I seem to be going all bookish on you at the moment, despite the fact that mine is not a book blog – or an anything else in particular blog, quite frankly. Here is a bit of fun doing the book-blogger rounds, in which participants address themselves to various questions by answering them with a title from among the books they’ve read in 2023. Here’s mine.
You should look at Annabel of AnnaBookBel fame’s list, as it was her idea. And you might like to see how Karen at Bookertalk, Susan at A Life in Books, Cathy at 746 Books answered. Perhaps other bloggers you know have had a go – as you could too.
This year, I tried to read my way round the world. And to help me along, I played a game of bingo. Here’s how. You take the bingo card shown below, and attempt to cover each square with the title of a book you’ve just read.
Here’s how I got on. The stars represent how much I’ve enjoyed the book (out of five). The scoring here is quite high – these are among my year’s Best Books. Other star ratings are available, and visible on some other – less successful -choices this year.
The links will take you to my reviews on Goodreads. I’m actively in the process of changing my book tracking to Storygraph. When I started recording the books I’d read, I was at first unaware that Goodreads was owned by Amazon. I’m a fervent Amazon Avoider, so it really is time to go, especially as the site is actually quite clunky.
Indian Subcontinent Kiran Desai: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard(India) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Village Barry Unsworth:Morality Play(14th century Northern England) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Australia Kate Grenville: A Room Made of Leaves(New South Wales) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Island Audrey Magee: The Colony(Island off West Coast of Ireland) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ UK (excluding Scotland) Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds (London) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mountain Christopher Somerville: Walking the Bones of Britain (mountainous regions of Scotland; Pennines)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Central America Any suggestions? Scotland Douglas Stuart: Young Mungo (Glasgow) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Africa Petina Gappah: Out of Darkness Shining Light (Central Africa: the route explored by David Livingstone) ⭐⭐⭐ Small Town Jo Browning Roe: A Terrible Kindness (Aberfan, Wales)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
South America Dan Saladino: Eating to Extinction (Bolivia and Venezuela: a bit of a cheat as Saladino visits every continent in this book)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Central or Eastern Europe Lauren Chater: The Lace Weaver (Estonia)⭐⭐⭐ Sea Karen Pinchin: Kings of their Own Ocean(Tuna, widespread)⭐⭐⭐ Middle East Susan Abulhawa: Against the Loveless World (Palestine). I've hardly started this one, so no thoughts or ratings yet. Polynesia Eleanor Catton: Birnam Wood(New Zealand)⭐⭐
This great idea comes from Fiction Fan: you can read all about it on her site and maybe decide it’s for you too. At least one other blogging pal, Karen of Booker Talk has joined in the fun. Read all about it!
As this is my last post this year, it’s time to thank you all for reading and commenting, and for being part of such an engaging community. All good wishes for 2024.
Nicola Nuttall of Unsplash has provided my featured photo.
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
I read Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential quite a long time ago, and seem to remember not liking it – or indeed him – very much. But it’s given me my chain for the month. You’re not getting a single novel from me this time, not one. Simply a run-down of a few cookery books.
To ease you in gently, I will start with a book that – though full of recipes – is also meant to be read from cover to cover; the 1950s classic by Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed. I’ve only just got it out of the library, so I can’t really comment on it. The inside cover says that it’s a ‘passionate autobiographical cookery book; Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first class novel.‘
Which leads me to one of the first cookery books I owned, one which was my cookery bible when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s: Elizabeth David‘s A book of Mediterranean food. She wrote very readably and enticingly about ingredients which I was able to source on a student budget in multi-cultural Manchester, and cemented the love of cooking fostered by my mother when I was growing up. All the same, my only memory from that time of using one of her recipes was when I cooked an indifferent moussaka for a lecturer whom my then boyfriend and I were trying to impress. I’ve never really liked moussaka since.
Now I have different cooking bibles. Unsurprisingly, some are written by the cooks who contribute to the Guardian’s food supplement on Saturdays. I went through a phase of perpetually using Meera Sodha‘s East: ‘vegan and vegetarian recipes from Bangalore to Beijing‘. Try this one: Leek and Chard Martabak.
Yotam Ottolenghi came my way via the Guardian: Rick Stein via his television series. I recently found his India in a charity shop, and it seduced me because of its glorious pictures of food and street life . The recipes are pretty good too. How about Aloo dum: potato and pea curry with tomato and coriander?
