is important to emphasize that this isn’t a memoir about being disabled, but an account of one person’s struggle to be herself and to be independent. On the surface this is an account of Penny’s life until the early 2000s, but it charts so many changes and developments in society. Music is one strand; like many of us Penny was inspired by punk and she has been referred to as a post punk musician. The story of Penny’s letters to and from Morrissey, meeting with Ian Dury and her own musical career is fascinating. Under the name Kata Kolbert, Penny played gigs and even had an album produced called Spiral Sky (number one in Greece for a week; hence the title of the book). Another strand is Penny’s writing, liberated since the invention of the personal computer. She writes regularly for the Guardian, is writing a novel and some poetry. She has published two volumes of erotica where the central characters are disabled. Friends, lovers and relationships figure strongly and like the rest of us there are triumphs and disasters. Penny pulls no punches and the descriptions of family life also took me back to the 70s and life and culture then. She describes a difficult relationship with her stepfather. She meets Tamsin in hospital and the development of their friendship based on music and their attitudes to surviving life develop until they move into a flat together. There is a thread running through the book focussing on the struggles to lead an independent life. It starts in the old and grim warehouse type hospitals of Penny’s youth and the refusal of many professionals to accept that Penny can ever have any independence. Cringeworthy descriptions of the “there there” pat on head approaches of many of the well-meaning. Penny also charts the development of the disability rights movement: battles over access to places others take for granted, battles over access to transport, to toilets, to adaptions at home. There are encounters with social workers, slowly improving over years, until the times when money can be available to pay for a PA which is liberating. My own involvement in the social care system has charted these changes. Unfortunately the tide is now going in the other direction with the onset of austerity politics. The sort of budget Penny got for care in the late 1990s is increasingly more difficult to get. Some battles still need fighting. Penny also writes with great humour and lightness of touch. In the early 1990s Penny received an educational grant from a charity whose patron is Lord Snowdon. She describes the rather posh do: “I sit next to Freddie at one of the round tables. The cutlery’s too heavy for my small hands and I’m terrified of plopping food into my exposed cleavage. Somehow I get through lunch and then there are speeches, before we’re lined up ready for the presentation to Lord Snowdon. I’m suddenly angry. This isn’t my natural habitat. I’m punk. I’m anti-capitalist. I’m anti the greedy rich. Yet here I am about to receive a cheque for which I’m not truly grateful. I find I don’t want to call him sir or lord and I’m not going to bow – a difficult movement for me on many fronts and also because I’m certain my tits will fall out.” Penny is earthy, swears a lot and tells it how it is. She is a remarkable woman, her journalism is sharp and perceptive and this moving memoir charts her life and battles. It is very human and life affirming and it made me laugh and cry in equal measure. It also made me angry and reminded how far we have to go as a society in our struggle for justice and equality. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting Tea and Tranquilisers by Diane Harpwood

The Mill for Grinding Old People Young by Glenn Patterson Sometimes buying a book because the title intrigues you can lead to serendipitous discoveries, sometimes it doesn’t. This one falls into the probably doesn’t category. The unusual title is the name of a tavern, an actual historical tavern. This is a historical novel looking at Belfast in the 1830s through the character of Gilbert Rice. Fictional and historical characters mix together and although Rice is essentially middle class there are occasional glimpses of the underside of the city. The plot itself is fairly minimal. Rice is living with his religious and rather stern grandfather; he starts work at the Ballast Office at sixteen and finds a group of friends. A fall one day led to a diversion to the tavern of the title where Gilbert meets Maria, a Polish refugee, who works there. A relationship develops. Gilbert is still very young and easily led. Maria is rather more worldly and focussed on the revolution in her homeland. The working out of the relationship occupies the second half of the novel. The architect John Millar pops up as he designs the Third Presbyterian Church and puts a slate with a message in one of the columns. The slate was found in the rubble when the church was bombed in 1941. Patterson also weaves in some of the tensions from the failed uprising of 1798. The reader learns something of the history of the city of Belfast and the growth of the shipping industry. The sectarian divisions are not to the fore, but there are tensions present, especially in relation to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Patterson, Belfast born himself, describes writing the novel as a voyage of discovery. The novel starts and ends in 1897 with Gilbert’s death, looking back to a time before the great shipyards existed. Patterson says the research taught him the importance of the river: “But in a sense, everything that happened in Belfast’s entire history has revolved around what happens on the waterfront. The city begins at the confluence of two rivers, a place where you can ford from west to east. The shipyards defined it for a number of years, and now we’re reclaiming the waterfront and redefining ourselves as Titanic town.” I’m afraid this didn’t really grab me. I learnt a bit about the history of Belfast, but the plot meandered too much. The teenage Gilbert irritated me and I didn’t really engage with the whole. 6 out of 10 Starting First in the World Somewhere by Penny Pepper

