Category: Book Reviews

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!

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.

“Labyrinth” by Kate Mosse

You have got to admire Kate Mosse – in addition to being a best-selling author (with thirteen novels, non-fiction and plays to her name) she co-founded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, has been honoured twice (with an OBE and a CBE), has won a clutch of highly respected awards and appears regularly on screen and radio. It makes you wonder how she gets time to write because her books are not short! Despite Kate Mosse being on my radar for a long time (and I would describe myself as a fan of hers) I am ashamed to say I had not read any of her books – I guess I thought that medieval mystery wasn’t for me. But I was prompted to pick up Labyrinth after I was invited to put a question to her on BBC Radio’s World Book Club. I was in the middle of the Booker shortlist at the time and was somewhat daunted to note that it was almost 700 pages long (and about 18 hours on audio)!

It is almost twenty years since Labyrinth was first published and the book has been a sensation, selling almost 900,000 copies – astonishing. And a million readers are not wrong – it is a titanic novel, gripping, accessible, with a remarkable attention to detail and extensively researched. I just cannot believe I am so late to this particular party.

The novel opens on an archaeological site in south-west France, where Dr Alice Tanner, working as a volunteer (because she is a friend with one of the dig’s leaders), inadvertently strays off the permitted boundary of the dig and into a cave where she discovers two skeletons. She is severely reprimanded; the police must be notified, not least because they are trying to solve the suspected murder of two missing persons, and they promptly force work to be halted. When a powerful lawyer, infamous in the judicial community, becomes involved, events take a darker turn. 

This part of the novel is set in the early 2000s, but then switches to the early 1200s in Carcassone (though Mosse uses traditional Occitan references and language throughout. This language was widely spoken in the Languedoc region at the time, but suppressed by northern invaders who conquered territories in the south). The young noblewoman, 16 year-old newlywed Alais, daughter of Bertrand Pelletier, a key advisor to the head of the Cite (Carcassone), Viscount Trencavel, considers her life in the chateau where she lives. She is free-spirited but under the yoke of her scheming older sister, the constraints placed upon women of the time and now as a wife. 

We learn that Bertrand Pelletier (and some of his friends and allies) is the guardian of certain key spiritual books and objects which together contain the secrets of the Holy Grail. When he believes his life is threatened he entrusts these to his younger daughter, not realising the grave danger that this places her in. Meanwhile civil war is erupting, with the brutal warlords of the north seeking to suppress the Cathar movements in the south and taking the land of the southern noblemen under the pretence of protecting the established church. Alais must use all her wits to keep the books safe. 

Alice Tanner has unwittingly stumbled on the Grail secrets and, like Alais, this makes her a target too. The novel tells the parallel stories of both women as they attempt to work out the significance of the treasures they have been trusted to guard and to escape those who want them for themselves and who have no regard for their life, and would, in fact, rather see them dead. 

The book is a genuine page-turner, managing to tell its complex historical narrative in profoundly human terms. It is a book about power, money, greed and religion, and the conflicts that these things give rise to, as ever they will. But it is also about the power of love, between parents and children, between friends and comrades, and about the endurance of faith. The research is quite remarkable and I learnt a lot about the period and about this part of France, which I have visited on a few occasions but had very limited knowledge of. The author’s love of the Languedoc is clear. Indeed, she says that it was the purchase by her and her husband of a property in the area in the 1980s that first sparked her interest. 

Labyrinth is the first in Mosse’s Languedoc trilogy, and after finishing it, I promptly sought out book number two, Sepulchre, which I also enjoyed. I’ll post my review of that one soon!

Highly recommended.

Crime fiction – Val McDermid

Crime fiction is not one of my favoured genres, although whenever I have read any I generally enjoy it. I have really enjoyed dipping into Agatha Christie (I’ve reviewed Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and The ABC Murders on here and I really enjoyed Betty Boo by Argentinian author Claudia Pineiro, whose work I’d really like to get more into.

I have a lot of time for Val McDermid; she’s so interesting and entertaining, very funny when she appears on literary panel shows or festival events and just seems like a great ambassador for her profession. I decided over the summer that I really needed to sample some of her writing so I listened to the audiobook of A Place of Execution, one of her earlier works, published in 1999.