But for my last book, I’ll choose another cookery book which can be read from cover to cover. And I’ll make it seasonal: Nigel Slater‘s The Christmas Chronicles. Nigel Slater is my sort of cook, in that he doesn’t go in for careful measuring. If you haven’t got this, use that. He’s keen to tell you what he doesn’t bother with. And licking the bowl out is part of the joy. Recipes here are interspersed with stories of his Christmases, and his greedily-anticipated preparations for them. I hope you made your Christmas cake at the end of October. But if you didn’t, here’s his.
So that’s my chain. one in which most of the books I’ve chosen are capable of being linked with each other. It’ll be business as usual next month, with books where you can start at the beginning, and read until the end. Our starter book will be Gabrielle Zevin‘s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I happen to know our daughter’s read this, and I shall be able to snaffle it from her bookshelves when we go to visit the Spanish branch of the family early next month. Not in time for the next Six Degrees, but still …
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
This month’s starter book by Chetna Maroo, Western Lane has only just been acquired by our library, so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I understand though that it’s about eleven year old Gopi whose mother dies. Her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen in squash, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters.
This took me off at a slight tangent, something to do perhaps with ‘quietly brutal’. I remembered reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: the tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after will stay with me for a long time.
This linked for me with another book where a father is centre stage: The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. As someone of dual heritage myself (half English, half Polish), born in the same period as Hamilton I was interested to read this account from a man with a German mother and Irish father. His story is told in a series of vignettes, which gradually provide a coherent picture of the family’s day-to-day life over the years of Hamilton’s childhood. His mother brings with her memories of her family’s anti-Nazi stance – yet in Ireland she and her family are called Nazi. His father insists on the family’s Irishness – which meant denying everything English in their lives. Both these threads isolate them all from their peers. They’re rather poor, though Hamilton’s father has all kinds of unusual and ultimately unsuccessful business ideas. This is an account of a young boy’s growth into adolescence and adulthood, trying to find a path towards the adult he thought he wanted to be. A sensitive and restrained and thought-provoking narrative.
Let’s move to a book with no father figure at all: Sisters byDaisy Johnson. July is utterly dependent on her damaged, controlling older sister September, to whom she is very close in age (the clue is in their names). Following some bullying of July in their Oxfordshire school, they move with their mother to the house in North Yorkshire that had once been the father’s family home. Sheela, the mother is also unstable – withdrawn and neglectful. The girls are widely considered ‘isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty’. Their behaviour is unsettling, often shocking, and makes reading the story a tense and unsettling experience. It leads towards a denouement that is both shocking and yet satisfactory, leaving the reader with a hope for better things.
Another book with families and relationships at the heart: The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell. Here are two stories: that of Lexie, 1950s university drop-out, who meets Innes, and leaves rural Devon and her family, to live the full bohemian London experience. And that of Elina and Ted, new (present-day) parents who after a horrible, dangerous birth, are struggling to adjust to their new very-far-from normal. Their exhaustion, Ted’s curious moments of disorientation, their differing expectations seem likely to destabilise their relationship. How do these two worlds collide and make a story? They don’t, not in the first half. Then hints get dropped, about the house and neighbourhood where all these characters lived. And despite the drip-feed of clues, the end, when it comes, is shocking , unexpected and entirely believable. I was involved from the first to last page.
This is getting a bit heavy. I’ll do what I so often do after a dose of mood-lowering reading and rush over to Venice to read a Brunetti mystery by Donna Leon. The plot hardly matters. It’s a few hours in the company of Commissario Brunetti and his entirely satisfactory family life that I’m after. Give unto Others is Leon’s latest book. And this post-pandemic tale is as usual a good one. It involves a former neighbour who comes and talks – unofficially – about some concerns she has about the business in which her husband and son-in-law have been involved. As ever, layers unpeel to reveal dark secrets and shenanigans. Tricky moral questions arise for Brunetti to wrestle with. How involved should he be? If you’re a Leon fan, you won’t need any encouragement to find out.
