Julia's books

Book review – “Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips

Do you ever find yourself seemingly out of step with the general consensus and wondering “is it me?”, thinking you must have missed something? I have had that experience twice recently. Last week my husband and I went to see the newly released film Black Bag, a spy thriller set in London, and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as a married couple working for the British secret service. Now, I love both these actors and was excited to see the movie, especially as Fassbender seems to be very selective about what he does these days (his last movie, The Killer, released two years ago was superb). But, honestly, it was quite mediocre. Disappointing. It was short, poorly edited, the characters were two dimensional, the plot opaque and the script weak. I read one lukewarm newspaper review but, apparently, reception by critics has been largely positive – according to Rotten Tomatoes it received an average rating of 8.2/10. I’m baffled.

I have a similar feeling about Night Watch, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jayne Anne Phillips. It was my book club choice for last month and I had not completed it by the time we met. I just found it quite slow and never felt motivated to read it. I almost gave up but my friends convinced me it was worth finishing. Set in the 1870s in the United States it follows the fortunes of a twelve year old girl ConaLee and her mother Eliza, a woman who has been deeply traumatised by sexual abuse and has been mute for many months. Eliza has born three children by her abuser, a boy and further boy and girl twins. ‘Papa’ is a former civil war soldier, who fought on the Confederate side, and has been brutalised by his experience. When Eliza is living alone with ConaLee he and a fellow runaway come across their small homestead and he rapes Eliza for the first time. She fights back as best she can and he goes away but he returns and this time makes the homestead, and Eliza, his own.

ConaLee’s father is a man who grew up with Eliza in her family home. He was a servant, an orphan taken under the wing of another servant, mother figure Dearbhla, an Irish immigrant and a strong and resourceful woman who will become vital to Eliza and ConaLee. Eliza and the boy fall in love, for which he will be severely punished, but eventually run away together and Eliza gives birth to their daughter ConaLee. He then goes off to fight for the union side in the civil war and is lost to them.

When we meet ConaLee and her mother, Papa is taking them to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. Having grown tired of the family he now has and Eliza’s state of mind, he plans to abandon them there. The asylum is a forward thinking institution run by Dr Story, nephew of the founder, who, based on his Methodist religion, had very specific ideas about how to treat the mentally ill – with exercise, routine, fresh air, good food and talking therapy.

The book then sets out the back stories of each of the characters and the plot of the novel becomes clearer. It explores the terrible effects of the war, particularly on the women and is detailed and graphic in some of the scenes. A large part of the novel also explores Dr Story’s philosophy behind the methods used at the asylum. It is a place of peace and tranquility where inmates and staff are treated with respect and kindness, and where Eliza finally might be able to recover from her trauma in a place of safety.

I did find the book lacked momentum, however. I usually like non-linear time frames, but I found the jumping back and forth between characters and life stages, not so much confusing as frustrating because it meant the pace was constantly shifting. I also found there was very little connection between outside and inside the asylum. I did not really see the point of knowing so much about the methods in the asylum. I’m not sure what that setting added to the story other than that it was a plot device. Yes, it was a place of safety for people who were damaged and previously unsafe, but it also had its vulnerabilities, as will become clear. I liked the character of Dearbhla, but, again, she seemed under-used – I’m not really sure what she was for. And, for me, the story was just not strong enough. And I was really annoyed by the omission of quotation marks to indicate dialogue – why? It made it tricky to read sometimes.

The critics loved this book, mostly, and in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, it was shortlisted for a number of other awards, so, as with Black Bag, I am left wondering what I am missing. I note that the New York Times took a less positive view which makes me feel less of an outsider! I’d love to know what others thought of this book. I would struggle to recommend it, if I’m honest.

Books out this spring

It really does feel that at long last there is a bit of a change in the air. I am spring cleaning my bookshelves at the moment – always a very challenging task. Books that I have forgotten I owned, books I might want to re-read (someday!) and books that I am ready to let go of, either because they deserve to find a new home or because I am accepting I will almost certainly never get around to them! And I need to make some space for the new titles coming out this season. A few have caught my eye and I thought I would share them with you.