Review – A Place of Execution

The central character is George Bennett, an up and coming young detective in the Derbyshire force in the 1960s, somewhat disliked by a few of his colleagues due to his having received a university education, rather than coming up through the ranks. He is put on a very disturbing case involving the disappearance of a young girl, Alison Carter, from the small isolated village of Scardale. Many of the inhabitants of the village are members of the same family and the missing girl is in fact the step-daughter of one of the more well-to-do residents, Philip Hawkin, informally known as ‘the squire’ and very much considered an outsider. Although he has family connections to the village and inherited the manor house he now lives in with Alison’s mother Ruth, he grew up in the south and is not well-liked.

George and his assistant, Tommy Clough, encounter resistance in their investigations and George has a powerful sense of something not being right but he cannot put his finger on why. There is evidence of Alison having been harmed, perhaps sexually assaulted, but even though a thorough search of the vast rural area is conducted, no body is found and the case goes cold. This part of the novel is set in 1963 when the infamous Moors murders took place in Greater Manchester and there are references to the missing children in that case, as the respective forces share information to try and tease out common leads, but none are found.

Years later, journalist Catherine Heathcote, sets out to write a book about the famous unsolved case, and seeks out the now elderly George Bennett. As she digs deeper, however, she uncovers more than she bargained for, and when George suddenly writes to her and says that she must not publish and he can no longer cooperate with her in the work, she is dumbfounded.

I found this a brilliant novel and I was hooked. I could not work out what was going on and then at some point I thought I’d cracked the case, but I hadn’t! the plotting is superb. The characters are also all very authentic and well-drawn. It is no surprise to me that this book won awards and plaudits and was shortlisted for some prestigious prizes.

After reading this book, I encouraged my book club to read a Val McDermid novel. She has written so many so we searched for a ‘Top 10’ online and Past Lying was recommended.

Review – Past Lying

I listened to this novel on audiobook too and I found it to be much less interesting and somewhat more cliched. Published in 2023 and the seventh in McDermid’s Karen Pirie series (the name of the detective) it is set in Edinburgh during the Covid pandemic. Detective Karen Pirie is the head of the Historical Cases Unit at the Leith station, and is supported by two more junior colleagues, one of whom she now finds herself in a ‘bubble’ with in the apartment of Karen’s current boyfriend Hamish, who is spending lockdown in the Highlands making hand sanitiser.

Karen’s assistant Jason is contacted by a librarian at the national library who is in the process of cataloguing the archive of the famous now-dead crime writer Jake Stein, and has found an unpublished manuscript the circumstances of which bear a strong resemblance to an unsolved murder, that of a young student in Edinburgh some years earlier. With nothing better to do in the lockdown, Karen and her colleagues set about following up leads, going in whichever direction their investigative noses take them. They slowly uncover a complex story of literary rivalry and foul play, lust and betrayal. All perfect ingredients for a good crime novel, but for me there was something missing.

There are parallel stories in the novel too, as indeed there are in A Place of Execution, the personal lives of the characters. And Karen’s back story has some drama – her long-term partner was killed a couple of years before (in a previous novel, I believe) and she is still grieving, while working out what Hamish means to her. There is also a refugee story, another theme which appears in an earlier Karen Pirie novel, but the author does not draw out any connections between the case and this side story, which begs the question what then is it for? I wasn’t hooked in the same way as I was with A Place of Execution and when I thought I’d worked out what was going on I was eagerly awaiting a twist, but none came, so the ending of the book just felt anti-climactic.

I have found subsequently that other reviewers have been lukewarm about this book, so I’m puzzled as to why it was recommended as one of McDermid’s top ten; earlier books in the Karen Pirie series seem to have garnered much greater praise, such as A Darker Domain, published in 2009.

So, a mixed experience with Val McDermid. She has many more books in her oeuvre, and legions of her fans can’t be wrong, so I am sure I will trial a few more and hope I find them more satisfying, like A Place of Execution.

Booker shortlist review #6 – “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden

Winner of the Booker prize 2024

This is my sixth and final review of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. The winner was announced a couple of weeks ago so I didn’t quite get all my reviews in before the big day! The prize went to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital which is a worthy winner in my view and it is interesting that the Chair of judges said the decision of the panel was unanimous. It feels like it was a book for this moment, when we seem to be on the cusp of something big globally and could all do with stepping back and looking at the world from a different perspective. If only!

