But marriages are usually made up of two people, whereas I feel as though I am married to three different women. One, of co
Published today 11-5-23
But marriages are usually made up of two people, whereas I feel as though I am married to three different women. One, of course, is my wife, the woman I legally decided to marry, on purpose. The second is my wife’s best friend, who is forever in our house. Her presence usually involves a few jokes at my expense, but also one or two bizarre compliments, about how I look tall today, how I look like I got dressed in daylight, or a question as to where the various rare animals I killed and sacrificed in order to cast the spell that made my wife fall in love with me are buried. Then there’s the third woman, the one that I see when we’ve all had a bit to drink and my wife’s friend has elevated the level of her insults and my wife is laughing at them and whispering with her best friend right in front of me. The third woman is completely detached from the person that I recited my vows to.
The set up of this book is relatively straightforward – a triangle of three people: wife, husband (both unnamed but a very well off London-based Nigerian-descended couple) and (the also well-off, London based Nigerian) wife’s best friend Temi, with the added complication of Temi being extremely close to the husband’s sister who is married to Temi’s brother.
Temi and the husband hate each other: Temi because she still cannot believe that her best friend (the wife) has effectively betrayed what she thought was a life long pledge to reject the domestic dreams of their parents and to live an independent life (BMFM – by myself and for myself) and instead stay as the closest of close friends; she seems to believe – or at least hope - that the whole marriage is a prank by her friend which got out of hand. The husband for the (at least to me entirely understandable) reason that Temi’s presence in their household is close to stalker like and seems based around systematically undermining his marriage – albeit its also clear that he has some fairly conventional and traditional expectations of the marriage and his and his wife’s roles in it.
The novel takes place over a single day. Temi who, as is her wont, comes over for a day of drinking and marriage wrecking is horrified to find that the husband and wife have been trying (for all of a) month or so to have a child so far unsuccessfully; the husband comes back part way through a stressful workday and resents Temi’s presence and both try to influence the wife in their favour.
It is written in three first party sections, with the wife, then the husband and then Temi taking turns to take over the narrative of the events of the day, while also looking back over incidents in the past (often with different perspectives on the same events).
I did not think that the structure quite worked: for me both the husband and Temi had a pretty clear agenda and their sections serve largely to reinforce the impression we have of them from the other narrators. The more complex motivation is that of the wife, however with her section coming first we do not really get to the bottom of how she has permitted the situation to arise or how she feels when Temi and her husband try to engineer a crisis and so force her to a choice between them (both taking it largely for granted that she would chose them).
In a book with unreliable (or at least slightly self-deluded) narrators I felt I needed someone with a more reasonable (or even just believable) behaviour, as well as someone I could sympathise with – and in the absence of that in any of the three narrators I felt my investment in the novel rather unmoored.
Overall I think this is a book which might appeal to fans of “My Sister the Serial Killer” – but which was not for me.
He sees what I see, but from the other side. A woman in between two selves, undecided as to which she can remain loyal. Where I see uncomfortable levels of domesticity and submission, he sees impolite outspokenness and levels of negative emotion rarely observed. What he thinks is a new person emerging in short and sometimes alcohol-fuelled bursts, I know is the occasional reappearance of my misguided friend. We are trying to solve the same problem, but our judgements on the solution differ significantly.
My thanks to Random House, UK for an ARC via NetGalley...more
#6 of the Ruth Galloway novels – a series of crime novels featuring a Norfolk based forensic archaeologist and of particular interest to me given my i#6 of the Ruth Galloway novels – a series of crime novels featuring a Norfolk based forensic archaeologist and of particular interest to me given my interests in both Norfolk and archaeology (see my review of “The Janus Stone”).
After the (for me) ill-advised outing to Blackpool (although is there any other type) this novel in the series thankfully returns to Norfolk, in particular centred on Norwich Castle (the main museum from my childhood).
Thankfully also, and just about for the first time in this series, the book does not rely on intimidation of any physical threats to Ruth (which for reasons I have outlined in other reviews of the series do not work on a number of levels).
This book feels like something of a resetting of the series in two ways which I can perhaps call - familial and fame.
Familial - Ruth (via her brother) and Cathbad (via his daughter) have more fleshed out families – with both also having significant potential relationship developments (Ruth via a TV producer, Cathbad with Judy).
Fame – Ruth’s archaeology career is expanded both into the book world (via a book she is due to publish based on the previous novel in the series) and into the TV world (
And to be honest these developments – presumably laying the ground work for future novels actually work better than the plot of the book which relies rather too much on an overlaboured concentration on potential crimes involving children.
Having : an archaeological dig featuring a notorious (but possibly unfairly so) Victorian child killer; a case of possible SIDS/possible infanticide; a seemingly deranged child abductor (styling themselves The Childminder); Nelson still remembering his failures in a much older child abduction case; Ruth remembering how she and Nelson first met professionally over two child abductions;
is a little too much particularly with the cases all highly overlapping and being mixed up with the relatively limited core cast of Nelson/Ruth/Judy/Cathbad.
I also did not care for the Psychic who seemed to help crack the case and there also seemed an oddity where something a policeman accidentally researched on the internet (a case based in Boston US rather than Lincolnshire) was suddenly switched to Ruth.
I did enjoy how Nelson’s character developed in this book – and his sense of ennui and disquiet throughout. And Tim (who we met in the last book) seems an interesting new character, with Clough finally moving away from walking cliché to character....more
#5 of the Ruth Galloway novels – a series of crime novels featuring a Norfolk based forensic archaeologist and of particular interest to me given my i#5 of the Ruth Galloway novels – a series of crime novels featuring a Norfolk based forensic archaeologist and of particular interest to me given my interests in both Norfolk and archaeology (see my review of “The Janus Stone”).
This novel compared to the others is set in Blackpool and the surrounding area – which immediately means that one of the two main attractions of the series for me is rather missing.
And even the part set in Norfolk is rather ridiculous. It returns to the Roman site near Swaffham from “The Janus Stone” which so reminded me of my own past – but whereas I remarked in this book that the site was “rather incongruously on a hill” the site now has a distant view of the sea which moves a little too close to geographically ignorant.
There are some other anomalies in the plot – at one stage Ruth reflects on how an old friend of hers had forgotten Ruth had a child (and what this says about Ruth) – which would be interesting if we had not just been told that the two had been out of contact for three years (Ruth’s child is two).
As a result therefore some of the aspects that I least like about the series were rather grating for me this time – in particular (from an earlier review): the way in which the books rely far too heavily for plots on intimidation and then actual physical threats to Ruth; her involvement in cases that she is investigating is not just repetitive but ridiculously coincidental (in both books too many of the story lines overlap in an insular fashion) and implausible (how often are forensic investigators really dragged into cases); having the main tension in the book around threats to someone who is the protagonist of a known series removes the concept of jeopardy almost entirely (even if it is I think more of a crime/procedural genre than a series flaw).
And this aspect is perhaps sillier than ever in this novel in that Ruth knowingly places herself in danger, despite the book opening with a University archaeologist friend being killed in suspicious circumstances as she “can’t imagine Dan was murdered because of his discovery [of the possible bones of King Arthur]” as ”Things like that just don’t happen to archaeologists” – which is almost a direct contradiction of her experience in the first four books (other than that she and some other key characters don’t die due to the need to appear in subsequent books).
And the end to the book is weak – a rather contrived and rather over-blown closing confrontation followed by an anti-climatic ending, then a series of exposition of what the different character’s motivations were which could be taken straight from Scooby Doo and even involves ghost and a dog and a (not entirely pesky) kid, and a rather ridiculous druidic funeral.
But the Ruth/Nelson and Judy/Cathabad (and for that matter Ruth/Cathbad) dynamics still work, the next in the series is set in Norwich Castle (the favourite museum of my childhood) and anyway I already bought the first 10 books – so onwards and (hopefully) upwards....more
won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what
won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed
The title of this essay collection is taken from Lucille Clifton’s poem (reproduced above), just as the author’s Goldsmith Prize shortlisted novel “Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” was taken from Mary Ruefle’s “Donkey On”.
