I read this book due to it being the library pick for the 2020 Guardian Not the Booker Prize.
It is, I realised, the third book I have read by this autI read this book due to it being the library pick for the 2020 Guardian Not the Booker Prize.
It is, I realised, the third book I have read by this author after her famous “Room” and her historical novel “The Wonder” and unfortunately it was by far the weakest of those three – really because I felt its set up was doubly lacking originality (both in the two protagonists and the story).
The two main characters are: Noah (an 80 year old widowed, still active chemistry Professor who lives in New York) and Michael (his great nephew). At the book’s start Noah, who recently lost his sister, is planning a trip to Nice for the Carnival (a trip funded by his sister’s bequest which insisted the money be spent imminently on something fun): his aim being to return to the City where he was born before fleeing the City during the war years to join his father in America at the age of around 4. There he hopes to find something about his Mother (the daughter of a legendary photographer)’s wartime years – his interest piqued by a motley collection of oddly shot photos he finds in his sister’s possessions and which were clearly owned by his mother.
His plans are initially disrupted by an unexpected phone call – Michael is the son of his nephew (his sister’s son, who also died in recent years, in this case of a drug overdose). Michael’s mother was imprisoned for drug possession some time before and his current guardian can no longer cope. As the only known relative of Michael, Michael’s social worker makes it clear to the equally reluctant Noah and Michael’s mother, that unless Noah agrees to look after Michael for a short period (until another relative can be traced) then Michael will go into care and it will also severely compromise the chances of Michael and his mother being reunited when she is eventually released.
Noah therefore takes Michael with him and we have what seems like the cliched plot of a movie – an 80 year old and an 11 year old on a road trip together, where their differences can come to the fore. Even better the setting is glorious Nice – ideal for filming in a break from the Cannes Film Festival.
And not just an 80 year old and an 11 year old – but an extreme version of each. A very old fashioned 80 year old with no kids of his own (and seeming no experience of anyone else’s) – who thinks that for example explaining a Le Coubusier chair is a good way to break the ice. And a mouth, streetwise 11 year old, one who seems worldywise in many ways but ignorant of basic concepts such as currencies or not talking about bombs/guns in security queues (so has perhaps never watched a movie) – one who also seems to add “Dude” to every sentence (do streetwise American 11 year olds really do that in 2020?).
I also found the narrative part lacking originality. We guess almost immediately that we are in a murky world of Nazi collaborators versus resistance heroes (and Jewish rescuers) and our guess is not confounded. While I did like the way in which the author had actually worked with a photographer friend to actually shoot and include a number of the photographs, I found this a very unconvincing narrative device – to be honest it felt to me like it would be much better placed in a young adult’s novel (and it probably did not help my appreciation of this book that while I read it, I was also reading a bedtime novel with one of my daughters – Tamar by Mal Peet - which had a lot of overlap but was I thought a lot better).
I read the book over the opening weekend of the Tour de France – three stages around Nice as it happens. When the Tour de France on screen action is lacking (as it often was this weekend) the cameras tend to focus on tourist sites and landmarks and the commentators for want of something better to do, read out bits of historical detail they have been given. And everytime it happened I was reminded of this novel – as far, far too often the characters look up something (normally about Nice and its history) on Google and then explain it to each other.
Overall this all sounds very harsh. I should say that the novel is extremely competently written, there is some interesting details on American drug/penal policy (again unfortunately largely read from Google) and I think some interesting things to say on the importance of living in the present with all its problems and challenges rather than looking back to the past. But this novel simply did not work for me, dude.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker Prize: having nearly qualified via the Public vote it was the bookshop sI read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker Prize: having nearly qualified via the Public vote it was the bookshop selection.
The book is the story of Hashim, who, newly married to Munira, leaves East Pakistan in late 1960 to join his cousin Rokiful in Manchester. The confident, almost brash Rokiful was something of a pioneer in Bengali immigrants to Manchester, but to the shy and traditional Hashim seems to have rather downplayed his family responsibilities at home, and his Islamic faith to embrace the English life – drinking and taking an white girlfriend: Helen who has left her own Irish immigrant family as soon as she hit seventeen.