For my last book, I’ll choose to link with Brunetti by choosing another crime novel where the personalities are of just as much interest as the crime, and where human relationships are what count the most, The Lock-up by John Banville. We’re in 1950s Dublin, some six months after Banville’s April in Spain took place. A young woman has apparently asphyxiated herself in her car in a lock-up garage. It becomes apparent it’s a murder. As ever, though the whole of the book is on the surface an account of the efforts to solve the crime and find the perpetrator, actually, that’s not the reason to read it. Instead, it’s about the more-than-prickly relationship between DI Strafford and police pathologist Dr. Quirke, about the complicated love affairs both men have in 1950s Dublin, still under the somewhat puritanical stranglehold of the Catholic church. And this extends to its influence over police investigations as well as moral arbitration. It’s about the weather, the greyness of Dublin. And it’s about simply enjoying Banville’s luscious writing. So many reasons to read and appreciate this book.
So: families and relationships form the link between all my choices this month. Next month, perhaps it will be food, as the starter book is the culinary classic, Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential.
Three of my images this month come courtesy of photographers catalogued in Pexels. Tirichard Kuntanon illustrated the Cormac McCarthy, Dids the Donna Leon, Mike Bird the John Banville. The image for the Hugo Hamilton was from Wikimedia Commons.
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
Somehow, I didn’t read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith when I was younger. And I’ve only just managed to source a copy, so I haven’t read it in time for Six Degrees. This is how it’s introduced in Goodreads. ‘Through six turbulent months of 1934, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps a journal, filling three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries about her home, a ruined Suffolk castle, and her eccentric and penniless family. By the time the last diary shuts, there have been great changes in the Mortmain household, not the least of which is that Cassandra is deeply, hopelessly, in love’.
That seemed to chime with a book I’ve just finished, Natasha Solomon’s Fair Rosaline. This is a re-interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet story from the stand-point of bit- character Rosaline. To be fair, the story of bereavement, infatuation, love and bereavement again zipped along, but even as a page-turner, the narrative quickly became increasingly unbelievable. The characters were something of a caricature and the language veered unconvincingly between the Shakespearean and more modern idiom. If you want a reasonably page-turning beach read, this could be for you. I made the link to our starter book because Rosaline could well have lived in a castle (though she didn’t). And she falls hopelessly in love.
One thing you’ll notice if you read Fair Rosaline is that a fair few characters die. So my next book is A Tomb with a View, by Peter Ross. This is an evocative, delightful and thought-provoking book. Yes, it’s about death and burial. But the variety of cemeteries, ways of remembering the dead and rituals Ross explores is astonishing. He’s clearly a sympathetic man to have around, and historians of ancient cemeteries, gravediggers, Muslim celebrants, natural burial enthusiasts, proponents of The Queerly Departed all willingly open up to him and bring their own special Final Resting Place to life. He visits graveyards, charnel chapels, cemeteries and so much more, animating them in a delightful tribute to these sites and those who work there and care for them. A book to read with – yes – enjoyment.
From death, to near death, in Maggie O’Farrell‘s I Am, I Am, I Am. This is not an autobiography, but a non-chronological exploration of the author’s 17 (seventeen!) brushes with death, each episode named for a different part of the body. Attacks at machete-point, nearly-road-accidents, a dreadful experience of childbirth: all these and more are graphically and tenderly brought to life. Most affecting is the last quarter of the book, where she describes her own debilitating and long-running experience of the after-effects of a virus: and then her daughter’s even worse experiences. It’s compelling, sometimes angry, often visceral. She’s graphic at describing pain, fear, despair. Impossible not to experience at least some empathy for O’Farrell and her experiences. And yet she’s still here, bringing her experience to bear on her other work, in which she brings fictional characters and their dramas to life, informed no doubt by her own experiences.
And now from one non-chronological memoir to another: Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops. Marvellous. I was suspicious of a book written by something of a National Treasure. It would play to the gallery, surely? I was wrong. This is part memoir, part political polemic from someone whose views I’m happy to share, part social commentary and part Interesting Facts About London and the many places she’s called home. She uses the device of a journey on her most familiar bus route, the Number 12 from Dulwich to central London to gaze out of the window and use the memory triggers she finds as she observes the scene there, or among her fellow passengers to introduce the story of her life in America, Denmark and England. She’s witty, compassionate, angry and introspective by turn, and always amusing, often laugh-out-loud funny. I loved this book.
My next choice also uses London as a starting point. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a powerfully unsettling novella. Here is a world descending into chaos and uncertainty just after the ‘author’ has given birth, in London. This is the story of a fleeing into the unknown from a city that’s no longer functioning following an unspecified apocalyptic disaster. Sparingly and beautifully written this is a short, eloquent and potent account of one woman’s fall-out from a not too unlikely future catastrophe. But one which does not finish on a note of despair, but of love.
