From Pyrenees to Pennines

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.

Kate W: Books are my favourite and best

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.