Henry Forge is heir to a Kentucky farm, descended from the first settlers in the area, and son of a beautiful but mute mother and a fiercely proud, paHenry Forge is heir to a Kentucky farm, descended from the first settlers in the area, and son of a beautiful but mute mother and a fiercely proud, patrician and fundamentally racist and sexist father who disinherits him (unsuccessfully) when Henry declares his intention to convert the farm from crops to racehorses.
Most of the book of the book is set years later as Henry and his unmarried daughter Henrietta pursue Henry’s dream of breeding a triple-crown winning racehorse from the bloodline of one of his early champions. To Henry’s disgust Henrietta employs a part-black/part-Irish ex-convict Allmon on the farm. Although Henry cannot help acknowledging Allmon’s skills with horses and in particular with his great hope Hellsmouth, he is disconcerted by the relationship Allmon forges with Henrietta and strikes a deal for Allmon to leave the farm and assist as a personal groom to Hellsmouth in exchange for a share of Hellsmouth’s winnings.
Horse-racing is integral to the story - lengthy passages describe horse training, breeding and riding and various races serve as dramatic and involved set pieces, bringing the world of top-class horse-racing to life with the anorexic jockeys, unprincipled trainers and champion horses in-bred to the extent that their thirst for racing goes beyond the physical limits of their bodies.
However at the same time it is clearly a device that Morgan uses to examine the real themes of the book: inequality and greed, racism, breeding/natural selection, destiny and inheritance (both of wealth and poverty), slavery and its enduring and terrible effects through the generations.
Another key parts of the book is the natural world, geography and geology of Kentucky – described in lengthy and at times over-elaborate detail. As an example, the sun rising is described as
Over her drowsy head, the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the shifting dark. After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armoured sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering to earth’s antipodal edge. Now the lingering armies of dew turned to mist
Morgan directly addresses the reader during one such passage, asking rhetorically
Or is this too purple, too florid? Is more too much – the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin?
And then answering her own question (one that this reader is still struggling to answer)
I say there’s no such thing – any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words; ten thousand books, all the world’s dictionaries and there would never be enough: we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way; the icy display of the aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night skies …..
Set alongside these reflections on the natural world, are lengthy and often harrowing passages on Allmon’s life: his mother’s death from lack of ability afford medical care, his own drift into drug crime and the hell of his time in prison, as well as sections on the terrifying and tragic escape from slavery to the free states of one of his ancestors.
Henrietta’s reading is non-fictional based (largely, at a guess, based around the research that Morgan herself must have carried out for the novel – horse breeding, evolution, geology – and which she often examines in detail.
We are told:
She [Henriettta] read no novels finding them a waste of time. She resisted how they worked on her, asking her to suffer on someone else’s behalf. If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn’t speak with the limited tongue of sense
And in some ways Morgan has introduced her own elements of madness into this novel: Henry’s obsession with breeding a pure bloodline which he is not prepared to restrict to the equine world, but also to his own descendants; Allmon’s rage at his own loss, ruinous ambition to somehow make a fortune and join those who have taken everything from him, and then his thirst for revenge when he realises that even his ambition has been taken away.
While perhaps not quite “genius”, and while clearly at times over-written and over-ambitious as well as overly melodramatic in its ending, this is nevertheless a hugely ambitious, powerful and affecting novel. ...more
Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith to match its earlier shortlisting by the Bailey's prize - I have now re-read the book, but have little to add to my Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith to match its earlier shortlisting by the Bailey's prize - I have now re-read the book, but have little to add to my original review.
I thought of my mother, on the move. The energy for each flight, as for all of her lashing out, surely generated by the cowering cringe she lived in. Was I like that? Would I be? I’d hardly been unprone to impulsive moves. Dashes. Surges. The impetus seemed different, but perhaps it amounted to a similar insufficiency.
My father’s sprees were both a reaction to and the cause of his confinement. It was his debts which meant he couldn’t move from that house, even when the stairs got to be a daily torture. Was I too stupid – I couldn’t be – to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair?
Too often that wretchedness came into me. A torpor. A trance. . And any idea I could do something about it was lost. It’s hard to account for …. but I just felt I had to abide .. Suffer
Neve, the first party narrator, is a writer and teacher, married to an older man Edwyn who subjects her to mental abuse by his passive-aggressive behaviour, and psychological dissections of her behaviour (he continually brings up an episode when she became very drunk after a part) and character (claiming that her attitude towards him is caused by her reaction to her father). She also reflects on her bullying father, his physical abuse of her mother and mental abuse of others, her own itinerant past including a previous relationship with an American musician characterised by verbal rows and her mother’s own desperate neediness.
