This book is published by Dead Ink, a UK small press focused on bringing” the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and present it to our audience in the most beautiful way possible.”
Impressively Dead Ink have two books on the Guardian 2018 Not The Booker shortlist – this (picked by public vote) and Three Dreams In The Key Of G picked by last year’s judges.
This book could be best described as a near-future dystopian, eco-horror based around pregnancy.
Perhaps the nearest recent literary equivalents are: the haunting motherhood-based Fever Dream (shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize); and the fragmentary novella The End We Start From – where a new mother flees apocalyptic floods.
In this book, the first party 30+ weeks pregnant narrator, Alice, has recently left the City (clearly Sydney) to move out to the countryside (The Blue Mountains) together with her partner Pete (who initially comes across as a fairly one-dimensional Aussie bloke).
For Alice, a worker in the local housing department, it is a chance to move away urban environmental pollution, before it is too late. In particular she is obsessed by a relatively new condition which has emerged – Cutis, first observed in the local waste dump by a down-and-out whose mouth has sealed over, asphyxiating him. Whereas official reports downplay the danger of this condition, Alice, through her work, internet research and blogging is convinced it is far more widespread and common that admitted and has contributed to many deaths ascribed to other conditions (including that of her mother).
For Pete, he is also looking for a clean start and new environment but the pollution he thinks that they are escaping is Alice’s obsession with the condition which he sees as verging on hysterical – later another male character Paulie drags her away at a barbeque claiming you had a total epi out there ... you’re having a panic attack that is all. Interestingly as an aside the author, a teacher of creative writing, has an academic specialism in the literary history of swooning.
Like another book on the Not The Booker shortlist (Raising Sparks) – the epigraph is taken from The Book of Job – in this case Job 10:8-11, which in verse 11 says Thou didst clothe me with skin and flesh.
However the key text to understanding this book Alice, remembers from her childhood – her single parent mother, estranged from her strict non-conformist British parents, draws on her vet’s assistant experience to comfort Ali through her childhood cuts and scrapes by reassuring her
That’s how clever the skin is, she said, it makes the bad things disappear
Most obviously this comes across in the condition Cutis. Even after the first outbreaks an expert diagnoses a potential link with pollution and with the skin’s mechanisms:
The condition might, he suggested, be similar in mechanism to an auto-immune disease: a potentially deadly, misdirected defence response. The skin in these .. cases was acting in aberrant ways, knitting together in disastrous patterns: might it be, he speculated, that the skin was attempting to protect the body from dangerous environmental pollutants, sealing the body off in the process.
However what is impressive about the novel is how the same ideas are also examined from different angles.
The Cutis disease exacerbates two existing divides in society between the privileged and the disadvantaged: the rich increasingly sealing themselves off from the poor; the first world seeking to seal itself off from the third world.
For those with expensive tastes, protected food guaranteed an indoor reared product, with minimal exposure with atmospheric pollution and chemical treatment. Those who could afford to bought the special food, bought their face masks for high polution days, bought their private insurance for high-speed surgery. .... only poor people ever seemed to die from cutis, poor people far away, or poor people at home who didn't take care of themselves .... Only the feckless and faraway had anything to fear.
And, even more chillingly, the authorities use the state of environmental crisis to facilitate aggressive policies which further exacerbate this divide: shutting down on rural services, carrying out a form of socio-ethnic cleansing aimed at the poor, the rural and the original native population – who are encouraged to displaced people’s camps; and ramping up the use of offshore displaced people’s camps to stop would-be immigrants reaching the mainland. A reader cannot help me reminded of the way in which the financial crisis was used to justify austerity policies.
And then the same theme of “sealing off” is examined more personally in terms of Alice and her relationships. Alice is, an introvert, and also someone who has sealed herself of emotionally – unwilling to expose herself to the dangers of relationships and make herself vulnerable to hurt. When she first realises Pete, a childhood friend, loves her she thinks What bit of the tiny sliver of myself that I allowed to escape can possibly have given you enough grounds for love. When she does open up to Pete, and is hurt, her mental skin seals back over and she holds herself back from any future commitment – even after the unplanned pregnancy forces them back together.
After her first enthusiasm and betrayal she reflects on relationships that after the first flames, everything is just dying sparks – an interesting counterpoint to the title of “Raising Sparks” (which is taken from its Job-sourced epigraph).
Her emotional distance applied also to her mother – in fact she realises that Pete as a child was closer to her mother, who Alice pushed away; and now that distance and sealing off threatens to apply to her unborn child.
The author, with past success as a short story and novella writer, makes a very successful transition to the novel form – managing to pack in a range of themes in in a relatively short novel.