Lastly, let’s go back to the 14th century: a time when England, like much of Europe, was turned upside-down socially by the predations of the Black Death, as well as by war, and it must have felt like the end of the world. Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play. Nicholas Barber, a young cleric who has abandoned his post and fallen in with a band of itinerant players tells his story. What brings this story its power is its power to immerse the reader in the life he’s – at least for the time being – chosen. This band of players live from hand to mouth, often cold, always dirty, always on the move and wondering where the next meal and billet is coming from. But they devise the idea of re-enacting a shocking murder that has just taken place in the community in which they find themselves, and discover that all is not as it seems. And add fear of the more powerful to their list of worries. An immersive tale, bringing the sights, smells, sounds, and mores of the 14th century to life.
Well. We have wandered about a bit. Each book links, if tenuously, with the next: but there is no common thread running through these choices.
And next month, Kate invites us to read as our starter book Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. Are you going to join in the fun?
Corvids have been given another week to show themselves at Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge. I have no further photos so have resorted to the internet to provide one. Thank you Frank Cone at Pexels.
But I can provide a crow-related story, and one very suited to this challenge for photographers, thanks to a book I have just finished reading
But if they (crows) make fierce enemies, they make even finer allies. A girl in Seattle called Gahi Mann made worldwide news when the crows she had fed every day since she was four years old began to bring her gifts in return: a paper clip, a blue bead, a piece of Lego, a tiny silver heart from a pendant. But even better, her mother Lisa dropped a camera lens cap while out taking photographs in a field. The crows watched nearby. She was almost home before she realised it was lost, but as she came down her garden path, she saw it had been returned to her, balanced precisely on the rim of the bird bath. Camera footage showed a crow arriving with it, walking it on the bird bath, washing it several times over, and laying it out to wait for her return.
Katherine Rundell: The Golden Mole, page 78
This short but perfectly formed book is a hymn to the species which we treasure – or ought to treasure – but may be fast disappearing. From stork to swift to narwhal to hedgehog to seahorse … and fifteen other creatures, Rundell assembles an eclectic mix of fascinating facts to explain why they are special to her, and should be to us. It’s beautifully produced, and evocatively illustrated by Talya Baldwin. Not a natural history book as such, but something that everyone who loves the natural world may want to linger over.
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
This month’s chain starts with Anna Funder’s Wifedom, whose heroine is Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife. She hasn’t had much of a press – good or bad. Orwell never acknowledged her in his writings, and his biographers have largely passed her by. Yet she was an Oxford graduate studying for a masters degree when this was still an unusual path for a woman. She gave it all up when she married Orwell to live in near poverty in a remote cottage. When they go to Catalonia for Orwell to participate in the Civil War, he never mentions in his writing Eileen’s significant role in the struggle or the risks she took. And so it goes on. This is a novel rather than a biography, because there are so few hard facts to rely on: mainly a few letters, so the book is perforce speculative. But enough is known about Orwell’s patriarchal attitude to women and their role to surmise that this is a reasonably faithful account. This is a shock to Funder, long-time Orwell admirer. He doesn’t come out of it well as a husband and father. An interesting and thoughtful reconstruction.
So let’s do a chain on relationships within a marriage, within a family, and start off with Stanley and Elsie, by Nicola Upson, because here is another fictionalised account of the lives of real people. It brings before us the story of one of England’s most celebrated twentieth century painters, Stanley Spencer, and the women in his life, including the sensible, cheerful live-in maid Elsie, and his two wives, Hilda then Patricia in a most vivid and involving way. Early twentieth century village life, an eccentric lifestyle, and the complicated lives of imperfect fractured people is brought to life in an entirely readable way. This is a story of love, obsession, the thought processes of a painter, the English countryside written in a way that demands to be read, compulsively.
And now another book involving real people: a biography this time. There are so very many gaps in knowledge about the facts of John Donne’s life and work. Katherine Rundell, in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne has done a fine job in meshing what is known with what can reasonably be surmised with an evaluation of the man. Born a Catholic, with all the dangers and limitations that presented, Donne early exhibited his dexterity with words and his sparkling intelligence. Initially successful in the law, an early and unwise marriage pitched him into prison, then penury. What with his wife producing twelve children, five of whom died in infancy, and being remote from the power-house that was London, his career stalled, though his creativity never did. Only when his wife, from whose day-to-day life as mother he was very often absent, died as a result of childbirth (to a still-born child) did his career finally take off as Dean of St. Paul’s, and preacher extraordinaire. Rundell deftly deals with all this material, all the while offering a critique of Donne’s often dazzling and dextrous use of words. Frequently misogynistic, it’s his love poetry that we often remember him for. She argues that these frequently erotic poems were written not for his wife, but for the enjoyment of his male friends. His wife seems to have had a raw deal.
