Tag: John Banville

Six Degrees of Separation: from Western Lane to The Lock-Up

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: Six Degrees of Separation

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 by Daisy 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.

Six Degrees of Separation from Armfield to Banville

‘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 have only just succeeded in borrowing Julia Armfield’s Our Wives under the Sea from the library, so I’ve barely started reading it. But this seems to be a summary to work with:  It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.

Where to start then?

Perhaps with Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers. This is a tender, lyrical novel, largely based in a rural Ireland, whose modest, gentle landscape encompasses the entire book. At the heart of the novel is Paddy, postman and herdsman, his wife Kit, and their daughter Molly who as the book begins, has disappeared – just gone off early one morning, suitcase in hand. I can mention nothing more of the plot without giving too much away. Yet this is a novel full of secrets, many of which reveal themselves as the novel draws to a close. We meet the characters in this book at a distance, and they retain their privacy, may not always be rounded out. But it scarcely matters. This is an intriguing, poetic book which fully absorbed me.

Rock of Cashel, County Tipperary (K Mitch Hodge, Unsplash)

Thinking of how rural Ireland is almost a character in the book put me in mind of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands.  This is a marvellous moment of armchair travelling. Schalansky was brought up in East Berlin, at the time of The Wall, where poring over the atlas provided her only means of distant travel. Beautifully mapped, her book takes us to fifty of the smallest and most remote islands in the world. Some are inhabited, some are the domain of academics visiting for months ar a time, some are uninhabited. All have a story to tell. It might be their geology, or a tale of how they were discovered. Or folklore, or a moment or two of history. This book will transport you into regions you never knew about, and like Schalansky, will never visit … except in your mind.

Moai Rano Raraku, Easter Island (Aurbana, Wikimedia Commons)

Some of these islands feature in Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: How Imperialism has shaped Modern Britain.This book is essential reading – for Brits at least. Sanghera presents a wealth of material, examining the history of the British Empire and how it was acquired. Many of us were brought up to regard the Empire and what Britain brought to the countries it had dominion over as something of a triumph, something which all subjects should be grateful for. We were brought up glossing over what slavery means to all involved, whether as slave-owner or slave. The Windrush generation, racism, the continuing legacy of our attitudes to Empire all form part of Sanghera’s narrative. This book is carefully researched, and attempts to be fair. It gives much to think about, and much material to form the basis for thoughtful on-going discussion.  Tough stuff, but also highly readable.

A Union Flag flies in Ripon.

Let’s find a book set – at least partly – in one of those Commonwealth – formerly Empire – countries. The Last Hunt, by Deon Meyer. This is the first book I’ve read by Meyer, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Two parallel stories – the first involving South African cops Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido, given the thankless task of solving a cold case: the second introducing Daniel Darret, an African who after a chequered life has settled in Bordeaux. It’s only at the end these apparently unrelated threads come together. The characters, and the areas and worlds they frequent are well-painted and vivid, and the story, involving corruption in high places seems unsettlingly topical. Only the last chapter of all failed to convince me: and while this was disappointing, it didn’t stop me from feeling I’d had an involving and exciting journey along with the protagonists.

Place de la Bourse, Bordeaux (Cab, Unsplash)

My next book isn’t really a crime story.  Or is it?  You’ll have to read Darke Matter: A Novel, by Rick Gekoski for yourself to find out. James Darke, retired schoolmaster and professional curmudgeon, narrates his story. His much-loved wife Suzy has recently died, wracked by pain in her last months. He lives alone, disapproving of everybody and everything, even his daughter and her husband – though he makes an exception for his grandson Rudy. His distress at watching his wife die encourages him to help her on her way to death through overdosing her, as he admits to his horrified daughter, though she comes to understand and agree.   No spoilers alert here, though you might well wish to refresh your knowledge of Gulliver’s Travels, a book Darke re-fashions for his grandson’s entertainment. A perceptive, witty and moving evocation of love, grief, loss, and the fall-out from assisted dying.

Classic Comics no. 16 1943. Linda Chesney cover and art.

Another whodunnit, which, being set in Ireland, links back to the first book in my chain, though not to this month’s starter.  Snow by John Banville. This paints a richly evocative picture of 1950s Co. Wexford in Ireland. A miserably cold snowy winter; a country house peopled with a decaying family of Protestant gentry; a pub-come-shop; a cast of splendidly eccentric characters. This is Cluedo brought to life. Though so much richer. Here is a picture of a narrow and barren society, subservient to the authority of the Catholic church, and with strong memories of their not-so-distant battle for independence. The motives for the murder we learn about on the first page are more important than finding out who committed it. A rewarding read, being a whydunnit rather than a whodunnit.

Next month, the chain will begin with Peter Carey‘s True History of the Kelly Gang, a book which has unaccountably sat unread on my shelves for ages. Its moment has come!