And just as these themes have been explored, the book then ends in a horrific, visceral, but still intriguingly open, climax.
This book, together with another Guardian Not The Booker choice - Dervla McTiernan’s The Ruin - was one of Val McDermid’s 2018 New Blood picks at the annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival: a previous pick being Belinda Bauer whose Snap was picked by the Booker judges (including McDermid – a tireless champion of crime fiction and of new crime writers) for the Booker longlist itself.
Within the first two sentences of this book we are immediately on both familiar and unfamiliar territory within the crime genre.
An elk emerges from the overgrown pines and it is monstrous – and, together with the cover and title, we are, we realise, in the familiar genre world of Scandinavian Noir, as well as a first person, present tense narration
…… and then I nudge my ponytail and switch on my hearing aids but then we are confronted with a very different narrator.
In terms of Scandinavian Noir, this is (pardon my alliteration) Nordic Noir with a nice nuance: a nuance which one can immediately see appealing to a publisher and which lead to this being picked up by Oneworld publications – who, amazingly for an independent publisher, were twice winners of the Booker prize in 2016 and 2017.
The twist here being that the author – Will Dean – is not a Scandinavian but an Englishman living in Scandinavia, in fact in a wooden house he has built in a vast elk forest.
This has two advantages.
Firstly it avoided the need for translation - so not distracting the prolific but still clear overly in demand Wymondham based Don Bartlett from completing the translation of Knausgaard's My Struggle into English.
Secondly this enables Dean to give an English perspective on some some quirks of language (he is particularly fond of examining the expression “he has a nice economy”), the menacing countryside captured in the book’s title and the hunting based local society. This outside/English based perspective is given some fictional resonance by having his main protagonist as something of an outsider herself – a Swede who lived in England (as an intern at the Guardian no less) and has had the chance to examine her own country’s cultural assumptions and linguistic quirks, and a natural City dweller and internationalist wary of the countryside and insular society in which she now lives.
And our narrator is the unconventional part of this novel – a deaf, bisexual young journalist (Tuva). The author has commented that his first (unpublished and – he implies - unpublishable) novel had a protagonist with a similar background to his own and that, as a reaction, he decided to pick a very different character for the narrator.
Rather cleverly, the author confronts the risk of being accused of writing in the voice of a character he cannot possibly know by having one of the characters say to Tuva after a simple observation the latter makes on the former’s relationship: I really hope you don’t mind me saying, but you can’t really know about these things until you’ve been married yourself.
Largely I think he has succeeded however in capturing someone else’s voice.
Certainly Tuva’s deafness is an important part of the novel – and an interesting one. For example: the sensitivity to sound on the edge of the aural spectrum; the ability to turn off the hearing aid and effectively zone out aurally; the challenges of lip reading; the sensitivity to condescension about speaking skills; and hearing aid battery power as an addition to the 21st century journalists version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – Wifi, GPS, mobile signal and mobile battery.
Dean has clearly done lots of research here and I think he manages to steer a line between the over-research of The Mars Room and under-research of From a Low and Quiet Sea (to pick two Booker books). Whether the portrayal is accurate I cannot say, but it is certainly one that seems sensitively handled.
Further Tuva has additional complexities to her character: her fear of the wild; the loss of her father and the longer lasting repercussions of that, including the impact it has on her victim’s family-sensitive approach to journalism; her ever present guilt over the conflict between her career ambitions and her need to look after her mother – which lead her to uneasy short and long term compromises (including her very move to a small Swedish town) which fail to satisfy either requirement – and some quirks (mainly wine gums and gaming).
Another strength of the novel is the intense and almost claustrophobic, picture it paints of the small town of Gavrik - with its hunting season, and close-knit small business community with a web of connections and histories between individuals.
I also enjoyed the eccentric but complex cast of characters that inhabit the handful of houses that make up Mossen village: an ex-army single father taxi driver, obsessed with mice and his haunted son; two sisters hand-carving Trolls augmented with animal and body parts; a ghost writer who refuses to fit in with local conventions and is still suspected by many locals of an earlier, unsolved set of related murders; an obsessive animal rights activist; and then the leader of the local hunting group, the most popular man in the town but with his own secrets.
And across both are laid a local strip club (and former brothel) and rumours of the activities of a high-stakes poker group – all of which emerge to Tuva and the reader as possible clues to the resolution of the new series of murders that are striking the town – all it seems of family-men hunters and all mutilated for their eyes.
And this probably gets to my biggest issue with the book – it was a book I did not want to end, but not (as is sometimes the case) because the book was so enjoyable I wanted to carry on reading it, but simply because I knew that the conventions of the genre would take over and that the story would have to be resolved, probably with some form of rather implausible explanation.