Ragnorak by A S Byatt This is in the Canongate myths series and is a retelling of the Norse myths. Byatt tells them pretty straight but puts them in the context of her own childhood. Ragnorak is the Norse version of Armageddon (Gotterdammerung in Wagner’s Ring Cycle) and the retelling is very much as the original. Byatt uses her experience of being evacuated to the countryside at the beginning of the war. In the book the child is only known as “the thin child” and there is no conversation with anyone else. The myth comes through the child’s reading of a rather scholarly book on it. The child also reads Pilgrim’s Progress as well. Her father is in North Africa and she is convinced he will never return. This retelling has a very personal slant and a clear message. If you don’t get the point during the retelling of the myth there is a chapter at the end on the nature of myth and the difference between myth and fairy tales. Parallels are drawn between what we are doing to our planet and the end of the gods. There is great energy and power in the writing and the prose is rich and luscious; sometimes a bit too much for me. It’s a bit like drinking a full bottle of Cointreau (trust me, don’t ever do that). The telling is pretty straight with Odin, Loki, Frigg, Baldur, Hel and the rest all doing their stuff. Byatt contrasts the battles in the sky and the war with the doings of the gods. Yggdrasil is described as an ecosystem, a doomed one given the title of the book. One of the interesting points is how Byatt reacted to the myths. She recognised them as myths and in her mind compared them to the stories she was told in Church which were presented as fact. She came to the conclusion that these too were myths and she preferred the Norse myths because they ended with the end of the world with no happy resurrection like saving of the situation. For Byatt the myths of the Norse gods are mirrored by what we are doing to our planet: “The surface of the earth was like a great embroidered cloth, or rich tapestry, with an intricately interwoven underside of connected threads” Byatt makes her points clearly: “We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lop-sided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind and a biologically built-in short-sightedness,” And of the gods are similar to humanity because: “they are limited and stupid. They are greedy and enjoy fighting and playing games. They are cruel and enjoy hunting and jokes. They know Ragnorak is coming but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story. They know how to die gallantly but not how to make a better world.” Difficult to disagree with and it was good to be reminded of the Norse myths. I struggled with some of the prose and if the point was to draw parallels with the current state of the planet, the way it was presented led to a bit of a disconnect for me. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor

Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay This consists of a novella, Pany and a short story Sahana or Shamim. They address love, longing and sexual desire and the working out thereof. Bandyopadhyay describes the genesis of the novel thus: “If, confined by three or four days of constant, torrential rain, someone were to discover Jack Kerouac beneath the pillow, Milan Kundera and Sylvia Plath on a chair in the veranda, the poet Jibanananda Das on the water-filter, and Salvador Dali and James Joyce when chasing a rat into the larder, and if, on top of all this, that someone were to be a Bengali writer, especially a woman writer, would the awakening of her reckless impulse to write a novel like Panty not seem as natural as the stormy winds that accompany rain?” The author has been described as “the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature”, and there is indeed a great deal of eroticism in the novel, the juxtapositions are sometimes surreal and always interesting. An unnamed woman moves into an apartment in Kolkata. She has no luggage and seems to be waiting for surgery which may or may not happen and is sometimes in pain. She discovers a discarded pair of leopard print panties in the wardrobe and starts to think about the other woman who once owned them: “I picked it up. Imported. Soft. Leopard print. At once I wanted to know who the owner was. Many years ago I had found a blue bangle in a bedside drawer in a hotel room. When I took it in my hand it seemed to be dripping blue water. That day, too, I'd felt an urge to find out who the owner was.” “I slipped into the panty. What I did not know was that I had actually stepped into a woman. I slipped into her womanhood. Her sexuality, her love. I slipped into her desire, her sinful adultery, her humiliation and sorrow, her shame and loathing. I had entered her life, though I didn’t know it.” The lives of the two women begin to intertwine and it becomes quite difficult to work out which chapter relates to which woman; assuming of course there are two women; there are no easy answers: “I found myself standing before a mirror stretching across the wall. The reflection didn’t seem to be mine, exactly, but of another, shadowy figure. I touched my hair. Eerily, the reflection did not” Bandyopadhyay weaves sexuality seamlessly into the rest of life and the issues covered include poverty, homelessness, religion, Kashmir, terrorism, class, marriage and death. Opposite the apartment lives a homeless family and they figure in a number of chapters providing a contrast with the relative wealth of the woman. The woman witnesses a suicide, someone jumps from a building: “At once I made the death my own. “This is my death,” I said. I seemed to have rid myself of a weight I had borne some seven or eight months, and the foot I set down on the