A Book Blog 2025 by Books do Furnish a Room

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Modernism's Middle East: Journeys to Barbary by Joanna Grant

“The myth of the desert was one of the most abiding creations of late antiquity. It was, above all, a myth of liberating precision. It delimited the towering presence of the “world”, from which the Christian must be set free, by emphasizing a clear ecological frontier. It identified the process of disengagement from the world with a move from one ecological zone to another, from the settled land of Egypt to the desert. It was a brutally clear boundary, already heavy with immemorial associations,”

This followed on from Said’s Orientalism and was an interesting contrast. The above quote from the historian Peter Brown illustrates some of the desire of modernists to explore the desert and what they called The Levant. This book examines that, setting it in the context of the times. The First World War and the rise of film being factors. There is an examination of the “sheik films” of the 1920s, especially those with Rudolf Valentino. Grant also looks at the writings of Virginia Woolf (especially Orlando) and Vita Sackville West, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence Durrell and Paul Bowles.

It is interesting throughout and I have picked out a few things that struck me. When examining Woolf and Sackville-West’s writings, Grant argues that what they are doing is “drawing on this corpus of orientalist fantasies to create a kind of queer fantasy space”. I see what she means and this was something that had not occurred to me before.

“For Woolf, at least, desert images and stories remain a source of enabling communion with extremity, even if the utility of the desert topos does outlive much of its homoerotic promise”

I was slightly surprised to see T E Lawrence in this, although the Lawrence myth is centred in the Arabian desert. Grant looks closely at both sides of the Lawrence debate and there are fanatics for and against. I think there is a fundamental problem with Lawrence as the blond hero in Arab dress who saves the day. He’s just a bit too … well, gay. He also doesn’t court and promote his fame. In fact he changes his name and re-enlists as a mere aircraftsman, not a full colonel. He was an adjunct of the imperialist state, whatever else he was.

I will skim over Wyndham Lewis and Paul Bowles. The more I read of Durrell, the less I like him.

This, as an examination of the obsession of some Modernists with the Middle East does cover some of the major modernist players and adds a different dimension to the debate.

8 out of 10

Starting Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse

 

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Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse

“…and he stands up and looks around and then he thinks that everything is somehow what it is and at the same time different, all the things are normal things but they have become somehow dignified, and golden, and heavy, as though they weighed much much more than themselves and at the same time had no weight…”

This is a novella, about a hundred pages and my first encounter with Fosse. It’s in two parts. We encounter Johannes twice. The first section describes the day of his birth. The second section is a longer account of the day of his death. On that day Johannes gets up feeling much better than he has for many years and he walks around his usual haunts, meeting people he knows, who he gradually realises are already dead. He gradually realises he is dead himself. This is very much not The Sixth Sense.

This is a sort of reflection on death and what happens afterwards. Johannes and his friend Peter (who has come to fetch him) end up sailing off on a boat (Johannes was a fisherman). From the musing here it seems that Fosse perceives the afterlife as a sort of nirvana type existence: essentially a “happy soup”, well here a “wordless light”.  
This is a stream of consciousness novel and Fosse, as yet, hasn’t discovered the full stop, because there aren’t any in this. The language is simple. There is a sense of death throughout, but life is peaceful, calm with little disruption.

To me it didn’t feel very real. I am also sceptical about an afterlife, so maybe this wasn’t really for me.

“He stands and looks down at the buildings on the wharf along the Bay and he notices that something is different about them too and Johannes stands there, closes his eyes, what is wrong with him? because everything he sees is different somehow, now he is looking at the buildings on the wharf and they are also heavy and at the same time so strangely light, no, what is going on with him today? Johannes thinks, no he’ll never figure it out, Johannes thinks, and it’s probably all just his imagination, the buildings on the wharf looking different too, anyway he can’t point to anything specific that’s happened, and if something is different then it’s probably in him that something’s happened, but could it also be something outside of him?”