And so it proved.
Similarly although I enjoyed both the main character and a number of the side characters, I would prefer if the author moved on to something different and allowed the future of characters to remain in my imagination – but inevitably within the genre this is likely to be the first in a series of appearances by Tuva who will presumably stumble across other small town murders in future.
One touch I did like though was that the author is conscious of those who might look down on the genre – of the ghostwriter, distrusted by all the village, another character says One time I mentioned the books I enjoy …. and he raised his eyebrows and made a kind of “o” shape with his mouth like they were dumb things to read. He’s a book snob, you know the kind.
Well I am probably one of “the kind” – and certainly have struggled with the inclusion of “Snap” on the Booker shortlist, but overall I enjoyed this novel far more....more
Of all the hardest things to lose in the world, amongst all the food turned to dust, all the people you loved a memory, all the landscape you knew as well as your own body turned to mulch, hope was the hardest to lose of all.
This compelling and quietly beautiful is published by the Ross-shire based small publishers Sandstone press who “are an independent publisher with an international outlook, producing inspiring books by innovative authors”.
The Prologue and Epilogue of this book, which both start “I found a lemon yesterday” reflects the genesis of this book and much of the underlying theme of the book.
The book itself I believe started shortly after the author painfully lost her father, and amidst her grief was able to gain some form of comfort “because when I felt that everything had been wiped away by grief, I was unbelievably grateful to see a lemon in a fruit bowl, and watch my friend slice it into water”.
From that starting point she has crafted what could initially be categorised as a feminist near-future, dystopia (but is so much more).
The book is narrated by two alternating first person narrators – Mathilde and Jaminder.
Mathilde’s chapters are written in a past tense and relate to when the two first meet, in a bleak and totalitarian London, with both power and food severely rationed after a climate change driven catastrophe (with excessive heat and flooding).
Jaminder’s chapters are in the present tense; the two and their child Hugo, having fled to an even bleaker (although freer) Scotland where they live on oatmeal.
Mathilde came to London with her dressmaker grandmother after fleeing a France racked by even greater catastrophe. Jaminder, a pianist of Sikh-descent, moved to London from Kenya with her grandfather before the power cuts took hold. They meet at a series of parties held by a privileged group of Government ministers with access to what little food and alcohol remain and both are entangled with George (one of the ministers in the Big-Brother style government of Mrs P, whose policies include a duty for women to bear children to replenish the population, despite the clear lack of food).
But strikingly the dystopia and plot serve really only as a literary device – a background for the author to examine what I think are her real themes.
I would instead describe this book as a moving examination of grieving for a lost identity and how that grief can be mitigated, in some quiet way, by the power of memory (particularly of childhood food) and by the strength of female friendship.
Mathilde and Jaminder’s bond, forged on their shared loss, stands at the heart of the novel:
We’re the only two in the world that could understand the other. Because of how our bodies are woven with fear, and how that gets to you after a while. How living a life that is only a memory of other things makes you something else. And how you try, despite this, every day, in the tiny ways you can do it, to stitch it all back up.
But the two’s attitude to the past varies: Jaminder keen to preserve as much of her memories as she can, using memory as an antidote to loss; Mathilde aiming to suppress her pain by forgetting (so that even when first moves to London she refuses to speak French) – and it also affects their relationship with Hugo who has no experience of almost anything that constituted their childhood. Jaminder takes Hugo to the local market (now little more than a jumble sale) and the two search for momentos of a past, but for different reasons:
I look for things too, but it’s a different sort of looking. His is discovery, enchantment and a world of endless possibility. Mine is the pointless hope of recovery …….. I look for anything that is recognisable, anything that’s familiar. I look for anything I could hold up to him and say: look, that’s what we left behind
Winner of the public vote and a close runner up on the 2018 Guardian Not The Booker shortlist for which I was delighted to have been picked as a judgeWinner of the public vote and a close runner up on the 2018 Guardian Not The Booker shortlist for which I was delighted to have been picked as a judge.
Interestingly like another book on the Not The Booker longlist (Sealed by Naomi Booth) – the epigraph is taken from The Book of Job. Job plays an important role in this book I think as representing those who question God, particularly through times of darkness, while never losing their ultimate faith.
The epigraph is from Job 5:7 – “Humanity is born for trouble - as the sparks fly upwards” and building on that theme the book draws on an idea from the Safed Kabbelists which one character – Moshe – explains to another – Malke,
“that there is a spark hidden inside everything and everyone in the world – every encounter, every experience, and every sensation. If you can be really present in the moment, you can set a spark free and return it to its source”
Malka and Moshe are the two central characters of the book.