pavement felt completely new.” Each chapter provides a sketch of a situation or incident. The chapter numbers are not sequential. There are twenty-one chapters numbered between one and thirty. There may be a meaning or code there, but if there was I didn’t spot it! This may sound a little surreal or ethereal but it is grounded in the physicality of sex and the female body and the descriptions are frank. Bandyopadhyay said in an interview: “I had talked openly about orgasms — one of my woman characters says, “I can feel it” — and people told me, “How can you be so open? There are some things that you can’t be so open about.” But I don’t think you have much control over what you write. It flows.” This is an exploration of female sexuality, with and without men and the two (like the women you could argue as well that there is only one man) nameless men take varyingly active and passive roles. Sahana or Shamim, the short story at the end is about a married woman who eats fish behind the back of her vegetarian husband knowing that if he finds out it will end their relationship. It is surprisingly visceral with an interesting twist. I’ve read some awfully bad erotica in my time. This is not in that category. It is many layered and grounded, if somewhat surreal. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Violent bear it away by Flannery O'Connor

The writer on her work by Janet Sternburg A collection of essays and talks (even an extended poem from Ursula Le Guin) by women on writing. It covers what, why and how they write and what the obstacles are. The contributions are variable in quality, but they are all worth reading. Contributors include Margaret Attwood, Joan Didion, Erica Jong, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Anne Tyler, Diane Johnson, Mary Gordon and others. None are more than a dozen or so pages and provide an insight into the minds of the writers. Some are very personal, others more didactic. Of course there are insights into the attitudes of society and of men. Mary Gordon’s anecdote is particularly horrific as she reports a story told to her by a famous male writer in 1971. Sadly she doesn’t say which writer it was. “I will tell you what women writers are like. Women writers are like a female bear who goes into a cave to hibernate. The male bear shoves a pine cone up her ass, because he knows if she shits all winter she’ll stink up the cave. In spring the pressure of all that built up shhhhhhh makes her expel the pine cone, and she shits a winter’s worth all over the walls of the cave. That’ what women writers are like.” That sort of left me speechless. Gordon goes on to say she stopped writing for two months after that. However she also argues that there much more of a community of female writers who are mutually supportive than there is of men. Alice Walker writes powerfully about being a writer and a mother and also about being a black writer amongst white writers, even white feminist writers. Margaret Walker’s essay entitled On Being Female, Black and Free foreshadows the Black Lives matter movement. This is the virago edition, a collection put together from the two original volumes published ten years apart. It is a fascinating insight into the art of writing and into its challenges. 8 out of 10 Starting Ragnarok by A S Byatt

Riding Towards Everywhere by William Vollmann Riding Towards Everywhere I haven’t read nearly enough Vollmann and I intend to remedy this. This is Vollmann’s account of riding the rails in America. There is a touch of On the Road about this, but not for the teenage, for the middle-aged. The dedication at the beginning sums it up: This book is dedicated to STEVE JONES who never pretended that he or I were hobos and who therefore coined the word fauxbeaux who turned fifty riding the rails with me. Who was riding the rails with me as I turned forty-seven, Who never made me feel guilty for saying That this or that train was too fast for me, And who is the finest Christian who ever bought me a cigar, drank my booze or shouted fudge! into the diesel-scented night Riding the rails is much more an established tradition than in the UK, mainly because of the sheer size of the rail network in the US. There is a long history going back into the nineteenth century and later with authors like Jack London (who is referenced regularly), during the great depression and with musicians like Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. Vollmann has long chronicled the lives of the poor, oppressed and disenfranchised and his penchant for riding the rails allows him to continue this. He does it with vivid prose at times mixed in with the earthiness: “We rushed on. A flare of evening sun in the Gabilan Range (pink chalcedony), the white loveliness of rainbirds blowing spray in elongated flower petals, the Sierra de Salinas to the west, the leaden darkness of a lettuce field, all these perceptions granted to me right next to the freeway became my loveliest treasures which I hope to hoard right up to the cemetery lights amidst the last golden-green of the fields” Vollmann has no plan when he goes train hopping, he actually doesn’t care where he ends up. What he is aiming for is Cold Mountain, a sort of idyll which the New York Times review describes thus: “Cold Mountain represents for Vollmann an idyllic destination, an American nirvana, a vanished paradise of manly freedom and personal liberty.” This isn’t entirely fair because although Vollmann’s company is generally male, this is nothing gendered about this. Vollmann does nostalgia for the old days very well, but he is not taken in by it: “Would I really have preferred my grandfather’s time, when Pinkertons were cracking Wobblies over the head, or my father’s, when Joe McCarthy could ruin anyone by calling him Red?” Vollmann asks himself plenty of questions as he travels along and this quote illustrates his distinction between citizens (usually in italics) and hobos and