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My last live cultural experience before lockdown was introduced in the UK was on February 11th. I saw Isabel Allende in conversation with Jeanette Winterson at The Dancehouse in Manchester as part of the Manchester Literature Festival. The evenings were still dark and the weather was cold. The excited spectators queued on the stairs, we sat next to strangers and laughed out loud, a microphone was passed around the audience. Nobody was wearing a face mask nor using hand sanitiser and the Coronavirus seemed like a thing that was happening far away and not at all like a real threat. A few weeks later and it would have been cancelled. Isabel Allende probably would not even have embarked on an international promotional tour. Only 6 months ago, and yet it feels like a lifetime.

A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende’s twentieth novel and, as with many of her works, is based on the true story of a close friend of hers. It concerns refugees from the Spanish Civil War who escape the fascist regime in September 1939 and flee to Chile via France on a ship called the Winnipeg, in an operation  organised by the legendary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who felt his nation had a duty to support those fleeing the terror in Spain.

Victor Dalmau is one of these refugees, a young medic who escapes the country with his heavily pregnant sister-in-law Roser, a pianist who was engaged to be married to Victor’s brother Guillem. Guillem was a fighter, a passionate revolutionary, and lost his life to the cause. Victor and Roser are forced to leave behind Victor’s elderly mother, Carme Dalmau. She says she is too old for the journey and wishes to die in her country. Victor persuades Roser to marry him, believing it will be safest for them both and give them the best chance of being accepted into Chile.

The couple settle in Chile and Roser gives birth to a son, Marcel, whom Victor cares for as if he were his own child. Although theirs is a marriage of convenience, Victor and Roser grow fond of one another and whilst, initially, they intend to return to Spain one day, it becomes clear, as the years pass, and world war two rages in Europe, that this is unlikely to happen. They therefore set about making a decent life for themselves: they set up a business, a small bar, Victor completes his studies and qualifies as a doctor, eventually becoming one of the leading cardiac surgeons in the country (a fact which will later save his own life). Roser, meanwhile, develops her own career; she was a pianist in Spain (she was rescued by Victor’s parents who spotted her talent and rescued her from a life of poverty) and begins teaching music.

They seem to be thriving, until the military coup in 1973, when General Pinochet led the overthrow of the president Salvador Allende. This, of course, is closely linked to the author’s own story, President Allende having been her father’s cousin. Here, Victor’s past catches up with him; he is known as a former anti-fascist activist and had become a friend of the President, playing chess with him regularly. The couple’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.

I won’t give away any more of the details as it is a cracking story which doesn’t end quite as you’d expect. In the talk I attended, Isabel Allende described this book as a straight love story, and indeed it is, a tale of the kinds of lives on which the world turns. It is what Allende does best, story-telling and this book will keep you gripped. There is no shortage of action or plot and I suspect she has stayed very close to the facts of the original true story. If you are an Allende fan you will love it, as it would be hard not to love anything she has written. It is not The House of the Spirits though, nor does it have the breadth or power of a story such as Portrait in Sepia. I think the canvas here is a bit smaller and I suspect the author has constrained her imagination a little in order to be loyal to the real-life story. That said, it is clearly a book full of love for its characters and their story and it feels very authentic.

Recommended.

There was a bit of alarm in the book world recently when the Publishers Association in the UK announced a 7% decline in revenue from sales of fiction (physical formats) in 2018. There was a rise in sales of digital formats but not enough to offset fully the drop in sales of actual books. In contrast, non-fiction sales were up and are now worth almost £1bn! Audiobooks have also enjoyed big increases in the last couple of years.

Those of us who feel strongly about books may find this rather worrying and publishers have identified fiction as most vulnerable as there are now so many other things competing for a slice of our leisure time. In my household, I have three teenagers and whilst they do all read (some more than others!) it is undoubtedly Netflix that commands  more of their attention. They will quite literally walk around with their earphones on watching their mobile phone screens! (As I wrote that I chuckled to myself, thinking about Anna Burns’s central character in Milkman who got such a hard time for “reading whilst walking around”!)

Don’t get me wrong, I do watch Netflix and am working my way through a couple of box sets at the moment. I seldom watch more than one episode per sitting, though; I know some people will watch several episodes back to back, and suddenly your evening is gone. ‘On demand’ television is great, but I do feel you have to have balance in life – I also have on-demand coffee and chocolate in my house but I wouldn’t dream of drinking three consecutive cups per evening! The reasons are obvious. And whilst Netflix, Amazon, computer games or social media are probably not going to make you really wired and stop you sleeping (though they might!) it is still important to be able to stop and switch off, to know that there are other things in life that deserve your attention and may be better for you.

Some might argue that it’s all just entertainment and it’s not doing us any harm, and, indeed, that there is high quality television out there. The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, has made an extraordinarily successful transition from novel to Netflix and this will no doubt drive an increase in sales of Margaret Atwood’s follow-up book The Testaments, due for publication this Autumn. However, it’s not the blockbusters, the big-name, already rich and famous authors who need our support, it’s all the other writers, striving to get their books noticed. My worry is that the links between on-demand television and online book retailers, and the time-pressed, mobile phone-dependent consumer will create a perfect storm where the choice of reading we have available is gradually narrowed and homogenised.

I am pleased to see non-fiction is thriving; there are some wonderful history, philosophy and political books out there. And I do believe the trends in children’s books are more encouraging, less linked as they are to television and film.

All I can say is we must keep reading widely, keep campaigning to ensure our libraries stay open and use our bookshops before we lose them, particularly independents. Oh, and go to a literary festival or an author talk.

Do you worry about the future of the novel?

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