I have been enjoying a lot of non-fiction in recent months and I find that I feel more excited by this genre’s new books than the fiction, to be honest.

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

A few years ago I read a book about tuberculosis by science writer Kathryn Lougheed and found it absolutely fascinating. My paternal grandfather died of the disease in London in 1940 just days before his second child (my dad) was born, and I was drawn to this book as I was trying to find out more about my family history. This book comes at a flexion point I think, as I was reading in the newspaper just this week of fears that cases of this terrible condition are likely to rise in the coming months and years following the withdrawal of US aid to developing countries. In our globalised world, we should not expect to be able to contain the disease within national boundaries (as we found with the Covid 19 pandemic) so it will be no surprise to see cases increase in the global north.

Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold

Hallie Rubenhold caught the attention of the literary world with her bestselling book The Five about the women who were the victims of the infamous Victoria London serial killer Jack the Ripper. Her new book, released at the end of March, gives the same treatment to another famous murder case. In 1910, a London doctor, Hawley Crippen, murdered his wife Belle Elmore, a music hall performer. In this book, Rubenhold applies her research and detective skills to uncovering the story of how a group of Belle’s friends helped bring the killer to justice, and shady associates who may also have had a role. The book has been highly praised and its publication is much anticipated.

Maternity Service by Emma Barnett

I am an avid listener to the BBC Radio 4 morning news programme Today, and Emma Barnett is one of its main presenters. She is a broadcasting tour de force and made her name with some spectacular interviews on Radio 5 Live, and changed the face of another Radio 4 stalwart show Woman’s Hour. She is a campaigner for many feminist causes and is a high profile mother of young children who speaks passionately about the challenges of juggling motherhood and a career. As I work with new mothers I am very interested in what she has to say on the topic.

So, that’s the non-fiction, what of the fiction?

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Published just a week or so ago and immediately longlisted for the Women’s Prize, this is the much anticipated new novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her first in a decade. I love her work – her book Half of a Yellow Sun about the Biafran war is one of my favourite books of all time – and have reviewed her recent non-fiction books on here. This will be top of my TBR list for spring.

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay’s 2016 novel All That Man Is was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog, after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. It wasn’t my favourite on the shortlist but I did enjoy it and found it interesting to read men’s perspectives on life’s dilemmas. Flesh follows the life of a young Hungarian boy as he moves from his small town to the ranks of the super-rich in London. With so much toxic masculinity in the world just now I feel this might be an important read.

The House of Barbary by Isabelle Schuler

This is said to be a feminist re-telling of the legend of Bluebeard which interests me as this myth has crossed my path a couple of times in recent years, also as a feminist re-telling. First in the non-fiction book Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and second in Angela Carter’s collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber. The book is a re-imagining of a number of brutal myths and the opening story (which gives the book its title) concerns the Bluebeard tale. I have not heard of Isabelle Schuler so I am interested to read her treatment of this story.

So, that lot should keep me occupied for a little while!

What books are you looking forward to reading this spring?

Audiobook review – “The Women” by Kristin Hannah

This was one of my book club’s favourite reads of 2024. It had not crossed my radar at all (one of my friends suggested it) but was a New York Times bestseller last year. The novel is broad in scope and while the central theme of the novel is the much-overlooked role of women nurses in the Vietnam war, it is essentially a story of a life and draws in other themes and events in its sweeping timescale.

The central character is Frances ‘Frankie’ McGrath, whom we first meet as a young woman from an affluent background, a military family, in southern California. It is the 1960s and the expectation is that young Frances will do her duty and make a good marriage. There is a family party to celebrate the fact that her brother (with whom she is very close) has enlisted and is about to go off to Vietnam to fight for his country, following in the footsteps of his father and many other men in the family. There is a wall of honour in the family home covered with portraits of the various family members who served in the military. At this stage, the war still seems like an honourable endeavour for America, taking a moral stand against communism.