concerns a bearded hobo called Emmanuel: “And I wonder what it means that I am willing to consider Emmanuel my brother, whereas to him I am but a citizen to be begged from, avoided or duped? But then I think: Do I really consider him my brother? Would I leave my backpack with him? Would I trust him to sleep beside me in a boxcar and not go for my throat with his new sharp knife? And if not, could it be that my various books, written in the belief that we are all members of the same human family, are either hypocritical or else as ghostly as boxcars slowly trundling through the northern darkness” It is Vollmann’s reflectiveness that lifts this above the ordinary type of travelogue: “Precisely because it perishes, each moment deserves eternal memorialization.” There is also a very clear anti-authoritarian feel to it as well and Vollmann rails against unnecessary laws which limit those on the outside of society and oppress them. He relishes the brushes with railroad security and trying to avoid them. Vollmann is no daredevil and he is unable to jump on and off trains as adeptly as his friend Steve, having recently broken his pelvis and as he says himself he is; “a cautious, even timid soul who makes himself pull off one stunt after another for his own good”. There are some poignant and telling photographs at the end of the book taken by Vollmann on his travels. I like Vollmann’s relentless curiosity and his insistence in bringing to our attention those who society would rather ignore. 9 out of 10 Starting Poor People by the same author

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee This novel covers over eighty years and four generations of a Korean family and if you want a cliché it can be described as a sweeping family saga. It begins in Korea but most of the book is set in Japan and examines the lot of Koreans in Japan, those born in Korea and zainichi, their descendants. Korea was part of the Japanese Empire in the early twentieth century, at the end of the war this changed as Korea became independent and split into North and South. Those Koreans in Japan lost their right to stay and there followed decades of wrangling over status. Many of the Koreans Lee portrays lived in slums and ghettos and have low paid jobs. Lee describes the discrimination through the eyes of her characters. She also looks at the phenomenon of “passing” where Koreans pass as Japanese. In the New York Times review Masachika Ukiba comments: “Koreans have suffered from the discrimination that all immigrants face, plus an added dimension that comes from their having been colonial subjects. Many of today’s zainichi are fourth-generation, so they’re hardly immigrants anymore. They are essentially Japanese.” The title comes from the game Pachinko, which is akin to pinball and is very popular in Japan, although there are issues with the gambling that surrounds it. Many of the Pachinko Halls are run by zainichi. Lee worked and reworked this novel for almost thirty years and did a great deal of research, the original idea coming in 1989 and the novel published in 2017. The novel revolves around the character of Sunja and her mother, husband, sons and grandson. The plot is inevitably quite labyrinthine and there have been criticisms that the second half of the book is rushed and disjointed. I can see that point and I sort of feel that this could have easily been double the five hundred pages it is now. Lee makes her points fairly easily but occasionally will explain them through her characters. Isak, Sunja’s husband and a Christian pastor is told: “No one will rent to the Koreans. As pastor, you’ll get a chance to see how the Koreans live here. You can’t imagine: a dozen in a room that should be for two, men and families sleeping in shifts. Pigs and chickens inside homes. No running water. No heat. The Japanese think Koreans are filthy” The storyline involving Sunja’s son Noa is also telling and illustrates how the effects of migration can be pervasive and long lasting. The yakusa make their appearance but are not at all caricatures. There is love, romance, tragedy, imprisonment, suicide, poverty, disease, success, war and even AIDS. It’s what you would expect given the breadth of the saga. It is no surprise that Lee says that Eliot and especially Middlemarch were important to her. Lee’s style is a third person omniscient narrator which gives her flexibility and the ability to construct her world carefully. As well as Eliot and other Victorian novelists, another influence is the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. I did enjoy this novel, it engages the reader and it is easy to relate to the characters and become involved with them. There are flaws, especially in the second half, but it is a good read and well worth the effort. I also learnt a lot about the Korean community in Japan and their history. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Reflections on Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller A set of essays split into three parts. The first part is a historical analysis which ranges from Plato to Bacon and the Age of Reason. Part two looks at subject and object. The final part considers theory, practice and ideology. It requires careful reading if, like me, you don’t have a scientific background and the chapter on quantum mechanics was a challenge. This was written in the 1980s and Keller’s main work is as a molecular biologist. Keller looks at the assumptions underpinning scientific research and method and looks at why objectivity has been seen as male and subjectivity as female. The essays cover a broad range of topics including historical philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology as well as science. Keller takes a specifically feminist perspective and the implications for science and its study. She analyses the work of a colleague, Barbara McClintock and speculates how gender issues impacted on her and her work, despite winning the Nobel Prize. Keller makes the argument for a gender free science very convincingly and ends at an appropriate point: “To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. Every past vision of scientific truth, every model of natural phenomena, has proved in time to be more limited than its adherents claimed. The survival of productive difference in science requires that we put all claims for intellectual hegemony in their proper place – that we understand that such claims are, by their very nature political rather than scientific.” 