Soon Hashim is joined by Munira. Munira, a well-educated, independent girl, strikes a friendship with Helen and the four and later their children (respectively) form an tight unit. When Hashim, encouraged by Munira, buys the corner shop in which he works, and finally gets the confidence to rename it, this extended family gives the name both to the shop and the book (the cover of the book rather neatly being a reproduction of the shop sign).
Much more than this is hard to explain without spoilers, but the characters face tensions both internally generated (as family responsibility proves impossible for one to face; while for another it realigns the role they would naturally take; for another it gives them a sense of what was missing from their own childhood; and for another a quite sense of completeness and happiness); and externally generated (due to pernicious societal racism – at both an individual and institutional level over many years).
In many ways this is I think a fairly classic immigrant tale – perhaps made most distinctive and worthwhile by its detailed and knowledgeable examination of a particular immigrant group, perhaps less covered in literary fiction than some others. The book in this sense, in my view, forms a close analogy to the Women’s Prize shortlisted “Dominicana”.
What though really distinguishes it is a searing passage set in East Pakistan/Bangladesh in the events from the outbreak of Civil War to the declaration of independence. In contrast to the rather gentle and sympathetic form of the sections set in English – where even the sessions dealing with overt racism focus more on the dignity of the victims, the strength and courage of those organising resistance and the zeal of those assisting them – this section turns an unflinching gaze on the atrocities of the Pakistan army which are laid out in brutal and uncompromising form.
Whether this juxtaposition quite works I am not so sure – at times it can feel like two books and it’s at best a brave choice by the author to have it recounted by a character whose thoughts we had previously not known and for who we have very little sympathy. However I think the rather split nature of the book also captures the split nature of the immigrant experience, as captured by the Tagore Epigraph to the novel, with concerns and ties both in their adopted country and in their homeland (particularly for the Bengalis with their powerful concept of desh).
There were I felt a few missed notes: an observant reader could already guess at the book’s major revelation, without the clunky device of a hovering pen; and the character of Joy seemed underdeveloped (her birthday on the day that Bangladesh gained independence, I will take as a Rushdie tribute rather than being derivative of Midnight’s Children).
Overall, however, a worthwhile read. 3.5 rounded up....more
If you win this war - if this small, untrained militia of less than a dozen brings down Nicholas Grant – if a group of teenagers from a special sch
If you win this war - if this small, untrained militia of less than a dozen brings down Nicholas Grant – if a group of teenagers from a special school defeats an army of millions – it will prove the might of underdogs, once and for ever. We are Britain’s last line of defence – outnumbered, outgunned, but not outwitted. We are the people who will bring civilisation back, who history will remember for a thousand years. We are the Underdogs of Spitfire's Rise.
I read this book (and its predecessor in the series) due to it being shortlisted for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker prize after a very strong show of support (which is easy to understand given how many followers the author has on You Tube and Facebook channels from his “Autistic not Weird“ website, and given the 500+ people who subscribed in advance to crowdfund this book on Unbound and are listed at the start and end of the book).
This book is very much in the same simple, dystopian, young adult adventure story style as the first; but like the first book gains its strength from its neuro-diverse group of teenagers and the sensitive but also positive way in which it explores how each is hindered by their condition (not least with the additional stress of their predicament) but also assisted by their unique world views.
Even more so than the previous book this one explores how many (but not all) of the characters learn over time how they have agency over the extent to which they allow their past and their conditions to define and limit them, and over the way in which they react to the extreme circumstances in which they find themselves. Interestingly in this book that list extends outside the Underdogs to one of Nicholas Grant’s trained teenage assassins. We also in this book get our first understanding into Grant’s ultimate aims.
A worthy addition to an important series of books.
I also checked out the Autistic Not Weird website and was extremely impressed with the content I read and can easily see how it both inspired the author to write this series and for so many people to back, read, enjoy and enthusiastically support the series of books.
Even though we don’t get to decide what happens to us, we do get to choose how we respond. And even if people tell you your future is predestined, you have more control over your personality than you think
So never let your troubled past get in the way of your self-belief . Never think that your diagnoses make you a lesser person, or ‘not good enough’ to be who you’re meant to be.
