Author: Julia's books

Reader. Writer. Mother. Partner. Friend. Friendly.

On reading challenges

Every year there are very many interesting reading challenges that bloggers and others set themselves. I have done one every year since I started this blog more than six years ago and I have participated in others, some successfully, some not. For a while there my challenge was to pick a genre or theme for each month and select a title. The aim was to expand my reading horizons and delve into things that would not normally attract my attention, such as science fiction or autobiography. It worked and I read some amazing things. Some stand-out discoveries for me were Emily Bain Murphy’s The Disappearances, the very first choice in my very first reading challenge in 2018, classic crime fiction (I never imagined I’d become a fan of Agatha Christie) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which I confess I had been a bit snooty about when it was published.

Just a few of the brilliant books I might not have read without a reading challenge

Last year, I decided I wanted to read more non-fiction. I only managed about four books! And, another confession, Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions, which I think I started last summer, remains in my bedside pile, only half-read! Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying it, but it’s a chunky volume and is a series of essays, some only a few pages long, so it’s the kind of book you dip in and out of. Definitely not one to speed read. It was a tricky year between one thing and another and I neither read nor blogged as much as I have done in previous years.

So, as the end of January draws near (noticeably longer days, hurray!) I find myself reading about other people’s reading challenges and wondering should I be doing one? And the conclusion I have come to, is perhaps not. Having failed (and I’m using that word with a degree or irony) last year to achieve quite a number of the goals I had set myself, due to a mixture of over-estimating my time and abilities, and under-estimating the other demands that would be placed upon me by life, I have concluded that perhaps the overall goal of expanding my reading horizons has been met, and I don’t need to do that any more. That particular habit has been well and truly established and neither do I need encouragement to read.

What I am going to do, however, is aim to pull an unread book off one of my shelves each month to read. If you are reading this you will no doubt be familiar with the particular compulsion that we book lovers have to just keeping on buying new ones, despite the many dozens of unread ones we already own! This is both a waste of money and a source of unnecessary guilt. I’m going to aim for one a month but be kind to myself if I don’t manage it.

First title to be dusted off the ‘unread’ shelf!

There’s less than a week left of the current month, so I’ve been looking for something shortish, and I’ve landed on Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, published in 1989. I have no idea how long I have had my copy, but I vividly remember reading her 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety. It was one of the first books I read after completing my English degree (at which point my head was too saturated to read anything substantial for a long time) and it reignited my passion for literature, so I’m guessing I bought this book around that time. Hmm. I make that about thirty years. It’s time to give it the attention it deserves, don’t you think?

Re-reading the classics – “The Great Gatsby” by F Scott Fitzgerald

My book club is great. We like to dabble in a few different genres and periods and we all make suggestions about the next title. Our last read of 2022 was Graham Norton’s Forever Home and our first choice for 2023 was The Great Gatsby – couldn’t be more different! We also mainly read via audiobook, about which there seems to be a perennial debate (and for the avoidance of doubt I am totally pro audiobooks), which throws up some interesting debates about individual titles in itself. 

The Great Gatsby is one of the very few novels that I have read multiple times. I am not a big re-reader (although I have become a bit more of one since getting into audiobooks). I do love it and it never ceases to amaze or surprise me. For a relatively compact book it is thematically dense and exposes a side to the American way of life, the American dream that few wrote about in the early 1900s. The book is almost 100 years old and yet still the concept of the United States of America exercises a powerful draw, although arguably in the last few years, the scales have fallen from more of our collective eyes. But Fitzgerald was writing about this dark underbelly long before most. 

The contrast between the lavish first half of the book, with its portrayal of seemingly endless wealth, lives full of Dionysian pleasure, and purpose directed only at extravagance, is thrown into sharper relief by the darkness of the second half of the book. Once the book moves out of the bubble of the Long Island social scene, when the narrator Nick Carraway accompanies a drunk and brooding Tom Buchanan to New York City, along with Tom’s lover Myrtle Wilson, wife of a local garage owner, events take a decidedly more sinister turn. In place of music and dancing there is violence and the dark side of alcohol. In place of the luxury West Egg mansions there is the sordid city apartment where Tom takes Myrtle. And in place of easy and superficial socialising there is violence, secrecy and betrayal. Fitzgerald is systematically picking apart the edifices of wealth, class and the American dream that he has set up for us in the opening chapters of the book, with only a hint of what is to come in the dark moods of Tom Buchanan. Jay Gatsby is, for me, less of a defined and rounded character, and more of a device for Fitzgerald to undertake this dismantling process, more of a representation of fakery and of the damage caused by the aspiration towards something so ultimately meaningless. The book is truly a masterpiece. 