Pure fiction now. Claire Kilroy, in Soldier, Sailor, examines two intimate relationships: of a mother to her baby son (‘Sailor’), and as a wife to her husband. Here is a book, an all-encompassing and visceral read that brought back almost fifty year old memories of the early days of motherhood. The overwhelming love for that new life brought into the world: but also the endless, utterly debilitating exhaustion, guilt, loneliness, confusion. The realisation that your partner is not, as you had believed, your equal partner, but someone who escapes every day – perhaps to an office, where normal life ensues. All-consuming love, combined with unremitting drudgery is woven through the book. As is reference to the husband of the narrator who fails to understand, to help, to be truly involved with his son’s welfare. He resents the little that he does, forgetful of simple but important baby-related tasks – but remember, this is Soldier’s tiredness-sodden perspective. She is an unreliable narrator, but one who reliably conjures up early motherhood. We stay with Soldier as very early motherhood ends, but all-consuming love of her partner does not. A devastating book.
Charlotte Mendelsohn, in When We were Bad, is someone else who is good at complicated family situations. I struggled at first to get into this book. There were so many characters, all equally important: all so flawed: all so Jewish. That isn’t a criticism. Just an observation that understanding the Rubin family (and all the characters are family members) means getting to grips a bit with what it means to be Jewish too. I persisted. It was worth it. The lives of every family member begin to unravel as son Leo’s life very publicly does, the day he leaves his wife-to-be some 4 minutes before they take their vows. It turns out that he isn’t the only one in inner turmoil. By turns funny, touching and embarrassing, I was engaged with every character, despite their many and obvious flaws, long before the conclusion of the book.
What about a family that believes it has a trusted protector in its midst? Ricarda Huch’s The Last Summer was written in 1910. Set during one summer round about that time, we are in Russia, in the country retreat of the von Rasimkara family. They are here because the father, as governor of Saint Petersburg has closed down the University in the face of student protests. The three adult children (a young man, two young women) send the letters from which the book is composed to various family members describing their lives and feelings, and the young man whom the mother has hired to protect the life of their father. Little do they know, as we find out almost immediately, that this young man sides with the student revolutionaries, and is here to do harm to von Ramiskara. And it’s this irony which fuels the book’s narrative. The whole family, for different reasons, believe in the young protector, even when his behaviour is, to say the least, odd. The tension builds until the final letter … An exploration of ideology and trust, and the complicated layers of family life.
All of these couples, these families have been, in different ways, hard work. Let’s end on a gentler, sweeter note and look at true love instead, in Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night. This is a tender, gentle novella about two lonely neighbours who in later life find each other, and love. Their measured path towards new happiness, their discovery of and acceptance of their former lives forms the body of the book, even though always there in the background is the judgement of others, threatening their happiness. A delightful last work from the never disappointing Kent Haruf.
That’s my rather loose chain this month: more of a wheel really. Next month, our starter book is the classic I capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. Why not join in?
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
This month’s starter book is Curtis Sittenfeld‘s Romantic Comedy. Anything Sittenfeld writes is fine by me, but I haven’t managed to read this one yet. The Guardian has it as an ‘affable, intelligently crafted tale of work and love’, with a somewhat insecure heroine who can’t believe that true love has really come her way.
Let’s stay with complicated love, in The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue. At first I thought I’d stumbled upon a Mills & Boon for Millennials. Then I thought I might not be all that interested as I’m scarcely the same generation as Rachel and her friends and colleagues, floundering through messy early adulthood. But almost against my will, I was drawn in to the convoluted affairs and working arrangements of Rachel, and her gay friend and flat mate James. We begin in 2009, and there’s a recession on, which colours everyone’s prospects, including Rachel’s middle class dentist parents. Rachel is at first finishing her English degree while also working in a bookshop. She fancies her professor. But he, it turns out, has begun an affair with James, although he’s married to the woman whom Rachel is in due course working for as an intern, and Rachel has fallen for someone who’s fallen for her too, but has a habit of disappearing … It’s all intriguingly complicated and believable. It’s gossipy, witty, wry and a real page turner. Recommended.