Overall a fragmentary novella which does however give a striking view of dysfunctional relationships, the helplessness of those trapped within them (both abuser and abused). The prose itself can feel sparse but is simultaneously powerful and insightful, conveying the different ways in which relationships can descend into toxicity.
A modern take perhaps on Tolstoy Leo’s famous quote “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”...more
she had been maimed by an illness that [in the 21st Century] was so far out of fashion it might have been a wartime recipe for pink blancmange made fr
she had been maimed by an illness that [in the 21st Century] was so far out of fashion it might have been a wartime recipe for pink blancmange made from cornflour when everyone these days ate real chocolate mousse and tiramisu. TB was spam fritters and two-bar electric fires ………….. tubercolosis had died with the end of people drinking nerve tonics and Horlicks.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book is the glimpse into what is effectively a forgotten world (but one less than 65 years ago) when TB was still close to an incurable disease and one only treated with an austere regime of complete rest in sanatoriums, alongside crude physical intervention.
It was nice being in a new decade with a pleasant number, the curly 5, the fat 0, no longer the sharp points of a 4, which would rearrange themselves into a swastika if they felt like it, and had done …. War was in the process of becoming a memory, not a situation to be endured and survived. Anything new had to be a good thing.
A clear theme behind the book is of British society on the cusp of change from the 1940s to the 1950s: the end of rationing; the rise of the National health service and its increasing take-over of private health facilities; the aspirations and achievements of the Labour government set against the increasing realisation they could be voted out of power; the struggles of a free-to-use service being able to cope with increase demand and the costs of drugs which cure a previously fatal condition; social mobility struggling against entrenched class distinctions alongside a breakdown in traditional forms of deference, for example to medical professionals, and an increasing trend for people to demand the right to decide on their own treatment; the rise of new entertainment mediums (television and rock and roll). Its clear also that Grant sees at least some of these themes as reflecting issues in 21st Century Britain.
However I simply failed to engage with the characters in this book – which matters in this case because clearly the reader is meant to engage with and care about those characters (and even is meant to be interested in the last 60 pages, which first of all cover many of the characters meeting 3 years after they leave the Sanatorium) and then picks up their life stories from the present day. The crucial plot development seemed implausible to me, and the eventual career of Lenny, which I found of almost no interest, revealed in the acknowledgements to be based on the story of an actual television comedy writer.
Overall I felt I would have gained more enjoyment from a lengthy Sunday magazine feature on the pre-antibiotic treatment of TB than from this fictional account....more
The story is told through two first party narrators – a Nigerian woman Yejide and her husband Akin. The story is also told in two chronological parts:The story is told through two first party narrators – a Nigerian woman Yejide and her husband Akin. The story is also told in two chronological parts: the main part set across the 1980s and early 1990s telling the story of their marriage; the second set in 2008 when Yejide, long having parted from Akin although the two never were divorced, and living in a different part of the country accepts a surprise invitation from Akin to attend the funeral of his father.
Yejide’s mother died in childbirth and she is bullied and looked down on by the other wives of her father (even after she marries Akin). Akin has a close but less responsible brother Dotun, his domineering mother who still believes strongly in superstition, folk medicine and faith healers, becomes the closest Yejide has to a mother (and she calls her “Moomi”) but their relationship becomes under strain when Yejide after 3 years still has not had children and to Yejide’s despair and anger it becomes clear that her Akin’s relatives have agreed that Akin has to take another wife Funmi.
The historical part of the book describes how Yejide and Akin's relationship develops and the influences of Moomi, Yejide's father's other wives, Funmi and Dotun and ends with a string of revelations, none of which are entirely surprising to an observant reader, but which maintain the dramatic tension.
The 2008 account ends in a moving scene what is primarily a bleak and loveless book, about loss, mistrust and above all bitterness, ends on almost its first positive note.