7 and a half out of 10 Starting Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte I’ve been meaning to read this for years and have finally got round to it. The plot is pretty straightforward. Gilbert Markham is a gentleman farmer and the story is set as a series of letters to his friend. A mysterious woman (Helen Graham, an assumed name) and her young son move into Wildfell Hall, a local and somewhat rundown property. She is rather reclusive and begins to be the subject of local gossip. Over time she mixes with some of her neighbour and Gilbert falls in love with her. Helen does her best not to encourage him, but he befriends her son and praises her art, which is important to her. One evening he sees Helen being friendly towards a neighbour and friend of his. He confronts her and she gives him her diary and tells him to go away and read it. Gilbert also attacks and injures the neighbour. The diary is an account of Helen’s abusive marriage to Arthur Huntingdon and it transpires that the man Gilbert has attacked is Helen’s brother. The diary takes up a large portion of the book and is narrated by Helen. Helen then goes off to nurse her husband who is now very ill because of his dissolute lifestyle. Eventually Arthur does the decent thing and dies. Then the question is do Gilbert and Helen finally get it together. The reader already knows the answer of course. A fairly straightforward plot, executed well. However we are talking Bronte’s here and there is a lot more going on. It has been described as one of the earliest feminist novels. When Helen discovers that Arthur is having an affair she makes a clear decision to end their marital intimacy, saying to him that she would remain a wife in name only. As May Sinclair said the shutting of Helen’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated through Victorian England. Unlike her two sisters Anne Bronte did not glamourize violent and alcoholic men and she was the one that spent the most time nursing Branwell. All of the sisters used Branwell as a model, Anne did not endow Arthur Huntingdon with any glamour, and he is painted plainly as a charming abuser. Anne also has a lot to say about the nature of men, on which subject she is a bit of a pessimist: “It is all very well to talk about noble resistance, and trials of virtue; but for fifty-or five hundred men that have yielded to temptation, show me one that has had virtue to resist. And why should I take it for granted that my son will be one in a thousand?-and not rather prepare for the worst, and suppose he will be like this-like the rest of mankind, unless I take care to prevent it?” The topics the novels covers: abuse, alcoholism, adultery, a woman leaving her husband were all unusual at the time. Helen wants to bring up her own son differently: “My greatest source of uneasiness, in this time of trial, was my son, whom his father and his father’s friends delighted to encourage in all the embryo vices a little child can show, to instruct in all the evil habits he could acquire – in a word, to `make a man of him’ was one of their staple amusements” Although Helen’s attempts to ensure he never drinks by administering alcohol with an emetic hardly seem to be the height of good childcare either! Helen is made to challenge a lot of legal and social conventions relating to marriage, motherhood, living alone and relating to men. There are some irritations as well. Helen is piously religious as well and will insist on going on about it. Gilbert spends most of the time whining and complaining, apart from beating up someone he sees as a rival. There is a complexity to it and articles and texts analysing it are abundant. In the end Helen proposes to Gilbert: “She turned away her glistening eye and crimson cheek, and threw up the window and looked out, whether to calm her own excited feelings or to relieve her embarrassment,—or only to pluck that beautiful half-blown Christmas rose that grew upon the little shrub without, just peeping from the snow, that had hitherto, no doubt, defended it from the frost, and was now melting away in the sun. Pluck it however, she did, and having gently dashed the glittering powder from its leaves, approached it to her lips and said— ‘This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals.—Will you have it?’” It’s a great novel with a lot going on and I shouldn’t have left it so long to have read it. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Queer City by Peter Ackroyd Ackroyd is a prolific and thorough writer, novelist and biographer. He has written other histories of London, including ones on the Thames and the underground of London (not just the tube). This is about the history through the ages of the gay population of London. There is an issue of terms: to use gay, queer, homosexual. Ackroyd settles for queer to cover the whole range of topics he covers. There is a plethora of facts and stories assembled by Ackroyd; some are funny, hilarious even, others heartrendingly sad. He drags up some of the most unlikely names: Constable Obert Pert and a seller of trinkets called Samuel Drybutter. Facts such as the late Tudor name for a dildo (or at least one of them) is a shuttlecock. I don’t think I’m going to look at the game of badminton in the same way again! It was also interesting to discover that in the seventeenth century there was a male brothel on the site of Buckingham