Love story involving gay men? We’ll go for a tremendous first novel from Alice Winn: In Memoriam. Here is a book which starts in an English public school, and moves quickly to WWI and the trenches. This is the journey of a varied cast of characters, chief among whom are Stanley Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, both of whom have been exploring their homosexuality whilst still at school. They exchange their privileged lives for the grim reality of battle, and Winn uses telling detail to underpin how truly frightening and beastly in every sense this is. Every few chapters the Preshute College magazine appears, and among the ever-longer lists of dead and wounded old boys are the names of characters we too have come to know. Ellwood and Gaunt, so very different, continue their relationship. Winn explores the strong bonds and unlikely alliances that war brings about, and continues this exploration to show its effects on the families whose sons have gone to fight, and its effects in the years after the war. A moving and deeply affecting book. I’m quite well-versed in WWI literature, but this has perhaps brought the full horror of that war, and its long-reaching effects before me in a way that few other books have done.
One of the consequences of war is that the world of spying evolves. This month I read Ben Macintyre‘s story of super-spy Kim Philby. As with in Memoriam, this book – A Spy among Friends – is peppered with ex-public school characters. Here is a graphic picture of a completely different world: a world in which who you know, and the school you’ve been to, rather than what you’ve achieved and the jobs you’ve held gets you into a career in espionage. A world in which secrecy was paramount, and – apparently – an ability to down prodigious quantities of alcohol. Ben Macintyre shows us this world, as it existed during WWII and the subsequent Cold War. He introduces us to the milieu of the agent – and the double agent. Specifically to Kim Philby who worked tirelessly not only for the British, but for the Russians, thereby sending colleagues and blameless citizens to untimely deaths. His life was a lie. Not his two closest friends, nor two of his wives or his family had the least idea of his machinations. He remained unsuspected by his M16 and American colleagues for many years. This is his story, pacily told, and offering a picture of this secretive world of postings and relationships all over Europe and the Middle East. In many ways, this isn’t my sort of book. But Macintyre is a reliably involving and good writer who draws you in. I’m glad to have read this book, and thoroughly relieved that neither I nor anyone I know is part of this duplicitous world. I don’t think…
Patrick Modiano‘s The Search Warrant also explores the consequences of war. Nearly 40 years ago, Modiano came across an ad in a 1941 edition of Paris Soir: by two Jewish parents seeking for their daughter who had run away from boarding school. His interest piqued, Modiano set forth on a ten year search to find out more about the life and possible death of the child, Dora Bruder. While he never forgot her, his search was intermittent. He looked at documents and newspapers. He trawled through the streets of the Paris Dora frequented, though many of them had changed almost beyond recognition. In this document of his search, he paints a picture of the Nazi occupation of Paris, of the lives of the Jewish citizenry – incomers from all over Europe – under Pétain’s regime. He connects and contrasts Dora’s adolescence to his own. This then is a personal story, as much about Modiano himself as about Dora Bruder. It is though a memorial to her, and to any and all of the Jews who lived and died in that particular and brutal period of French history.
War of a different kind, with Eco-warriors centre stage is the subject of Eleanor Catton‘s Birnam Wood. Full disclosure. I borrowed this edition of the book from the library, then discovered that the BBC was currently serialising it, so – unusually for me – I ‘read’ it courtesy of BBC Sounds. And I didn’t enjoy it. Could this partly have been that the resident ‘baddie’, the American tech billionaire’s voice was so clearly that of a man dripping evil that any nuance the book might have had was lost? In the Good Guys’ (not Shining White Good Guys) corner were the members of a guerilla gardening group who want the land not as a bolt-hole or a secret mining project as American Lemoine does, but to pursue their aims. Lemoine’s drones and techie spyware sees all. Then there’s ex-guerilla Tony, and investigative reporter … and Owen, a self-made pest-control business man, whose wife actually owns the farm on which the land in question is sited, and who is willing to sell. All of these, with conflicting aims and ambitions were in the mix. The verbosity and proselytising of many of them lost me early on. The characters were thinly-sketched ciphers of Types, and I warmed to none of them. The ending was an excitingly gruesome one, but for me it was just a relief that it heralded the end of the story.