I understand how a word others use every day can become something whispered in the dark to soothe a wound that just won’t heal. I remember thinking that I would never hear it spoken without unravelling a little …. So I recognise the gift in this simple pronouncement, the promise of a beginning in this one word ……… I shut my eyes as one receiving a benidiction. Inside me something unfurls, joy spreads through my being, unfamiliar yet unquestioned and I know that this too is a beginning
One of the strongest parts of the book was how it took what is a universal theme (the devastation of childlessness on a relationship) but shows it in a very specific cultural context of 1980s Nigeria.
The story unravels against the political upheavals of Nigeria – although this part of the book, (often limited to Yejide or Akin listening to the latest developments on radio or newspapers) was in my view slightly clumsily done and perhaps not as developed as it could have been – for example I felt like the link of the stories subject matter, to the birth pangs of the return to democracy from military dictatorship, was an interpretation I added myself.
Overall I enjoyed this more than other Tremain boosk I have read, particularly The Road Home, although that is setting a low bar.
The book had much to Overall I enjoyed this more than other Tremain boosk I have read, particularly The Road Home, although that is setting a low bar.
The book had much to recommend it but I had two main issues with it- in each case I would expect more from a novel with true literary merit:
- The sentimental ending - The way that the theme of the book it so explicitly telegraphed (see below)
The theme of the book and the reason for it being set in Switzerland is set out very explicitly and without any subtlety on the second page when we read.
“[Gustav] never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he had always forced it down. Because this was how [his mother] had told him to behave in the world. He had to master himself. The world was alive with wrongdoing, she said, but Gustav had to emulate his father who, when wronged, had behaved like an honourable man, he had mastered himself. In this way Gustav would be prepared for the uncertainties to come. Because even in Switzerland, where the wat hadn’t trespassed, nobody yet knew how the future would unfold. “So you see” she said “You have to be like Switzerland. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then you will have the right kind of life”
And then, in case the reader missed it, is emphasised again at the book’s end as Gustav reflects
“Although [his mother] had schooled him well in how to love without being loved in return, he could now see that this state of lovelessness had made him obsessive in his quest for superficial order and control ……… wanting everything to be part of some category or other and never letting things be how they truly yearn to be”....more
The story’s narrator is a Chinese immigrant living with her mother in Vancouver – we learn quickly that in 1989 (when the narrator was only 10) her faThe story’s narrator is a Chinese immigrant living with her mother in Vancouver – we learn quickly that in 1989 (when the narrator was only 10) her father went to Hong Kong and killed himself. Shortly after a family acquaintance (seemingly the daughter of someone who knew her father in China) Ai Ming comes to stay with them, seemingly fleeing after Tiananmen Square. Ai Ming finds a set of notebooks that the narrator’s father owns, and identifies the writer of the pagers as her own father. Asked to read from the notebooks Ai Ming instead starts to tell the story of her own family and various other characters from the time of the Great Leap forward, through the Cultural Revolution and right up to Tiananmen Square.
The remainder of the book meanders through this story – largely chronologically and told as a story (although one we know written by the narrator based on what Aim Ming told her, based on at best first-hand accounts but often we realise family stories or even imaginative filling in of known detail. At times the story – (with chapters with count forwards to a pivotal point when the main characters are split by the cultural revolution, add then counts down to the end) – is split with the narrator speaking directly about her own quest.
The three main characters of the book are three musicians who meet at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Jaing Kai (we discover later the narrator’s father) – who was the only survivor from his family of the Great Famine, adopted by a professor he becomes a great concert pianist but when the Cultural Revolution comes his instincts for survival means he sides with the regime, later fleeing to Canada. Sparrow – a gifted composer and teacher at the school, largely denounced in the Cultural Revolution. Zhuli – the gifted violinist daughter of Sparrow’s Auntie and Uncle (who were sent to labour camps after various anti-landowner campaigns) and who is now bought up in Sparrow’s family – she hangs herself in the Cultural Revolution. Both are loved by Jaing Kai but he at best deserts then and possibly joins their denunciation. Sparrow is later killed in the protests around Tiananmen Square having just received an exit visa arranged by Jaing Kai who is waiting to meet him in Hong Kong and becomes (wrongly) convinced he has betrayed him again by his actions.
Common themes/memes which run through the story include: Book of Records – the story included in the notebooks: Sparrow’s parents first meet through the book Madeline Thienand later the book is used by the different characters to search for each other (leaving copies in meeting places) and also to encode some real stories by altering characters names; Glen Gould’s interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg variations.
