Tag: Audrey Magee

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wild Dark Shore to Island Dreams

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:  Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s chain starts with Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy.  I’m fourth in a queue of readers at the library waiting to borrow this book.  Here’s the first sentence of the book’s resume. ‘Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank.’ 


So I’m going with the sea for all the books in my chain this month.  I’m going to try to dodge books I’ve showcased before, and that I know many of you have also recommended.  So no Clear by Carys Davies, no Seascraper by Benjamin Wood.  Or James Rebanks’ The Place of Tides, which Kate has just reviewed.

In fact, let’s not start with a novel at all.  Let’s celebrate the fish that so often feed us – specifically here, the fish round the British coast, in Silver Shoals by Charles Rangeley- Wilson. I was entirely and unexpectedly engaged by this book, an exploration of our nation’s iconic fish: cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring. This is a story of the fish themselves; of fishermen; of the consequences of greed and the way back from it; of geology; meteorology; our nation’s social history as it relates to food and farming; of corruption and political will. It combines serious discussion of issues with good yarns about the fishermen who took Rangeley -Wilson fishing with them, whether on week-long voyages on trawlers, or half day sorties to the local river bank. He travelled north south east and west in quest of fish and their stories, and produced an absorbing account which I read in record time because I was so enthralled by all the threads of the story Charles Rangeley-Wilson told. 

Those Silver Shoals don’t include tuna.  Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin talks of little else. This is quite a story. It details the history of man’s love of eating tuna, from way before Roman times, to the present day, when the Japanese have cornered much of the market, while teaching the world to enjoy their own particular obsession with the freshest, choicest tuna flesh. The book details a history of overfishing, of trying to understand the tuna’s migration patterns, of political interests and manoeuvres and focusses on particular individuals who have been prominent in the story, such as tuna-tagging supremo Al Anderson. An engaging book, reeling in this non-scientist who has no prior knowledge of the industry: and who doesn’t even eat tuna (even less likely to now). 

So now to a novel about fishing.  About whaling to be exact. The North Water by Ian McGuire.  This is a gritty story set largely in a 19th century whaling ship. There’s violence, brutality, bad language, bowel movements a-plenty, but it doesn’t feel gratuitous. Patrick Sumner has – we eventually discover – left the British Army in disgrace and his options are few. He becomes a ship’s surgeon on the whaling ship, and finds that a hard and desperate life becomes even worse as the ship and its crew battle against an arctic winter and a particularly brutal and amoral member of the crew. An involving and gripping story that recreates a world I can only be grateful not to be a part of. I saw a good and faithful  TV adaptation of this book some years ago.  Recommended.

Audrey Magee’s The Colony might have been a good choice to begin my chain. 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 turn to another Irish island in John Boyne’s Water, part of his Elements quartet. We meet a woman in middle years who has just fled to live on a fairly remote Irish island, changed her name and as far as possible her appearance.  Why?  Only slowly do we find out.  Her husband’s crimes reflect on her: the world assumed she had enabled them – and, she believes, one even greater tragedy. She has done her best to vanish. She meets a few characters who are also uncomfortable with their lives, making relationships with some.  Slowly she regains the strength of character necessary to reject her husband and to renew her relationship with her daughter.  This book deftly charts her slow, but steady steps to recovery.

I’ll finish where I began, with non-fiction.  And with the subject of the starter book and two of my other choices:  islands, in Island Dreams, by Gavin Francis.This is a beautifully produced book. On heavy paper, with blue and black ink, the text is allowed generous space to breathe. As well, the text is interspersed – also generously – with maps old and new illustrating the outlines of islands he visits and discusses. These are the only illustrations. Often the subject of the map will be – for instance – the usual trade routes using the islands illustrated. So this is a book to savour and linger over, returning several times to the maps on display. Gavin Francis has often been able to combine his passion for island-hopping with his career, working in those places he has most wanted to visit. He appreciates the way that islands can offer both isolation, and yet a sense of community with those who call it home. This is a book that’s both very personal, yet also universal. It encompasses myth, psychology, philosophy, literature and straightforward travel writing. Quickly read, it demands to be looked at again and again. It will stay in my mind for a long time.

So there we have it. My sea-related chain. Our next book is Stefan Zweig‘s The Post-Office Girl. Will my next chain be post office related? Now that would be a challenge.






Six Degrees of Separation: from Time Shelter to The Last Man in Europe

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.