Month: August 2021

Book review – “The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman

I am not a huge fan of celebrities writing books; memoirs I can just about get (if they have had interesting lives and have fans then I can see people might want to read about them), but I bristle slightly when I see celebrities capitalising on their success in other fields by publishing a book. David Walliams has carved out a second career as a children’s author and seems to be more of a writer than a comedian these days. Miranda Hart has also dabbled in children’s fiction, with a bit less success, I think. For adult readers, Dawn French and Ruth Jones have also been very successful. I have resisted all of these. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course, it’s my total prejudice! I suppose I just think that it is so hard for unknown authors to get published, that it’s kind of annoying when someone uses their fame to jump the queue, especially if their book is inferior. Why don’t they seek publication under a pseudonym and try their luck with the rest of us? Jealous, me? You bet!

You can understand why publishers would want a famous person to publish under their own name, of course. And you could argue that if it gets someone buying a book which they might not have done if it was written by A N Other, then that’s a good thing. And perhaps that purchase subsidises less well-known authors? It’s never as simple as it seems at first. For the celebrity, of course, there is also a risk – what if people read the book and think it’s not very good? Then their reputation for eg comedy, acting or singing, which may have been cultivated through years of hard work, could easily be put at risk.

45,000 copies sold in the first three days on sale!

I had no interest in Richard Osman’s book published in September last year, The Thursday Murder Club, which has been a rip-roaring success. It quickly became a best-seller and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A sequel is due to be published next month and the film rights have been bought by Steven Spielberg. Then a neighbour passed it on to me – she did not rate it very highly (neither did another neighbour), but my book club decided to give it a go. So, fate threw the book my way.

There are four main characters making up the eponymous Thursday Murder Club – Elizabeth, who has a shady past, possibly in the secret service, Ron, a former trade union leader, Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist, and Joyce, a widow of no particular distinction. They all live in a high-end retirement village in Kent, which is on the site of a former convent. The village is owned by spivvy, property developer Ian Ventham. The quartet meets every week to discuss unsolved murder cases, and they amuse themselves by trying to work out whodunnit and how. They get their case files from Penny, a former detective and fellow resident, now with severe dementia, cared for by her husband. Penny should not have kept the files, but she did.

While studying one particular case, Tony Curran, a local man with a criminal past, former associate of both Ventham and Ron’s son Jason (who happens to be a famous former boxer, now retired), is murdered. The group now has a real life case to look at! Using wily and underhand means, Elizabeth and Joyce manage to get in with the local murder squad investigating the case – Joyce is something of an innocent and is led into deceit by Elizabeth, although she does not seem to mind. They target a young local officer, Donna, who has transferred from London following a relationship breakdown, to get them access to privileged information and they persuade her on the basis that they can ensure she is attached to the murder squad; Donna is ambitious and agrees. The other police officer who becomes central is Chris, a middle-aged, lonely, overweight, long in the tooth type, who fancies that he knows it all, but seems to be easily manipulated by the retirees. Whilst the Thursday Murder Club is considering the case another murder takes place under their noses, this time it’s Ian Ventham, the owner of the retirement village.

I think that’s enough plot information to give you an idea of where it’s all going. It is quite a clever complex plot, and it does not turn out how you think it’s going to. The activities of the Thursday Murder Club, their methods, their characters, bring an element of comedy, which you would expect from Osman, whom, I have to say, I have always liked on television. But, there is also an inescapable poignancy, not just from the fact that several people get killed (!), but also because all the residents know they are in the latter stages of their lives and death may not be far away for any of them; in fact they have to deal with it all around them on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps this is what makes them fearless, even reckless sometimes. There are some plot easements which lack a bit of credibility, which are mostly explained away by Elizabeth’s ‘access’ to people and information by virtue of her past life, and which need to remain confidential. But this book is not meant to be completely rigorous. It’s a bit of escapism with a message, that life is short and we should grasp opportunities when they come along.

The pace of the book dipped a bit in the middle for me, but overall, I have to admit I enjoyed it. Recommended if you like your murder on the lighter side.