Malka Sabatto (literally - Sabbeth Queen) is the middle, teenage daughter of a Rosh yeshiva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_ye...) in the Jerusalem Haredi community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_...). Despite his apparent orthodoxy, from the age of 5 her father taught her daily, in secret, from his books – suddenly breaking off when she was 12 and leaving Malka both hurt at his apparent rejection and frustrated at the restrictions of her strict-Orthodox upbringing.
At the book’s start, pursuing, on a whim, a cat through the Christian quarters near her house she finds herself in the house of a recently deceased Kabbalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah) where she meets Moshe (Moses) – a student of Malka’s father, who has been studying the Kabbalah in secret.
Moshe is a Russian immigrant – and hence something of an outsider. He is still haunted by a family tragedy in which he unwittingly played a part as a child, and which ended up breaking up his family. He is a student of Malka’s father and has secretly been obsessed with Malke for some time.
After an unexpected meeting with her father (when she understand what drove his earlier behavior), Malka decides to head for Safed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safed) – a Kabbalist centre, followed by Moshe who has been expelled by Malka’s father, after his studies are discovered but is later asked by Malka’s family to help find her.
The journey takes her first to Safed – where she falls in with Mystical Encounters, a cult-life Kabbalists group, whose members operate a bakery. She is befriended by the secular singer Shira and begins to shed her religious restraints. The group’s leader Avnew (Abner) encourages her further visions and Kabbalist studies - and suggests that she may have a crucial role to play in resorting the presence of God by reuniting its Divine Feminine aspects Shekhinah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shekhinah).
In a small but important part of the book - Malka goes out of her way to befriend a group of Hasidic children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic...) by offering them leftovers from the bakery. This action is symbolic I feel for much of Malka’s role in the book – reuniting past divisions (here East versus West, Orthodox against mysticism); it also reflects something of the author’s own past actions (when, working in a London restaurant, he pioneered the sharing leftover food with a local homeless community). And later, Malka’s kindness helps, in a crucial plot detail, with her ultimate redemption.
After she channels the power of Chashmal to avenge a betrayal, she flees to Tel Aviv/Jaffa – pursued at distance by Moshe. There she finds work in a new major restaurant – Leviathan which has a Palestinian chef and an Israeli backer – an inversion of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, and one which employs street kids as in its kitchens - the idea inspired by a restaurant Lilith in Tel Aviv (https://www.jpost.com/Local-Israel/Te...). There she is befriended by Mahmoud (nicknamed Shelag) an albino, gay, muslim.
Again I feel there is a lot of important symbolism to unpack in this restaurant. Leviathan is, for those with biblical knowledge, the sea monster featured in a number of books including Job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan). Water plays a crucial and complex role in the book: the owner of the restaurant, like Moshe, has his identity largely defined by a water-based family tragedy, however water also plays a crucial redemptive part for Moshe (in an incident with echoes of Moses leading the Israelites on their crossing of the Red Sea) and Malka (who during her water explorations encounters a group of fishermen in an incident which for a Christian reader has clear New Testament overtones). Lilith is also important https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith – particularly in the different interpretations of the legend over time and links back to the idea of Shekhinah. And the nature of the restaurant and Malka’s friendship with Mahmoud again brings out the idea of reconciliation and the power of food to draw different communities together and heal past divisions.
At the book’s end this concept of healing through reconciliation of differences culminates in a mystical action Malka performs for her family, drawing on her friendship with Moshe, Shira and Mahmoud – each being asked to reach deep inside themselves to uncover past hurt in their life and bring those broken places into the light.
Overall this is a complex but uplifting novel – one which draws heavily on Jewish traditions (I have given a number of references in the review – but in the book much of the heavy lifting here is done by the characters in exposition) and on magic realism, but one which ultimately celebrates love, the type of love which reaches across divides to set free the spark inside us all.
The book is published by Bluemoose Books - an independent publisher based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, a “‘family’ of readers and writers, passionate about the written word and stories, [who] delight in finding great new talent.”...more
This book, together with another Not The Booker choice – Will Dean’s Dark Pines was one of Val McDermid’s 2018 New Blood picks at the annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival – a previous pick being Belinda Bauerwhose Snap was picked by the Booker judges (including McDermid – a tireless champion of crime fiction and of new crime writers) for the Booker longlist itself.
Whereas “Dark Pines” was a Scandinavian noir, this book fits into the police procedural genre, set in Galway. The author now works for an Australian mental health commission, but for 12 years practised as a lawyer in Ireland (albeit not as a criminal lawyer).