Now winner of the 2020 Guardian Not the Booker prize. It was not my favourite book on the list (by some distance) but I always admire ambition in an aNow winner of the 2020 Guardian Not the Booker prize. It was not my favourite book on the list (by some distance) but I always admire ambition in an author, and Parthian press seem an excellent publisher.
The author has previously written a short story collection, and appears to be as famous in Serbia as he is his native Wales, as set out in an extremely detailed and almost hyperbolic Wikipedia page which seems to be out of sync with the level of reviews to date of his work.
The book is set on the island of Ynys Môn (the island formerly known as Anglesey) and features Hill – something of an concept-film maker (the rights to one of his films having been bought by Jack Black. He (and his cat) returns to the Island to visit his dying father (from whom he seems to be estranged ever since blaming his father for his mother’s suicide) – living in his mother’s old house which she actually bequeathed to Hill (with his father Roger having the right to stay there). Hill has recently-ish lost his wife to an accident and has fallen out with her relatives.
Roger has taken on a carer (who he met in the Co-op) Trudy and she with her dog seem to have taken up residency – and despite Hill’s unease over this, he and Trudy start a relationship.
Do you want to stay over, Trudy asks I, Hill says Might be a disaster, Hill thinks
On one level Trudy gives Hill a sense of perspective – but she does it by statements such as announcing that not doing things that give you pleasure is actually categorised as self-harm. The two seem to function better typing and then deleting searches on their phones or flicking through a Netflix menu than actually talking.
There really is not that much more to the plot of the book – what makes it unusual is its rather staccato and often repetitive narrative style and its frequent references to social media devices, to films, to social media ideas (characters ask of mundane conversations if they are being cancelled or trolled) and to a balanced obsession with health and junk food (with little in between). Short chapters are interleaved with unanswered emails to Jack Black, texts from Hill’s friend Ed, emails from Roger to Hill (which seems their only communication method) and some watersport/activity interludes.
All of this makes the book a very place specific and very modern (dare I say millennial) exploration of the universal and timeless theme of grief.
And to be honest I could not really connect with either the strong sense of time or strong sense of place in the novel.
When reading the profile above (and the references to it and other items in the Wikipedia profile) I sometimes felt I was missing out on a series of in-jokes and similarly when reading this book I felt I was missing out and was not really the intended audience. It probably shows that I am not the target for this book that I had to check that Jack Black was a real life actor and had no idea who Jason Stalham (the subject of a chapter) was.
Ultimately I would recommend reading the free preview of the book on Amazon - it really gives you a feel for whether the time/place and the style (which is very embedded in both) will appeal to you.
And if you like it then order direct from the publisher....more
I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all putting inside a house and locking Him there. I wa
I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says – with love, patience, kindness and forgiving
This book won the 2018 Bath Novel award for debut writers.
The judges citation for that award, given by the literary agent Felicity Blunt, who then went on to represent Abi Daré is, I think, a perfect summary of the book.
“This is a book that looks at women’s roles, not from a soap box, but from the ground beside them. It is poignant but never saccharine, it is painful but never exploits that pain. It is beautiful because it is ultimately a song of kindnesses. The winning book is a book of many voices, heard and unheard. But ultimately it is about one girl and her ambition to find and own her voice”
This book was then shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels, losing out only to the wonderful “That Reminds Me”. Preti Taneja, head judge and previous winner for her brilliant “We That Are Young” also captured the spirit of the novel:
‘The Girl with the Louding Voice is a virtuosic study of female loss, determination, and of the subversive potential of words: it magnificently reveals how language constructs us as humans. With immense skill, Daré creates an irresistible energy and powerfully sustains it on every page.’
The book was also shortlisted for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker prize and backed by two judges - the third though (who might have been me) preferring a book more suited to the prize and its boost for little known authors with a strong fan base of readers.
The first person narrator of the book is Adunni. Her mother inspired in her a desire for education as a road to independence – a desire which drives her (and gives the book its title):
In this village, if you go to school, no one will be forcing you to marry any man. But if you didn’t go to school, they will marry you to any man once you are reaching fifteen years old. Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.
That day I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t want to be having any kind of voice …. I want a louding voice.
But at the book’s opening, her mother has died and Adunni’s father has pulled her out of school and at fourteen year old he tells her that he is marrying her off to a local taxi driver – Morufu (in exchange for a generous bride price including her father’s Community Rent). Whereas Adunni’s friends are excited, she is horrified due to her education ambitions. And things do not improve when she is married – subject to marital rape by Morufu and the open hostility of his first wife Labake, her only ally is his second wife Khadija (desperately trying to produce a son for Morufu). And when things go very wrong for Khadija, and my implication Adunni, she flees to Kampala, finding herself sold as a housemaid to an abusive wealthy owner of a fabric factory (Big Madam) and her predatory husband Big Daddy. But education remains her dream of escape – a dream fuelled by Big Daddy’s cook and by a campaigning social acquaintance of Big Madam (Ms Tia).
The really distinctive element of the book is the voice of Adunni – a kind of broken English. The author has said that she did not want to write in the Pidgin English spoken by poor and rich Nigerians but find Adunni a unique voice.
And I think the correct way to think of the voice is as more akin to say that in Ducks, Newburyport or Milkman: not as a straight, literal rendition (Adunni thinks in the voice and presumably most of the time thinks in Yoruba, in which she is fluent), but as a literary interpretation.
It is one that: gives Adunni (and the book) a distinctive and memorable style; fits Adunni’s character – always speaking up, always bringing a fresh perspective, questioning things which others are resigned to; fits the central themes of the book – the importance of language and education, the need for girls to be given the chance to find and develop their voice.
Overall I found this a powerful and moving story – it is not one that I think everyone will like (particularly some of my Goodreads friends): the book has a distinct plot and a fairly neat resolution; its apparent simplicity is deceptive – carrying off and sustaining (while also gradually developing) Adunni’s voice is an impressive feat of writing; it is a book I think founded on optimism, looking at the worst of society and human behaviour and then looking for hope rather than wallowing in despair.
I read this ahead of a Book Group in June 2021 having previously read it in early April 2020 (just after the start of lockdown). In the comments belowI read this ahead of a Book Group in June 2021 having previously read it in early April 2020 (just after the start of lockdown). In the comments below the review I have added my notes from the author’s brilliantly produced interview with Peter Florence at the 2020 virtual Hay Festival.
This book was on my radar since the Guardian’s Alex Preston in his 2020 preview said it was the book that might beat Hilary Mantel to her third Booker.
The book of course beat Hiliary Mantel won the 2020 Women's Prize, the 2020 Waterstone's Book of the Year (from the UK's best bookseller), the National Book Critics Circle Award (one of the very few US awards open to UK writers), the 2021 British Book Awards Best Fiction "Nibbie" and so on.
It was also, to the considerable deteriment of the Booker not even longlisted for that prize (which was distinguished in 2021 only by its Winner). That omission I think resulted in its unusual shortlisting for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker (unusual in that the Guardian website BTL votes which are used to pick half that shortlist are normally dominated by author and publisher lead campaigns on small books) - a prize for which the judges (of which I was one) decided it was too good to be a winner.
My thematic thoughts on the book - including some extensive quotes, best read after completion of the book.
COMPARISONS TO MANTEL (AND GREGORY) – STYLE OF FIRST TWO THIRDS
And comparisons to Mantel’s book are inevitable – a book set in the 16th Century, featuring a famous Englishmen in an unfamiliar way, and written in a third person point of view present tense. A comparison made even more inevitable when the book’s opening lines include a confused child and the words “He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor” which to the reader immediately evokes Mantel's opening words of he trilogy “he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard” which follow the now-famous ”So now get up”.
There however the two books depart – both in subject matter and style.
Whereas Cromwell is the sole focus of Mantel’s book(s), so much so that the third party style is really as close as possible to a first party narrative; Shakespeare, while featuring as a point of view character, is very much a tertiary one (and in fact only ever referred to in indirect terms (the tutor, the husband, the father) , with the narrative initially started by his son Hamnet (twin to Judith) and largely sustained by his wife – Agnes (perhaps better know to us as Ann Hathaway).