6 out of 10

Starting Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

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The Luminaries Eleanor Catton

The Luminaries

“His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future and profoundly regretful of the world's decay.”

A Booker Prize winner, about 850 pages long, this has been taking up space (a lot of space) on the shelves for some years. Currently I am on a mission to read stuff that’s been hanging around for a while and this falls into that category. It is set in the New Zealand goldfields of the 1860s and has been compared to Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It does have the feel of a Victorian novel. There are multiple narrators, each narrating their own particular part of the story, not all of them are reliable. The reader gradually begins to piece together the whole over the course of the novel. The whole is split into twelve parts and it uses the astrological signs and readings for the individual days in question, including planetary positions in relation to the zodiac signs. There are twelve main male characters, each relating to a sign of the zodiac.

“The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met”

The other characters in the book, including the women correspond to the sun and planets. There is lots of symbolism and lots of themes. These include perception (how different people perceive the same event in varying ways), desire, greed, revenge, filial relationships and much more. The first part takes up almost half the book and apparently each part is exactly half the length of the previous one (so I read). All of this is on the internet if you feel the desire to look it up.

The plot is quite convoluted and complex, but it involves the search for gold, a frontier town that almost has the feel of the American West and the variety of characters that go with it. The non-linear nature of the plot was a mild irritation. There are two female characters (one of those being a prostitute), a small number of Chinese characters and one Maori. Here we come to some of my quibbles about the novel. The one Maori character has the feel of the “noble savage” about him and neither of the main Chinese characters can speak much English (the French and German characters though speak it fluently). We are in the middle of the Empire, although it is easy to forget that. The Chinese and Maori characters seem to be token additions or plot devices.

It is a well crafted tale, a good story; but for me the backdrop was a problem, the use of the minor characters. The only other NZ winner of the Booker was The Bone People, and I preferred that to this.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

[Madeleine]

this was a TV series a few years ago, well made and acted and looked great but was pretty incomprehensible to most viewers (self included!).

[poppy]

On 3/30/2025 at 8:12 AM, Madeleine said:

this was a TV series a few years ago, well made and acted and looked great but was pretty incomprehensible to most viewers (self included!).

 

I loved this TV series, but maybe you have to be a Kiwi to understand it properly?  My memory is questionable at the best of times, but I remember the Maori and Chinese characters having quite major roles in the series.

[Madeleine]

Yes they did.

[poppy]

20 hours ago, Madeleine said:

Yes they did.

 

Perhaps they feature more in the TV series than the book ( I haven't read the book).

[Madeleine]

I haven't read it either.

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Sovereign by C J Sansom

“How easy it is to leave things undone until they are too late.”

I have managed to reach number three in a series! Mind you it’s about a decade since the last one. This one is set in 1541 during the King’s Progress to York. It’s mostly set in York with a bit of time in Hull and London. Henry is on wife number five, Catherine Howard. Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak, are sent to York ahead of the Progress on a mission by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer.

It is well plotted and there are the usual shenanigans with plenty of misleads and cul-de-sacs. If your like a Tudor mystery novel then you will probably like this. It’s good to have a disabled protagonist and Shardlake is likeable. The plot is pleasingly convoluted and inevitably revolving around plots against the king.

The are a couple of interesting aspects worth mentioning. There is mention of the mouldwarp legend which was current at the time. A mouldwarp is an old name for a mole. It’s also known as the Prophecy of Merlin. It says that the sixth king after John will be a mouldwarp; generally someone who is contemptible and villainous, rather proud  and a coward (sounds like a lot of them). Shakespeare mentions it in Hemry IV part one. It was also used by some of those opposing Henry VIII.

The other rumour Sansom uses is one relating to Ceciley Neville, an ancestor of all royals from Edward IV. There was a rumour prevalent at the time Edward IV was the result of Ceciley having a liaison with a Kentish archer whilst her husband was away. This would mean that all the royals since then were descended from said Kentish archer. Now there’s a thought!

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.

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San Miguel by T C Boyle

“A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes—not elsewhere—I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.”