The more general themes of storytelling and remembering and of classical music (and its various themes of repetition, variation and so on) run both implicitly and explicitly through the novel – and form a device for retelling a story of Chinese modern history whose very retelling is prescribed. Interestingly there is a hint at the book’s end and in the acknowledgements that herself has done what the different book’s characters did with the Book of Records and woven real stories and people into it.
Some of the writing is excellent and Andreï Makine like in its quality, yet at others times Madeline Thien will seemingly reproduce a paragraph from Wikipedia by way of historical exposition (mainly when the narrator is herself speaking directly), while at other times the Chinese politics or musical references becomes obscure to the point of incomprehensibility (albeit with perhaps a sense that much of what is happening is in a different sense incomprehensible to those living through it). Overall though this is an admirable attempt to explore modern Chinese history from the outside by trying to imagine and explore what is must have been like to live through it....more
Really excellent retelling of “The Tempest” which both entertains while at the same time exploring the play deeply.
The first part of the book – the sReally excellent retelling of “The Tempest” which both entertains while at the same time exploring the play deeply.
The first part of the book – the set up and particularly the establishment of cast and discussion of themes is oustanding: by making the book a play explicitly about Tempest, Atwood both loses lots of the coincidences (for example Felix explicitly named his daughter Miranda after his wife died and sees lots of parallels in the revenge and prison parts of the play) while also allowing the plot of the play to be reproduced as an appendix and discussed throughout the text.
The actual revenge scene is a confusing, too long and unbelievable and at this point the links to the play become too contrived.
The end of the play as the inmates discuss how life might have ended after the story for each of their characters regains the book's strength (particularly in how it brings in the prisoner’s perspective – so that they shape a possible happy ending for Caliban) and feeds well into Felix considering himself (like Prospero) how we now goes forwards having gained his revenge but also lost a lot of what was sustaining him – he also realises as the story ends that he has effectively been imprisoning Miranda’s memory (and ghost) and needs to set her free....more
The story and the lives of the characters revolve around the enigmatic figure of Cora Seaborne - widowed after the death of her oppressive politician The story and the lives of the characters revolve around the enigmatic figure of Cora Seaborne - widowed after the death of her oppressive politician husband and now free to pursue her interest in naturalism including fossil hunting.
Those whose lives revolve around her include: her obsessive possibly Asperger's child Francis; his once nanny and now Cora's deviated companion Martha, passionately interested in socialism and particular the cause of London housing; Luke Garrett the doctor that treated her husband - a brilliant and innovative surgeon but hopelessly in love with Cora; Spencer a fabulously rich inheritant and middling Doctor who befriends Garrett at University and who sweeps up behind him - he is besotted with Martha and starts to support her causes with his fortune; the Ambroses an influential childless couple initially friends of Cora's husband but who adopt her.
The story is set in the late 1890s and while Cora is staying in Colchester she hears of rumours of a mythical serpent that is rumoured to have reappeared on the Essex marches possibly at the time of a local earthquake. Convinced that it may be a living dinosaur she is interested to investigate and the Ambroses facilitate an introduction to the local vicar William Ransome living with his children and beautiful but consumptive wife Stella who as the condition gets worse deteriorates into an ecstatic delirium convinced like most of the parishioners that the Serpent is some form of divine judgement on the local community, an attitude that infuriates the conventionally religious Ransome.
The narrative takes a decided second place to the atmospheric descriptions of the Essex marches and the sense on a world on the verge of change, with superstition, religion, Darwinism and atheism, feminism and socialism all struggling for influence across different social classes. A lot of the characters real thoughts are expressed in formal letters and handwritten notes which are interleaved in the narrative and the book is almost Jane Austen like in its series of unrequited or frustrated passions.
Very atmospheric, almost brooding novel with a strong sense of time and place and sharply drawn characters - albeit the Cora character does not really convince as one so remarkable that all the others base their lives around hers....more
EDIT JUNE 2023. (while watching the author and one of the 2017 judges discuss the book with a 2023 judge ahead of the 2023 shortlist readings) - the tEDIT JUNE 2023. (while watching the author and one of the 2017 judges discuss the book with a 2023 judge ahead of the 2023 shortlist readings) - the third part has pretty well come true other than Amazon Prime rather than Netflix. EDIT JUNE 2017: THE 1ST PART OF MY 1ST PREDICTION HAS NOW COME TO PASS IN FULL EDIT JULY 2017: The second unfortunately did not, which is a shame as I think Exit West and Underground Railroad use the same basic idea of a fantastical device to examine a topical political issue.