Which brings me on to the subject of the medium through which one accesses such works. There have been a few film adaptations of The Great Gatsby; the most recent one, starring Leonardo di Caprio was critically panned. A version starring Robert Redford was made in 1974, which I think I have seen, but a long while ago (note to self: must watch again). My book club friends and I all ‘read’ Gatsby this time via the audiobook, which was a freebie on Audible. What appealed to us in particular was that the reader was Jake Gyllenhaal. I’m afraid to say that we were all deeply disappointed. There was something very mechanical about his reading, almost no distinction in voice or tone between the characters, which is surprising given his talents as an actor. Truly, it was as if this was his first reading of the novel. Which perhaps it was. I know many people will point to this as one of the underlying problems of audiobooks, that the reader can affect your view of the book. In this case, if it was my first encounter with Gatsby, I might have come away wondering what all the fuss was about, although I also hope I might have decided I actually needed to go to the source and read the book myself too. A film is clearly more of an interpretation than a straight unabridged reading, but you would not judge a book by the film or the mini-series. The excellent readings have far outweighed the poor ones I have come across in my audiobook experience; besides Gatsby, the other terrible one was a reading of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which was so bad I actually stopped listening! That was a freebie too. Which is perhaps the moral of the story here; you get what you pay for. It requires a certain skills set, commitment and a good understanding of the book to pull off a reading well. 

A recent debate regarding audiobooks was around the use of AI, surely an alarming development for jobbing actors. I think this will be a retrograde step by production companies and readers will turn away. During the various lockdowns I dabbled quite a bit in Youtube recorded meditations. There were some I came across which just felt to me that I was not listening to a human, and they were terrible. We know the difference and we won’t be fobbed off.


So, The Great Gatsby, do read it if you haven’t done so already, it really is one of the landmarks of literature in English, but the audiobook? Best avoided.

Audiobook review – “Forever Home” by Graham Norton

Happy New Year! I am rather late to this I realise. We have had a somewhat sickly household over the last few weeks, with Covid plus some other assorted ailments, and still not out of the woods yet, but hopefully it’s the beginning of the end and we can start getting back to normal soon. I did just about manage to get a decent Christmas dinner on the table, and we also managed a short trip to Dublin for new year to visit family, but apart from that it has all been very low-key. 

I haven’t done much in the way of reading in the last few weeks – partly too busy and partly because my head hurt too much! I managed half a book of Christmas short stories (pictured left), which was nice. In this selection I particularly liked Trollope’s Christmas at Thompson Hall and Alice Munro’s The Turkey Season, both of which managed to pull off that particular skill of being both amusing and poignant. It’s a while since I’ve sat down and read a series of short stories; it’s curiously liberating, like a brief fling, enjoyable and without commitment! That’s not my usual approach to life, I hasten to add, but it was nice, especially in the context of so many other distractions when it was hard to maintain long periods of concentration.

An audiobook I listened to over the Christmas period also gave me great pleasure – Graham Norton’s Forever Home, his fourth novel and another set mainly in his home county of Cork, Ireland. I am a huge fan of Graham Norton’s and have previously reviewed his earlier novels Holding and Home Stretch on here. In Forever Home he explores similar themes of complex family dynamics, love relationships, modern culture and life in Ireland and, in this novel, as in his first, Holding, a slightly macabre twist! There are secrets, there is a sense of shame and a desire to appear normal, even when things clearly aren’t, and in this way the author makes a nod, though not a heavy one, to elements of Ireland’s past that it is still coming to terms with.

The central character is Carol Crottie, a teacher living in a small town in County Cork. She is divorced and has one adult son who lives in London and while they are not exactly estranged, it is clear that his distant and separate life is a source of pain to her. Carol found love again later in life when she developed a relationship with Declan, owner of the local pharmacy. Their love blossomed after she began giving home tutoring to his daughter Sally, who was struggling at school. Sally is a fragile girl, deeply affected by her mother having left the family home, mysteriously, when she was young. Sally’s older brother Killian carries anger and resentment towards both his father and Carol.