I have no idea how this ended up on my shelves, but here we are. Time to read it and move it on.

San Miguel is an island off the California coast. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was lived on by a few sheep farmers attempting to make a living. There are some memoirs available, and Boyle has taken these and constructed a novel based on them. There are three accounts from members of two families, all of them women. The novel starts in 1888 and goes on until the 1940s.

The women are Marantha, who has TB and has ended up on the island under false pretences (husband being the culprit) and her daughter Edith. They arrive on the island in 1888. Elise arrives in the 1930s with her husband Herbie.

The novel moves at quite a pace, it’s a bit frenetic in terms of plot lines and possible crises. The plot feels a bit scattergun. It’s not Robinson Crusoe, but there is always a sense of isolation and scraping an existence. The problem is that it is an account daily life and how to manage men who are really not bothered about what those around them are suffering.

It wasn’t memorable and didn’t grab my attention. 

5 out of 10

Starting New Boy by Tracy Chevalier

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New Boy by Tracy Chevalier

“….people were shouting his name and in the distance the girls were cheering and for a brief moment O shed the hyperawareness of his black skin and was just another shiny new hero on the playground.”

This is a volume in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, modern retellings. This one is a retelling of Othello. It is pretty brief and not at all demanding. This version of Othello is setting in Washington and in a school the main characters are eleven year old children (oh dear) with a couple of teachers. And one more thing, it all happens in a day!

The time is the early 1970s. Osei (Othello) is a diplomat’s son who starts a new school in Washington, he is the only black pupil. The plot is compressed into a day and for me, it’s a total disaster. The Ian/Iago character is just not believable and because Osei in new and no one knows him the interactions (especially with Dee/Desdemona), just don’t work. Neither of the teachers are believable, particularly Mr Brabant (Brabantio}, who is one of the villains of the piece. The interactions between the children are way too adult (this is the 1970s). The plot simply doesn’t work because it is compressed into a day. I think there is a lack of depth and of believable characters. The handling of the race element wasn’t a total disaster, the sexualisation of the eleven year olds definitely was.

I much preferred Winterson’s retelling of A Winters Tale.

3 out 0f 10

Starting Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling

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Edge Of England by Derek Turner

This rather comprehensive account of my home county, Lincolnshire covers a good deal of ground. It is the second largest English counties and one of the least well known. Turner covers geography, history, customs, folklore, wildlife, architecture, industry, farming (inevitably), lots of brief accounts of historical figures along with Turner’s own personal history in Lincolnshire and his experiences. It also has the feel of travel literature.

The chapters are organised geographically, which means there is no real chronological framework. After the introduction there are chapters on waters, coastline and doggerland (the land now covered by the North Sea that was once inhabited). Then there are chapters on the Fenlands, Marshland, the Wolds, the River Ouse, The Humber Estuary, northwest Lincolnshire, Lincoln, the west and southwest.

The chapters are a bit of a patchwork which leads to odd juxtapositions. Some work better than others. When discussing Grantham Turner inevitably has to comment on two particularly famous residents; Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. He is a bit cautious about Thatcher (more than I would have been) and with Newton perhaps overly hero-worshipping the notoriously grumpy Mr Newton: very much avoiding his alleged investment in a slave trading company. Slavery is also skated over when he talks about Stamford. Most of Lincolnshire was too out of the way for any involvement, but Stamford, in the south of the county was much closer to London with easier access to what was happening.

There’s plenty about landscape and architecture. There is the magnificence of the cathedral and some of the oldest churches (Saxon) in the country. The vignettes of the well-known and less well known are fascinating with lots of Saxons and Vikings (origins of place names and the like), assorted explorers (Flinders, Franklin, Harrison, Bass and Banks) a veritable choir of churchmen with a few added “saints” (Hugh, Guthlac, Gilbert, John Wycliffe, Robert Grosseteste (who now has one of Lincoln’s universities named after him), John Wesley and John Foxe), a sprinkling of the great and the good as well as various literary and musical types (Tennyson, Byrd, Taverner). In addition there are lots of stories of the everyday type.