Palace. One fascinating aspect of the journey through history here is the breadth, depth and luxuriance of the language used over the ages. We meet words like: catamite, sapphist, ingle, pathic, mollie, jemmy, tribade, tommy, indorser, fribble and madge. We also meet a vast array of characters. The law is also never far away, it must be remembered that penetrative sex between men was punishable by death between 1533 and 1861, the last hangings being in 1835. Hard labour was the punishment until 1967. Ackroyd charts an ebb and flow as there were periods of time when the law was applied more severely than others. When he can find original voices Ackroyd makes use of them, like the man arrested for lewd conduct in 1726 who said “I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body”. There are ideas thrown in too, Ackroyd suggests that there was a third gender in Anglo-Saxon times inspired by male corpses buried with grave goods more associated with women, and records female monks who cut their hair short and “dressed, worked and lived like men”. Ackroyd says that: “our modern descriptions of what is gay or queer need to be thoroughly revised in order to understand the past”. There are transvestite knights in Malory and Richard of Devizes in the twelfth century describes “glabriones (smooth-skinned pretty boys), pusi­ones (hustlers), molles (effeminates) and mascularii (man-lovers)”, The voices of ordinary men and women are more difficult to capture, but are sometimes found in the court records. Cross dressing is common and clearly gender fluidity has a very long history. The city itself has a central role and Ackroyd quotes Calvino: “Cities, like dreams, are made up of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” There is a great deal to fascinate, but also a great deal of persecution and tragedy, some of it truly horrific and Ackroyd charts periods of particular persecution and roots them in the troubles of the times. The early twentieth century (apart from the two world wars) being very repressive. The ending of the history is fairly brief and everything since 1967 is packed into the last chapter, which is far too brief. The problem is that the last fifty years since legalization could be a rather hefty tome in itself, so not everyone will be happy with Ackroyd’s selectiveness. It must also be remembered that this is not the history of a movement but of the city of London and its relationship with its queer citizens over the ages. The writing about Aids is poignant given that Ackroyd’s long term partner died of Aids in the 1990s. This is a good history, alternately funny and sad, written with great erudition and verve. A bit limited towards the end, but I suspect the modern history requires a whole other book. 8 out of 10 Starting The Writer and her Work edited by Janet Sternburg

The Zealot's Bones by D M Mark This combines historical fiction and crime. It is set in a specific time and place. The city of Hull in 1849 at the time of a cholera epidemic which killed one in forty-three of the population. It also moves to North Lincolnshire as well. This is my area of the country hence the attraction. The plot is a little far-fetched (well quite a lot actually). It is rumoured that the bones of one of the apostles, a rather obscure one, Simon the Zealot, have found their resting place in North Lincolnshire. Seeking for these relics is a Canadian antiquary and academic Diligence Matheson. He has hired as a bodyguard Meshach Stone, an ex-soldier with a very colourful past and enough inner demons to run a small portion of hell. The search for the old bones becomes rather secondary as Stone discovers a quest of his own. Stone makes a connection with a prostitute in Hull. He returns to try to find her and discovers she has died, most likely of cholera. He goes on to discover that actually she has been brutally murdered and that there is a serial killer at work, murdering women of the lower classes (mainly prostitutes). Would it surprise you to find that the two quests become enmeshed? No, I thought not! This is not for the faint-hearted and there is certainly a gothic edge with a script that could have come from Hammer Horror. There is also a great deal of brutal violence and torture, quite graphically described. What the novel lacks is meaningful female characters. The women involved are all prostitutes (and most of them are dead) and mentally unwell (and there are only two of them). It’s a man’s world and men have to do what they have to do, usually in inventively gruesome ways. I like a bit more subtlety in my crime novels and this wasn’t for me. If you like your historical crime violent and brutal then this may be for you. 4 out of 10 Starting Riding Toward Everywhere by William T Vollmann

Sweet days of discipline by Fleur Jaeggy A fairly short novella set in Switzerland in the 1950s, it begins in a straightforward way: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” The reader may be tempted to think this is going to be yet another analysis of teenage adolescence and in some ways it is as Jaeggy writes this in a semi-autobiographical way. Brodsky makes the point that: “Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective.” There are lots of literary references: Walser is invoked on the first page and of course he died in the snow in Appenzell in 1956. The mountain setting are suggestive of TB and Mann’s The Magic Mountain. There are Bronte references and suggestions of Jane Eyre’s boarding school. The plot is a simple description of life in the school and the narrator’s friendships. These are contrasting. There is Frederique, something of an austere relationship with some distance and coldness, yet very profound. Then there is Micheline, more open and spontaneous: “What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time, and wasn’t that what I wanted too?” The contrast between Frederique and Micheline is central to the book. The narrator