An intelligent woman with little else to do, Frances decides to follow in her brother’s footsteps and enlist, as a nurse. She expects, rather naively, that her parents will be proud of her, but their reaction is furious and ashamed. This is clearly not the sort of thing the women in the family do. Under a cloud of antipathy, Frances undergoes her short period of training before being transferred to a field hospital in Vietnam. Frances’s sheltered life has done nothing to prepare her for what she will face there. Soon after her arrival she experiences her first emergency with casualties being brought in from the field, horrific death and injury, inclement weather, power cuts, scarce resources. It is a very rude awakening and Frances spends her first few days in complete shock. She is supported by the two women friends she makes there, fellow nurses Barb and Ethel.

Frances undergoes a rapid transformation – not least from Frances to Frankie – she grows up, she learns to drink, smoke, fall in love and adapt to her new role and wholly new environment. The portrayal of the war and the conditions is visceral and the author handles it deftly. Writers and film makers do nig hold back on the horrors of war nowadays, as they might once have done, and the very particular horrors of Vietnam have been thoroughly explored, but it bears repeating. It is far in the past now (so much so that this book is considered historical fiction) but it is good to be reminded of the dangers inherent in hubristic over-confidence and who ultimately pays the price for the failure.

Beyond the war, when Frankie returns to the US, it becomes a more personal story. She battles with romantic betrayal, rejection by her parents, the loss of her beloved brother and denial by the American public of her part in the war. This is Kristin Hannah’s central mission with this book – for years, the role of women was completely overlooked. Most did not know that women had served and what they had been through. When Frankie returns and finds that the US public has turned against the war and that the pacifists partly blame the service personnel, she takes up the cause of veterans. Disillusioned, lost and alone we follow Frankie’s recovery and rehabilitation as she searches for new meaning in her life.

This book has been widely praised although some reviewers have described it as overly-long. I did feel that the second half of the book was a little more laboured and lacked the force of the Vietnam sections. Yes, there is much to say about the way veterans were treated both by American society and by their government when they came home, but this story is separate from the ‘women’s role’ that was the opening rationale for the story. That said, I did enjoy the book, it does stretch credulity a little, but it is a page-turner nonetheless.

Recommended.

Book review – “Sepulchre” by Kate Mosse

I read this book over the New Year holiday and I thought it would be fitting to publish my review today as the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist has just been published. Only a handful of the books on the list have crossed my radar – Elizabeth Strout seems to be a regular on prize shortlists at the moment and her latest book Tell Me Everything has made the longlist. Yael van der Wouden’s book The Safekeep, which I reviewed after it was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize is also there. But perhaps most interestingly, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s long-anticipated new novel Dream Count has made the longlist – the book was only published today – that’s timing!

Kate Mosse was of course the founder of the Women’s Prize (formerly the Orange Prize) which is now in its 30th year. She is an extraordinary woman. Labyrinth, the first book in the Languedoc trilogy, of which this book, Sepulchre, is also a part, was published twenty years ago and Mosse is currently touring with a one-woman show, sharing her secrets about the book.

So, what of Sepulchre? I was eager to get to this novel having so thoroughly enjoyed Labyrinth. The third instalment, Citadel, is on my TBR list. Labyrinth has been an international bestseller, translated into more than forty languages. Sepulchre is a little less well known, I think, and the novels can be read and enjoyed in isolation, although for me, having read Labyrinth, deepened my understanding of the themes explored in the second novel.

Sepulchre follows a similar structural premise to Labyrinth – two women whose lives are intertwined in ways that we as readers do not know about but which will emerge as the narrative progresses. The author tells their stories in parallel, using the technique of the contemporary character uncovering details about the life of her distant predecessor. In this novel, the two women are Leonie Vernier, from the late 19th century, and Meredith Martin from the present day.

Leonie is a young woman living in Paris with her mother and brother. There is a sense of threat in the air, both from social and political upheavals of the time (one of the opening scenes is of a violent uprising in a theatre) and because of some mysterious business that Anatole, Leonie’s brother, is involved in. A shady character, Victor Constant, enters their lives and it is clear that he bears some ill will towards the family, particularly Anatole. When it is suggested that the siblings go to Rennes-le-Bains (a town about 50km south of Carcassonne, which is where the connections with Labyrinth begin) to visit their widowed aunt, a young woman who was married to their late uncle, it is in large part to enable Anatole to evade the attention of Victor Constant.

In Rennes-le-Bains, at the remote mansion the Domaine de la Cade, the siblings enjoy a relaxed time with Isolde their aunt and begin to experience a quieter life away from Paris. Leonie explores the grounds of the Domaine although she experiences a disturbing supernatural event in an abandoned chapel in a densely wooded area in the grounds (further links to Labyrinth). She paints, sews, explores the town and makes friends with some of the local gentry, including Audric Baillard, an intellectual and someone to whom Leonie is curiously drawn. Audric, of course, appeared in both time periods in Labyrinth.

The modern-day character is Meredith Martin, an American writer, teacher and musician, who arrives in France ostensibly on a research trip for a book she is writing about Claude Debussy (whom we meet earlier in the novel as he is a neighbour of the Vernier family in Paris), but also in search of information about a French musician ancestor, about whom she knows very little. She was adopted after her young and troubled mother died. Whilst in Paris she has a tarot reading which takes her to Rennes-le-Bains. She stays at a country house hotel (the former Domaine de la Cade) and becomes enmeshed in the personal family difficulties of Hal, whose father has recently died in mysterious circumstances, and whose uncle now stands to control the entire business of the hotel where the two brothers were partners.

The plot of the novel is complex and clever. Mosse manages to draw out the connections between the two womens’ stories whilst making each one uniquely interesting and separately gripping. The scenes of denouement in both stories are powerfully told without melodrama or sentimentality and I found myself gripped by events, eager to read ‘just one more page’ to find out what happens next! Her control of the story is masterful. There is a wide range of characters although I’m afraid I did not think that some of these were as complex or as well-drawn as those in Labyrinth. Victor Constant, for example, felt like a pantomime villain at times. This does not detract from the overall effect, however, which is of a talented writer with a passion and feel for her subject, completely in command of the narrative.

I am looking forward to picking up the final instalment of the trilogy, Citadel and devouring that one too!

The 1st day of Spring!

It has felt like it was a long time coming and then it seems to have happened all at once. February was both long (the final last yards of the winter slog), but at the same time a full 72 hours shorter than both of the months which bookend it (January and March). As I write this, the sun is shining outside of the window, my youngest has just called me from the north east of England to tell me what a beautiful day it is in her university town (she sounds more well than she has done for weeks) and I am just back from a short visit to my middle one, who is studying much further south) where crocuses, daffodils and narcissi were blooming everywhere.

As well as being in the north west, my own garden is north-facing and the flowers are always slower to bloom, but my camellias definitely have buds, the snowdrops are out and the other bulbs are showing promise. It’s still cold, around seven degrees apparently, and I’m wrapping my hands around my tea cup, but the sunshine makes it seem less cold and, more importantly, my spirits feel somewhat lifted.

I hope like me you are feeling a little more energised. March promises to be a fairly quiet month for me, with less work than I have had over the last few weeks, but I am hoping to make the most of that time with some spring cleaning of my much neglected house, some gardening and lots of reading. I am a bit stuck with my current book, Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips, about which I was so hopeful but which I am struggling to get through. I have just completed Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world which is brilliant and has left me with a list of ‘must reads’ and ‘must watch’ films, YouTube clips and television shows! I highly recommend the book, which won the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction last year, and will post my review of it soon.

After my wonderful trip to Venice I have a small stack of books which I bought from the secondhand website World of Books, which I am eager to dive into, coffee table books about the palazzos, and writers’ memoirs of the city.

What is so striking about spring is the sense of hope I find I have suddenly – about all the cleaning and tidying I’m going to get through, about all the books I’m going to read, the yoga classes I am going to attend and the general sense of order I am going to bring to my life! Well, that is what it is to be human I think, to be hopeful and to keep striving!

So, Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus to everyone especially anyone out there with Welsh connections – what brilliant thinking to have your saint’s day on the first day of meteorological spring – and apologies if I have misspelt that. Happy reading, planting, spring cleaning, travelling or whatever it is you will be doing with your March.

Audiobook review – “The Land in Winter” by Andrew Miller

It is late February and the weather has turned very cold, and very windy. The winter solstice is long past and the meteorological start of spring is only a little over a fortnight away, but in much of the UK right now there is the stark reminder that the winter is not yet done with us. Thus it was in Britain in the winter of 1962/63, a particularly harsh year where snow lay in deep drifts as late as mid-March. This is the setting of Andrew Miller’s tenth novel, a study of two couples, four individuals, trapped by the weather, as well as by social expectations, class and their own caged personalities.

Eric Parry is the local doctor in a village in south-west England. He is married to Irene and they live in an attractive cottage on the outskirts of the village. Across the field from their home is a farm run by Bill Simmons. Bill is from a humble background but is Oxford-educated, and is a man who aspires to expand his farm, currently dairy-based with a single sullen bull, to something more modern and efficient and on a more industrial scale. He is married to Rita, a colourful but troubled woman, who has a past life in the bars and clubs of Bristol which she can never quite escape. The two women strike up an unlikely but easy friendship when they find that they are both pregnant and at around the same stage. In the 1960s in Britain young women were taught little about sex, married life and pregnancy and there is a kind of welcome relief in being able to compare notes.

There is no such chemistry between Bill and Eric; they meet at a Christmas party that Irene hosts but it is clear that not only do they hail from different worlds, but that they are also prisoners of their background. What they have in common, however, is a profound sense of disappointment, of hopes dashed, a feeling that they will never be able to create the kind of life that they might have hoped for. At the start of the book this is not the case for the two women, Irene and Rita; they have hope, the optimism that comes with the burgeoning of new life inside them, although, as we will later discover, for Rita this brings back memories of past trauma.

As Christmas passes and the familiar January gloom sets in, the snow lies ever deeper. The characters, having been thrown together initially, find themselves going in different directions, emotionally and geographically: Bill must visit his unrefined but cash-rich father to ask for money and Rita revisits past haunts and acquaintances in Bristol in an attempt to exorcise her demons. Eric and Irene become increasingly estranged and on a journey to visit her parents Irene becomes trapped on a broken down train and must take shelter in a nearby school for the blind where she is overwhelmed by a sense of isolation.

The breakdowns in the relationships and the individuals are slow, as life in the winter slows, almost to a frozen halt. We observe the gradual decline in slow motion. This is a powerful novel about the human condition that hits you almost without you realising it. The coldness of the world the characters inhabit is both the literal cold of the frozen landscape and the spiritual chill of England in the 1960s where status, the necessity of observing strict social rituals and behaviour and emotional illiteracy caused so much human misery.

This was the perfect book for January and I listened to it on audio, read very well by the author. Recommended.

Book review – “Thunderclap” by Laura Cumming

The longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction was announced last week. Only a couple of the books on the longlist have crossed my radar – Neneh Cherry’s autobiography (I have heard her talking about it on the radio quite a lot recently) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, which feels like it might be required reading at the moment, sadly. Anne Applebaum is someone I admire hugely and she is speaking at the Hay Festival this year, the opposite weekend to Colin Greenwood so I am trying to choose between her and Radiohead! Depression and joy perhaps!

So, I thought it might be a good week to post a review of Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, which was shortlisted for last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction and has been widely praised since its publication in 2023. Laura Cumming is a journalist, art critic for the Observer, and Thunderclap is her third book. The subject is Carel Fabritius, the Dutch Golden Age painter, pupil of Rembrandt, who was killed in 1654 at the age of 32 in Delft when a building in the town where gunpowder was being stored exploded, killing more than a hundred people and injuring thousands of others. Fabritius was killed and his studio destroyed along with an unknown number of his paintings. Only about a dozen of his paintings remain in art galleries around the world.

Laura Cumming follows in the footsteps of many other scholars and art experts in trying to find out more about the artist who showed so much promise (he has been described as the only one of Rembrandt’s many pupils who began to develop his own style after learning from the great Master, and at such a young age) but has left tantalisingly little. Experts have long felt that there simply must be more of his work, but that it just has not been found yet. He is a somewhat enigmatic figure and very little is known about his life; it is known that his first wife died young as did their infant daughter, and that he married again, but there are significant gaps and despite his rare talent he seems to have died quite indebted so he obviously did not live well from his work. For one so gifted he has left remarkably little behind, either in terms of paintings or a paper trail.

Cumming writes of her deep love of Dutch art and how this was fostered from an early age. Her father was also an artist and nurtured her interest, and married with the deep dive into the life and work of Carel Fabritius (and his contemporaries) is biographical detail about her father and his creative life. She draws many parallels between her modest, gentle and talented father (who died prematurely) and the kind of person she imagines Fabritius might have been. Examining the facts of his life, his humble background, his marriage to a local girl, then widowhood and the loss of a child, she concludes that he carried a heavy burden and that this helps to explain his absence from the main Delft and Amsterdam artistic scenes. Cumming looks deep into a number of his paintings and finds in ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ (thought to be a self-portrait) traces of tragedy and grief.

This book is both expansive (as well as Fabritius, Cumming writes at length about other Dutch painters of the time and the genre generally, her father and her own journey embracing art) as well as focussed on the tiny details of her subject, his life, his appearance, his paintings. I learned so much but I did not feel at any point that I was being given a history lesson – Cumming takes you on the journey with her.

One of my favourite books of recent years is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which, of course, concerns one of Fabritius’s most famous paintings of the same name. It now hangs in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. I was drawn to find out more about the painting and its artist creator after reading that book, and Thunderclap came out shortly after I read it, so I have been keen to read this book. I was not disappointed, it really is excellent. Since completing it I have also been to the National Gallery in London to see the Van Gogh exhibition there. The National Gallery has two of the paintings Cumming explores in detail – ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ and ‘View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall’ – and it was a joy to see them and have a greater understanding of the work.

I recommend this book highly.

By coincidence, I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which won the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction last year. I am enjoying it enormously and it shows what high quality this particular Prize promotes. The 2025 shortlist is out on 26 March.

Book review – “North Woods” by Daniel Mason

This novel crossed my radar last year when I was seeing it everywhere. I am a sucker for a good cover and the first edition cover (a cougar sitting on a hillside) would have passed me by but later editions feature a beautiful apple with leaves and vibrant colours and it definitely caught my eye! So I was delighted when one of my book club companions suggested it. It is a work of historical fiction set in New England, something else that attracted me as it is a part of the world I know quite well, having spent a few months there as a student. The author, Daniel Mason, has published five novels previously and is both a writer and a medical doctor – his scientific background brings an extra dimension to the work.

I learn lots of new things through reading, but I am delighted to have learned that this is an “epistolary novel” (something that I’m afraid my English Literature degree did not teach me!), told through a series of media – letters, diary entries, newspaper reports, as well as conventional narrative. It makes for great variety for the reader although the structural device was not universally praised by critics. It provides an interesting way of dealing with the different historical periods covered by the novel.