Another consequence of war. Refugees. Asylum seekers. These are the subject of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. Richard is a widower, a retired professor of Classics in Berlin in the former East Germany. His life seems – to him as well – somewhat purposeless. One day he happens upon a demonstration in town by a group of refugees from various African nations who have camped out there. This is a world of which Richard knows nothing, but his interest is piqued, and gradually, reluctantly at first, but then with increasing passion, he comes to know them and something of their stories. Of their families, lost to them, or killed in frightening circumstances. His life acquires a purpose: helping the men fight their corners, seeking funding. He discovers his own country’s dark past, the prejudices still alive and powerful among politicians, many of the general population and his own friends. He finds a legal situation where each country with whom the asylum seekers have contact have a get-out clause enabling them to move these men on to somewhere else. This quietly, lyrically told told but urgent story is an indictment of that system. Absolutely nothing has got better since 2017, when this novel was published. Required reading for Suella Braverman and readers of the Daily Express.
Unusually, there is a further link between all these books. I’ve read them all in the last month, and with one exception, wholeheartedly recommend them: especially the Winn and the Erpenbeck.
Next month’s starter book is Anna Funder‘s Wifedom, which examines the life of George Orwell’s wife. It’s well reviewed here, and I’m looking forward to finding a copy.
And finally, those of you whose TBR pile totters and becomes more unstable by the day might enjoy the cartoon highlighted today in Brian D Butler’s Travel Between The Pages.
More than half way though the year. The longest day has come and – oh woe! – gone. And quite a few book-bloggers whom I follow have been joining in Six in Six, a way of recording at least some of the books read and enjoyed in the first part of the year, hosted by Jo of The Book Jotter. She proposes all kind of headings for lists-of-six. I’ve interpreted these fairly liberally. Here are mine.
Six books set in a country not my own:
Leila Slimani: Watch us Dance (Morocco)
Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead (USA)
Lauren Chater: The Lace Weavers (Estonia)
Roy Jacobsen: Just a Mother (Norway)
Georges Simenon:Monsieur Monde Vanishes (France)
Jennifer Saint: Atalanta (Greece)
Six books in translation:
Philippe Claudel: Monsieur Linh and his Child (French)
Hubert Mingarelli: A Meal in Winter(French)
Guadalupe Nettell: Still Born (Spanish)
Hanna Bervoets: We had to Remove this Post(Dutch)
Jenny Erpenbeck: Go, Went, Gone (German)
Daniela Krein: Love in Five Acts (German)
Six books set in the past:
Kiran Millwood Hargrave: The Dance TreeLauren Goff: Matrix
Victoria Mackenzie For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on my Little Pain.
Peter Ackroyd: The Lambs of London
Annabel Abbs: The Language of FoodJo Browning Wroe: A Terrible Kindness.
Six works of non-fiction:
Dan Saladino: Eating to Extinction
Katherine Rundell: Super-infinite
Patrick Galbraith: In Search of One Last Song
Matthew Green: Shadowlands
Patrick Modiano: The Search Warrant
Kushanava Choudhury: The Epic City: the World on the Streets of Calcutta.
Six books set in Ireland:
Sheila Armstrong: Falling Animals
Hugo Hamilton: The Speckled People
Audrey Magee: The Colony
John Banville: The Lock-up
Louise Kennedy: Trespasses
Sebastian Barry: Old God's Time
Six books I enjoyed and haven’t yet mentioned
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds
Shelley Read: Go as a River
William Trevor: Last Stories
Kate Grenville: A Room made of Leaves
Elizabeth McCracken: The Hero of this Book
Joseph O'Connor: My Father's House
This has been a bit of fun, revisiting books I’ve enjoyed and authors I’ll read again. Popping books onto the appropriate list was a challenge in itself . Many of them fitted into two, if not three categories. Have you any particular favourites from the books you’ve read this year? Do any of my choices appeal to you? Thanks for a fun challenge, Jo!
My header photo was taken in the Bosu-Dong Book Alley in Busan, South Korea.
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
I reserved this month’s starter book, Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov from the library, but it’s only just come in, so I have yet to read it. However, I gather that an enigmatic flaneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.
This immediately reminded me of Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals, which also opens a window on the past. This is a novel no doubt inspired by Lockdown, in which our young heroine is incarcerated in a hospital as part of a drugs trial which isn’t completed because the world at large goes into melt-down as a result of an untreatable variant of the virus rampaging round the world. Whilst there, another participant introduces her to the Revisitor, a device which allows her to re-experience her past life, which has been full of drama and error. It’s all a bit odd as a device for flashback. As are her letters to H, the revealing of whose identity would be a spoiler alert. Unsatisfactory, uninvolving, with too many plot-lurches, this is far from Fuller at her finest.