The whole thing is pretty comprehensive and fascinating. Inevitably there are some issues and things I disagreed with, but it’s very informative.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Folklore of Lincolnshire by Susanna O'Neill

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Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

“The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person’s existence.”

This is another of those books that has been on my shelves for some years which need to be moved on. I can’t remember how it got there, but here we are. This surprised me a little by not being a total disaster, not that far off though. It is set in the 1910s. The first part in Vienna just before the First World War. The second part in England and France during the First World War. The protagonist is Lysander Rief is an actor and son of an actor.

The first part is Vienna in 1913 where Rief is staying and consulting a psychoanalyst. Freud even makes a walk on appearance. Rief becomes involved with  another patient of his psychoanalyst. Boyd throws in a rape trope to conclude this part and introduces the spy part. In the second part Lysander has a price to pay for being extricated from Vienna and he has a job to do for what passed for secret services. He goes undercover to look for a traitor. There is a brief foray to Geneva and a bit of torture followed by Rief being shot. Back to London to unravel the puzzle and unmask the bad guy. The ending is a little opaque with a twist or two.

Boyd does bring psychotherapy into a number of his novels. In this one he invents a style of psychotherapy called “parallelism”.

The plots rolls along well, but it’s a bit clunky and some of the spy tropes are a bit predictable.

“Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.”

5 and a half out of 10

Starting Nightcrawling by Leila Motley

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The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst

“It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.”

This novel spans seventy years. It is very English starting in wartime Oxford in the early 1940s. There are five snapshots in time with some recurring characters and their offspring/partners. There is a queer note running through it as the main character Johnny is gay. He does not appear in the first part, though his father David does. There are glimpses of gay life and coming out in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s and finally 2010s. It had a bit of the feel of A Dance to the Music of Time and it really does feel very English. Hollinghurst has been called the heir to Henry James, although as far as I am aware James never wrote any scenes involving blue dildos …

The title relates to David (Johnny’s father) and was a 1960s scandal involving gay sex and MPs. The scandal is always just off the screen and we never really find out quite how it happened. We see the nature of gay life in Oxford in wartime and in each snapshot, ending with the age of Grindr in the 2010s. The novel is from a variety of perspectives; Freddie Green in the 1940s, Johnny himself, Lucy Johnny’s daughter (not by the usual method), who has two mummies.

There is a sense of nostalgia about the whole thing. The old pre-legality, pre social media ways of communication: glances, smiles, a different semaphore in contrast who the very upfront ways of today. One thing to mention, the whole AIDS epidemic is conspicuous by its complete absence. That felt odd to me. I know Hollinghurst says that he wants to show the effects of these things without telling, but I don’t think he succeeds here.

On the whole this did work and following the characters from the beginning (the 1940s section) to death is quite effective. As I have said, omitting AIDS completely was a mistake. It is also very English and very middle class.

7 out of 10

Starting Ordinary Families by E Arnott Robertson

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Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

“Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.”

This is the first in a series, and has a number of classic tropes in place. Jackson Brodie is a forty something ex police officer who is now a private eye. He is also divorced (well, estranged). He is managing three cold cases of varying ages: the relatives involved have turned to him for help. He is also trailing an air stewardess whose husband thinks she is being unfaithful. To all this is a complicated private life and the fact that someone appears to be trying to kill him. Obviously, there’s no way this lot could be linked….is there?

I haven’t seen the TV series, which probably helps. There are lots of plot strands and Atkinson uses a variety of voices. It took me a while to unravel them all. It is well written and pretty undemanding, a good last thing at night read. There is a dry sense of humour as well, which also helps.

“The plot thickens,” he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. “I think we have a suspect.” That didn’t sound much better. “My house has just exploded, by the way.” At least that was novel.”