The novel’s location is a property in Massachusetts (both the house and its land) and the characters are the many people who have occupied it since it was first settled by an English immigrant. Retired English soldier Charles Osgood emigrates to the new world in the 1700s and cultivates an orchard on the property. He sets about creating a special apple variety, named after himself, as a way of making his mark on the world. His wife dies and he must bring up his twin daughters alone, but is determined to pass on his knowledge of apples in order that they continue his work.

The two women inherit the property after their father’s death and so the house falls to a new generation, but history is not in the gift of those who have passed to determine and under their stewardship, the property begins its steady path to decline. The sisters are preternaturally close and when a suitor begins to woo one of them, the other cannot allow this to stand. Their unusual relationship and the events of their lives foreshadow later tragedies that will befall the various occupants: a gentleman conducting a scandalous illicit relationship, the lonely wife of a businessman disturbed by visions, and the schizophrenic loner who seems to have a profound connection to the property’s past history.

It is not only the human occupants who enjoy the author’s attention; we learn of a cougar taking up residence in the wilderness that the property becomes, and the reproduction of insects in the decaying woodland. I enjoyed these bits less, preferring the human characters and their life dilemmas, but I appreciated the depth of the author’s scientific knowledge.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and personally I liked the variation in the ways of telling – I felt these created a good sense of the different time periods being explored. I listened to the book on audio and there were many different voices used for the various characters which helped to create an ensemble feel. It is also a deeply philosophical novel – Charles Osgood thought he was creating a place in history, but within a few generations his beloved orchard is derelict, built over and forgotten and apple varieties have diminished to a fraction of what was available in the past. The businessman envisions a presidential retreat for the house, but this is never realised and the house becomes broken and dangerous. Individual human lives have only minimal significance and nature will take over in some form.

I’m afraid I did not like the ending. It did not seem true to the rest of the book to me. I liked how the ‘spirits’ of the past were ambiguous throughout the novel, but the ending seemed to take a particular stand on this that I could not subscribe to – I cannot say more than that without giving too much away. I recommend the book for the journey rather than the destination!

Book review – “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

I am very happy to be at the stage in life where I read books that have been recommended to me by my children (all now adults). This is one which my elder daughter enjoyed reading over the summer last year and which she thought I would too. She was not wrong; it is hard not to be a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, one of our finest living writers, internationally acclaimed, winner of the Booker Prize in 1989 (for The Remains of the Day) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Remains of the Day was adapted for screen in 1993 and turned into a highly-acclaimed film starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Never Let Me Go was also made into a film in 2010 (though I did not know this) with a stellar cast which included Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. Ishiguro has quite the pedigree and from what I have seen seems a very nice and down to earth chap. (And a British ‘Sir’ to boot.)

[This review contains some spoilers.]

I read and reviewed Klara and the Sun when it came out in 2021, a novel about some of the potential repercussions of our obsession with technology and AI in particular (I posted about my own sense of alarm about this last month). It looked ahead to some future date when the advance was seemingly beyond our ability to arrest. The world it portrayed was at once familiar and extremely strange. Never Let Me Go bears some similarities in that it explores human cloning. Some readers may recall ‘Dolly the Sheep’ the first successfully cloned mammal who was born in Scotland in 1996 and died in 2003. At the time, there was a lot of fear-mongering about the consequences of this extraordinary achievement and some justified debate about how we as a human race should manage and control the inevitable advance of this particular field of science. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro imagines a world where this science is normalised into everyday life and what that means for the people involved.

The narrator of the story is Kathy, a woman still quite young when she is looking back on her life, and in particular at her childhood, from the perspective of one whose living purpose is to care for her peers, the others who share the same destiny as her. Kathy was brought up in an English boarding school (‘Hailsham’) where the staff are known to the young people as “the guardians”. This was in the late 1990s (when Dolly the sheep was all over the news?). Kathy tells us all about her life there, about the daily life of the children, about their relationships and petty differences, about the trivial things that were important to them. At first it is not clear to the reader exactly what is going on at Hailsham, but part way through, when reference is made to their future status as “donors” or “carers” it becomes increasingly and terrifyingly clear what these young people are for – their purpose is organ harvesting. They are all clones of someone on the outside (who they refer to as ‘models’ or ‘possibles’).