Despite this Carol and Declan live happily (though unmarried, because he has never actually divorced his first wife) in the family home for a number of years until Declan begins to develop dementia. In a cruel twist, Killian and Sally secure power of attorney over their father’s affairs, admit him to a nursing home and put the house up for sale and Carol has no rights to object. She is forced to move back home with her parents, into her childhood bedroom. 

Carol’s parents are a hoot! Moira and Dave have become wealthy from the chain of coffee shops they set up, capitalising on the modernization in Irish society that happened so suddenly in the early 2000s. Despite this they are old-fashioned and set in their ways and provide hilarious comic relief to the tragic events occurring in their daughter’s life. When they propose to her that they secretly buy Declan’s home, with a view to renovating it and selling it on for a profit, no-one realises what dark secrets will be uncovered and how this will turn everyone’s lives upside down.

This is a fun novel though it is not without its dark moments. All the characters experience a transformation as a result of the events, and it is not all neat happiness. I listened to this on audiobook and, as always, the author’s narration is brilliant, a perfect showcase of his comic and artistic abilities. 

Highly recommended.

Audiobook review – “1Q84” by Haruki Murakami

I wrote last week about having finished two long books that I have been working through for a while. The first, Booker Prize-winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, was hard work and not a hit for me. The second I have been listening to on audio for a few weeks, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. By contrast, this complex and curious novel was one of the best things I have read in a long time. It is a huge book, three volumes totalling around a thousand pages, forty-five hours of listening time, recounting the events of a single year. Despite the huge anticipation of the novel when it was announced, it was not received with universal critical acclaim. Its initial print run, in the original Japanese, was sold out on the first day of release, largely due to advance orders, Murakami having already achieved a high literary profile by that stage. 

SPOILER ALERT!

The novel is essentially a love story, an unlikely one given the journey the two main characters have to take. The book opens with central character Aomame in a taxi on the city expressway. The traffic reaches an unexpected standstill and it appears that Aomame has some important business she is anxious to complete. She persuades the driver to let her leave the car when they reach an emergency exit, despite this being illegal. The driver advises her that there is a subway station below the expressway that she can reach via the emergency metal stairway. Aomame’s ‘business’ is murder. Her task is to kill a man who is a known philanderer and wife-beater and she poses as a hotel employee attending to the air conditioning in his room before killing him swiftly and bloodlessly with a specially crafted metal tool. The event is shocking, but Aomame has already become so likeable to us as the reader because she has so far seemed benign, polite, and charming. 

We later learn that Aomame’s actions are carried out with the assistance of an older woman we know as ‘The Dowager’, a wealthy widow who is a member of the exclusive health club where Aomame is a fitness instructor. It seems that both women have powerful reasons for dispatching of men like Aomame’s victim at the hotel and the combination of the Dowager’s money and Aomame’s skills, plus the support of the Dowager’s loyal bodyguard Tamaru, they conduct a quiet and effective campaign of retribution on violent and cruel men. 

Told in parallel with Aomame’s story is that of Tengo, a maths teacher at a cram school and aspiring writer. He is asked by his friend Komatsu, an editor at a publishing house, to rewrite a novella ‘Air Chrysalis’ by a young female writer, Fuka-Eri. Komatsu feels it has great potential and wishes to enter it for a prestigious debut writer’s prize, but feels it needs work. He arranges for Tengo to meet with the young woman and to rewrite the story at rapid pace. This will obviously be a clandestine exercise as it would be a scandal if it got out. The book does win the prize and is also a great commercial success, but it is then that all the problems start. 

Tengo deepens his relationship with Fuka-Eri and learns of her troubled background, the fact that she was brought up in a commune run by a secretive religious cult called Sakigake, and that after a violent and deadly confrontation with police, Fuka-Eri managed to escape and landed at the doorstep of a Professor Ebisuno, former friend and colleague of her father, and he took her in and became her guardian. She later confides to Tengo that she escaped under the instruction of ‘the little people’, who happen to be the subject of ‘Air Chrysalis’. Tengo finds himself increasingly drawn into the young woman’s strange world and a series of consequential events. 