We travel to the past in my next book: Sheila Armstrong’s Falling Animals.When Oona spots a man apparently resting on the beach in a small Irish seaside town, it’s not immediately that she realises he’s dead. Who is he? How has he died? These questions remain unanswered by Police, the pathologist, and he is finally buried, unknown. But it’s not the end of the story. Each chapter of this lyrically written book introduces us to someone else who may have had a connection with the deceased – often very many years ago. We travel to other countries, to ships at sea: and connections with the man, and with this small town weave themselves into the story from distant lands and cultures. It’s deftly, often poetically done, and the book ends a year after the body was first discovered. Is the man finally identified? You’ll have to read the book to find out, and I highly recommend you do so.
Looking to the past informs my next choice: The Colony, by Audrey Magee. We’re in Ireland in 1979, on a small, sparsely populated and isolated island, whose inhabitants have only recently started to learn and use English. Two visitors come to spend their summers there. Mr. Lloyd is a painter who wants to explore the landscape. He’s rude and entitled, but interesting to young islander James who has ambitions to go to art school. Masson, known as JP, is a French academic, keen to preserve and promote the Irish language, whether the inhabitants want it or not. Each chapter is interspersed with a terse newspaper-like account of a sectarian murder on the mainland, whether of a Catholic or a Protestant. At first these almost seem an irrelevance. Gradually, the penny drops that these incidents are deeply rooted in the history of the English towards their Irish ‘colony’, and do much to explain the largely hostile feelings both of the islanders and its two visitors. The book paints a picture of an island in many ways left behind, whose characters still struggle to find their place in the world, as indeed do the two visitors. A book to provoke thought long after the last page has been turned.
Let’s stay in Gaelic territory, but shift to Scotland. Love of Country by Madeleine Bunting. I’ve never been to the Hebrides, nor even really thought of going. This has changed, thanks to this book. Bunting makes a journey through the wild and remote islands of the Hebrides, focusing on seven in particular. This book recounts her explorations. Everything is potential material. The wild and severe beauty of the place touches her soul, and she writes poetically and personally about this. She explores geology, natural history, bird life, literature, and above all the sad and often wretched history of the people of these isolated places, and the people who sought to dominate or exterminate them. I found this a moving and fascinating book, and I’ll return to read other work by Bunting.
Poverty is what defines my next book: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell, set in Paris and London in the late 1920s. In one sense an easy read, in that the narrative sweeps the reader along: in another, difficult, because the story, describing conditions of brutal poverty as a ‘plongeur’ in a Paris hotel kitchen, then as an English tramp in southern England is unappetising in the extreme. The diary-like narrative is interspersed with anecdotes from the lives of other characters, such as his Russian friend Boris, and with more political reflections to make a striking and unforgettable short book. His characterisations of the men that he meets – and they’re nearly always men – are lively, and rounded, and put us in touch with the reality of existing on a meagre diet lacking substance and nourishment, of always being hungry, of either being unrelentingly overworked (Paris) or unrelentingly under occupied and bored (London) . The spikes may have changed, but is the reality of existence for the homeless really so very different now?
My last choice links with Orwell, with a Gaelic location and not much else. It’s The Last Man in Europe, by Dennis Glover. Focusing on the last years of his rather brief life, while occasionally diving back to earlier times – Orwell’s part in the Spanish Civil War for instance – this fictional-though-based-on-fact account mainly has as its subject Orwell’s last years on the Scottish island of Jura. This is a bleak and wholly unsuitable place for a man already dying from tuberculosis. Orwell was there to write his last novel, at first called The Last Man in Europe. We know it by the title he soon gave it – Nineteen Eighty Four. The book is assured in painting a picture of Orwell’s life in shabby-genteel poverty, of his somewhat cavalier attitude towards his colleagues and the women he bedded, and his wives, and most particularly of his changing political thought processes which would come to fruition in his last and probably greatest book. Now I need to go back and read the lot again, and not just Down and Out ….
This month’s chain barely ventured beyond the British Isles and Ireland, but next month we begin in America, with Curtis Sittenfeld‘s Romantic Comedy.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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