encounters Frederique later in life living in austerity: “I thought of this destitution of hers as some spiritual or aesthetic exercise. Only an aesthete can give up everything. I wasn’t surprised so much by her poverty as by her grandeur. That room was a concept. Though of what I didn’t know. Once again she had gone beyond me.” The austerity is a reflection of their austere relationship. One of the marvels of this book is that Jaeggy manages to write about the hothouse world of a boarding school in such a cold and austere way. There is a gothic quality to this and the award winning translation is excellent. Reviewers who have attended boarding schools have noted how well Jaeggy has captured the crushes (passiones), the rituals and teachers having favourites. The head of school Frau Hofstetter is reminiscent of Mme Beck in Villette. Jaeggy writes well and turns a good phrase. School lockers are described as “the dear little mortuary of our thoughts”. Boarding schools: “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in a sense it is founded on blackmail.” The language is often that of mental illness and there are plenty of premonitions and death and all that surrounds it are ever present. There is the sense that we are all dying, even as children, evoking Rilke who said that we carry our deaths within us. The narrative is intense and claustrophobic and there are gaps which the reader has to fill and mercifully there is no whiney teenage angst. It is a brief and sparely written novella and there is more to it than meets the eye. 8 out of 10 Starting Mill for Grinding Old People Young by Glenn Patterson

There are a lot of us around Madeleine! A Pin to see the Peepshow by F Tennyson Jesse This is a powerful and moving representation in novel form of a true crime in the 1920s. Published in 1934 by F Tennyson Jesse (great niece of the poet Tennyson) it is well written and the characterisation is strong. I must say at this point that there are inevitably spoilers ahead, although it is a bit like warning of spoilers at the beginning of a fictionalised account of the Titanic! The novel is based on the infamous Thompson/Bywaters murder case of the early 1920s. Edith Thompson was a married lower middle class woman having an affair with a younger man (by seven years). The younger man (Bywaters meets Thompson and her husband late one evening as they are returning from the theatre and murders Percy Thompson. Both were convicted of murder as it was felt that it was planned by both and they were hanged on the same day. A case that was notorious at the time and had a significant impact on the debate about the death penalty. It has resonated since: Sarah Waters’ novel “The Paying Guests” is based on the case as was Jill Dawson’s novel “Fred and Edie” and E M Delafield’s novel “Messalina of the Suburbs”. There have been several true crime books about the case, two TV adaptations, at least two plays, several TV documentaries, mentions in Agatha Christie’s novel Crooked House, a number of legal examinations of whether the trial and sentence were valid, a biography of Thompson, a novel by Molly Cutpurse (A Life Lived) speculating about what might have happened to Thompson had she lived, fiction based on the case has come from P D James, Dorothy L Sayers and Anthony Cox and last but not least James Joyce was fascinated by the case and used transcripts of the trial extensively in Finnegans Wake. The title of this novel comes from an incident when sixteen year old Julia Almond (Thompson in the novel) is looking after a class of younger children at her school. She is shown a peepshow by nine year old Leonard (later to be her lover): “Then she picked up the box. A round hole was cut into each end, one covered with red transparent paper, one empty. To the empty hole was applied an eye, shutting the other in obedience to eager instructions. And at once sixteen year old, worldly wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child an enchanted child was looking into fairyland. The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size – a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact of insane proportions, but lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.” This novel is written with great humanity and intensity so the reader understands Julia Almond, despite her flaws and her fantasies. Almond is portrayed as a hopeless romantic wanting the sort of romance she found in novels. Her husband is portrayed as respectable, slow and plodding, expecting the sort of wife a lower middle class chap should expect and being surprised when he didn’t get it. The novel covers Julia’s life for over ten years and does portray how events can take on a life of their own. The last hundred pages of the novel are horrific, portraying the investigation, trial and time leading to the execution. The actual description of Thompson’s last days and execution are truly awful and should be enough to convince anyone that the death penalty should be opposed. John Ellis, the executioner, was so haunted by Thompson’s execution that he took his own life. The novel is well conceived and well written and the reader is taken along as events spiral out of control; an indictment of lower middle class values and mores: as one reviewer pointed out had the characters been upper class or working class events would not have happened as they did. It is also a pertinent check to remind one that the jury system is not perfect. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