This is a book with characters who appear on the page with a backstory, some of which is revealed but some of which (particularly as it relates to Cormac and his partner Emma) is held back. The Garda characters - Cormac in particular – largely manage to rise above the clichés of the genre.
It is clear from the novel that the author’s emigration from Ireland after the financial crisis has given her a distance from which to examine her native country – some of that is in the pubs and the weather, but the underlying current to the book is the multi-decadal institutional neglect and abuse of children, and in this book the consequences of that abuse – and the different way in which people react to it - reverberates to the present day.
Another notable part of the book – is what is clearly a deliberate inversion of societal career expectations – with Cormac taking what is at best a sideways move from his high flying reputation as a anti-terrorist detective to move to Galway to allow Emma to pursue her research career. The way in which he tries to shield this from Emma – trying to convince himself as well as her that the anti-terrorist unit will be wound down post the peace process (interestingly the book is set pre-Brexit) and that he is in the forefront of a move to decentralise policing talent – adds to the depth of their characters. Aisling and Jack also face a career dilemma and again one relating to Aisling’s career.
Perhaps less obviously, but more strikingly to me, is the way in which Cormac does not really solve the central crime until the situation becomes critical and the solution can no longer be ignored – whereas his female colleague in the Domestic Violence unit, understands what is going on from the outset.
I felt that the book relied to much on coincidence (even in the side-story of another murder that Cormac investigates) and that the actual denouement of the book was far-fetched. My understanding is that only 2 Garda have been shot in the course of duty in the last 20 years – and therefore the level of national attention resulting from the finale to the book would I think make the level of police corruption alleged in the book difficult to continue to cover up. However I appreciate that this (and the painful scene with the perpetrator’s family at the end) fits the author’s theme of both institutional complicity and of relatives and friends being unwilling to admit the truth about the actions of their loved ones.
This book is published by Dead Ink, a UK small press focused on bringing” the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and present it to our audience in the most beautiful way possible.”
This is a highly intelligent, thoughtful and stimulating novel, one which simultaneously celebrates ideas and language.
it is narrated in first person by three characters: the Mother, Crone and Creatrix - the interleaving sections symbolically and clearly delineated. All three in a state of siege and all three musing on the topics of inheritance and nature.
The Mother is the dominant character in the novel - a Northern Irish housewife and mother of two young children, married to a chauvinistic and bigoted decommissioned loyalist paramilitary. Her story is woven through with non linear extracts from a journal she keeps which simultaneously serves to note her two childrens’ development and as an outlet for her own hitherto suppressed creative and linguistic flair.
This section contains some lovely musings on the phases of parenthood (in her case motherhood as her husband’s contribution is limited; but any enlightened father will find much to empathise with) - with musings on subjects such as buggies, party bag contents and party invite etiquette. More seriously she muses on the nature versus nurture debate and whether the debate even makes sense within a community where prejudice is passed down alongside genes.
The second character is a seventy year old English woman, living in Florida and running what is first described as a shelter for female victims of domestic violence. Her shelter is surrounded by various US law enforcement agencies in a Waco like siege in what initially seems an overreaction. But over time we learn of her backstory and her initial attempts to reset what she sees as the inherent patriarchal nature of the world by striking at the base of the very units of measurement which have delineated it and, when the digitisation of those measures renders any such attempt impossible, to strike even further at the roots of patriarchy.
The third character or characters is the voice of the four bases of the human genome project which individually and in combination hector the scientists trying to decode their structure with the futility and misguided nature of their quest. This is the most intellectual section - I particularly enjoyed a comparison of the very different role of transmission errors between DNA replication and the religions of the word, as well as what I read as a criticism of man displacing God with a deification of DNA. This section reminded me, in the level of intellectual contemplation it provoked, of Harry Mulischand his wonderful The Discovery of Heaven.
The three characters are respectively named Jean Ome (who contemplates the influences in her family name of John Hume, David Hume and Sir Alec Douglas Home, pronounced Hume), Jean Ohm who has “encountered major amplitudes of resistance” and the Human Genome. And this leads into another distinguishing part of this novel. The author is clearly in love with and in command of the English language and loves to play with homonyms, words with double meanings, word combinations and with etymology in a way that reminded me the Republic of Consciousness Prize winning Attrib. and other storiesby Eley Williams (and I struggle to pay a book a higher compliment).
In a year when the Booker judges, while not descending to the Stella(r) depths of a notorious previous panel, have placed something of a premium on accessibility, this is a book which never under estimates the intelligence of its readers and is a rigorous read as a result. I found myself reaching for a dictionary to check why a firstborn would have a faint ichorous fume and for Wikipedia to check the seventh SI base unit and I was delighted to be stretched like this.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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