Literary sightseeing #2 – James Joyce’s Dublin

I have just returned from a couple of weeks holiday in Dublin where we were visiting my in-laws whom we had not seen since Christmas 2019. We spent most of our time with family, naturally, but with two whole weeks to fill (and not wanting to go any further afield on this trip) it was a good opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing in the city. Remarkably, in all the years that I have been visiting Dublin, this is something I have rarely done. I decided to start re-reading Ulysses a few months ago. I had not got very far into my mission so I used the downtime to read, listen and study the book. I took my Ulysses companion with me and at a secondhand book stall in Dun Laoghaire market I picked up a copy of The Ulysses Guide: Tours through Joyce’s Dublin by Robert Nicholson (first published in 1988) which offers several tour options corresponding to the different chapters in the book, in the order that Leopold Bloom takes them.

James Joyce was actually born less than a mile from where my in-laws live in Rathgar, a south Dublin suburb. Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, a red-brick Victorian terraced house in a quiet residential area. The house is very typical of the area, but fairly unremarkable.

http://www.joycetower.ie

The building with which Joyce is most associated, however, and the venue for the first part of Ulysses (Telemachus) is the martello tower at Sandycove. This is now home to the James Joyce Tower and Museum. I visited it many years ago on a trip I once made to Dublin in the ’90s. I would have loved to have gone again this time, but unfortunately, at the time of writing, it has not yet reopened following the pandemic.

Sandymount strand, another site in Ulysses is lovely, really typical Dublin by the sea, with a view of Howth on the opposite side of Dublin Bay, a haven for walkers and dog owners and now also a protected area due to some rare grasses having taken root there. You can reach both the museum and the Strand from the city centre by taking the Dart train at Connolly station (to Sydney Parade for Sandymount Strand, then a 10 minute walk, and Sandycove for the Museum, followed by a 15 minute walk). On the left hand side you can also see Ringsend pier, another site in Ulysses.

Sandymount Strand – a panorama

Chapter six of the book, also known as Hades, covers Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession (an associate of Bloom’s and many of the other characters appearing throughout the book) from Sandymount to Glasnevin Cemetery. The cortege passes through and along many of the city’s most well-known locations – O’Connell Street, the bridges over the Liffey, the Dodder and Grand and Royal Canals (these four waterways represent the four rivers on Odysseus’s journey to the underworld). They also pass through Ringsend and Pigeonhouse Road (Poolbeg Road), where a family member of mine actually now owns a house.

Glasnevin Cemetery, where the funeral cortege ends up, is a Dublin ‘must-see’. It is one of the most important historic sites in the country. Covering 124 acres, it is the final resting place of approximately 1.5 million people. Its inhabitants include Michael Collins, Daniel O’Connell, Eamon de Valera, Charles Stewart Parnell, Maud Gonne, Brendan Behan and Christy Brown. Tours of the cemetery are usually possible and are expected to resume shortly. The cemetery is also adjacent to the National Botanical Gardens, nothing to do with Joyce, but a beautiful place that should be high on the list of any Dublin visitor.

The Round Tower, which stands over the grave of Daniel O’Connell, at Glasnevin Cemetery, as seen from the Botanical Gardens

That’s as far as I got this holiday, both in my reading and my sightseeing. James Joyce devotees in Dublin run a programme of events every year on 16 June, the day depicted in Ulysses. These include talks, tours, readings and dressing-up! It is on my bucket list to participate sometime, but always falls in term time for me so has not been possible yet…but soon! For more detail on all of the above as well as many of the other wonderful things you can do in the beautiful city of Dublin see www.visitdublin.com

Book reviews – “A Thousand Moons” & “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty” by Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry – poet, novelist, playwright, multi-award winner and Irish Laureate for Fiction 2019-21

One of the best books I read in 2017 was Sebastian Barry’s Booker shortlisted novel Days Without End. This extraordinary novel tells the story of Thomas McNulty and his companion and later lover John Cole who meet in the US Army and fight in the wars against native Americans and then the Civil War. Thomas crossed the ocean from Ireland to escape the famine. The couple rescue a young Indian girl, Winona, who has been orphaned at the hands of their own fellow soldiers, and go on to risk their lives, leaving the army and setting up home together with her as their adopted daughter. It is a breathtaking book. Barry began his literary career as a poet and he is also a playwright and it shows in this book; he uses the most beautiful lyrical language and has a keen sense of dramatic tension. The battle scenes are among the most vivid and visceral that I have ever read.