Meanwhile, in Aomame’s world, strange things are also happening. She has begun to observe that there are two moons in the sky which it seems only she can see; the usual silver one, and a smaller green one. She concludes that she is living in some sort of parallel world, which she names 1Q84, to distinguish it from the actual year 1984. The Dowager runs a hostel for abused women in the grounds of her estate, and after taking in a young girl, rendered mute by the sexual abuse she has experienced, she asks Aomame to carry out one last killing – that of the leader of Sakigake, who she says is responsible for the violence that the young girl has experienced. It will be a very risky, dangerous and complicated task that may not be successful and could lead to Aomame’s death, because Leader is so well-protected. Believing she has nothing to lose, Aomame accepts the challenge.

Aomame’s and Tengo’s stories are told in parallel, yet the links between the strange events in their lives soon become clear. We also learn that Aomame and Tengo knew each other as children. She came from a family of devout Witnesses, setting her apart from the other children at school, and from which she would later escape, while he was the only child of a widowed and distant father who forced him to go to work with him at the weekends, collecting television license fees.The two lonely outsiders formed a bond as 10 year olds, but lost touch. Neither has forgotten the special kindness the other showed them however. 

The plot thickens, events become increasingly unpredictable and dangerous and Tengo and Aomame’s lives are drawing ever closer. Right to the end, I found myself unable to predict how it was going to turn out. I gasped more than once at an unexpected twist. Though the book is long, it draws you into its world skilfully and imperceptibly. Some critics disliked the book and found the writing clunky and cliched. I disagree completely. I found the simplicity and spareness of the language remarkably engaging and powerful. I loved the way the author got into the heads of the characters and into the minutiae of their lives that made you feel you were observing this year in their lives almost in real time. As I said at the beginning, it is essentially a love story, in my opinion. It is a brilliant homage to Orwell’s 1984, focusing not on controlling governments but on the sinister power of cults. I am having great fun thinking about the parallels between the two stories! I also love the questions it leaves unanswered, such as what really happened to Tengo’s ‘older girlfriend’ and what about the little people and Mr Ushikawa? 

Completing this book has truly felt like a milestone in my reading life. I have not come across anything quite like it before and I recommend it highly. It is well worth the investment of time. 

Booker Book Review #6 – “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka

This week I have at last come to the end of two reading marathons, one has been spectacular, the other has been a slog. Almost two months after the winner of the Booker Prize was announced, I have at last finished the sixth book from the shortlist, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the book which in fact won. I started this book on 26th September, but found it very difficult to get into, so I switched to one or two others. It was the only book I did not manage to complete in time for the announcement of the winner. I have to say that I am somewhat surprised that it won. But then that is not unusual for the Booker, or any literary prize for that matter. Reading pleasure is such a subjective thing that I am sure there are very few works that are unanimously loved. There are also books that you just ‘know’ are good, but which are not that enjoyable to read. For me, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida perhaps falls into that category. I can appreciate the achievement, but it just wasn’t for me.

The book is set in Sri Lanka (the author’s homeland) at the time of the brutal civil war in that country, which started in 1983 and last more than 25 years. I am ashamed to admit that I knew very little about this piece of history. Some of the information had a familiarity; I was aware for example of the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, though I had no idea that the regime was so brutal or repressive. Sri Lanka has also been in the news recently after the terrible economic situation there led to nationwide street protests and the downfall of the Rajapaksa regime. Clearly, it is a country where corrupt members of the ruling classes (many of whom have been related to one another) have at various times pocketed the nation’s wealth for their own enrichment and to the detriment of the wider population. 

Seven Moons has been described by the author as a ghost story and in addition to the history lesson and the expose of the corruption, repression and factionalism which characterised the authorities at that time, it is said to weave in myth and folklore surrounding death and the afterlife in Sri Lanka. It reminded me very much of a previous Booker winner Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, which won in 2017. It concerns that period of transition where the spirit is in a kind of limbo between life and death. 

Maali Almeida is the central character and the book opens with him having just died and in the process of entering the afterlife. The ‘seven moons’ relates to the period of time he has left to tie up unfinished business from his life. Maali was a photojournalist and in the course of his work he gathered together photographic evidence of some of the crimes of military leaders against the rebels and against other journalists reporting on the civil war. As such, the book becomes a bit of a murder-mystery as the nature of Maali’s ‘evidence’ becomes clear. Some people had a powerful interest in the material never seeing the light of day. Maali knew this of course and concealed what he had in an elaborate trail involving playing cards and his two best friends: Jaki, with whom he slightly masqueraded as a couple, and DD, the son of a government minister who was his lover. Homosexuality was not accepted in the culture at that time, hence the concealment, but Maali had many lovers and rebelled against the prevailing homophobia and this is another complication which made him a target. 

There is a wide cast of characters in the book (not dissimilar to Lincoln in the Bardo actually), and many of the more colourful or fantastical ones exist in the spirit world. There is a real contrast between the passages which take place in the earthly world and those in the heavenly realm where Maali is floating, plotting, and whispering instructions in the ears of those he has left behind. I found some of these characters difficult to keep track of and those at the centre (Maali, Jaki, DD) I just found hard to warm to.

The novel is quite fast-paced with some strong action sequences, but for me the flitting between the earthly and heavenly realms was just too bitty. I found it hard to keep a grip on what was going on. That can be true of a lot of books that I have loved, but I’m afraid this one just did not sustain my interest. Had I not been the sort of person who has to finish a book I have started (I can count on one hand the number of books I have abandoned) I would probably have given up on this after the first or second moon.

Moons feature heavily in the other marathon book I have just finished – 1Q84. This was quite a different undertaking and my feelings about it could not be more different. I’ll save my review of that for next week!

So, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, well it won the Booker, but…I’m struggling to recommend it, sadly, unless you are a student of Sri Lankan recent history.

Book progress

Perhaps it is the approach of the year’s end that is causing me to write posts about ‘progress’ at the moment. Over the past year or so, I have written a few times on here about a book I am currently writing, a novel with the working title ‘Flood’. In a little under three months’ time (on the 31st of January 2023) in some parts of the country (and in the Netherlands) commemorations will take place for the victims of the 1953 flood disaster. The devastating events of one night saw more than 300 people killed in east coast communities of England and Scotland, a further 230 deaths at sea, and more than 1,800 in the Netherlands and Belgium.

My novel is set in Canvey Island in Essex, a place I was familiar with as a child, having grown up in the east of London. Canvey was one of the worst affected communities and as a place it fascinates me, due in part, I think, to the fact that it bears some similarities to Zeeland in the Netherlands, a place I know well and which is very special to me.

Low-lying Canvey – the Lobster Smack pub (shown on the right of the photo) is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

I dialled back my paid work (I’m self-employed) over the spring and summer both to support my two daughters during their exams and to put some serious time into writing the novel. I managed about half of it in that time, and the other half has been squeezed out over the last three months. I am happy to report that I have almost finished the first draft. Hallelujah! It’s been tough work though and I found there were some gaps in my knowledge as I went along.

I paid a further research visit to Canvey a few weeks ago and met with some wonderful ladies running the Canvey Island Heritage Centre (which has been closed on both my previous visits) who let me look through their archive of material about the flood. The staff in the local library were also extremely helpful.

I had hoped to get hold of a copy of a book while I was there, called The Great Tide: the story of the 1953 flood disaster in Essex by Hilda Grieve, which was published by Essex County Council in 1959. Grieve was a council employee, a researcher and historian and her book is considered to be the seminal account of the disaster. It is almost 900 pages long and gives a detailed account of the maritime history of the coastal and river communities affected by the flood, the meteorological phenomena present on that terrible night, as well as the evolution of the storm and its progress from its Atlantic source, around the coast of Scotland (many fishers lost their lives that night too), and then down the east coast of England, climaxing at the Thames estuary. I hoped to be able to consult a reference copy of the book in Canvey library, but alas they did not have one (much to their own astonishment!). Not having time to go to another library which did have it in stock, I found myself purchasing a copy. At £50, I had been reluctant, but now that I have it I realise what a treasure it is. What is so amazing to me is how the author has managed to combine a factual historical account with the real-life human stories. Her hour by hour description of the rising tides at each point along the coast, the growing alarm of people employed to monitor high tides, the warnings being sent to police stations, and then the impacts on individuals is thoroughly gripping. The book is both a work of some scholarship and a poignant tribute to the suffering of those affected.