The Secret Life of Owls by John Lewis-Stempel I have always had a thing about owls. I have a mug with an owl on it, a few pottery owls, pictures, bookmarks and so on. So I had to have this little book, only ninety pages long. It is a combination of looking at the nature of owls, the different species that live in and visit the British Isles and some of the history and mythology of owls. The parts relating to anatomy and physiology are fairly brief, but the interesting parts are the mythology, poetry and history. This is the poet Edward Thomas writing during the First World War: Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof. Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. All of the night was quite barred out except An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, that night, as in I went. And salted was my food, and my repose, Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice. The owl reminds the soldier that although he is safe, warm and fed, there are those that are not. We Have owls as harbingers of death, wise owls, wol in Winnie the Pooh, owls as a symbol of sobriety (various parts of the owl, eaten, boiled etc were supposed to cure drunkenness), putting the heart and foot of an owl under your arm to cure rabies and other such interesting pieces of information. Owls have been kept as pets, Florence Nightingale had one. But nothing beats seeing an owl gliding across a frosty field at dawn or dusk. Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat inevitably gets in there (never really a favourite) as does the old nursery rhyme used to try to keep children quiet: A wise old owl lived in an oak The more he saw the less he spoke The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can't we all be like that wise old bird? There are stories about owls from around the world, China and a Native American tale and there are records of owls from cave paintings dating back many thousands of years. It’s a mine of owlish information, if a little too short for me. The book starts with The Owls by Baudelaire and it seems a good place to finish: Among the black yews, their shelter, the owls are ranged in a row, like alien deities, the glow, of their red eyes pierces. They ponder. They perch there without moving, till that melancholy moment when quenching the falling sun, the shadows are growing. Their stance teaches the wise to fear, in this world of ours, all tumult, and all movement: Mankind drunk on brief shadows always incurs a punishment for his longing to stir, and go. 8 and a half out of 10 Starting Sweet days of discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

I think you both are right and I will look out for more of her books! The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price This is a remarkable piece of work. Sometimes when you read a book it feels so familiar that you think you must have read it before. I felt this about Carr’s Month in the Country and about this book. The beginning of the Guardian review sets the scene: “In 1964, BBC Wales made a short film about three brothers, blind from birth or infancy, raised on a farm in the lovely and remote valley of Maesglasau, east of Dolgellau in Merioneth. Their genetic fate both closed and opened doors. Special education away from home meant that Gruff went to Oxford and became an Anglican clergyman. William – who returned to the farm – worked as a polyglot Braille editor. Lewis, the Benjamin of the family, would programme computers and, in retirement, become a prize-winning blind artist.” Rebecca Jones was their aunt and it is her life that is told here: part novel, part history, part portrayal of rural life. Her family have lived in and farmed the valley for over a thousand years and can trace their roots in the valley to 1012. Rebecca Jones was born in 1905. Angharad Price is the great-niece of the siblings, making her Rebecca Jones’s great great-niece. She is telling her own family story. The original is in Welsh. The landscape of the valley and its moods and climate are almost another character. Over the course of the book we are taken through the changes in the twentieth century. Jones is portrayed with great dignity and perception and with a good deal of warmth. If you are tempted to read this don’t read any introductions and don’t turn to the last page! This work is also profound and reflective. Rebecca reflects as she ages; “Continuance is painful. It is the cross onto which we are tied: its beams pulling us this way and that. A longing for continuance lies at the heart of our nature, and we lie at the center of those forces which pull us this way and that like some torturer. Our basic urge is toward continuance. Yet, we are born to die. And we spend our lives coming to terms with that paradox.” The language is poetic, even in translation: ‘This was a reversal of creation. The perfection of an absence. / Tranquility can belong to one place, yet it ranges the world. It is tied to every passing hour, yet everlasting. It encompasses the exceptional and the commonplace. It connects interior with exterior.’ There is a good deal of prose by Hugh Jones, a hymnodist but it is family and location that matter most: “Memories of my childhood reach me in a continuous flow: smells and tastes and sights converging in a surging current. And just like the stream at Maesglasau, these recollections are a product of the landscape in our part of rural mid-Wales at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its familiar bubbling comforts me. It was not really like that, of course. The flow was halted frequently. Indeed a stream is not the best metaphor for life's irregular flow between one dam and the next. I have not mentioned the reservoirs. In these the emotions congregate. I approach them with hesitation. I stare into the still waters, fearing their hold on my memories. In terror I see my own history in the bottomless depths.” This novel/history is simple and yet written with great profundity, set within a very specific and limited landscape and seeming to contain the whole world. The history of the family has its sadness’s with the loss of several children over the generations, two world wars, the coming of mechanisation and electricity. I would recommend this book to anyone who reads; it is quite brilliant. 9 and a half out of 10 Starting The Secret Life of the Owl by John Lewis- Stempel