A Thousand Moons is the follow-up to Days Without End and was published at the start of the pandemic in March last year. Its central character and narrator is Winona, now a young woman, and her guardians, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, are living a relatively settled life in middle age. Winona is bright and determined and the men are keen that she should develop her talents, so she gets a job working as a clerk for a lawyer in the town. They family lives together on a small farm in Tennessee in a seemingly arcadian, slightly bohemian set-up with two former African-American slaves to boot. But prejudice is never very far away and in the small town, where post civil-war resentments still run deep, the household is regarded with suspicion, and particularly Winona, whose darker skin makes her origins obvious.

Local boy Jas Jonski is in love with Winona and wants to marry her, but she keeps him at arms-length. When one night Winona is raped, it sets off a sequence of events which lead to the murder of Jas. Winona is the prime suspect and events threaten to break up the family idyll; it seems inevitable that the discrimination in the law (Indians have no defence) will make it impossible for Winona to escape the death penalty.  

A Thousand Moons lacks the epic sweep of Days Without End, and is therefore a book which does not quite enable Barry to display his mastery. But it also feels like a book that had to be written; we had to hear Winona’s story, but it was always going to be a more intimate one than the grand tumultuous scale of the earlier novel. It is no less powerful, however, and the same themes, prejudice, small-mindedness, injustice, and the power of love, are picked up and explored further in the sequel. Almost all of Sebastian Barry’s novels are part of a wider schema, with different generations of the same families’ stories (the Dunnes and the McNultys) being explored. But despite their links, each novel seems to stand on its own, like The Whereabout of Eneas McNulty for example; Eneas would have been two or three generations after the migrant Thomas, but they are linked, part of the great spread, the Irish diaspora. A Thousand Moons is a true sequel and it helps to have read Days Without End.

I love Barry’s writing and I have decided I need to read his entire works! I started with The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty because it was his third novel (published in 1998) and the first of the McNulty sagas. I am also interested in how his writing has developed. He was clearly already operating at a very high level when he wrote it. It’s brilliant! Eneas was born in Sligo at the end of the nineteenth century and we learn much about his childhood, particularly his friendship with Jonno Lynch. He joins the Royal Irish Constabulary after the end of the first world war, a decision that will define his future life. It will set him apart, mark him as a loyalist when the Irish conflict intensifies and his former friends side with the republicans. He is handed a death sentence by these former friends and is forced to flee Sligo. But Sligo will never leave him and is a constant presence in the novel.

Most of the book concerns his travels, his odyssey, as he moves around the world, making comrades and enemies. He travels first to America (a brief reference is made to a distant uncle, Thomas McNulty), to Africa, returns briefly to Sligo, only to discover that his past “crimes” have not been forgotten; even in the context of Irish independence there is no amnesty for those perceived as traitors. Eneas ends up in London running a hostel with his old Nigerian friend Harcourt, a man also exiled from his country by civil strife (and ruination caused by British colonialism) but his past will always catch up with him.

This feels like a foundational novel. The first in a series, the start of a complex family saga that the author will weave. It also has the lyrical language that characterises his later work, and explores the many different kinds of love and companionship that humans can experience, and the horrors of prejudice and intra-community conflict. I listened to both on audio (also Days Without End) and the readings have been faultless – Aidan Kelly is fabulous and I could listen to him reading anything.

I recommend both these books highly and will be adding many more by Sebastian Barry to my reading list.

Book review: “Wild: A journey from lost to found” by Cheryl Strayed

When we first meet Cheryl, the author and narrator, she is lost. At the tender age of 26 she finds herself in a dark place, at the bottom of a downward spiral that began when she lost her 46 year-old mother to cancer four years earlier. Cheryl is one of three siblings, brought up mostly in a single parent family, the mother having left the children’s violent alcoholic father when they were still very young. The mother later married Eddie, a calm and steady influence, and they lived a humble, fairly rural and, most importantly, stable existence. With her mother’s death, however, Cheryl’s life begins to collapse in on her. She and her siblings seem unable to bond in their grief, Eddie drifts away and soon finds another partner and step-children who quickly take over the family home, and Cheryl sets off on a path of toxic behaviour (infidelity, drug-taking and serial unemployment) that will drive a wedge between her and her husband.

