Because people who write about Norfolk will always say sky “There is always sky” said my sister “Why mention sky” Then we moved and saw that Sky takes
Because people who write about Norfolk will always say sky “There is always sky” said my sister “Why mention sky” Then we moved and saw that Sky takes up space in Norfolk Important, the sky
This book is I already suspect, despite it being mid January, one of the very best I will read in 2022.
Published late in 2021 it is an absolutely beautiful (in both form and substance) novella length autobiographical free form poem by Jessica Streeting. In 1975 her father, the Reverend Paul Farnham, having been a chaplain at a mental hospital on the outskirts of Oxford, moves his family (wife and two daughters) to the Norfolk country parish of Cawston and its church of St Agnes (http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/caws... with its stunning interior famous most of all for the angels in its hammer beam roofs), as well as (at least for a period while a new vicarage is built) its sprawling vicarage. His move is partly following a dream.
While the children revel in “garden, fields, space ……..and sea and sky” (see opening quote), Jessica’s father throws himself into the parish, organising a choir open to all and acting as an inspiration and mentor to young people (Stephen Fry who writes a moving forward to the book being one example), but tragedy awaits.
The poem is written many years later as the author revisits the church and its neighbouring vicarage where she encounters an angelic robin as she looks back on her time in Cawston and on the events before, during and after the death of her father.
And really the writing is exceptional in the way it revisits unlocked memories and explores grief and mourning – how it was processed in a different age and time and how it still impacts now.
The superbly produced book is published by Propolis – the publishing imprint of the independent Norwich bookshop The Book Hive (the founder of which – Henry Layte - was involved in the publication of “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing” as then co-founder of Galley Beggar). I bought it from another Norfolk independent bookshop – Holt Bookshop.
As a final note, I have a Norfolk barn in the parish of Heydon just a few miles north of Cawston and which now comes under the team Vicar based at Cawston. Every month I receive the Cawston and District Messenger (a parishes magazine) and I happened – after reading the book - to see in the May 2020 edition that the author of this book and her sister joined the Easter 2020 service online in memory of their father in what I think may have been the 40th anniversary of his death
And how do you shout about death in the sea When even a whisper disturbs ……
It is too much We would lose the balance of our minds Without the guard that comes down to protect us We would be flooded Our minds would drown in the sea
One way is writing perhaps? And one way is music. Music endures like Immortal hearts. Golden wires touch our heart strings Speak Unbearable pain-joy And memory Spills from our soles As we sing
From the excellent website http://www.fadensmapofnorfolk.co.uk/i... - “the map was the first large-scale map (at one inch to the mile) of the whole coFrom the excellent website http://www.fadensmapofnorfolk.co.uk/i... - “the map was the first large-scale map (at one inch to the mile) of the whole county and shows the landscape just prior to Parliamentary Enclosure of the early 19th century. Surveyed between 1790 and 1794 the map was published in 1797 in London by William Faden, Geographer to His Majesty. Within 15 years of the map’s publication the extensive commons, heaths and warrens had largely disappeared.”
This 1989 volume gives a good introduction to the map and its production and then proceeds (over a few pages) around the county making remarks both on what the map shows us and in some cases on the likely accuracy or otherwise of the map.
The map itself is produced over around 35 small plates which while meaning that it is easy to look at the detail on each plate does mean that there is very little overview of the whole map (and county) – there is a picture of the county with the position of each numbered plate shown but the subsequent plates are then not numbered. The labelling of the large areas (which I think may be hundreds) are particularly hard to make out.
Nevertheless this was a worthwhile introduction to the map
5* for the map, 3* for the version of it
The website I reference above appears to have a much better reproduction of the map
This is the first volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series of memoirs (later followed by “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real EsThis is the first volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series of memoirs (later followed by “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real Estate”) this was published in 2013, two years after her Booker shortlisting for “Swimming Home”
“Swimming Home” was Levy’s first novel for 15 years – the break it seems largely being down to being a mother of two children, and she struggled for publication of it with major publishers before being picked up by (a then relatively new) crowd funded publisher “And Other Stories” (whose crowd funding subscription model is now hugely successful and alongside many successful books are also well known for their leading the way in the area of diversification - deliberately moving their base out of London and later having a year of only publishing Female authors).
This book is effectively a riposte to George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Reasons Why I Write” and examines over four sections each of his reasons (albeit in a different order): Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism and Aesthetic Enthusiasm.
The first section is largely set in Majorca to which she travels from London after a “spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot”. In London she finds herself crying when standing on up escalators and later becoming obsessed with a poster of the human skeletal system which she misreads as The Societal System – as she realises society is taking her to places she does not want to go. In Majorca she stays at a small and cheap hotel, thinks back on incidents in her life and reflects on the role of women, particularly mothers, in a patriarchal Societal System “fathered by masculine consciousness” as well as arguing against Orwell that “even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that tis robust enough to get her through January, let alone all the way to December”. In addition in this and the fourth section (which returns to Majorca) she interacts with the locals in scenes which reminded me of her fictional writing.
The second section while perhaps simpler in a literary sense (and less reminiscent of her powerful fictional writing) is also the most powerful – an account of her time in South Africa as a young girl after her anti-Apartheid father was arrested and held in prison for four years, something which lead to the author developing a habit of speaking very quietly and then reverting to silence. As Levy said in a recent Guardian interview “It was really about being totally overwhelmed by everything, not believing that my thoughts were in any way valuable to anyone, probably very frightened thoughts, and so I just stopped speaking.”. This section explores how Levy eventually started to rediscover her voice through writing. One of the strengths for me of this section is how Levy as an adult conveys and explores her feelings as a child – in a way which to me seemed both true to the remarkable lived experience of a child but with the literary filter of an adult.
The third section was for me something of a misstep – looking at the author’s life as a teenager in England (where her family fled). For me this failed in precisely the way the second section succeeded being an uneasy mix between a rather cliched diary of a teenager “It was very urgent that I got out of my life”, some rather unlikely slapstick and a clunky analogy about missing lids.
The fourth largely concludes with a line that is key to the book and printed on the cover of some versions of it: "I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.".
Overall an extremely valuable read – thought provoking and beautifully written if a little uneven.
My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin for ARCs (and the other two volumes in the series) via NetGalley...more
When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hati
When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.
This is the second volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series (after “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real Estate”) this was published in 2018, two years after her Booker shortlisting for “Hot Milk”.
Unlike its predecessor – which was four essays only two of which really were concurrent – this is more of a linear autobiographical tale, albeit far from a conventional one as told in a series of fourteen short essays. Nevertheless we start to get a sense of a group of characters around the writer which gives the book at times a novelistic feel.
The book is set in a difficult and pivotal period for the author – her marriage has just broken up, she has sold the family house and moved to a flat with her two teenage daughters, and her mother has recently died. This naturally leads to much reflection on the subject of women’s roles, motherhood, the patriarchy , femininity “as written by men and performed by women”
This book is also set in a year when Levy is starting to write “Hot Milk” and in discussions about a film of her previous (also Booker shortlisted) novel “Swimming Home”. In a meeting with the film executives she is asked to email a list of major and minor characters for her proposed adaption of the book – and this becomes a recurring theme as she examines the idea of major and minor characters in her and other people’s lives and also links this idea to her reflections on society.
There are also copious reflections on the physical and mental process of writing itself – with many quotes from and reflections on the lives of other (mainly female) writers which Levy uses to examine her own personal and literary development.
An excellent edition to great trilogy.
Marguerite Duras suggested in a reverie that came to her from the calm of her final house, a home she had made to please herself, that ‘writing comes like the wind’. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself. The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living
My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin for ARCs (and the other two volumes in the series) via NetGalley...more
Winner of the 2021 Christopher Isherwood (and LA Times) Prize for Autobiographical Prose
I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalt
Winner of the 2021 Christopher Isherwood (and LA Times) Prize for Autobiographical Prose
I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalties to my daughters. In this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass.
This is the third volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series (after “Things I Don’t Want to Know” and “The Cost of Living”), this was published in 2021, two years after her Booker longlisting for “The Man Who Saw Everything”.
The book opens in London in January 2018. The author is approaching sixty and over the last few years has gained a degree of (in modern literary writing terms) commercial success, but it still conscious that compared to writers of previous generations (some of whom bought large houses from their success) or some of her contemporaries (with paid off mortgages and second homes) she lacks a grand old house of her own where she can live and work and write. Instead she builds the house both in her imagination and by starting to accumulate possessions for it. At the same time he real flat is about to become a one person home as her younger daughter sets out for university.
She also reflects on how females – both characters in books and real women, particularly married with children, are in effect written out of their own story – this in turn leads her to reflect on whether women are “real estate owned by the patriarchy”.
And these two themes around different types of real estate interleave throughout the book (whose chapters are set in different cities – London, New York, Paris, Greece, Mumbai, Berlin) giving it perhaps more of a coherence of theme than the first two novels, even while at the same time it has much of the same writing style and underlying themes (motherhood, femininity, the patriarchy, the writing life) and a developing group of characters from the second volume.
Each of the volumes in the trilogy follows two years after one of Levy’s novels and there are links and references in the previous volumes to the relevant novel – but the links to “The Man Who Saw Everything” are much more extensive and explicit here – which I particularly enjoyed as it is my favourite of Levy’s novel and one I read and re-read and discussed at length with Goodreads friends.
When it became clearer to me that the main male character in The Man Who Saw Everything was going to live simultaneously in different points in time, I found that it was so technically hard to melt time in a work of literature, I had to write in all time zones.
To work is to live without dying. Rilke
I was creating a male character who literally was trying to find a way of living without dying. He was running out of time. There were spectres, historical and personal, coming out to play in what remained of his life. He himself would become a spectre three seconds after the very last line in the book. There were spectres in the shadows of my own life too: childhood, Africa, love, loneliness, ageing, my mother, all the unreal estate in my property portfolio.
A wonderful end to an outstanding trilogy.
My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin for ARCs (and the other two volumes in the series) via NetGalley...more
This book was I believe self-published by the author – an Aylsham (in Norfolk) based bookbinder – and it has to be said that the presentational standaThis book was I believe self-published by the author – an Aylsham (in Norfolk) based bookbinder – and it has to be said that the presentational standard of the book: both its binding, and the way in which the contents are set out and illustrated is excellent.
The content to be honest I found rather too idiosyncratic – a historical survey of maritime Norfolk which roughly proceeds from the West of the County to the East but which is both rather brief and rather random in its content and structure.
I bought this edition from the newly re-opened second hand bookshop at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate (likely birthplace of Mary, Anne and George Boleyn) – the largest second hand bookshop in East Anglia and only a couple of miles from Aylsham....more
This is the fifth and (as it turns out) last of the “Book of Psalms Mystery” series – a set of five ecclesiastical crime novels set in the Church of EThis is the fifth and (as it turns out) last of the “Book of Psalms Mystery” series – a set of five ecclesiastical crime novels set in the Church of England and each based around an issue in the church
From the author’s website
Each of those books explores some issue in the Church of England: “A Drink of Deadly Wine” is about ‘outing’, before that term hit the news; “The Snares of Death” deals with the High Church/Low Church divide, and related issues of extremism and fundamentalism; the problems of a cathedral and its battling personnel are detailed in “Appointed to Die”; “A Dead Man out of Mind” focuses on the ordination of women; and “Evil Angels Among Them” explores the consequences of the Church’s financial crisis
The books seem to be hold together by a Wymondham and then London based family solicitor with a strong interest in church architecture - David Middleton-Brown – and Lucy Kingsley, a London based artist – the two having a developing relationship across the books. Albeit even at the start of this book Lucy is still not prepared to commit to marriage and the two are considering moving into separate houses.
I was drawn to the series by “Literary Norfolk: An Illustrated Companion” – as two of them (this and “Snares of Death” are set in my birth and now second-home county of Norfolk).
This one in particular is set in the entirely fictional mid-North Norfolk village of Walston. From what I have read Walston is a deliberate portmanteau of Salle and Cawston – two nearby villages around three miles from my second-home barn and both renowned for their remarkable parish churches: Salle (http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/sall...) for its huge size completely out of keeping with a population of 50, and the much larger village of Cawston (http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/caws...) for its interior including a 15th-century angel roof and painted screen – the church in Walston is effectively almost a fictional replica.
As an aside - the church at Cawston is also the setting for Jessica Streeting's beautiful autobiographical free-verse novella "Sea Change"
The basic plot is that Stephen Thorncroft (mistakenly initially arrested for the murder in “Snares of Death”) and his recent wife Becca (daughter of the murder victim and at the centre of much of the book’s intrigue) have recently moved to the Parish to take over from a much loved single Vicar. As an aside the book seems set around a year after “Snares of Death” which implies that Middleton-Brown and Lucy have had a busy time of mysteries (with whatever was covered in the third and fourth volumes) – Becca also seems very innocent and hard to easily reconcile with the same character in the second book.
The small village and its church is far from welcoming. Stephen seems to be unfavorable compared to his predecessor at every opportunity; Becca is haunted by a series of obscene phone calls and when a lesbian couple Lou (with a daughter Bryony) and Gill move to the village they are close to ostracised by most of the locals (particularly by a pair of sisters – one Enid single, the other Doris married to Ernest, an ex-Churchwarden who seems to think he runs the church).
And the village seems to be a web of intrigue and plotting – particularly after one of the Churchwardens stands down after an unexpected heart attack. The other Churchwarden – Fred, the village store owner and local gossip – is supporting two plans (one to allow a nearby poultry farm and factory to expand on church land; the second to withhold the church’s Quota to the Diocese and keep the money locally) which the standing-down Churchwarden and Stephen largely oppose. Stephen tries to persuade the owner of the local manor house to stand, while Ernest seems to think (with some justification) that the position is in his gift and persuades a local social worker Flora to successfully stand.
Casting around for advice Stephen invites David and Lucy to visit and quickly they find themselves at the heart of a murder mystery again as Flora is found murdered (apparently with a heart attack induced by foxglove/digitalis which was administered when she visited Gill to relutanctly discuss accusations from Enid of child abuse/neglect).
And as in the previous novel, despite being a family not criminal solicitor, David is appointed as Defence solicitor – a role he and Lucy again interpret as being investigative detectives with the mutual assistance of the same sex, alcohol and easy-life loving policeman as in the previous novel.
Compared to that novel the resolution to the mystery here seems a lot more logical and less tortuous – there are various red-herring type plots but these are more resolved as time goes on rather than left for a climatic denouement – with really only a single twist. I think overall that made for a better book. I was also perhaps less disinterested than before in David/Lucy; they do remain far less interesting than the characters in the core mystery but that I think is deliberate and I liked the way that their relationship remained open (even if I think the author had not meant this to be the last in the series and did decide to revisit the characters in a different series).
I also appreciated more this time the Psalm verse epigraphs for each chapter and enjoyed two short but effective talks by Stephen: the first on Matthew 7:16-20 – where he correctly argues that the “fruits” the congregation are showing is hardly fruit that their beloved previous Priest would approve of or that reflects well on him; the second on unclean words from Matthew 15: 8-20 accompanied by a pointed anti-hypocritical reference to Matthew 7: 4-5 (“mote in your own eye”) and John 8:7 (“let you without sin cast the first stone”).
Overall more enjoyable than the last book although not enough to persuade me to re-read the author unless she returns to Norfolk.
This is the second in the “Book of Psalms Mystery” series – a set of five ecclesiastical crime novels set in the Church of England and each based arouThis is the second in the “Book of Psalms Mystery” series – a set of five ecclesiastical crime novels set in the Church of England and each based around an issue in the church
From the author’s website
Each of those books explores some issue in the Church of England: “A Drink of Deadly Wine” is about ‘outing’, before that term hit the news; “The Snares of Death” deals with the High Church/Low Church divide, and related issues of extremism and fundamentalism; the problems of a cathedral and its battling personnel are detailed in “Appointed to Die”; “A Dead Man out of Mind” focuses on the ordination of women; and “Evil Angels Among Them” explores the consequences of the Church’s financial crisis
The books seem to be hold together by a Wymondham and London based family solicitor with a strong interest in church architecture - David Middleton-Brown – and Lucy Kingsley, a London based artist – the two having a developing relationship across the books.
I was drawn to the series by “Literary Norfolk: An Illustrated Companion” – as two of them (this and “Evil Angels Among Them” are set in my birth and now second-home county of Norfolk,).
This book had an intriguing premise for me – a new Conservative Evangelical minister (Bob Dexter) moves in the early 1990s to a small Anglo-Catholic in the (fictional) North Norfolk parish of South Barsham, only a few miles from the real life Marian shrine at Walsingham. There he quickly upsets the traditional locals by removing statues (including one of King Charles II), various Anglo-Catholic paraphernalia and even the pews.
Now the premise was intriguing for me for a number of reasons: in the mid 90s my own home village had a dispute between a Charismatic minister (who wanted to remove the pews to allow for the Toronto Blessing) and the village (who wanted to preserve tradition) which lead to the Church leaving the church building and ultimately two congregations (a missionary one meeting in a purpose builit building and a traditional one meeting in the 14th Century church) with thankfully good relations. I have stayed in the real life Barshams on several holidays (note there is a West, North and East Barsham so the choice was clever). And every time I visit the beautiful North Norfolk Coast at Wells and Holkham we drive through Walsingham where we play a game of “count how many religious figures you can see” – a game to which it is impossible not to score something as the lowest possible answer is “nun”.
Returning to the novel – Bob Dexter’s move is a deliberate one – he wants to take a more prominent role in the Evangelical anti-popery, anti-idolatry protests at the annual National Pilgrimage, protests lead by an organisation run by what is clearly meant to be a Bernard Matthews figure (albeit he factory farms chickens for his drumsticks and has had a religious conversion) – Noah Gates.
The first line of the book makes it clear that Bob Dexter is the murder victim. He is described on the author’s website as a charismatic individual but is portrayed as arrogant, self-righteous and judgmental – in my view very much following in the footsteps of the Pharisees (although I am not aware they referred to themselves routinely in the third person).
And the basic premise of the first two thirds of the book (before Dexter’s murder late at night in his church while he tries to chisel down a Marian statue) is to show quite how many people had a motive to kill him, be it: two High-Church old biddies horrified at the desecration of their shrines and statues; Noah Gates for Bob’s attempts to usurp his power base and for a secret he realises about Noah’s family that would ruin his reputation; his wife subject of his constant bullying and hectoring and still mourning their stillborn first child (who Bob refuses to acknowledge); at least two potential lovers of his previously devoted and virginal but now rebellious daughter (even herself another potential if unlikely killer); a motley crew of animal rights protestors (joined by Bob’s daughter, Noah’s son – rebellion against parental beliefs being a key theme) of varying degrees of fanaticism who are angered both by Dexter’s teaching on man’s dominion and his striking of their dog.
When one of these is arrested for the murder he asks David (who with Lucy already knows some other fringe players in the mystery) to act as his solicitor – which David and Lucy seem to interpret as being investigative detectives – and everything builds to a climax in Walsingham as all of the players converge for the Pilgrimage.
I largely enjoyed the novel – many of the characters are interesting and some of the portrayals strong. I particularly liked Dexter’s wife who turns towards Anglo-Catholicism as she sees in Mary a fellow mother mourning a son.