7 out of 10

Starting Revelation by C J Sansom

[Madeleine]

I've read the first 3 Brodie novels and really enjoyed them, I can't get on with her other books though.  The TV series was also good.

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A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Sweeney

“The world’s most celebrated female authors are mythologised as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. The Jane Austen of popular imagination is a genteel spinster, modestly covering her manuscript with blotting paper when anyone enters the room. Charlotte Bronte is cast as one of three long-suffering sisters, scribbling away in a draughty parsonage on the edge of the windswept moors. George Eliot is remembered as an aloof intellectual, who shunned conventional Victorian ladies. And Virginia Woolf haunts the collective memory as a depressive, loading her pockets with stones before stepping into then River Ouse.”

This is an account of four female literary friendships. The first is Jane Austen and Anne Sharpe. Anne was a governess for the Austen family and a sort of servant, she also had literary ambitions and there was a friendship and correspondence between her and Austen. Unfortunately much of their correspondence has not survived, so there is a fair amount of speculation in this section.

The second friendship was between Charlotte Bronte and Mary Taylor. They were friends throughout their adult lives. What was interesting was that Taylor felt able to be critical of Bronte’s work, saying she found it too conventional and not feminist enough. That made me want to look out for Taylor’s novel, which is more radical than Bronte’s were (more for the tbr list).

The third is a transatlantic friendship between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, a connection I wasn’t aware of. It was entirely by letter, they never met. This was interesting and uncovered some aspects of both women’s careers that I wasn’t aware of.

The final friendship between Woolf and Katherine Mansfield is the one most is known about, although large parts of their correspondence has also been destroyed. Woolf and Mansfield are often presented as enemies, but the reality is much more complex and they both acknowledged the other’s genius. This account looks more closely at the nuances in their relationship.

This is an interesting account and there is no putting on pedestals, it’s pretty much a warts and all account. There is a good deal that is already known, but it is well-researched and if you are interested in this sort of thing then you may enjoy it.

“And so, misleading myths of isolation have long attached themselves to women who write: a cottage-dwelling spinster; an impassioned roamer of the moors; a fallen woman, shunned; a melancholic genius. Over the years, a conspiracy of silence has obscured the friendships of female authors, past and present. But now it is time to break the silence and celebrate this literary sisterhood—a glimmering web of interwoven threads that still has the power to unsettle, to challenge, to inspire.”

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

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All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

This seems to very well liked and won the Pulitzer Prize as well. The plot revolves around two particular characters and is set mostly in World War 2. The two characters are children/early teens at the start. Werner is an German orphan who lives with his sister in a foster home. He has great abilities building and using radios. Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father who works at the Museum of Natural History. We follow them through the late 1930s and through to the end of the war. Their paths converge at St Malo.

The novel is constructed around small fragments grouped together  and the groups are not in chronological order. The plot also revolves around a diamond called the Sea of Flames, which was kept at the Museum of Natural History. It is a sort of boy meets girl, although the meeting is very fleeting. The tale is also told in the present tense. I found the construction of it rather irritating. Doerr does have a way with words though and he deals with difficult subjects with a light touch.

It’s a compelling story, but there are so many in this genre, I’m not sure this one is that compelling, not for me anyway. There are dozens of slick quotes though.

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

6 and a half out of 10 

Starting The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

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Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling

“What avail is honour or a sword against a pen?”

I have been skirting around Kipling for some time now, mainly by reading some of his children’s stuff. This is a combination of short pieces of prose and poetry. It is set in Sussex and is a look at English history from an Edwardian perspective (published in 1906). It is an interesting look at Kipling’s imperialism. The stories are told to Dan and his sister Una. They have been practising the play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Puck appears to them and in a series of visits he shows them different aspects of English history by introducing characters to them. Each different story begins and ends with poetry. There is an element of fantasy, the world of faerie is taken as given. There are also Danes, Saxons, Normans, Picts and Romans. There is also a tale set around the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Interestingly the last tale looks at the history and treatment of the Jews in England and their influence on Magna Carta. Puck represents the spirit of England and describes himself as “the oldest thing in England”.

I am writing this in the shadow of the right doing very well in local elections, with their anti-immigration agenda and the ramping up of racist rhetoric. Interestingly Kipling makes the point that there is no such thing as racial purity. The English are made up of Saxons, Danes, Picts, Romans, not to mention the original Britons. Kipling is making a broader point and elsewhere has argued that the variety of races that have combined to make the English very suited to managing an Empire!!

Kipling is also interesting in his approach to religion. One of the poems is a hymn to Mithras and Weland makes an appearance. Kipling is very negative about the later Protestant/Catholic conflicts and says that the world of faerie left the country at that time.

The whole is somewhat disjointed and Kipling is still the arch-imperialist, but his approach is interesting.

6 out of 10

Starting The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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Folklore of Lincolnshire by Susanna O'Neill

“When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire

Full well I served my master, for more than seven year.

Till I took up to poaching as you shall quickly year,

O ‘tis my delight on a shiny night

In the season of the year.”

Not many English counties have a celebration of criminality as their county song! And poaching still thrives in Lincolnshire.

I have started reading more about my local area and this is part of that process. This covers a large area of local folklore and even touches of Lincolnshire dialect. I am just old enough to remember older members of some rural communities still speaking the dialect.

Folklore is based on important aspects of everyday life. So there are sections on religion and the church, farming, Sheep (wool was vital in Lincolnshire’s medieval economy, love and marriage, the dead, animals and much more. There are plenty of witches, wizards, wild men of the woods, ghosts, ghostly goings on, large black dog like animals (a bit like the modern day black panther sightings), the Lincoln Imp (inevitably), giants and much more. There is also more modern stuff around the Second World War and the many air bases. There are also descriptions of events such as the Haxey Hood.

It's all very entertaining, but it is also a very good record of social history, much of which is now disappearing with the advent of modern technology.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Michael Palin, diaries 1969-79

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Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

This is a historical novel based in the World War One era, but it is a bit of a variation on the usual theme. It is set primarily in 1919 with some flashbacks.

Amy Vanneck goes to France /Belgium in 1919 to search for her fiancé Edward Haslam, who is missing, presumed dead. Edward was an officer in the 7^th Manchesters. There is a good deal of work going on with groups of soldiers looking for bodies and attempting to identify those they find. One thing I did learn was that a good deal of the labour of finding bodies was done by Chinese labour; as was some of the tunnel digging throughout the war.

Amy meets Major Westbrook a Provost Marshal who is there to investigate the deaths of an English officer and a number of Chinese workers  at a place called Two Storm Wood. Foul play is suspected. She also meets Captain Mackenzie who is in charge of the soldiers looking for bodies. Gray builds up tension well and it sort of ends up as a thriller as it becomes unclear as to whether Haslam is alive or not. There are lots of rumours and red herrings. Gray is a journalist and it does show in the way it is written. The novel itself was triggered by Gray looking at his grandfather’s trench maps. Gray says he wanted to unsettle and disturb. I did feel that some of the more gruesome details were rather unnecessary. The build up and tension work well. However the ending was too trite and contrived. Nevertheless it works well as a historical novel and is an interesting addition to First World War fiction.

8 out of 10

Starting Ceremony of Innocence by Madeline Bunting

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Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

“She is a woman who survives, even if that survival means tricking herself into believing this world is something it is not, that her life is all glory.”

This is a debut novel, which Mottley started writing when she was just seventeen. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It is set in Oakland in California. The novel concerns Kiara and her brother Marcus. Their father is dead and their mother is in prison. Kiara is seventeen and her brother is a little older. Kiara also looks after a younger child called Trevor (he is about eleven) as his mother (who lives in the same block) is unreliable. The rent on their flat has increased and the landlord wants payment. Kiara’s job pays to little and her brother is too busy trying to produce rap music to earn any money. Kiara solves the dilemma by falling into prostitution, eventually being used by a group of local policemen. The novel works through what follows.

The themes are poverty, sexual exploitation and social injustice. Mottley has commented that although this is fiction, the story is real. Mottley is looking at the underside of society, at the vulnerable, the victims of exploitation and violence. The novel is disturbing and graphic at times, but it is written with passion and power. It is moving and the characters are engaging. Mottley does throw everything at this and it feels rushed at times, but I enjoyed it and it’s an impressive first novel.

8 out of 10

Starting Lincoln Cathedral: Biography of a Great Building

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Revelation by C J Sansom

“Fanatics on both sides,’ old Ryprose said gloomily. ‘And all we poor ordinary folk in the middle. Sometimes I fear they will bring death to us all.”

This is the fourth is Sansom’s Shardlake series set in the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign. This one is set in early 1543. Catherine Howard has lost her head and Henry is looking for wife number six and he has his eyes on Katherine Parr.

I have noticed that if I search for a book on Google I get a brief sketch about it, presumably from the AI. Interesting to note that these shorts are actually worse than Wikipedia, quite an achievement.

Sansom covers quite a lot in this one. Shardlake in his lawyer capacity has taken a case concerning someone who has been admitted to Bedlam; and there is a good deal about the links between fundamentalist religion and mental health. There is also a serial killer on the loose, working his way through some of the nastier parts of the Book of Revelation. At this time there was a good deal of tension in society relating to religion. Henry had stepped back somewhat from Reformism and towards the Catholic Church (now that he had had his way maritally and had taken a good deal of its wealth). There were now two camps: pushing for more and more radical reform and the other pushing back towards the old rules and regulations. The Reformers were on the back foot and Archbishop Cranmer’s situation was a little precarious. Katherine Parr was in the Reformist camp and the Reformers were pinning their hopes on the prospective marriage. Sansom weaves the plot around these tensions.

Sansom makes his feelings clear in his historical afternote:

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."

It's an interesting mix to hang the story on and it mostly works.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Great North Road by Peter Hamilton

[Madeleine]

I enjoyed this one, I think it was the last one of the series I read, I still have the others' somewhere but they are so big!  Sadly he's no longer with us.

[Books do furnish a room]

Yes Madeleine, they are certainly not short!

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“I am a bad refugee because I insist on seeing the historical reasons that create refugees and the historical reasons for denying refugee status to certain populations.”

This is a collection of eight short stories about refugees from Vietnam. They are set in California and sometimes Vietnam. Obviously the collection is full of refugees. Themes include homes and homelessness, homesickness, starting a new life, alienation, starting a new life, estrangement, parent child relationships and much more.

“Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them. Even if their fate is to be the high-school dropout and the fast-food cashier, so what? That makes them about as human as the average American, and we are not about to deport the average American (are we?).”

Black-Eyed Women is about a ghostwriter writing a memoir about a man with survivor guilt. Her mother tells ghost stories and this is significant.

The Other Man is about an eighteen year old refugee arriving in the US and discovering his sponsor family consists of two gay men.

In War Years an unnamed boy watches his parents as they negotiate running a convenience store and relating to other members of the Vietnamese community, especially those collecting for the anti-communist cause.

The Transplant is about Arthur who has been saved by a liver transplant. He discovers that the donor was Men Vu. He gets to know his son.

I’d Love You to Want Me is about Mrs Khanh and her husband who is developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The Americans is about James, former USAF pilot. He and his wife Michiko are visiting their daughter Claire and her boyfriend Legaspi in Vietnam. Things don’t go quite as planned.

Someone Else Besides You. Thomas, following his mother’s death lives with his father. He gets to know his Father’s mistress and attempts a reconciliation with is ex.

In Fatherland Phuong lives with her parents and two siblings. Her father had a previous wife and three children in the US. One of those children visits with interesting results.

The stories are plainly and simply written, but they are effective. They is no pity, but a clarity and humanity which is impressive. A good collection.

8 out of 10

Starting Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan