Gillian Flynn – 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: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s Starter -for-Six is Rachel Cusk‘s Life of M. I haven’t read it, it’s not on the TBR, but apparently an unnamed writer proposes writing the autobiography of M, a globally famous film star who has lived in the public eye since childhood. M casually tells her to ‘just make it up’. And that, apparently, is exactly what happens.

I bet I’m not alone in making my first link RF Kuang‘s Yellowface. Here’s a book I raced through: a book which dissects the publishing world. Or that part of the world ruled by social media in any case: books likely to seize the popular imagination with a theme that chimes in with the current zeitgeist. Our heroine, June, is a young and rather unsuccessful young author, who has a sort-of friendship with another young, but wildly successful author. Who dies unexpectedly. Our heroine seizes a chance, purloins the manuscript of the deceased: spends time researching and re-working it, and then presents it as her own. It has a Chinese WWI theme, and when it’s accepted for publication, her publishers find ways of Chinese-ifying her name (Juniper Song). Sales become stratospherically huge. Throughout, the ground keeps shifting. Juniper’s self justification for her plagiarism is often convincing, as is the sheer nastiness of some of the social media battles she faces. It’s a melodrama. It’s a thriller. It’s a window on racial diversity as seen through the eyes of a social media and publishing world totally lacking in nuance. It’s a comic novel. It’s clever, leaving you with lots to think about as you flip-flop from ‘getting’ Juniper’s take on her theft , and finding her morally indefensible. It’s entertaining too. Shall I read more by Kuang? Much as I raced through this book, eager to find how the story ends – probably not. I was exhausted.

From a yellow face to a yellow sun: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A richly evocative book telling the story of the creation, rise and fall of Biafra, through the eyes of three separate yet connected groups of people. There’s Ugwu, from a traditional village, houseboy to Odenigbo, an Igbo academic. There are Olanna, Odenigbo’s partner and her twin sister Kainene, and her English partner Richard. Their structured lives fall apart as Nigeria itself does, as Biafra emerges as a nation and civil war threatens to destroy them. I’m ashamed at how little I knew of this conflict, remembering it only because of the famine caused by war. Now, an interplay of characters dealing with loyalties, often conflicting, moral responsibility, colonialism and its aftermath brings this piece of history vividly to life, the more so because the author’s family lived through this devastating time. A marvellous and involving read.

Let’s stay in Nigeria and read My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. What did I think of this book? Well, it was a quick read, an easy read, and at no point did I think of not finishing reading this story. But – and perhaps I’m not entering into the spirit of things here – a story in which the writer’s sister gets into a routine of killing her boyfriends, while the writer colludes with her deception just left me cold. The short sharp chapters, and the action which jumped hither and thither kept my interest, as did the back story of a controlling, brutal father. But in the end, it was a slightly distasteful read as far as I was concerned.

My next book is a story in which a murder of an – allegedly – loved one does not actually take place. Amy Dunne disappears on her 5th wedding anniversary, then fakes her own murder to implicate her husband Nick. She eventually returns home and … things can obviously only get worse. This is Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl. I’m actually not sure why I decided to read this book. After all, I’d seen, and been thoroughly disturbed by the film. Why put myself through it twice? Perhaps because I’d been assured that both book and film (Flynn wrote the screenplay) were equally well done. Early on I wondered whether I was right to bother. But then, those details which no film can really get to grips with – tiny vignettes, and thoughts from the innermost workings of those two messed-up heads – started to enrich the narrative. How could I go on willing the ending to be different when I knew perfectly well what it would be? A creepy read, with a thoroughly disturbing ending.

Another, and very different book which prompted a film, which I was disappointed to miss when it was doing the rounds: H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. Back in the day, I had resisted reading the book simply because it had become, according to the critics, a ‘must-read’. But …read it. It’s part nature writing – sumptuous, evocative, richly descriptive, each word carefully chosen: part autobiography of a woman overturned by grief at the death of her father; part biography of TH White, author of Sword in the Stone and The Goshawk, and so much more; part manual on learning to fly a goshawk – I now now for sure this is something way beyond my capabilities and my patience. This is a splendid book for the richness of its prose, and the chance it offers to see two wholly unknown worlds: that of the falconer, and that of TH White.

And finally, another book in which a woman becomes intimately involved in te life of a wild creature – Chloe Dalton‘s Raising Hare. Confined to her country retreat during lockdown, Dalton, a high-powered political adviser finds a small, apparently abandoned leveret.This is her story. Of how she treads a difficult path of wishing to help it survive to adulthood, while respecting its wildness. While it is her house-guest, she never treats the creature as her pet, or even names it. Against the odds, it survives to maturity, and continues to include her house, inside and out, as its territory.But the creature has a profound effect on Dalton. She is sensitive and observant, and describes beautifully its changing appearance as it matures through the seasons; their ‘language’ together. Just as the hare is not quite living a normal life, she too is changed. She re-evaluates her career. It’s still important, but no longer so all-consuming. The hare makes her infinitely more connected to and aware of the natural world where her home is situated. This book strives to restore a sense of the sacred and to meet an animal on its own terms.

Well, the chain links book-to-book I hope, but is there an over-arching theme? Not a chance. Let’s see what next month brings. Kate suggests we start things off with a novella of our choice, to celebrate the popular Novellas in November, hosted by Becky of Bookish Beck and Cathy of 746 Books.

‘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’.

Six Degrees of Separation: Kate W

I was pretty stumped by the book starting this chain: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher. The story of a Hollywood actor’s struggle with drugs didn’t appeal to me.

I settled on Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn. Here is a cast list of utterly blemished characters, with the narrator, Camille Preaker, as the lead. Fresh from psychiatric hospital, this Chicago-based reporter is sent to her long-left home town to comment on a couple of nasty and unsolved murders. We meet her damaged mother, her unreliable sister, and a host of others. This is an engrossing but troubling story which in the end rather exhausted me. I was glad to turn the last page, feeling that both characters and the town in which the book is set are caricatures, rather than living entities.

Wind Gap, the town on which the story is centred, was based on Barnesville , Georgia- here’s its City Hall ( Wikimedia Commons, Michael Rivera)

Now to an autobiography of someone who could have been damaged beyond repair, but isn’t. My Name is Why. Lemn Sissay: Chancellor of Manchester University: official poet to the London Olympics: broadcaster and advocate for the rights of children in care. A successful life. It was not always so. His Ethiopian mother, briefly in England to study, gave birth to him in a home for unmarried mothers and was forced to give him up. Initially fostered, he became estranged from his foster family. and aged twelve, began a distressing journey through several children’s homes. His descent from bright, happy and popular child to uncooperative social misfit is shown in a series of dry reports from social workers and officials with whom he had contact. The book is an indictment of the care system. That he survived such a system and has since prospered is no thanks to it.

Lemn Sissay (Philosphy Football via Wikimedia Commons)

And so to Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo. Here is a world turned upside down. Black people are in charge, whites are their slaves. Feudal Britain, eighteenth and nineteenth century worlds, the modern age and a dystopian future all combine in this world of toil and trouble in which Doris, kidnapped from her home into slavery, finds herself. There’s much to enjoy and admire in this early novel from Evaristo: the playful place names such as Londolo: details such as the efforts of whyte women to achieve the curly Aphro looks of their former masters. The speech patterns of the slaves, rooted in those of their black masters didn’t work for me, and overall, this was an only partially successful attempt to demonstrate that tyranny rules when we begin to regard others as inferior to ourselves.

Evaristo plays with the idea of a world in which history is up-ended (Unsplash: Ivana Cajina)

There are two contrasting worlds in my next book: The Communist’s Daughter, by Aroa Moreno Durán, Katia, the daughter of Spanish refugees from the Civil War was raised in East Berlin with all its difficulties and privations. She saw the wall go up, experienced the limitations of the life they were obliged to leave. And she left, with all the difficulties and dangers her leaving represented. But what had she gained? And what might her family have lost? A sparely written, thought provoking and unsettling book.

The Berlin Wall: but not as Katia knew it

From one social outcast to another very different one: Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston. This is a quirky read, to be enjoyed for the oddball poems which are at its heart. Nobody could take the fictional Bilston seriously. He’s hopeless at his job, socially inept, useless at time and money management. But he writes off-beat verses, using anything from great literature or the day’s puzzle page in a newspaper as his catalyst. A book to read when the New Normal is getting you down.

Brian Bilston ( Smithsonian Magazine: no copyright infringement is intended)

One unexpected character leads to another. Meet Dr. Yvonne Carmichael in Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard. However did she, a respected and happily married academic, end up on trial for a murder she didn’t commit? And how is it that her co-accused is a man about whom she knows so very little, despite their having been lovers for months? In this book, we dodge between courtroom and back-story, learning how Yvonne allows herself to tumble into assignations with a man whose name we are told only late on in the narrative. I’m not sure I totally believed in Yvonne Carmichael, or in the beginnings of her affair. But I was sucked into the drama, had no idea how the book would end (slightly disappointingly actually, in my opinion), but it certainly fulfilled its can’t-put-it-down hype.

Westminster: a central character in Apple Tree Yard.

I’d like to end with a character who, though fictional, I totally believed in, encountered in Anne Griffin’s When All is Said. Maurice Hanigan, now widowed, and aged 84, sits in a bar and raises a toast, one by one, to the most influential people he’s met. We learn about his life, from his spectacularly unsuccessful school career, to his spectacularly successful career as an entrepreneur. We grow to hear about his complicated relationship with the family that first employed him while he was still at school, the Dollards. And his complicated relationship with a unique Edward VIII sovereign, which belonged to the Dollards, and which Maurice – er – found. It has a legacy, and bears a curse. This is an engaging, compassionate man, who’s well aware of his failings and of the stereotypes he lives up to. Each toast, each story is a stand-alone which weaves together into a narrative of the life of a man both wily and mean, loving and grudging for whom in the end, I felt a great deal of understanding. Best of all, you can’t help but read this story in a strong Irish accent.