The Safekeep is one of the longer books on the shortlist and that’s partly why I left it until last to read. It is also the debut novel of its Dutch author (the first from the Netherlands to be shortlisted I believe) and is a very impressive piece of work. It is set in the rural east of the country, bordering Germany, in 1961 and the central character is Isabel, a young single woman living alone in the house formerly occupied by her and two brothers (Hendrick and Louis) and their mother. The mother is now dead and Isabel is still clearly deeply in grief. She is obsessive in trying to preserve the house and all its contents, even broken fragments of crockery that remind her of her mother. She creates an inventory of the contents when she believes that the maid Neelke is covertly taking items away. Isabel is an anxious and paranoid woman.

In many ways she has every right to be anxious; she sees herself as the only custodian of their parents’ legacy. Her older brother Hendrick escaped the small town as soon as he could, preferring to live in the city with his boyfriend, and the younger brother Louis is an irresponsible womaniser. He will also inherit the property when its official owner (Uncle Karel, who obtained the house for his sister during the war) dies. Isabel will be homeless without any means of supporting herself, a fact which they all seem to brush over. Isabel is lonely, isolated and grieving.

When Louis invites his siblings to meet his new girlfriend Eva (whom Isabel views with disdain at their very first meeting) and then installs her in the house when he has go to England to work for the summer, Isabel is furious and desperate. To make matters worse, Louis gives Eva their mother’s old room, which Isabel has treated almost as a shrine, and cannot understand why his sister is so affronted. Over the course of the summer, the development of Eva and Isabel’s relationship will transform their lives. 

It is hard to say more about this book without revealing the significant plot twist. It took me a while to warm to any of the characters: Louis is insufferable and selfish, Hendrick is bitter and Isabel is uptight and unreasonable. Eva, initially, seems dull and insipid. But the book is about Isabel’s transformation and her coming to terms with loss. She has lived in the shadow of her mother, her brothers, the war (which would still have been fresh in everyone’s memory in 1961) and not been allowed to be herself or even acknowledge who she is and what she stands for. It is also a book about memory, and legacy, and the importance and value of “things”, what we hold on to when our life feels outside of our control. There are some significant sex scenes which felt a bit cringey – the portrayal of the intensity was powerful but they went on too long and were overdone for me. I also listened to this on audio and found the reader not great, almost to the point of distracting, so I’d recommend reading the book on paper. The book is undoubtedly a powerful debut, however, and I look forward to what more this author has to offer in the future. 

It’s the Booker Prize winner announcement tonight! (And here’s my review #5 – “Held” by Anne Michaels

Held is the shortest novel on this year’s Booker shortlist and of the five that I have completed so far (I’ve almost finished The Safekeep) the one that I have found the most difficult to read. My brief scan of the reviews suggests that opinion differs quite widely and I suspect it is one of those ‘Marmite’ books. I’m afraid I didn’t love it. I have a copy of the author’s highly acclaimed 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces in my house somewhere, a book I have attempted to read a few times over the years and never quite managed to get into. That novel won the Orange Prize and many other awards when it was published so there is no doubt that Michaels is an author of quality. She is not prolific, Held is only her third novel, but she has published a number of poetry collections and is I believe the current poet laureate of Toronto. In my view she writes prose like a poet and her novels perhaps need to be approached and read in a different way. 

Held is set in a number of different time periods, from early 20th century Paris, to 1950s Suffolk, to London, Estonia and the final brief chapter in Finland, 2025, when who knows what might have happened. The periods are not linear, the novel jumps back and forth. Many of the characters in each chapter are connected by a family thread although mostly they do not know each other well, others seem completely random, but are connected via the greater human story. The other common feature is that each chapter is overshadowed by war, either being in an actual war zone, or affected by an experience of war, or troubled by the threat of war, and its twin, death. Each character has been affected by the premature loss of a loved one, a partner or parent, or the loss of what might have been, and the novel explores how grief is passed down through the generations, of the terrible trauma left by war death and the power of memory which both sustains us but can also be a heavy weight to carry.