Primarily it is a series of twelve encounters with members of the African diaspora which as the author explains: “This book highlights twelve people who illustrate, for me, the essence of Clifton's poem. Each of them has charted a new path, often in the face of danger and fierce opposition. They've told stories past and present through fiction, autobiography, film and theater; they've uncovered, collected and curated old histories. And they've continued, each in their own way, to push for change and progress. This book is also a meeting of people and perspectives about Africa and its diaspora, with chapters that speak to each other, almost in call and response – sometimes in agreement, sometimes not - highlighting the diversity of views and experiences.”
The twelve are divided into three sections: Creators (which includes to Nobel Prize winners – Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka), Curators (which includes the British publisher Margaret Busby, as well as rather brilliantly a 102 – and a half – year old friend of the author) and Changemakers (which includes Michelle Obama and Cory Booker).
Some of the sections are more essay like, others transcripts of interviews and conversations – in which it is obvious that both that their author knows her and some hybrids. A number of the subjects are known to each other – in one case two of the subjects join the other’s interviews. A number of the subjects were also part of Henry Louis Gates Jr (one of the subject)’s “Finding Your Roots” and reflect on they learned there of their ancestry. But as the author’s comments imply there are also differences in their experiences and in the way they relate to their heritage.
The twelve parts are bookended by two personal sections – the first some autobiographical reflections as part of an introduction to the book, the second the tale of a trip to the Antarctic -
Given that I started to read the novel on Booker shortlist today I was fascinated (although not surprised) that even in the opening chapter links were made (one explicit and one implicit) to two of the Booker shortlisted books: with a mention of NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Glory” (which the author brilliantly reviewed in the Guardian) and references to a number of Black victims of US police violence and the lynching of Emmett Till (which of course is immediately reminiscent of Percival Everett’s “The Trees”)
And further for Booker fans (and I know many who follow me on Goodreads are more typically readers of literary fiction than non-fictional essays so I hope this peaks your interest in this brilliant collection) – the first meeting with Margaret Busby takes place in March 2019 with Bernadine Evaristo (who writes an excellent foreword to this collection) at the same event. Seven months later at a dinner I was fortunate enough to attend at the Guildhall, Evaristo would be crowned Booker Prize winner (and go on to a long overdue recognition of her influence) and Busby would be approached by Peter Florence about being the next chair of Booker judges (something she resisted on the night but later thankfully agreed to – giving us the excellent “Shuggie Bain” as the 2020 winner on a shortlist which also included novels by Maaza Mengiste and Tsitsi Dangarembga – the latter also being mentioned in the book).
Incidentally I first encountered the author on Goodreads after I reviewed Wole Soyinka (interestingly an alumni of my wife’s University and my own college)’s “Chronicles from the Land of The Happiest People in Earth” which was inexplicably overlooked for the 2021 Booker Prize which chose instead to represent Africa by two white South Africans.
Overall I thought this was an excellent collection – really thought provoking and also inspiring with the legacy each of the subjects has created (and I was really encouraged that some of the subjects mentioned the importance of their Christian convictions).
My thanks to the author and publisher for a review copy....more
Account of life as firstly a volunteer assistant warden, then helping during a bird breeding season on a part time contract and then lastly working asAccount of life as firstly a volunteer assistant warden, then helping during a bird breeding season on a part time contract and then lastly working as the full time ranger – all at the Blakeney Point nature reserve – one I am sure known to many visitors to Norfolk due to the seal colony accessible by a lovely boat ride from Mortson Creek on the right tide.
The author kept a diary for much of his time and although the book is written in a non-diary (while still chronological) style, it does as a consequence have rather too much detail – some of it at times rather banal (for example lengthy sections on various repairs). The author particularly enjoys giving talks to visitors and has also made a number of successful TV appearances so clearly is well suited to verbal communication but I did feel that he was not always able to bring the interest of his role fully to life – often over-emphasizing detail over drama. I did find the writing on predation and the often difficult decisions taken to deal with say foxes or aggressive gulls very interesting.
I bought the book recently in Norfolk on an impromptu trip to Cley Nature reserve after visiting Cley Beach (Blakeney also being accessible from a long walk along the spit from that shingle beach) which made the book perhaps more interesting than it might otherwise have been.
What had begun as a doodled voice would become a hectoring treatise, one I would sometimes interrogate as if real and external to myself. Does this
What had begun as a doodled voice would become a hectoring treatise, one I would sometimes interrogate as if real and external to myself. Does this mean then that your mind is out there doing its mad work still? Your switches all ticking back and forth this way and that, but out there in the soil, on the sea, and up there in the sky in pure elemental force? Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Infinite is my new kingdom. Then how is it that you are come to speak to me now in this voice?, I found myself led to enquire, but the answer was unsatisfactory: Ah, this voice is not me at all, but your guilt.
The book is published by the twice-Goldsmith, twice-Desmond Elliott prize winning Norfolk based publisher Galley Beggar – publishers of (among others) “A Girl is A Half Formed Thing”, “We That Are Young”, “Ducks, Newburyport” and most recently the Booker longlisted “After Sappho”.
The author’s debut novel “Forbidden Line” was itself Desmond Elliott longlisted and won a special first novel category in the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize – and was actually the book that first introduced me to Galley Beggar and lead to be becoming one of their limited number of Buddy subscribers.
That book was an audacious, sometimes learned, sometimes madcap but always unique retelling of Don Quixote (with an equally eccentric protagonist, and a narrative which like the original becomes self-consciously more meta-fictional over time) culminating in a modern day reinactment of the Peasant’s Revolt and shot through with copious references to the Hyperfine transition of Hydrogen.
This book by contrast is more moving than madcap, and more deeply personal than unique (in fact if anything it seems almost a tribute to another author’s writing).
The book is written around the suicide of the author’s brother in 2015 and describe the author’s attempts to come to terms with what happens, while circling around his own obsessions which both distract from and illuminate his quest for understanding. The book is written in three sections:
Cave (which is starts around the author’s interest in the naming of the North/German Sea) and from there moves into a general interest in oceans and maps – a quest which allows the author to spend his dreams in a cave in the underwater Doggerland. This section particularly interested me for its primary setting in my birth and second home county of Norfolk.
Why, if I had my answer, then, did this task preoccupy me for many months further? This general truth - that the renaming of the North Sea was a gradual process tentatively initiated in reaction to the politics of the early eighteenth century - was not enough. It was not enough because it did not satisfy. I pursued this new interest as if I were a plant and it were the sun: relentlessly, somatically, and under the force of a desire which swept every other consideration into irrelevance. And so how could something so impoverished as an answer cause me to cease this undertaking? It could not.
Horses – which was naturally of interest to me given a recent pony acquisition – and which starts with the author staying in someone else’s house where he finds a store of equine books which leads him to a wider interest (which includes White horses and the spread of languages)
I tended always to return by some route or other to the figure of Clever Hans the horse. Still I was unable to discover the precise significance this story held for me, but I felt a strong and certain truthfulness in it which refused to dissipate with time. This interest in Hans the horse eventually branched out and led me by a lurching, fragmented, grotesque taxonomy through the shape of my own broken thoughts. The horse - horses in general - though they had never interested me in the slightest before, began to assume a monumental importance. They promised to solve some obscure riddle of existence which I had never before considered. I undertook researches into horses in war, horses in chess, horses as workers, horses as signs and emblems, horses as vehicles. I tried to think myself into the places and minds of those people who first domesticated the horse on the steppe eight thousand years ago and more, and then rode out across Europe to make what would become everything around me.
And Trees where the author is drawn to the tree on which his brother died.
The book is from the off, with its East Anglian setting, Anglo-German considerations and discursive writing style, mixing physical roaming with writing that roams across historical figures (with a dose of fiction) and with even some black and white photos – very consciously Sebaldesque and in fact the Trees section opens with the author seeking out a memorial to Sebald.
Overall the book while covering much of historical/factual/biographical interest is really circling around questions of memory and forgetting, of facts and legend, of seeing and obliqueness, of the personal and the universal, of truth and fiction, of belief and obsession, of life and death, of ignorance and knowledge, of beginnings and ends, of roots and branches (and in each case realising that the more one looks the more one realises that the two parts of each pair are much more merged than distinct).