Thus the scene is set. When she has reached rock-bottom, Cheryl decides that they only thing she can possibly do is set out on a 1,100 mile solo hike on one of the toughest trails in north America. The Pacific Crest Trail runs from the Mexican border in the south, to the Canadian border in the north, through California, Oregon and Washington. The trail is, over 2,600 miles in total so the author covers only part of it, in a trip that will take her around three months. That’s enough! The terrain is inhospitable, the landscapes change from desert to snowy mountain top, which means that, since she carries almost all of what she needs with her, she requires clothing and equipment for a wide range of climatic conditions. The year that she chooses to travel happens to be one of the worst for snowfall in the mountains. The journey is treacherous enough so Cheryl decides, like all but the most intrepid of hikers, to bypass the worst affected part of the trail and rejoin lower down.

The Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl’s constant companion on her hike is ‘Monster’, the name she gives her enormous backpack. It is monstrously heavy and carrying it gives her constant pain, from the agonies of bearing the weight, to the blisters and open wounds it wears on her hips. Her other source of pain is her boots, bought in good faith, but which turn out to be too small for a hike of this type and which lead to various foot problems, including blackened and lost toenails. But these burdens, the pains, the wounds, are a metaphor for the emotional pain that she is enduring, and as she grows fitter and stronger, and as she learns to beat her immense discomfort, so she learns to live with her grief and to make peace with her suffering. This journey is a meditation on pain. It is therapy.

The book would not be as interesting if it were a trail diary alone. Rather, it is part memoir, as the author gives us the background to her life, to the decline and fall that brought her to the momentous decision to undertake such an enormous mental and physical challenge. It is also a lesson in how sometimes the toughest things can be the most important. The author meets people on the trail with whom she develops lasting bonds and learns that she has depths of resourcefulness that she did not know she had. There are also moments of peril – when her pre-packed supply box does not arrive at the ranger station on time, when she loses a boot over the side of a mountain and has to hike for several days in her camp sandals, attached to her feet by duck tape, when she meets two suspicious characters, ostensibly out to hike and fish, but who seem to take an unnatural interest in the fact she is alone, and then ruin her water purifier to boot.

This is a fascinating story that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was on holiday when I read it and began fantasising about long-distance walking trails! Perhaps just the Trans-Pennine for me though – I don’t think I need anything on this scale!

Highly recommended.

Reading challenge, August choice

I am just back from my holidays; that is a rarer thing to type than I could ever have imagined. My family and I usually get away a couple of times a year and have at least a couple of trips a year to Ireland to see my husband’s family. Like so many around the world, separated from loved ones, we had not seen them for eighteen months, since Christmas 2019. Even up to the last minute it was not certain we would be able to go, due to travel restrictions. My two daughters were both at school right up until two days before we left, and there was a lot of Covid around , so we might at any moment have been ‘pinged’ or the girls told they had to isolate. A neighbour of mine was ‘pinged’ within an hour of setting off for her holiday and had to turn back. We were on tenterhooks.

I am delighted to report that we did get away, and it felt very exciting indeed to drive onto the ferry and then finally to arrive in Dublin. My association with the city goes back a quarter of a century now and it feels like my second home. We wondered how we might fill a whole fortnight there – we don’t usually stay quite so long – but the time sped by and when we drove back onto the return ferry yesterday, it seemed like we had only disembarked the day before! Time with family felt precious indeed.

I’ll write more about my trip later in the week, but for now, since it is the 2nd of August, it is time for this month’s reading challenge. Lat month the theme was ‘a book to travel with’ and I chose Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. This book is a an account of the author’s epic 1,100 mile solo hike on the notoriously challenging Pacific Crest Trail which begins at the border with Mexico and winds through California, Oregon and Washington. I read this book on my holiday and it is highly compelling. Look out for my review later in the week.

This month’s theme is quite different – ‘a book to rest with’. I had a couple of choices, including a book by popular broadcasting psychologist Claudia Hammond called The Art of Rest: How to find respite in the modern age, which I might get anyway. But I have decided to go with something less science-y and more spiritual – The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim. If the last year has taught me anything it is the value to my own personal wellbeing of being less busy, spending more time in nature really noticing the world around me, instead of rushing through it. It has been painful being disconnected from friends and family and I know that for many people the isolation has been terrible, but for me I can honestly say that the slower pace of life has had its upsides. I would like to use the opportunity of reading this book to find the balance that works for me going forward.

I am rejoicing that my diary is quite literally empty for the entire month or August. I am looking forward to continuing the air of serenity that I have brought back with me from my holiday, and to spending the month reading, writing, walking and being a little more spontaneous than life usually allows.

I would love for you to join me on my reading challenge this month.