The next stage of the work on my book is to re-read and edit it. This process can often be harder ad just as time-consuming as writing the first draft. I hope not! When I first conceived this project, a few years ago now, I had hoped that I might find a publisher in time for the 70th anniversary. Alas, that will not be the case now, but there is a chance it could still come out in 2023. My research into the industry (and my awareness of how spectacularly difficult it is for a debut author to get a publishing deal) is making me consider self-publishing, but I need to find out a bit more about that. I wonder if anyone reading this has any experience or advice about self-publishing or e-publishing?

Whatever happens, writing this book was my biggest project for 2022, and I am satisfied with what I have accomplished. When you approach the end of the year (or sometimes even the end of the week!) it can be easy to get frustrated about what you haven’t done, or about goals missed. We have to remember that there is fun, fulfilment, learning and real achievement in the journey too, and looking at how far one has come is more productive than how far one has still to go. I hope we can all remember this as we reflect on 2022.

It has not escaped my attention that today is Thanksgiving in the United States. I’ve always loved the idea of this festival and wish we had something similar on this side of the Atlantic. So, Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and family!

On the ebb and flow of reading

I have not posted for a couple of weeks – let’s call it life getting in the way, the usual thing. I did have a few days away in the Netherlands during that time, however, so I certainly cannot complain. We go there every year, to Zeeland, and I have often posted on here about my trips. This time, my husband and I went, for the first time ever, without our kids, who were all elsewhere. On an impulse we drove all the way from Zeeland in the south to Den Haag (about 150km north) to visit the city’s renowned art gallery, the Kunstmuseum. They hold a large collection of work by an artist my husband was keen to see, but unfortunately none of it was on display! It is an amazing place – an Art Deco building, rather severe-looking on the outside, but fantastic on the inside with a large glass-roofed central atrium (below) and galleries around the edges and magnificent tiling work. There were displays of paintings, sculpture, ceramics and textiles and works were set out in a really innovative way, juxtaposing old and new to illustrate contrasts as well as showing the traditional techniques underpinning even the most modern pieces. We spent the entire day there and did none of the other things we’d planned for our day in the city!

Central atrium in the Kunstmuseum, Den Haag

My reading has been really up and down this last few weeks too. After the announcement of the Booker prize shortlist, I set about working through all six books, as I have done every year for a while now. I managed four and a half, I think, but was struggling with the book that in fact won, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. I am sorry to say that I STILL have not finished it! I am just not finding it is drawing me in and I am struggling to care about any of the characters. Perhaps one day I will get around to reviewing it on here…!

The non-fiction challenge I set myself at the start of the year (one non-fiction title a month) has completely gone out of the window! Many of the books I have chosen to date have simply been too lengthy to get through in a month and I am finding with non-fiction that I need to read it with more attention because it generally does not draw you into its world engaging all the senses, in the way that fiction does. My current non-fiction of choice is Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions, which I have been dipping in and out for weeks (months?). As with everything the great lady touches it IS brilliant, and witty, and clever, and informative, but I am reading it with the author’s Canadian drawl in my ear. So it’s slow.

By contrast, the audiobook I am listening to at the moment (my book club’s choice) is classic Haruki Murakami 1Q84. It is outstanding. I am devouring it. But it’s 45 hours of listening time, three thick volumes’ worth. When listening to it I find I am completely drawn into its peculiar world and Murakami’s writing is just delectable. But it is long.

I was talking to my daughter yesterday. She started university this autumn and is finding that this last week or so has got very challenging, that the workload has stepped up suddenly (week five is the worst, apparently). She was telling me that she does not feel very productive, even though she seems to be spending hours working. I feel a bit like that with my reading right now. Reading of course is a pleasure and a joy in itself and one should not feel pressure to finish, or to tick a book off the list, particularly where slower-paced reading is required to get the very best out of it. But when you review a lot of books, you get used to zipping through them, and it can feel ‘unproductive’ when you find yourself wading through very long books, or less fulfilling books.

I am reaching the end of both the Booker prize winning book and the Murakami so I hope to have something to review in the next week!

Do you ever find yourself in a reading rut? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Booker book review #5 – “Treacle Walker” by Alan Garner

My pick for the Booker Prize (Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo) did not win, sadly, but congratulations to Shehan Karunatilaka whose novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, came out top. It is the one book on the shortlist I have not yet read. I started it, but I have to confess that I found it a bit hard-going so I set it to one side. I will now come back to it with different eyes! That’s the trouble with being a literary blogger or reviewer – when you know that a book is a prize-winner, when everyone else thinks it’s amazing, it becomes a bit embarrassing to disagree! Oh well, I’ll go back to it and try a bit harder.