Winner of the 2017 Bailey's Prize
The key premise of the novel is that girls everywhere suddenly find that they have the power to emit bolts of electricity from a previously undetected piece of flesh “skein” under their collarbone – later believed to be due to the effects of an anti-nerve gas agent introduced into the water supply by the allies in World War II.
Almost immediately women start to use the power to fight back against men – either on a personal scale (women start to become the sexual predators) or national scale – there is a female uprising in Saudi Arabia, as well as in the hitherto sex-trafficking world capital of Moldova (which quickly leads to a coup by the ex-President’s wife, the country turning into a major drug centre for drugs which enhance the Power, an increasingly and a civil war between an increasingly matriarchal authoritarian regime against forces backed by the exiled Saudi Arabian King aiming to develop a counter to the Power).
The story moves between points of view chapters by four characters.
Allie, an adopted child who uses the power to murder her abusive foster father, and acting under the influence of a voice in her head and her ability to harness the Power for healings as well as violence, quickly becomes “Mother Eve” the head of a worldwide movement re-writing world religions to emphasise the primacy of women.
Roxy the bastard daughter of a gangland boss, whose unprecedented levels of power lead to her avenging her mother’s gangland murder. With Allie’s advice Roxy returns to the UK, takes over her father’s gang and turns it into the sole supplier of the Power enhancing drugs.
Tunde, a Nigerian who happens to capture video footage of one of the first manifestations of the power and quickly becomes the reporter on the emerging phenomenon, capturing the Saudi revolution on camera as well as the emerging men’s backlash terrorist groups in the US and atrocities and mass rapes of men in Moldova.
Margot, an American mayor who gaining in confidence from her Power, uses that confidence to fuel a rapid rise to power (interestingly winning an election in defiance of the opinion polls after what seems to be a catastrophic error of judgment when she allows her male opponent to needle her into a public display of her hidden Power at a time when it is still considered something to be controlled or suppressed). Margot’s rise to power also quickly comes with corruption, and in particular her close association with a private military contractor who train girls to control their power, while also becoming a de-facto armed force and almost extension of the American army, particularly in areas like Moldova where the government does not want to officially intervene.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the contrast in subtlety between the micro-writing and the macro concept.
The micro-writing can be weak, an uneasy mix of clichéd dialogue and easily skim-read action sequences which (depending on the point of view character) are a mix of British gangster film, Hollywood mercenary movie and HBO political box-set.
However the development of the central conceit of the novel is excellent. Initially the first manifestations of the Power are attempted to be suppressed, dismissed and controlled in a male dominated world. Then power structures and conventions begin to be over-turned and inverted as it becomes clear the Power is a permanent and universal – boys are sent to all boy schools for their safety, men start to avoid gangs of teenage girls. Then a backlash begins – with on-line forums, terrorist attacks and a Saudi lead counter revolution. The last part is particularly well handled as the key protagonists start to realise the inherent issues in women possessing physical power and dominance in a world where power is expressed less physically (by status and money) and is also still often held by men.
This in turn leads to Alie proposing to start an escalation of the Moldovan civil war which Roxy tells her will lead to a world wide escalation and to the following exchange.
[Roxy] You want to start Armageddon ……….The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone age
[Alie] And then we’ll be in the Stone Age
[Roxy] Er. Yeah
[Alie] And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do damage, can you instil fear
[Roxy] Yeah
[Alie] And then the women will win.
This last part in turn links to the other parts of the book – a starting and ending exchange of letters between Naomi and Neil Adam Armon, the author of the book we are reading and which includes various archaeological artefacts. Neil we realise is writing at the end of this five thousand years, in a world where male and female roles are reversed from our own, and using fiction to posit his view (based on his archaeological studies) of pre-history to support his radical masculine agenda that existing power structures (based on a time when women’s superior ability to jolt) need dismantling to create a more egalitarian society.
Overall an outstanding example of literary science fiction at its best – creating an alternative near future and as a result literally holding up a mirror allowing us to reflect on our own world.
My own near future view:
- The book must be a strong contender for the Bailey’s shortlist (and even the Prize)
- The Booker longlist could be a possibility – if English authors published by mainstream publishing houses are still considered eligible
- The book is, I hope, far too subtle to be made into a film, but would make an outstanding HBO series....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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