Overall a very different book to the author’s debut but one I am very glad that I read....more
Excellent, impactful, nuanced and now deservedly classic novel (Voted Best Women’s Prize winner in the first 25 years, ranked 10th on the Guardian’s BExcellent, impactful, nuanced and now deservedly classic novel (Voted Best Women’s Prize winner in the first 25 years, ranked 10th on the Guardian’s Best Novels of the 21st Century list, included on the BBC News 100 most influential English language novels, included on the Big Jubilee list of books).
I was gifted this book on Christmas Eve 2021 as part of my family’s first celebration of Jolabokaflod but read another of my gifts that day and decided to save this for later in the year (and in particular post Booker longlist)....more
Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize non-fiction category.
They are like Russian dolls. I understand now. Mummy blames Burrimummy for being unkind. Burrim
Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize non-fiction category.
They are like Russian dolls. I understand now. Mummy blames Burrimummy for being unkind. Burrimummy blames Mumma for ill-treating her, and Mumma blames Sadrunissa for thrashing her. They all took out whatever anger they felt over their own lives on their daughters. No one is responsible. It goes back and back. Elided are the wrongs of patriarchs, husbands, and fathers' treatment of their daughters.
This hugely evocative memoir has both the sweep of geography and historical forces, but the intimacy of the tensions of a multi-generational family as well as an examination of post-colonial literature.
Geographically it has three main settings – India, the Caribbean (Trinidad and St Lucia) and England – all captured in their full colour and noise (as well as where appropriate silence and drabness)
Historically it traces in particular the end of the Indian Raj – and end that was both very sudden (almost exactly 75 years ago with the creation of India and Pakistan) and drawn out (probably for me the strongest aspect of the book is how it traces both the gradual dissolution of the conventions of Victorian India and the way in which many of the leaders of the Princely States were cast adrift by the English colonial authorities and the way in which the vestiges of the Raj carried on in what might be called the Indian establishment even as a new elite of tech firm billionaries, Bollywood stars and nationalist politicians).
And in terms of the family we see the intimate relationships of the author, her sister and their mother, grandmother and even great-grandmother and the ways in which the treatment of each generation of girls at the hands of their mothers played out both on their treatment of their mothers later in life and in their own parenting.
And for literature – the memoir is played out against the story of the author’s burgeoning friendship with the Caribbean Nobel Laureate and poet Derek Walcott (as well as her decided ambivalence to another such Laureate – the Indian descended Trinidadian-born VS Naipaul) and in particular a lengthy account of her visit to his home in St Lucia where he critiques and guides her writing about her past and her lives both in India (where she was born) and Trinidad (where her family emigrated).
Overall I found this a fascinating book.
My thanks to the author and her publisher for a review copy....more
You were born before Elvis had his first hit. And died before Freddie had his last. In the interim, you have shot thousands. You have photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of '83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants. You have portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody. You have grainy yet identifiable snaps of an army major, a Tiger colonel, and a British arms dealer at the same table, sharing a jug of king coconut …………… If you could, you would make a thousand copies of each photo and paste them all over Colombo. Perhaps you still can.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – and it has a very strong thematic overlap with “The Trees” (in its treatment of retributive justice carried out by the victims of hate crimes and genocide) and “Glory” with its close examination of a turbulent political scene.
I would also describe it as “Lincoln In The Bardo” (with its treatment of a limbo style afterlife) meets “Passage North” (due to its treatment of the Sri Lankan civil war and due to the influence on both books and their authors of Channel 4’s Documentary “The Killing Fields”) with a dose of Arthur C Clarke (Sri Lanka’s greatest writer per the author of this novel and who once said “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living” for this is a novel about those ghosts).
This book was the final one of the longlist of 13 that I read (having read 9 pre-publication of the longlist in late July) and I finished it on 31 July. Hence I completed something I have always aimed for but never managed - reading the full Booker longlist by the end of July, something I achieved with more than just a glance through the covers but a detailed read and set of reviews, and an achievement which my twin brother (a left-armer with an unorthodox taste in books) once called the literary equivalent of 1000 runs by the end of May.
The cricket analogies in that previous sentence are deliberate as the author is best known for hugely successful best seller “The Chinaman” (2010) which used the lens of cricket – an unorthodox left-arm spinner and a drunk sports journalist - to examine Sri Lanka. That book was picked recently by the BBC as part of the Big Jubilee reads – the selection of 10 books from each decade of the Queen’s reign.
This book (or books) the author’s second novel – was 10 years in its conception, partly due to the success of “The Chinaman”, partly due to life events and partly as it took so long to coalesce into a coherent novel.
It was originally published in India in February 2020 by Penguin India as “Chats with the Dead” (note a publication 6 months earlier would have made it possibly Booker ineligible were it counted as the same book – and the two books have been merged on Goodreads). In the UK then book was then picked up by Sort of Books – a small independent publisher founded by the co-founders of the Rough Guide Travel Series (husband and wife team – Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz) and whose first ever book the living-abroad memoir “Driving Over Lemons” was a huge bestseller and almost genre-defining book.
The author has said ……
The initial manuscript got a great response from Indian publishers, but seemed to baffle the international ones. Many found the quagmire of Sri Lankan politics in 1989 too hard to follow, and the local mythology perplexing. What began as simple tweaks and edits for clarity, turned into more extensive revisions and rewrites. Penguin India were happy with the book and keen to launch it at the Jaipur Festival, and did so. But Natania and I ended up editing the novel all through the pandemic as our publishing dates kept getting pushed back. It’s the same story in spirit (ha!), with roughly the same characters, but with a few subplots revised. The new version is perhaps tighter, pacier, more textured and nuanced, and hopefully more accessible to a wider audience
Now I would say that the book still has a heavy dose of Sri Lankan politics and (particularly Hindu) mythology and at times can feel a little sprawling – but I never found it less than accessible and it has the pacing of a thriller so I think the edits worked.
The novel is set in Colombo in 1990 and features as its central character someone with birth name Malinda Albert Kabalana (born 1955) but who goes by the titular Maali Almeida, describes himself as “Photographer, Gambler. Slut”, who is also described by the author as a “hedonist, nihilist, atheist, closet gay” war photographer and who is partly inspired by a real life murdered Sri Lankan journalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard... whose quote “Father forgive them for I will never” gives the book its first epigraph and also sets the scene for a novel which like “The Trees” looks at the quandy between vengeance (with its risk of self-perpetuation) and forgiveness (with its risk of an absence of justice).
Most crucially at the novel’s opening Maali finds out he is dead – and not just dead, but rather disconcertingly for a life long atheist, in some form of afterlife – albeit not a particularly attractive one.
The novel opens
“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone has. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse”.
For this is a novel written in the second person. The author has said
[Originally] I wrote it in the first person, but I just found it hard to separate his voice from mine and so on, and then I just looked at it technically. When the body dies, what survives death? What is the soul? Is it breath? And I just came to the conclusion that what survives is the voice in your head. And mine is in the second person, it’s always ‘you, you, you’. So when I took that on the book started moving forward, so it worked from a philosophical point of view but also stylistically. And he questions it, ‘does the voice belong to me, or are there ghosts whispering in my ear?’
The afterlife in which Maali finds himself is partly a mash up of Buddhism (with the idea of an in-between Bardo), Catholicism (with a kind of purgatory with some form of prayers for the dead giving currency in the afterlife), Hinduism (with the in-between realm roved by malevolent spirits and in particular the destructive Mahakali who here consumes the souls of those dead not prepared to move on to the next stage of The Light) – but more than anything a chaotic bureaucracy staffed by white coated volunteers from among the dead and with any supreme being seemingly on an indefinite leave.
The first bureaucrat Maali meets – he suddenly recognises as Dr Ranee Sridharan – a Tamil university lecturer and campaigner, “slain by Tamil extremists for the crime of being a Tamil moderate”. She explains he has seven moons (seven days) in which to go through a number of stages - in particular an examination of his ear lobes to reveal the complexities of his life and the hindrances which might prevent him entering “The Light”.
But he is also approached by the black garbage bag wrapped ghost of Sena Pirantha – a JVP (a militant Communist body fighting a fierce war against the government) organiser. Sena claims that both he and Maali were victims of a hit squad including garbage men (a clean-up crew of body disposers with a sleeper Tamil agent driver), corrupt policemen, an army major, the chief torturer of the STF (Special Task Force who carry out abductions on suspected JVP or LTTE/Tamil Tiger members) and ultimately a government minister. Sena wants Maali to reject the promise of the light and instead join him in seeking vengeance on their murderers.
The book is effectively structured as a thriller/murder mystery with Maali trying to reconstruct the events that led to his violent death (which appears to have been caused when he was thrown of a tall building housing a casino that he frequently visited) and work out who killed him.
The range of potential killers is large as Maali lead a complex professional life – working as a war photographer (and part fixer) for a variety of different and often opposed groups including the army, some international journalists and an NGO. This murky role is made even more complicated by his suspicion that some of the journalists might be fronts for arms dealers, that the NGO may have links to the army and/or the LTTE and that the army and Tamil’s dealings are complicated both by the increasingly unwelcome presence to both of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the army’s willingness to deal with Tamil factions that might allow them to capture the LTTE Supreme Leader. Malli’s photos, a cache of which he keeps hidden from his clients, potentially expose these double dealings as well as the complicity of government ministers in past atrocities.
As an aside the book includes a helpful guide that Maali wrote to a fellow journalist explaining these groups and more and which ends “Don’t try and look for the good guys, ‘cause there ain’t none”.
And Maali’s personal life is as duplicitous and complex as his professional one. He shares a house with Jaki and her cousin Dilan (DD). Dilan is the son of the only Tamil minister in the government. Jaki is ostensibly Maali’s girlfriend, but they are not sexually or romantically involved (despite her seeming wishes) and instead Maali has a hidden sexual relationship with DD (hidden from Jaki to avoid unsetting her and from DD’s father as homosexuality is still largely taboo) while also carrying out a string of casual sexual encounters with men (which are in turn hidden from DD).
Now Maali needs Jaki and DD to find his hidden cache of photos, ones he has always intended to publish in exile but not wants to publish in exile from life – but that risks exposing them to severe danger and him to discovery of the duplicity in his personal life.
The author comes up with an imaginative way of allowing Maali to be both omnipresent but also close to the opposite of omnipotent as he navigates a Colombo which is both the living version and the one occupied by ghosts, which given the violence which has racked Sri Lanka is even more relatively populous than Arthur C Clarke’s quote would employ and of ghosts tormented by the natures of their deaths and lives.
Ghosts in this afterlife can travel wherever their dead body has been (allowing him to trace the grisly disposal of his body) and wherever their name is posthumously mentioned (allowing him and us to travel instantaneously around the various conflicted protagonists involved, implicated on interested in his disappearance at the precise moments they are discussing him).
However the ability of the dead to influence the living is restricted either to (the official approach urged by Dr Ranee) inserting themselves in dreams (this leads to a lovely King and Queen hint to the location of some critical negatives) or by more nefarious means which require involvement with the vengeful spirits which patrol the afterlife (as urged by Sena) – and Maali finds himself (perhaps not surprisingly given his professional and personal life) rather unsuccessfully playing both sides as he decides between moving on and vengeance in a plot which is never less than exuberant and fast moving.
Overall, this is a very striking book – one with a black humour which allows an unflinching look at the horrors of Civil War and one which fits really well on a very strong Booker longlist.
With thanks to the author’s publicity agent for an ARC.
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.
Fascinating for me having started my working career at Cargill and now involved with trade credit, political risk, energy and marine insurance
Max’s reFascinating for me having started my working career at Cargill and now involved with trade credit, political risk, energy and marine insurance
Max’s review here is so comprehensive that additional detail is not really needed but I found this an entertaining, well paced and informative book....more
11th in my 2022 Booker Prize longlist rankings - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https:11th in my 2022 Booker Prize longlist rankings - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CheM3eVML...
It is by one of three authors previously shortlisted for the prize – the others being Karen Joy Fowler and NoViolet Bulawayo. Macrae Burnet – a Scottish writer – was shortlisted in 2016 for “His Bloody Project”.
That latter was a pastiche novel about what is claimed to be a real-life set of murders (in a remote highlands croft in the mid-1800s). Its central novelistic conceit was of the author (noted as GMB) reviewing a series of historical documents and then compiling them into a modern-day non-fiction book. The novel includes the extracts of the journal of the prison surgeon/psychiatrist/criminologist whose role was to assess the sanity of the accused and whether he was fit to stand trial as well as a supposed memoir of disputed authenticity.
Many of these themes carry over into this book – the pastiche, the accusations of murder (albeit a little more tangentially), psychiatry (by contrast much more central here), the author as GMB compiling historical documents into a non-fiction novel, disputed authenticity.
(Note that the author’s other two novels have both a crime and meta-fictional nature – with GMB purporting to be the translator of novels by an obscure French crime writer)
It is also easy to see why this book appealed to this year’s judges – as they seem to have a liking for the pastiche and for books which play around with the concept of fiction itself – most noticeably with “Trust”. In that book in particular I think that the judges are perhaps over-influenced by the nature of the book rather than by its successful execution – a literal and literary prioritisation of form over substance (“Glory” would to be another example where the concept is better than the execution).
The novel’s origins began with a post the author made to his own website (and also posted to Goodreads)
in which he talks about his fascination with psychiatric case studies which began with Robert Lindner’s seminal “The Fifty-Minute Hour” (T) and then talks about two more obscure books he discovered in Glasgow’s chaotic Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop (T): Ways to Psychic Health (1944) by Alphonse Maeder (T) and Untherapy (1965) by A. Collins Braithwaite (F).
We are told that Braithwaite was influenced heavily by RD Laing, often seen as leader of the “anti-psychiatry” movement and his book “Divided Self” (T) and that:
Braithwaite was born in Darlington in 1925 and, from the scant information available, appears to have had a brief period of celebrity in the mid-1960s
If there is a recurring theme through the cases he presents though, it is that his clients are traumatised not by their eccentricities themselves, but by the stress of concealing them; of being forced to present different personae to different audiences. Braithwaite’s remedy is to embrace the idea of ‘being several’ (a phrase he uses repeatedly): to give up the idea that one persona is any ‘truer’ than any of the others. Once one has thrown off the idea of a ‘hierarchy of selves’ one can happily be whoever one wants, whenever ones wants.
Subjecting oneself to therapy from Braithwaite must have been terrifying. Reading about it is tremendously entertaining.
In the Preface to the book GMB, writing in April 2021, tells us how based on this blog post, he was approached by a “Mr Martin Grey” (an admitted pseudonym) of Clacton-on-Sea with a series of notebooks written by his cousin which he thinks GMB might want to turn into a book as they contain allegations about Braithwaite.
As GMB is currently working through an “archive” of materials about Braithwaite (little to be found on the internet he resorts to paper) he has been contemplating a biography but found little interest from his ageng and publisher in the tale of a “forgotten and disgraced character whose work had been out of print for decades”.
Reading the notebooks – which he on balance believes to be contemporary and genuine although noting clear mistakes – he decides to publish them interwoven with his own biography of Braithwaite.
The notebooks are by an unnamed woman whose sister Veronica committed suicide two years before she wrote the book – she believes due to her consulations with Braithwaite, something she only realises after reading a copy of “Untherapy” and realising the penultimate case study is about a lightly fictionalised Veronica (a case study included in her notebook from a ripped out First Edition of the book) before then reading its controversial predecessor “Kill Your Self”.
The woman decides to find out more about Braithwaite but not in her current virginal persona (unlike he adventurous and intellectually brilliant late Sister, she prefers the company of her widowed father – her mother having died in odd circumstances – and staying largely at home, albeit her imagination is feverish) – and so adopts an alternative persona of Rebecca Smyth, a sexually-confident habituee of the theatrical scene but struggling with a maladie.