This is my fifth review of the shortlisted books and another of those that I did not manage to finish before last Monday. At only 160 pages in length, it is a short book and is arranged over eighteen chapters. I think it has the fewest words of any book on the shortlist. Like Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (the book on the shortlist with the fewest pages) it is not a ‘fast’ read, however, but nor is it a novella, like Keegan’s book. It is something altogether different that defies pigeon-holing. I’m not even sure what genre to put it in – fantasy, myth, science fiction? It also has elements more akin to children’s fiction. 

I read this book in a couple of sittings (the best, perhaps only, way to tackle this kind of short book) and came away thinking, what on earth was that all about. There are three characters, Joe Coppock, Treacle Walker and Thin Amren. Joe is a boy who seems to be poorly. He has an eye problem, a ‘lazy’ eye, and wears a patch. He has periods of impaired vision, but this is presented almost as a superpower – he sees things in ways that other people can’t. Like many people who experience childhood illness, Joe seems quite isolated – there are no parents around – and pyjamas and comics seem to feature quite heavily in his life. He has a profound sense of the passage of time, which he measures by the passing of ‘Noony’ a train, at midday each day.

Treacle Walker appears outside Joe’s home one day. He is a ‘rag and bone man’, a concept which only some of us will be familiar with. Rag and bone men would roam the streets (in the case of my childhood, this was always on a Sunday) on a horse and cart, gathering items people no longer wanted. They would often give a small item in exchange for donations. Joe makes a trade with the old man, swapping some old pyjamas and a piece of lamb’s bone (from his collection of treasures) for a stone and an old jar of some sort of potion (equating the old man also with the notion of the travelling apothecary or healer). From these early chapters, and because of the strong dialect both characters use, I thought this book was set in the 19th century, but later Joe visits an optometrist and by the methods used (the letter chart and the ocular apparatus) it is clear that it is at least post-war. 

The third character is Thin Amren, a semi-human swamp man who wears nothing but a leather hood and who, it seems, must be kept in the swamp or else he might inflict damage on the world (this could be a comment on current geopolitical events!) It seems that Joe has some sort of power to do this, revealed to him by Treacle Walker, with whom he has quite an ambivalent relationship.

An old sign pointing to the famous gritstone ‘edge’ after which Alderley Edge is named

This could be one of the weirdest books I have read for a long time and after reading it, one of my first thoughts was ‘how on earth am I going to review this book?’ I haven’t read any of Alan Garner’s other work, but I know of him because he is closely connected with Alderley Edge, a place I have visited often. The town has become sadly synonymous with footballers and their wives, fast cars and bling, which is a shame because The Edge itself (where I go to walk), now in the care of the National Trust, is a spectacular geological feature on the Chesire landscape, infused with local legend, made famous in part by Garner’s work. Much of his work has used Cheshire myth and legend as its subject matter. 

I read a detailed piece of literary criticism on the book by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller (clearly a fan of Garner) on the Strange Horizons blogsite. In her piece she draws many of the literary allusions and self-referential features of the book. This provided me with an insight, but I doubt there are many people (outside of Garner’s fan base) who would be aware of these, which makes it a difficult ‘sell’ as a book. I picked up some of the references: Macclesfield (not far from Alderley Edge) is known as ‘Treacletown’ owing to the legend that a cart full of treacle turned over and spilled out, smothering the cobbled streets. It is a very ‘Cheshire’ novel in that respect. There is also the white horse, central to the legend of the Alderley Edge wizard – the stone that Joe received from Treacle Walker has a white horse on it and when the stone is rubbed on the doorstep it turns that place into a kind of entry way to a parallel universe. It reminded me a bit of the wonderful Stranger Things series, that recent television sensation – there is a kind of ‘upside down’ here that is the realm that Thin Amren occupies. 

If you are already a fan of Garner, you will no doubt enjoy this book, with its connections to his other works, but if you are not familiar with his literary world this will be a very difficult book to penetrate and enjoy.