I read this on my Kindle and I think that was a mistake; it’s probably a book that benefits from being on paper in your hands, beautifully typeset and with a wonderful cover (like the one in the photo above). I hate the way that with a Kindle you keep looking at your reading speed! I was astonished when I opened to the book that “most readers” had read it in under two hours! (Probably all those literary journalists under pressure of a deadline.) It took me almost twice that and even then I felt I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it more slowly. You can’t speed read poetry and you can’t speed read this book. 

I enjoyed it more towards the end once the narrative thread had emerged for me out of the literary mist, but for me it was still not strong enough to carry the book. There is some very powerful writing in here and I was moved by many of the characters – their griefs and passions felt very real – but it was just too disparate for me to feel a strong connection with them or with the themes of the book. Many of the novels on this year’s shortlist wear their politics very boldly, but with Held I would suggest it is more subtle, so much so that it is almost lost. This is a more philosophical novel than that.

I would recommend this book, and I may indeed try it again once I relieve myself of the pressure to get through the shortlist before 12 November. But it’s a book that is probably not for everyone. 

So, who is going to win…?

Well, I have completed five of the six books on this year’s shortlist and have almost finished the sixth (The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden), but I’ve read enough of the last one to be fairly confident that it’s not a Booker winner, although I am enjoying it.

My hunch is that Percival Everett will take the prize with James. It would be quite a statement if this book wins, in the light of current political events in the US, although I doubt most people will be listening who need to listen. I did love the book and think it’s a great achievement. But I would be very happy if Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won. I think it is so imaginative and beautifully written as well as being captivating and profound. It also says a great deal about geopolitics, even bigger and more profound than the election of a US president for the next four years, and the world really does need to listen.

The winner is announced at 9.45pm UK time, with a live programme on BBC Radio 4 and live-streaming on the various social media channels.

Booker shortlist review #4 – “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

I was on quite a roll with the Booker shortlist and beginning to think this was perhaps the strongest field for years. This is Rachel Kushner’s second time of being shortlisted, her 2018 novel The Mars Room also having enjoyed that distinction. I wasn’t mad about that novel and I’m afraid I’m not mad about this one either. I found I just kept waiting for something to happen and then there was a sort of denouement that was sketched out rather quickly and then it ended and I found myself asking what it was all about. 

The narrator and central character is a self-styled “Jane Doe” whom we know in this story as Sadie. She is a shape-shifter, trained in taking on alternative identities for her line of work. She learned her craft as an undercover agent working for the FBI in the United States, but seems to have found the rules of working in an organisation too stifling and now works freelance, often for people whom she also does not know. This is a book about people who can change who they appear to be. In the particular operation covered in this novel, Sadie is required to infiltrate a commune in southern France, influenced by the ideas of a reclusive intellectual (Bruno). The members of the commune are activists against capitalism and the modern world, living in an agricultural region, tending the land using traditional methods and attempting to live sustainably. Sadie’s mission is to cause havoc in the group and to urge them towards a big action that will ultimately undermine their cause. 

In order to complete her task, Sadie must develop a network of complex relationships, including a sham marriage, in order to gain the trust of the group members, to avert suspicion, and to cultivate an authentic identity. For me, Sadie comes across quite simply as a sociopath. She has no feelings for any of those she exploits in order to complete her mission, seems even to enjoy their vulnerability, and there is a kind of arrogance in her non-selfhood. I wondered whether this might be the point of the novel, that she might come unstuck as a result of excessive self-confidence.  

There is some clever prose in this book and some thorough research – Bruno the intellectual writes extensively about Neanderthals, about Home sapiens, our ancestors, which I assume is accurate? There is also some interesting exposure of some of the contradictions in the philosophy of those living in the commune – they really do not get along, and demonstrate that humans could never live in this kind of mutual arrangement. (I had many “we’re all doomed” moments listening to this book!) Like some of the others novels on the shortlist this is also a deeply political book, which I appreciated.

I’m afraid to say though that for me the narrative just wasn’t strong enough to hold it all together. There were parts I found, frankly, a bit boring and the plot just petered out, there did not seem to be any consequence and the sense of suspense just did not go anywhere for me. Kushner has cited John le Carre as one of her influences for the book and I can sort of see that, but le Carre’s novels deliver comprehensively on both plot and character and I felt this book was not really strong enough on either. 

I would struggle to recommend this book and will be surprised if it wins, but I have been very wrong before so let’s see!