When we think about clones we might think about robots (rather like Klara in Klara and the Sun), but the children at Hailsham have been created and have all the usual aspects of human personality. This presents challenges to how they are raised and ‘Hailsham’ was originally conceived as a place where their lives could be made rich, where they could develop relationships with one another (including sexual relationships) and be given some purpose in life until they would be required as donors. But of course, their lives are completely pointless, as Ishiguro shows us, their future is bleak; at some point they will donate, once, twice, perhaps more, after which they will weaken and die. By showing us the human frailty of the young people (petty squabbles, jealousies and meanness) he shows how they are just like us, how we could be just like them, just a few steps away from being nothing but an organ incubator. It would be easier if they were dehumanised (like Dolly).

I found this a powerful novel that I have thought about much since I finished it a few months ago. As I have been thinking about it for this review, I have dipped back into sections of the book and seen things I did not see first time around, the pathos in Kathy, Ruth and Tommy’s trip to Norfolk for example, to search for Ruth’s “possible”, like a search for a mother, an origin story, but of course, the search is fruitless and deeply disspiriting to them all. It is a moment of realisation for them all – there is no-one out there for them.

This book has to be on a list of must-read books of the twenty-first century.

Postcard from Venice

I have started the year as I hope to go on, fulfilling a long-held travel ambition! I have visited Venice a couple of times (once about 12 years ago when my kids were still quite young, and once when I was 18 and went inter-railing in Europe) and on both occasions it was mid-summer, very hot and very, very busy. Ever since, I have wanted to experience Venice in the winter season and last week, with no school term dates holding us back, my husband and I made the trip, spending 6 glorious days in this unique city. One of our favourite films is Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It tells the story of a couple, grieving after the death of their young daughter, in a very grey wintry Venice, where Sutherland’s character is restoring a church. The setting is so atmospheric and ever since seeing it I have fantasised about being Julie Christie wandering along empty the alleyways and bridges over deserted canals!

Needless to say it wasn’t quite like that – it was still quite busy, although not nearly as much as spring through to autumn. But the Venetians were warm and friendly, less harassed perhaps than at other times of the year, there were no queues for the big tourist sights (by closing time at Basilica San Marco we had the place practically to ourselves) and good restaurants had plenty of tables. It was well worth compromising on the weather to get the more authentic experience (it was chilly but we did have some bright sunny days) and although Venice is never ‘cheap’ you can definitely get more hotel for your money out of season. Here are a few of my holiday snaps!

As well as beauty, culture, and fascinating history, Venice has a distinguished literary pedigree. Shakespeare set two plays in the city (Othello and The Merchant of Venice). He also set two plays in nearby Verona – Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona). We stopped for a night in Verona before heading to Venice – another truly beautiful and fascinating city – and you can visit ‘Juliet’s balcony’ (left). Scholars disagree on whether Shakespeare visited the Veneto but he certainly had a feel for the area and its stories.

A plaque in Verona commemorating Shakespeare’s connection to the city

Lord Byron, of course, famously spent a lot of time in Venice (he loved Italy), occupying a palazzo near San Marco, and referenced it in his poetry. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century American author Henry James wrote about his love of Venice, and John Ruskin wrote a three volume compendium on the art and architecture of Venice. More recently, the Russian American poet and philosopher Joseph Brodsky and American poet Ezra Pound are both buried in the island cemetery of San Michele in Venice. And finally one of my favourite books is set on the Lido – Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, also a brilliant film starring Dirk Bogarde.

So, a definite bucket list trip for me! I highly recommend Venice in the winter.

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