Booker Prize winner announced tonight

Yesterday I posted my fourth Booker Prize shortlist review. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced this evening at 7pm. You can follow it live on various radio and online channels (details here). Unfortunately, I have to work this evening so I will have to wait until later to find out the result.

I did not manage to read all six books on the shortlist this year. I have completed and posted reviews of the following:

I have started The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, but I’m afraid I have put it down again twice and gone to a different book! I just can’t seem to get into it.

I am most annoyed that I have not yet finished Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. Alan is an author who is from Alderley Edge in Cheshire, not far from where I live. It’s very exciting to have a local author on the shortlist. It would be amazing if he won!

I have thoroughly enjoyed all four of the books I have read and reviewed, it’s a strong shortlist, but the easy standout for me is Glory. It is just such a powerful and ingenious novel. I haven’t read anything like it before.

So, for me, it’s fingers crossed for NoViolet Bulawayo or Alan Garner!

Booker book review #4 – “Oh William!” by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout is an American author who has published nine novels. The first four took her fourteen years, after which she well and truly found a groove and has published a further five in the last six years. Oh William!, her eighth novel, was published at the end of last year, in time for it to be shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, and in the meantime she has published Lucy By the Sea. Fast work! This latest novel, in common with Oh William!, and her 2016 novel My Name is Lucy Barton, share the same central character. I have been aware of Elizabeth Strout for a while and have wanted to read some of her work but never quite got round to it so it is great to have a reason to come to it now.

Oh William! begins in New York city and our narrator is Lucy Barton, a newly widowed novelist. She has long been divorced from her former husband William Gerhardt, an academic, but has remained on good terms with him. They have two adult married daughters and William has had a further two marriages, first to Joanne, one of his lovers during his marriage to Lucy, and then to Estelle, an actress, with whom he also has a young daughter, Bridget. Lucy is friendly with Estelle too, and attends William’s 70th birthday party at their home. It is at the party that Lucy first senses all is not well in William’s marriage. Lucy and Estelle are very different people and Lucy clearly finds William’s new and much younger wife somewhat shallow. 

We learn from the outset that two things happen to William that will affect Lucy deeply and change the course of events in both her and William’s life, but we are almost a third of the way through the book before we learn what even the first of these events is. Strout makes Lucy a fascinating narrator, who goes all around the houses to tell us a story. Before getting to the first event we learn a great deal about her loveless childhood, brought up in a deprived and emotionally neglectful household. Lucy was only able to go to college thanks to the kindness of one of her teachers who took her in hand. We also learn a great deal about William, his deep flaws, and in particular the behaviour which would eventually lead Lucy to leave him. He was a withdrawn and complicated character who left pretty much all the child-rearing to
Lucy, a particularly difficult task for her given how little parenting she had herself received. 

It was not just the string of extra-marital affairs that made their relationship untenable. William’s mother, although superficially kind, had secrets and her relationship with her only son was a complex one from which Lucy was very much excluded. I’m not sure how much of this detail, particularly concerning the nature of Lucy and William’s marriage, is a repeat of the content of My Name is Lucy Barton, but it has very much made me want to read that novel now. Even if there is duplication, Lucy is such a warm, chatty and candid narrator, I don’t think it would matter.

The second seismic event to occur in William’s life is that he finds out his mother had a daughter before him, something she never told him about while she was alive. He is curious but also fearful about what he will find out. With Estelle gone, William finds himself turning to Lucy more than ever. He asks her to accompany him on a trip to Maine to seek out his half-sister and during this trip they go over a lot of history, both the past they shared and that which they didn’t. It is a portrait of a marriage, of a post-marriage relationship, and of how time can alter our perspectives on events. We get a sense of William’s decreasing potency, and ultimately his lack of making his mark on the world; he is ageing and the shock reduces him. 

It is also during this trip that William and Lucy take together that they go over some of the ground they never covered in the aftermath of the end of their marriage. There is more than just a physical journey under way. Both of them will emerge from it changed, but in different ways. It all adds up to a powerful narrative on how our lives can be rendered unstable by events when the foundations are built on truths untold, not only to others but to ourselves also. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved its gentleness, the deft portrayal of character and the exploration of how people respond differently to the events of life. Highly recommended and this has definitely made me want to read more of Elizabeth Strout’s work.

%d bloggers like this: