Tag: Damian Barr

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wuthering Heights to Back in the Day

I gave Six Degrees a miss for several months, feeling as though I’d lost my way with it. But it’s rather addictive – so I’m back.

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 starts with Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights.  Whether or not you’ve read the book, or seen any of the film adaptations, you’ll know that anti-hero Heathcliff is a vengeful misfit, and a very angry man.

So I’m beginning my chain with another: Emily’ s own brother, who is the subject of Robert Edric‘s book Sanctuary. Bramwell is the family’s black sheep, fighting his failures, his addictions, his inability to find a way to make something of his life. He is in fact the ‘author’ of this book. He paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death. Edric has carefully constructed this book in a series of vignettes that barely constitute a narrative, but which leave us feeling bewildered sympathy for an intelligent young man who has utterly lost his way. A beautifully imagined reconstruction of a life ill-lived. 

My next choice features not just one, but two self-destructive men. The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, re-imagines the lives of two now little remembered Scottish painters from the early years of the twentieth century, Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun.  These working class Glasgow lads, homosexuals at a time when it was still illegal, at first made a success of both their lives and careers with their prodigious talents.  They worked hard, but played harder, and their wild parties were awash with hard liquor.  And this eventually became a problem.  Their self-destruction tumbles them further and further into poverty.  An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The book illustrates well the blossoming of two talents, and their chaotic collapse, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

What about a book – a true story –  about two men who might also appear to most as failures in life?  Under the Hornbeams, by Emma Tarlo .  She was a University professor (anthropology) living near Regents Park, and was introduced early in lockdown to two very unusual men. They lived, completely without shelter other than that offered by the hornbeam trees, in a little unfrequented spot in Regents Park, and had done so for some years. They didn’t identify as homeless, and considered their lifestyle a positive choice. Tarlo is intrigued, and their relationship deepens into friendship. Not that of a middle class saviour bringing food and practical gifts to the men, but one of give and take. She appreciates the increasingly deep conversations that take place, grows to love and appreciate the natural world in a different way, and to review with increasing dissatisfaction her own pressured life as a university head of department. Tarlo affords the men dignity as she writes about them, and recognises the dangers and discomfort of many aspects of their chosen life style: not least that the still-in-force 1824 Vagrancy Act still criminalises homelessness.

Here’s another unusual life, as recounted in This, My Second Life, by Patrick Charnley. This is a work of fiction. Up to a point. The story that narrator Jago Trevarno tells is his to tell, but it’s entirely informed by Patrick Charnley’s own life experience of his cardiac arrest and brain injury. This transformation from Jago’s high-achieving life lived to a large extent in the fast lane to a much simpler existence lived off-grid on his uncle’s farm is as much the subject of this story as the tale of how he and his uncle contend with a thoroughly villainous neighbour, Bill Sligo who – unaccountably – wants to buy part of Jacob’s farm. Jago’s new life – simple, measured, suits his new circumstances. Sligo’s nefarious plans force Jago into risky courses of action which could all too easily go wrong. Much of the delight of this book is in its spare. almost elegiac writing, bringing Joseph’s farm and Jago’s new circumstances gently yet vividly to life. I hope Charney can find a voice beyond this one, so effective at its sympathetic depiction of his hero’s brain injury. His writing deserves to be more than a one-book-wonder.

This month seems to be about the outcast.  So let’s have an entirely different one, in RJ Palacio’s YA novel Wonder.  This is a book about an ordinary 10 year old boy, who isn’t ordinary at all, because in his short life he’s undergone dozens of operations on his face. So abnormal, even frightening is his appearance that it’s impossible to pass him by without staring, or very obviously dropping your gaze. He’s much loved by his family – his parents and older sister Via – but he’s been home-educated till now. But this is the moment to send him out into the ‘normal’ world of school. This is the story of his first year there: a story of bullying, meanness, cruelty even, but also kindness and acceptance. Told by August himself – the boy who lives with his deformity – it’s a moving, thought-provoking roller-coaster of a story showing how even those who love him most can be tested in their acceptance of him, and even those who reject him can – eventually – learn that he is so much more than an exceptionally ugly face.

This chain has been entirely about men and boys living out their lives – with greater or lesser degrees of success – outside the mainstream.  So we’ll finish in the same way,with Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated with astonishing bravura by Nichola Smalley) The four protagonists have come with their families as immigrants from various parts of the world – narrator Ivor is from Croatia and Marco from Somalia for instance. Clever and ambitious, they lose interest in school when they overtake their classmates and remain unchallenged. Dreams of becoming lawyers are exchanged for knives and protecting other family members. Drug dealing leads to institutional care for one, and a slippery slope to violence, machetes and guns. Will eventual grief and remorse result in a turning point? This is a tough, intense yet rewarding read by a young Norwegian of Croatian heritage who wrote it when he was just 19. I hope there’s more from him, and from his talented translator.

However did I come to make this chain exclusively male (albeit with two female authors)? It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow after all. Ah well, next month’s book is by a woman,  Virginia Evans: her epistolary novel The Correspondent. Next month, why not join in Six Degrees … if you don’t already?

My Favourite Fiction in 2025

As I turned the last page of one of the very first books I read this year, I knew it would make my 2025 Top Ten. It may even be my Top Read. It’s Lucy Steeds‘s The Artist, set in rural Provence in the years after WWI. Rupert is sent off to France to write about the reclusive and wildly successful artist, once a friend of the deceased Cezanne, Edouard Tartuffe. Here he meets the idiosyncratic and uncommunicative painter, and his timid, almost invisible niece, Ettie, who serves his every need. This is their story – evocative, involving and completely immersive.

Shortly after this, I read Tessa Hadley‘s The Party. Hadley packs a lot into this novella about two student sisters, Evelyn and Moira, living in Bristol on the cusp of the 1950s. We meet them at a party in an all-but abandoned pub. We’re introduced to their home life, and to their sortie out of this stifling environment. A thoughtful and enjoyable evocation of a period of recent history and its awareness of class, its sexual and societal mores that feels at once so distant, yet so very recognisable.

Douglas Bruton‘s Woman in Blue next. He must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. In his story, an unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately and interrogates it for meaning. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

Joseph O’Connor‘s The Ghosts of Rome now. A thriller that starts where My Father’s House leaves off: though it can be read independently of the earlier book without difficulty. We’re in Nazi-occupied Rome in 1944. The novel details the activities of a group in the Vatican known as The Choir, daring Escape-Line activists, who have real achievements under their belts despite the disapproval of the Pope, and the efforts of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann to have them brought down. The writing is immediate, graphic and authentic; and the book is based on a real knowledge and understanding of this particular slice of Rome’s wartime history. It’s a thrilling and involving story that I was captivated by from the very first page.

Georgina Harding‘s Land of the Living has two settings: the Burma campaign towards the end of WWII, set in the beautifully exotic and remote landscape of Nagaland with its rains, forests, waterfalls and exotic birds; and the muted grey, flat Norfolk farmland to which Lt. Charles Ashe returns to farm following his wartime soldiering. Ashe soon marries the woman he was engaged to, Claire, and embarks on the hard day to day life of a Norfolk famer. He can’t – won’t – communicate with her about the horrors he’s encountered. She doesn’t know how to break his protective shell, finds she hardly knows him. Their mutual incomprehension, and Ashe’s two vastly different worlds is well-wrought. A vivid and emotionally charged book.

The Safekeep: Yael van der Wouden. We’re in a small Dutch town in the 1960s. WWII has cast a long shadow. Memories of the hardships endured then, and of the fall-out from the defeat of Germany intercede in every day life.This book keeps on delivering surprises. Is it about a lonely – and frankly unpleasant – young woman, Isabel, left living in the family home after her parents had died and her brothers departed? Is it about an astonishingly unexpected lesbian love affair? Or perhaps something else altogether? An absorbing, cleverly plotted book, which made me aware of a part of Dutch history about which I knew little.

We Germans, by Alexander Starritt, takes the form of a long account written by an elderly German, shortly before his death, to his British grandson, who has, perhaps clumsily, been asking what the old man did back in WWII. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They’re forced to kill as they attempt to muddle their way back to their unit, They witness horror. They steal. They squabble. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointless horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

With Benjamin Wood‘s Seascraper, we’re in the 1950s. Thomas is nineteen, and lives in poverty with his mum in a dishevelled house in a depressed Lancashire coastal town , scrabbling a living since his much-loved grandfather’s death by continuing his work as a shankar – prawn collector – using a pony and trap. Though bright, he never completed his schooling. His dream is to become a musician. One day, an American film director who somehow meets his mum involves Thomas in his idea to use a stretch of local beach as the atmospheric backdrop to his latest film. And he’s willing to pay Thomas well. Although he’s sceptical, this is an opportunity perhaps to escape his obligations, the bleak poverty of his situation. Of course, things don’t turn out to be so straightforward, but yet the story ends with a glimmer of hope. This story, unfolding a film-that-might-be is cinematic in its evocation of the bleak seaside landscape and Thomas’ dreary, tough existence. It packs a lot into its 160 pages. Benjamin Wood is someone whose writing is to be savoured.

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr re-imagines two lives: those of Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun, two twentieth century painters of whom you may not have heard. Both born in working-class Glasgow just before WWI, they both had a struggle at home to be permitted to attend Glasgow School of Art. Where they met, and soon became inseparable, living and working together, exploring their homosexuality at a time when they risked ostracism and imprisonment by being so much as noticed for this. Early success propelled them to star-status. They worked hard, but played harder, and their tendency to self-destruct sent them on a downward trajectory towards poverty and early death. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The first part, where the two men overcome their difficult circumstances to become rising stars is perforce much more enjoyable than the later chapters illustrating their self-destruction. But the book describes well the blossoming of two talents, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is beautifully translated by Martin Aitken. This story takes us to 17th century Denmark, where on average, one ‘witch’ was burned every five days. This kind of event was mirrored all over Europe. Our narrator is a little beeswax doll fashioned by a impoverished noblewoman, Christenze Krukow. Omniscient, she sees and hears all that goes on. How her maker is one of a group of women who work, and sing, and gossip, and practice the folk remedies they learned from their own mothers: who protect one another from violence from husbands or others in their household: who become seen in their communities as practisers of magic and witchcraft. The book is interspersed with spells and incantations which exist not to harm, but to protect; to prevent accident and disease; to bid others be kind; to divine if someone’s life may soon end. Inevitably, most die, found guilty of witchcraft. This book is beautiful, horrifying, visceral, poetic. There is a sense of spells being woven on every page. The women in this story existed. They died as ‘witches’ and now they are remembered in this powerfully atmospheric and evocative re-imagining of their circumstances.

I made this list of Top Ten books a week or so ago. But lo! Since then I have had two further 5 ⭐reads. I’ll review those in my Love your Library round-up next week. They couldn’t be more different from each other. They’re Saltblood: Francesca de Tores and Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated by Nichola Smalley).

It’s been a good year for memorable books. Of the 112 or so books I’ve read, well over half have scored 4⭐and above.

Only one has gained but a single star: Horrible Histories author Terry Deary came and spoke at our local Independent book shop about his venture into crime writing – Actually I’m a Murderer. I thought I should give this book a chance, even though Cosy Crime isn’t my thing. I tried. I have concluded that Cosy Crime definitely isn’t my thing.

I already have a pile of books, mainly from the library – fiction, works in translation, and non-fiction, awaiting my attention in 2026. Not to mention the books that sit on our bookshelves, month after month, wondering why I never get round to them. One day …

The featured photo is by Nitin Arya, via Pexels.