Braithwaite we learn is something of an enfant terrible but one struggling for a direction. But then influenced by and interacting with the angry young men scene (for example having a confrontation with Colin Wilson – author of “The Outsider” (T)), he reinvents himself (a very common theme in the book) and becoming the centre of a group at Oxford where he is famed for his unrestrained sexual advances, courting a woman who rejects his crude advances by pretending to be someone else writing to criticise Braithwaite (again note the common themes) before growing to fame with “Kill Your Self” (F)
He describes this new way of being as ‘schizophrening’. As the decade wore on, this would become an idea perfectly in tune with the be-whoever-you-want-to-be mood of the time, and copies of Kill Your Self would be soon found in the back pocket of every student and bar-room philosopher. ‘Phrening’ (or sometimes ‘phreening’) passed into beatnik argot, and the slogans ‘Don’t be yourself: phree yourself!’ or the more succinct ‘Don’t be: phree!’ were graffitied on the walls of university campuses up and down the land. The concept also gave rise to the short-lived Phree Verse movement in which often acid-fuelled performers channelled their various selves into a spiralling cacophony, until the different personae melded into one incomprehensible but ‘authentic’ stream of consciousness. Ironically, more than one participant in these happenings would later find themselves recovering in psychiatric facilities.
He then establishes tentative consulting practice and then becoming a successful therapist after Dick Bogarde (T) took his advice and recommend him to friends (one of Braithwaite’s contentions is that both actors and homosexuals have to be used to playing different roles), taking increasing sexual liberties with his clients before later suffering from a major scandal due to his involvement with a famous actress Jane Gressingham (F).
The author of the notebooks ranges first over her back story (we learn for example of a diary she kept for 2 years which she faked so as to reassure her mother – faked accounts are of course a key theme) and we quickly gather that she is both an unreliable narrator and rather self-deluded.
If anything her sections seem a little too naive. The author has in interviews said he read copious copies of the “Women’s Journal” (T) to understand “the language and attitudes of the time” but whether that is a great source I am less clear. However the author does get around this by the narrator making it clear she is very influenced by that same journal and wishes to be regularly published there which then implies she might aspire to the same style for her notebooks and of course fits a book about adopting identities.
She is rather exaggeratedly adrift of the swinging sixties and so increasingly relies on the persona of Rebecca to enable her to function out of her comfort zone. She becomes slightly obsessed with another of Braithwaite’s clients (the glamorous Susanna Kepler) and Braithwaite himself – and increasingly over time Rebecca takes her over, most amusingly in a scene where the two openly argue in front of a man that Rebecca is trying to seduce.
The book ends with a “Postscript to the Second Edition” in which GMB outlines the correspondence he received after Autumn 2021 publication claiming various errors in the notebooks (the acknowledgements end “Finally, my sincere thanks to David Holmes for invaluable legal advice. Any errors in the sections on Collins Braithwaite are entirely down to me. As to the remainder of the text, any inaccuracies beyond those already noted are the responsibility of the author of the notebooks.”) and how concerned to verify the authenticity of the notebooks finally arranges to meet the person who sent them to him.
Overall I found this a much better executed pastiche than “Trust” albeit the book was far from my favourite on the longlist because I am not sure it really followed through on its promise. Both sections are initially very entertaining and the reader is also intrigued where each of them will go and how they will converge …. and the answer to all three questions appears a little underwhelming.
Compared to “His Bloody Project” I think many readers will be far less interested in the rather deluded sixties-scene compared to an 1800s Highland croft – and we do end up reading for most of the book about a rather obnoxious man, filtered for half the book through the eyes of a rather odd woman. Nevertheless this was an enjoyable read while not one that I think merits a shortlist place (particularly given the author’s previous recognition).
“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball or whatever they do now. Twitter?”
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – one of only 4 of the 13 books I had not read pre-longlist.
As with the inclusion of the veteran English author Alan Garner – the longlist seems like an overdue recognition of an influential, prolific, versatile but often overlooked literary author.
Percival Everett’s books have since 2019 been published in the UK by Influx Press – an independent publisher based in North London who I first came across in 2018 when they were the winners of a book prize I helped judge (the Republic of Consciousness Prize) for Eley Williams “Attrib.”. The author has said “My agent said they’re a small press doing good things and that sounded good to me; I like a cheque as much as anyone else, but I’d rather then books have a good life” – and one hopes this deserved longlisting will lead to a decent cheque for author, publisher and agent.
If I did have a disappointment with this book it is that it seems less experimental than what had always intrigued me about what I had heard of Everitt’s other work, for example: the multiple embedded narrative styles of “Erasure” albeit retaining the same idea of genre parody; the cinematic plot mirroring of “I am Not Sidney Poitier” albeit this book does read like its own film script; the story inside a story inside a story of “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell” albeit this book perhaps more admirably voices the story of those that history and racism has tried to erase; the three different plot versions of “Telephone” albeit retaining the idea of loss and grief, albeit here funneled in the direction of retributive justice. But this relative lack of experimentation does increase the book’s accessibility which I think was a key for the author in his conception of this novel.
And if I had one other reservation it is that it feels very USA-focused for a UK Book Prize – I felt the book only confirmed my biases rather than confronting them.
This book is effectively a very hard hitting, explicit and directly confrontational expose of the USA’s violent and racist 20th Century history of lynching – one that the author explicitly links to more contemporary police shootings of non-whites, but smuggled in undercover inn a wrapper of a novel which uses humour, stereotyping and also the genre conventions of a detective novel in an extremely effective way to draw readers into something they would otherwise shy away from. The author has said:
It would be very easy to write a dark, dense novel about lynching that no one will read; there has to be an element of seduction. Humour is a fantastic tool because you can use it to get people to relax and then do anything you want to them. The absurdity of the inattention to the subject was the driving force of the comedy, but the novel lives as much in turning around stereotypes as it does in revealing the truth of lynching. I’m happy to say I’ve [annoyed] a lot of people for my stereotyping of the white characters. Someone in an interview [objected] and my response was: “Good, how does it feel?” When I started the book, I said to my wife [the writer Danzy Senna], “I’m not being fair to white people”, and then I said, well, f.. it: I just went wild.
The novel opens in Money, Mississippi – the real life location of the abduction, torture and lynching of the fourteen year-old black boy Emmett Till by Roy Bryant and his half brother JM Milam after he spoke to a white grocery story proprietor Carolyn Bryant (Roy’s wife). Emmett’s tragic death acted as a catalyst of the civil rights movement not least due to his mother’s brave decision to hold an open top coffin so that her son’s mutilated and bloated face could be viewed. The two murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
The book provides information for readers unfamiliar with the history – this was actually aimed at US readers (the author has commented “America has a great talent for hiding its own transgressions”) but is extremely useful for non-US readers as if one had a criticism of what is a very strong Booker longlist it is the unfortunately perennial one that it has too many books which assume a familiarity with US society, culture and history.
As an aside and to show the topicality of the book (even on top of the very explicit Black Lives Matter link the book draws to recent police shootings of unarmed black men – e.g. Maurice Granton in 2018) - only in 2022 was lynching finally made a federal hate crime (something under discussion for more than a century) when Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
Returning to the novel – the book opens with Granny C (who is in fact Carolyn Bryant), her son Wheat and his wife Charlene at a family gathering which also includes her nephew Junior Junior – the son of JW Milman.
Both are shortly after in turn found hideously murdered – with barbed wire wrapped around their neck, their face attacked and with them bloodily castrated. More oddly each body is found next to a dead (and in appearances long dead) black man with a mutilated and bloated face, and holding their testicles in his hands. Even more oddly the black man is the same in both cases – the black body disappearing after each murder and even more oddly as Granny C realises immediately and others a little later, the body looks the same as that of Emmett Till.
The murder baffles the bumbling incompetent and casually racist local police force and authorities – all of whom have deliberately satirical names (Sherriff Red Jetty for example based on redneck, Reverend Cad Fondle, Delroy Digby, Braden Brady) and the (I think fictional) MBI (the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations) are called in sending two of their operatives to Money later joined by an FBI operative.
These out of town policemen are black (the topic of whether blacks should or should not serve in inherently racist organisations is a recurrent debate in the novel), named deliberately conventionally – Ed Morgan and Jim Davis – and run verbal rings around the local prejudiced whites while still struggling to work out what is going on.
In Money they befriend Gertrude (who goes as Dixie for tips) a waitress in the local eating place Dinah (named by Delores whose catfish cooking is at least a little better than her spelling). Later she takes them to meet Mama Z – a black centurion whose father was lynched in 1913 and has made it her lifetime work to compile a written archive of lynching victims “you should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings”.
Gertrude has also invited a college friend – Damon Thruff, an academic genius wth PhDs in molecular biology, psychobiology and Eastern philosophy who the University of Chicago have placed in the Department of Ethnic Studies as “they didn’t know where to put him” and denied tenure as being too productive – to both meet Mama Z and to look into what is happening.
From there things rather spiral out of control – as first a string of copycat, equally brutal and similarly set piece murders (all it seems delayed retributive justice) spreads not just across Mississippi but the South and wider USA - even the White House proves not to be immune - and then with what seems like vengeful armies of dead Black and of Chinese bodies carrying out some retributive mob killings. Later. Note that the book was initially inspired by the author hearing the country singer Lyle Lovett pair “Ain’t No More Cane” with “Rise Up” and decided to write a book about the dead victims of lynchings rising up – and this latter part is as close as the book comes to his preliminary but discarded idea of a zombie book.
The attacks with their similar but slightly different gory detail can feel a little repetitive and is if the author has not found a way to really move the story on (other than to simply turn things up more and more) but of course this impact is very deliberate and is mirrored in Thruff’s reaction as he reads Mama Z’s archives:
What was most unsettling was that they all read so much alike, not something that one wouldn’t expect, but the reality of it was nonetheless stunning. They were like zebras, he thought—not one had stripes just like any other, but who could tell one zebra from another? He found it all depressing, not that lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.
As the book progresses we do get some insight into the perpetrators of the initial attacks – although even they are baffled and worried by the wider and wider spread. And through the eyes of the three detectives, with their easy humour, measured observations and confident banter – we also see the dilemma of understanding the need for justice while still being appalled at the methods implied.
The author has said of the real lessons of the book that “there’s a distinction to be made between morality and justice: justice might not always feel moral to us, and that’s a scary thought”
There is also an incredibly powerful section where Thruff simply lists the names of the real life lynching victims compiled by Mama Z – ending with Maurice Granton. I would really recommend readers at this stage to pause reading and spend some time picking names and googling the victims and their stories as a matter of respect and to really gain an understanding of the true nature of the genocide.
Overall I found this an impressive read. The book is extremely easy to read with short episodic chapters and copious snappy dialogue but also very hard to read with its subject matter – and the combination somehow works....more
‘What’s amiss?’ said Joe. ‘I’ll tell you what’s amiss. I shall. I shall that. You come here, you and your box and your pots and your donkey stone, and fetch in enough to make me frit to death. You’re on about bones and all sorts; and then you’re off, some road or other, and I can’t tell where I am. I’ve got a pain in my eye. I can’t see proper. And I go down the bog and get stuck; and this chap with no clothes on and a daft silly hat, he sits up in the water and he makes no more sense than you do. He says I’ve got glammeritis, and then Stonehenge Kit, he’s gone, and so’s my best dobber; and Whizzy’s with a Brit Basher and they’re after Kit and the mirror’s all wrong then he’s back in the picture.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – one of only 4 of the 13 books I had not read pre-longlist, and one from an 87 year old author for whom my knowledge did not previously extend much past his name and role as a part children’s, part adult’s author.
The book’s epigraph is from the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli translated “Time is ignorance” from his “The Order of Time” and (as Garner has explained in interviews) was inspired by a conversation with another theoretical physicist – his friend Bob Cywinski. The conversation started with the two discussing the differences between the observable physical universe of the latter and Garner’s ideas emerging from (as it were) nowhere – but the next day leas to Cywinski telling Garner about a local character: Walter Helliwell known as Treacle Walker – an eccentric tramp “able to cure all things except jealousy” which sparked Garner into thinking about treacle’s Middle English etymology as a medicine used by apothecaries/herbalists.
From there Garner seems to have thought more on the concept of time and the falseness of a linear, progressive view: “My [physicist] friend has read [the novel] and he says that he’s seen his subject through a novelist’s eyes and that, for him, it’s a new vision of quantum physics. It’s not; I’ve not done anything except look in a different way at different states and put them into a story where time collapses, and the whole thing takes place in no time – or, rather, not in time as we see it.”;
And then to have bought in ideas from:
His own life - particularly and most obviously his childhood – many of the ideas seem to be drawn from his recent childhood memoir “Where Shall We Run To?”, but also I think on the prospect of death (one of course close to him given his age but which was always present – hence the idea of time collapsing – given his childhood illnesses).
His lifelong study of (particularly but not exclusively – particularly in this book - British and Irish) folklore, legend, song and literature: examples I was able to identify – and I think there are many many more – and some of which are important to understanding the plot and others of which simply lend a few words of vocabulary included: the Welsh legend “Mabinogion”; hillside chalk horses; Samuel Johnson’s nonsense play “Hurlothrumbo”; Dr Robert’s Poor Man’s Friend Ointment from the early 1800s; the Grimm Brother’s “The Singing Bone”; the traditional mummers play “Pace Egg”; George Borrow’s “The Bible In Spain”; the Bonnacon from Medieval Bestaries; Native North American bone divination; the Irish mythological concept of a “thin place” between the physical tangible world and the “otherworld” of dreams and of the crane-skin magical possession bag, the “corr bolg”; bodies ceremonially buried in the bogs – like Tollund Man; the Finno-Ugric concept of the psychopomp or “conductor of souls” to the other world;
His lifetimes work “It brings together everything I’ve written, in 15,000 words.” – I suspect this book contains copious easter eggs for readers of Garner’s wider oeuvre
English colloquial language (squiffy, blinking heck, twitting, daft as a brush, tickety-boo, taradiddles) and traditions (a good knowledge of rag and bone men as well as marbles taxonomy is a useful adjunct to reading) of a certain age
Thresholds, boundaries and liminal imagery - doorsteps, mirrors, woods and bogs - What was in is out. And what was out is in.
And (linking nicely to the author’s own childhood and one of the early influences on his imagination) the British comic “Knockout” and particularly the strip “Stonehenge Kit The Ancient Brit” and his enemy “Whizzy the Wicked Wizard” and his “Brit Bashers” (note that I suspect in the hands of most literary fiction authors – particularly those under 60 – this would be a heavy handed allusion to Brexit or Boris Johnson – here refreshingly I do not think it is).
In terms of the plot – and there is just about some in this allusion and idea-filled novella, the book opens with ostensibly a convalescing young boy Joe Coppock (although I think Joe could equally be someone at the end of their life or both really as this is a book where time is collapsed) who marks his time by a daily midday train Noony. He has his house visited by a riddling rag-and-bone man Treacle Walker who in exchange for his ‘jamas and a bone from his treasure collection gives him a donkey stone (marked with a ancient horse - as shown on the book’s cover) and leaves a jar of ointment. Joe also plays a bone flute which seems to summon a cuckoo (but later turns out to have had wider impact). Joe wears a patch on one eye but starts to realise his bad eye can see things his good eye cannot – and is told by a bog dwelling man – Thin Amren - that he has a form of second sight. Thereafter Joe finds his ostensible day life, his dreams and the world of his comic book heroes merging and overlapping – and perhaps only late in the book really understands both his fate and destiny.
Overall I found this a fascinating addition to the longlist – one where I think many readers (particularly non-English readers) will I think understandably struggle with accessibility, but one that I really loved.
It is both temporally ambiguous and meticulously detailed and that itself (like so much of the book) links back to Rovelli’s book the first two sections of which are The Crumbling of Time and The World Without Time and the third of which (from a Wiki summary) argues that “the apparent flow of time is due to the inability to observe all the microscopic details of the world”.
Like many of the best books, but particularly appropriately here, this novella reminded me of my lifelong love of reading (from childhood to late 50s) and, again particularly appropriately, it also reminded me of how the best books take you out of time and place – making you simultaneously the child reading a book in bed and the adult using literary fiction – however apparently cryptic - to help to make sense of the world.
‘Fair do’s. Treacle Walker?’ ‘Joseph Coppock.’ ‘What is it you want for you? What is it you want most? For you. Not some wazzock else.’ ‘Never has a soul asked that of me.’ ‘What’s the answer?’ Treacle Walker leaned his head against the timber behind him and looked up into the stack. ‘To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Oblivion. Home.’ ‘That’s not daft.’ ‘It is everything.’
The impulses behind such amnesia are easy to understand. There have been many stages in educating myself about British empire when I have wanted to
The impulses behind such amnesia are easy to understand. There have been many stages in educating myself about British empire when I have wanted to look away. When reading about … Captain Cornelius Hodges, a man who worked for the Royal African Company in the Gambia area and who, when his African wife had given birth to a black baby, accused her of committing an infidelity and crushed the infant in a mortar and fed it to dogs,"' I have longed to do something else instead. I love my country and want to believe the best things about it. If I found nostalgic BBC2 programmes about the Indian railways soothing, I would have happily watched them instead. But the problem is, if you don't face up to these uncomfortable facts, you'll never be able to navigate a path forwards. Freudian psychoanalysts believe that if you deny or repress a traumatic experience, you risk acting out versions of the original trauma in ways that can be self-defeating. If we don't confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we want to be.
A very easy to read (almost popular history) non-fiction account of Britain and its Imperial past, whose effective argument is that without understanding that past and how much the legacy of Empire is so bound up in all aspects of British culture (our museums full of cultural artefacts looted from around the world, our attitudes to immigration and emigration, our food, our educational establishments, our manufacturers, our cities and our large financial services industry, our external relations, our internal politics, our great houses etc) then we have no real way to understand our national identity and to then decide how to shape it going forwards. The author’s fundamental suggestion is for an honest reckoning of Imperial history to be embedded in the educational system.
The author is very open, that as (or possible even as) a Wolverhampton born Sikh his own knowledge of empire was very limited and that was what largely lead to the research for the book which then further inspired by BLM. Of an earlier documentary he made (on the Jallianwala massacre in 1919) he comments: When I made my documentary some people were surprised that I was surprised... One TV reviewer wrote: ‘It feels like a genuine revelation to Sanghera that the British Empire is, as he describes it, “an exercise in institutional racism”. Don’t many of us know this?’
And I think if there is an issue with this book it is that many people interested enough to read it – on the full spectrum from defenders of the Empire looking to be offended, to opponents looking for arguments to bolster their views – will probably find little new here and again be surprised that say the author is surprised at the number of Indian origin words in the English language (Bungalow – really, who knew) or that New York was obtained by the English in a colonial trade with the Dutch). However perhaps I am being unfair as the book is implicitly aimed at those unaware and as educational.
The book is largely well balanced I found - the author is very open on say the difficulties in really assessing the economical impacts of the empire on Britain or India.
The only time I perhaps felt the balance went wrong is a chapter on politics which becomes too partisan – for example quoting Britain having the highest death rate in Europe from COVID (in a book with 30 pages of references there is none for this – which is perhaps not suprising given it is complete nonsense: interestingly this speaks to a wider issue with the book that it itself assumes a level of British exceptionalism – the imperial pasts and racism of other countries receive very little mention). Similar there is a bizarre quote (in a book which seems to take Boris Johnson’s bluster at face value and does not seem to have much humour) on the idiosyncracies of Britain’s permanent UN Security Council seat “despite boasting only a fraction of China's population, a mere portion of Russia's surface area, a slice of the USA's economic might and a smidgen of France's culinary capabilities”.
He is also perhaps a little too keen to explain as much as possible via the Empire (something which becomes almost tautological at times given it was such a big part of Britain’s past). At others a little too all encompassing e.g. the British love of cosmopolitan/exotic food and the British conservatism with food are not only both held to be true but both held to be due to Empire, and at others ignoring all other aspects of the past – for example the UK’s role on (or in some places beyond) the fringes of the Roman Empire or the Reformation and how it influenced England re both apparently of little consequence for Brexit compared to the role of the East India Company.
But overall I found this a worthwhile and flowing read – and one I would certainly recommend to others....more
The things women do for the sake of their daughters. The things women don't. The shame of it all. The shame of her daughter's rape, the shame of her husband's violence, her nephew's psychopathy.
She had raised their daughters the best she could without his help. Raised them to ensure that they always provided for themselves, never relied on the whim of a man, because how far would a Black woman get with that.
This novel, recently shortlisted for the inaugural Waterstone’s Debut Fiction Prize, is a non-linear three-generational but always easy to follow celebration of black womanhood – in the face of both white racism and black male violence (but the latter largely caused by poverty, racism and military PTSD). The author has described the latter part of the book as a satire, when criticised for her portrayal of black men (and see below – she has not reacted well to criticism), but I am not really sure I quite saw that – although I can see that the book was political in conception (the author has spoken at it being inspired – if that is the word – by the racist undercurrent of the MAGA movement).
It is also I think partly a celebration of Memphis – although for me the City came across as a nightmare.
The book is also at least partly autobiographical – the author being from a military family background and her grandfather being the first black homicide detective in Memphis later found murdered (widely to believe to have been lynched by his own colleagues) – which is the fate of the family patriarch in this novel – Myron - in 1955.
The novel is told in third person by Hazel (Myron’s wife), Miriam and August her two daughters and in first person by Joan (Miriam’s oldest daughter). Joan’s sister Mya is the only female member of the tight family group not to have her own chapters, while the other key characters are Miriam’s husband Jaxson (who serves in the Marines including in the Gulf) and Derek August’s son.
The book opens in 1995 – the deterioration of Jax and Miriam’s marriage (due to his affairs and violence) leads to him hitting her after she (partly inadvertently) humiliates him at a regimental dinner and returning to Memphis with 10 year old Joan and 7 year old Mya, to immediate tension with the fifteeen year old Derek, now home on a form of parole and shortly to fall in with a local gang – the tension we quickly learn due to the fact that Derek assaulted the infant Joan 7 years before (an incident which contributed to the tension in her parent’s marriage).
The 30+ sections then range as far back as 1937 (when Hazel was 16) and as far forward as 2003 (when Derek’s gang involvement leads to his imprisonment).
What ultimately for me really rather detracted from the novel (which is very strongly conceived and well if not spectacularly written) was the rather high levels of melodrama – it feels like all the characters are permanently moving from one crisis to another in a way which took this away from the level of literary fiction and closer to soap opera, while also diluting the impact of the individual events.
While of course having the lynching is pivotal to the book (and autobiographical) I think also having (and I am sure I have missed some examples): one character raped by another – as an infant; one character perpetrating a bodged gang murder which leads to the murder of a child; one character having lead a squadron into the mass murder of some children in a military action was far too much. And while it is of course completely reasonable to have sections where we see the characters impacted by the assassination of Martin Luther King and the attacks of 9-11 (after all who was not impacted by those seismically terrible events) why, given the excess of drama already present have a side character assasinated quickly after King, and another two in the very centre of the attack on the Pentagon.
One other comment – Joan finishes the book with a life changing opportunity to move to England, one she claims as her destiny and causes her to reflect on her namesake Joan of Arc: it was harder for me to think of a historical character less suitable for inspiration for seeing England as a redemptive promised land of opportunity.
And I cannot let a review of the book pass without remarking on the author’s ill-advised attempts to criticise Instagram and other reviewers who did not fully like her book – for example this following a 4 star (!!) review: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abGz0B_...
Touching its corners, I thought then about all that had passed in the eight years since we arrived in Memphis. The eighteen-hour drive in a busted-out van. The screaming matches with Mama every time I opened my sketchbook. Derek. Seeing himagain and being so stricken with fear that the piss just came. I remembered the night Derek was arrested. Auntie August, beside herself, muttering that a Black woman would never know the meaning of freedom. And I realized then that even my auntie could be wrong. Because I knew it now. Freedom. As God as my witness, it tasted just like one of Mama's warm blackberry cobblers.
10th in my 2022 Booker Prize longlist rankings - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https:10th in my 2022 Booker Prize longlist rankings - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChbeUjxs1...
"I don't know." I tell her, and I really don't. Telling her would have been like saying this is my life now, like committing to the streets. Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. I wanted the streetlight brights, the money in the morning, not the back alleys. Not the sirens. But, here we are. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun's out.
To write an accomplished literary novel at the age of 19 is an impressive feat. For it not to be (as one might thing) autobiographical but instead based on a real life example of insitutionalised misconduct (here by the Oakland Police Force) and aimed at giving a voice to the voiceless victims even more so. But to do that with such an originality of phrase and language in a way which not just gives that voice (here a seventeen year old) a level of articulation, but also effectively confronts the structural sexism by disassembling conventional writing is I think close to astonishing.
The book’s protagonist is Kiara Johnson. Her father was later in life a Black Panther, stitched up by the police and jailed he died of undiscovered cancer some time after his release. Her devastated mother is in a halfway home on parole after an attempted suicide which followed the drowning of Kiara’s baby sister due to neglect. Kiara’s older brother – who initially committed to looking after her – has instead focused all his efforts on an attempt to break through as a rapper, his and his friends lack of talent leading them instead to increasing involvement in crime. Kaira is also babysitter and effective care giver to a 9-10 year old Trevor – the largely abandoned son of a junkie in her flat.
The book opens with Kiara receiving a notice of a huge hike in the rent she and her brother can already not cover – and struggling to make any headway with a job, she drifts into prostitution and from there to servicing a group of policemen (anonymous to her and us and only known by their badge numbers) at a series of parties.
When one of the policemen commits suicide and names his guilt over his treatment of her in his note – a major misconduct enquiry kicks off, but this only makes Kiara’s life harder as the police force closes ranks to protect its own and to discredit her testimony in front of a Grand Jury and both her brother and Trevor are swept up in the aftermath.
As an aside the book opens with an excrement filled swimming pool – which made me worry we had an other Ottessa, more Moshfegh – but that was far from the case, Leila Mottley is a much more accomplished writer, and the pool rather than gratuitous scatology is instead a recurring and important image in the book – representing a sense of frustrated and fouled up freedom and friendship.
So why not a five star review. Well to be honest the voice did not really quite work for me. I always have a slight issue with novels where the writer is from a more privileged educational background than their protagonist and yet gives that protagonist an unusual eloquence. But I think the larger issue here is that the book seems to permanently be dialled up to a 10 and unlike Nigel Tufnel and his famous Marshall amplifier (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4v...) it leaves her with no where to go to add additional emphasis.
And perhaps as a corollary to this – for a novel which is largely around getting us into the head of a memorable narrator, I felt myself always slightly distanced from her, the author at times I think favouring phraseology over clarity.
But overall while far from flawless, this is I believe the first novel of what will be a famous and fresh new voice in fiction, and worth reading for that alone....more
Maggie - writing is no cure for insomnia, though it is, I suppose, a use for it. When I started all this, still reeling from the letter, threads of
Maggie - writing is no cure for insomnia, though it is, I suppose, a use for it. When I started all this, still reeling from the letter, threads of panic in my chest, I wanted ... what? To get in my side of the story before they got in theirs? One more, one last go at making sense of it all? I think for the last couple of years, I’d almost given up on that, making sense of it, and was having a go at living. The letter changed all that. It was like hearing in the middle of the night some small sound - a shifting, a cracking - and knowing at once it's the noise of the house about to collapse. So I’m trying to get things down before the chimney comes through the ceiling, though I notice now how hard it is to say anything without saying everything. Words have shadowy roots tangled around the roots of other words. Pull up one and you pull up twenty more.
The 9th novel from an author who has been Booker shortlisted (with “Oxygen”) and who has won the Costa Novel and Book of The Year awards (with “Pure”) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards (with his debut “Ingenious”).
I have previously read only his 8th novel “Now We Shall Be Entirely Free”.
That was a Napoleonic era story about a traumatised British soldier returning to a Somerset home after service in Spain seemingly haunted by something he saw or did in the war, and which takes place against the background of an enquiry in Spain about those British Army actions.
This is a modern era story about a traumatised British soldier returning to his Somerset home afetr service in Northern Ireland seemingly haunted by something he saw or did in the war, and which takes place against the background of an enquiry in Belfast about those British Army actions.
So the links are clear but I have to say that I far preferred this book as I felt its predecessor was consciously too much of an “energetic adventure story” that the author said was the type he loved as a boy;
Returning to “The Slowworm’s Song” and just a comment on the title. As an Epigraph makes clear it is from a line in Basil Bunting’s modernist poem Briggflatts (which line is referenced in the novel): “So he rose and led home silently through clean woodland / where every bough repeated the Slowworm’s song.”. The author has said “It was just right. There’s just something in that little scrap of verse from a long, long poem, which gave a suggestion of coming free through something”
Unusually (I think) for the author the book is written in the first person – and the narrator is Stephen Rose writing (we will return to that) some time in (I would guess) the late 2010s. Stephen’s father was a Quaker, but at age 16-17, Stephen decided to join the army and in 1982 when on a four month tour of Belfast, was involved in an incident. Now he has been asked by an independent Commission which is examining the events of 1982, if he will testify at one of their sessions.
When Stephen was bundled back by the Army to England and discharged with no action taken, he lapsed quickly into alcoholism and although he had a daughter Maggie by his partner Evie – Evie and he split over his drinking and a prison sentence for drug dealing, and eventually Evie decides to cut all ties with him. How many years later, he (now a struggling recovering alcoholic) and Maggie (who has moved back to Somerset) have established a tentative relationship.
Stephen works at a garden centre, sees a consultant for his serious liver problems, attends the local Quaker meetings where a number of the elders keep an eye on him, and has a slightly odd (to him) friendship with the owner of a local family Undertakers, a woman of a similar age rumoured to be involved with the National Front.
The conceit of the book is that – following the receipt of the letter from the Commission Stephen starts to write daily jottings in a note pad, ostensibly addressed to Maggie (as “you”) but as much (it not more) for Stephen to explore his thoughts and set down both his current life and gradually the suppressed memories that the letter has uncovered – of his time in the army (with the actual incident being approached gradually) as well as how he messed up his role as partner and particularly father.
Later Maggie does read the notes, after an increasingly tormented-by-his-past and his present Stephen lapses back to alcohol and ends up in rehab – and initially this causes real breach between the two as Maggie sees Stephen’s previous withholding of his Belfast past as a lack of trust. If I had a criticism of the book it would be of this conceit – an all too common one in books. I understand that it is a way to get around the artificiality of a first-person novel but here I think the artifice did not work. Stephen has no real identified talents as a writer, all we know of him is a part written attempt at an essay for an OU degree, but the book is not written in any form of simple/toned down form (quite the opposite – it’s a very literary novel) …….. so how are we meant to view Miller’s assessment of his own crafted novel (one he has says took him many attempts and years to write) – that an ex-soldier struggling with trauma and health issues can write it down almost verbatim?
But that is my only real criticism of a book which is eminently quotable (albeit that quotability only points out the issues with the conceit).
Firstly it is I think a brave writing decision (especially for an author who in his previous book took the safer route of historical fiction) to write a sympathetic portrayal of a British soldier during the Troubles – particularly as it was published close to the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday – and I think on balance this is managed well.
Secondly it is a nuanced exploration of so much; PTSD and alcoholism; how government policy falls on the soldiers of young troops and legally weights on their subsequent lives; the rewriting of guilt and history on both sides of the Troubles; male vulnerability and even suicide – a tragically always topical subject but one largely ignored in literary fiction due not least to its increasing female bias in readership and authors: note that this exploration of male vulnerability is so much better than the “boys own” nature of his previous novel; Quaker practices of silence and self-reflection and weighing of ones actions rather than those of others (a really subtle part of the book); the importance but also the dangers of story telling; guilt and the idea of (to quote the author”) “how do you recover from something you’ve no business recovering from”; how to remake a father-daughter relationships with an adult daughter with no childhood base to build on.
Overall 3.5*
Stephen, she said, we have to be careful not to get trapped by our stories. That's one of the things we can leam. To tell the story differently, even to let go of it completely. To do that for a single minute and see what's in the space we free.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
>
Books:
2022
(193)
Loading...