With as an aside a throwaway line later in the book which links to almost all we know of her (via the reference in her husband’s will)
[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.
Agnes herself is portrayed as following her dead mother as something of a white witch/folk and natural healer/forest folk/mystical diviner.
I was inevitably reminded less of Mantel and more of that other great modern day chronicler of the Tudor Court – Philippa Gregory, and in particular her Cousins War series and particularly the character of Jacquetta of Luxembourg and her relationship with Elizabeth Woodville in “White Queen” and “Lady of the Rivers”. That is not to damn the book with faint praise, both books are excellent, but it was a little unexpected in a purely literary novel. Like Gregory, O'Farrell uses this as a way for a female to gain strong agency in a fundamentally patriarchal society (at least in this section we see that Anne's pregnancy, resulting marriage and even Will's move to London are all engineered by her).
And while Mantel’s tale sustains throughout a sense of immediacy, of imminent peril, of ever present danger in a court subject to the arbitrary caprices of a tyrant, for the first two thirds of the book, this is written in an indirect, very distanced style. The style of course reflects the character – not a necessarily paranoid man-of-the-world, painstakingly aware of the precariousness of his ascent and the multitude wishing his fall; but instead someone who is by their very identity other-worldly, possessed of both ancient knowledge and foresight and who therefore operates at a necessary remove from both the here and the now.
This style though does make the first two thirds of the book at times a rather too languid experience.
MIRRORING
One interesting break is a section where we trace the course of the plague
For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.
And this account is very cleverly mirrored a little later – in an account of the convoluted passage of a letter sent to Shakespeare telling him of Judith’s seemingly imminent death with even some small details mirrored (such as some unevenly balanced baskets).
Mirroring being a crucial theme of the book – with Judith and Hamnet as slightly odd twins (seemingly identical other than in their sex)
It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two
He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’
Ideas which the author expands into a plot point which of course draws on the use of mistaken identity and doubles in their father’s work:
Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.
MODERN DAY RESONANCE
Another fascinating aspect of this first section – which effectively leads up to the (real life) death of Hamnet – is the many accidental resonances with our present day situation, resonances which I suspect increase the already high chances of this book winning literary prize acclaim.
The way the plague spreads not just in England but also in Northern Italy (and the links between the two)
The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).
The inadequacy of Personal Protective Equipment for English medical staff:
It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’ ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says. ‘From the pestilence?’ His mother nods. ‘And will it?’ His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Lockdowns
The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.
The guilty upside of the events for children of busy parents
If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.
Misplaced faith in unlikely treatments (hydroxychloroquin anyone?)
‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.
And the realisation that whatever contingency planning healers have done is powerless in the face of what they are confronted with
She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?
FINAL THIRD & GEORGE SAUNDERS
Any frustration at the slightly slow pace of the first parts, is really overcome in the final section, which deals with the aftermath of Hamnet’s death. Following on from Agnes’s realisation both that her healing powers were inadequate in the face of plague and that her foresight has actually mislead her and forced her to concentrate on the wrong risks (Judith rather than Hamnet) she is thrust back into the real world and the removal of time and place is taken away.
What we get instead is a fierce and painful examination of the grief of a mother and a more oblique examination of how that grief played out in the work of her husband.
Of the way it unmoors all of our pretensions to control
What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.
That includes a moving burial scene which cannot help remind the reader of another Booker winner - “Lincoln in the Bardo”
It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.
And then moves into helplessness
And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.
HAMNET AND HIS FATHER’S WORK
Agnes realises that rather than bringing her family together – her husband will instead move away from her and be absorbed in his work (her influence over him declining with her powers) – leaving her not so much for London but
‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’
That (and this was one of the inspirations for the writing of this book) that he will never reference plague directly in his work (as has already been noted by his daughter even in his speech)
It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.
That a playwright who gave so many words to the English language is not even available to help his family find the words that they need
What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?
But, in a tour de force ending to this excellent book that he will examine the death in his own way and via his most famous play.
Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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