However I did have a number of reservations: the author seems to have a bias towards a kind of liberal Anglo-Catholicism and as a result the conservative Evangelic figures lack any depth or sympathy of portrayal at all. The final resolution to the murder was from the Ted Rodgers 3-2-1 school or far fetched explanations (and having set up a range of plausible murderers to pick two entirely implausible ones is less a twist than a mistake). And perhaps my biggest issue was that the two continuity characters – David and Lucy – I found just boring.
But “Evil Angels Among Them” is set only a mile or so from my second home – and in a fictional church based on a striking real life one I drive past frequently – so I will read that and see if David/Lucy grow on me and also how versatile the author is in her plots and resolutions....more
I was a disappointed in this book although perhaps should have done more investigation before buying it.
It is billed as “The Essential Companion” to tI was a disappointed in this book although perhaps should have done more investigation before buying it.
It is billed as “The Essential Companion” to the author’s bestselling book on managing transitions as business leader (“The First 90 Days”) which applies the rules of that book to a number of specific challenges:
Promotion Leading Former Peers Corporate Diplomacy – moving from a position of direct authority to one requiring influencing Onboarding – to a new organisation International Moves, Turnaround Realignment (the latter two taken from the STARS framework in the earlier book) Business Portfolio – leading an organisation with a mix across the STARS (start up, accelerate growth and sustaining success being the others) framework
But at least in the chapters I read, a lot of the content was simply a repackaging of some relevant content in the former book. I think there is also the issue that in practice only 1-2 chapters are likely to be relevant for an individual (although the author does argue both here and in the predecessor that many transitions do contain at least two elements)
I think this would have been better if the genuinely additional content had been added to an expanded edition of the predecessor – but I guess there is a business learning here of look-before-you-buy.
The book is I think only really value for money for say libraries of corporate training centres or Executive MBA courses. I think individual readers are better to read all of “The First 90 Days” and make their own decisions on what content is relevant (and how it needs to be adapted) to their own transition....more
There are plenty of other reviews on here which rave about this but as a believer in old fashioned things like fidelity and faithfulness I think I am There are plenty of other reviews on here which rave about this but as a believer in old fashioned things like fidelity and faithfulness I think I am not the target reader for this collection of ultimately really rather repetitive and anti-church short stories about unfaithfulness, adultery, betrayal and so on.
My thanks to Pushkin Press for an ARC via NetGalley...more
I read this book as a result of it winning the 2021 National Book Award (in the United States)
I have to say that I can see very clearly why it won – tI read this book as a result of it winning the 2021 National Book Award (in the United States)
I have to say that I can see very clearly why it won – the National Book Award does seem to have a preponderance for topical/thematic books and this book with its core topic of police violence against black men is both topical and sadly timeless (one of the very points the books is making).
At the same time though the book is imaginative and innovative in a literary sense: with its two interleaved series of chapters which increasingly bleed into each other and in the way in which is it is a novel talking about novel writing. And while that can sound cliched – novelists talking about being a novelist – here it is much more profound. In particularly it addresses how as a black American writer there seems to be a burden placed on the novelist to make a binary choice and either consciously address or consciously not address the black experience in the US (both past and present) in a way that does not happen for a white writer (or if its does goes across a variety of different “elephant in the room” topics and ones which change over time – AIDS, 9-11, Trump, climate change … with race being only one of a range of topics).
And the book manages to be both light-hearted/irreverent and almost twee while at the same time addressing such a serious topic – a tone which is set from early in the first two chapters which set up the alternating storylines (the first a superficially neat third person story about a family who allow their son “Soot” to believe he is invisible as a way of making him feel safe, the second a first party account by an unnamed film-noir-line-cracking author escaping naked from a hotel room after being caught in flagrante by a cuckolded husband).
From there the two storylines initially crystallize.
Soot is a young, very black skinned boy – his parents take the decision to try to protect him from the racism he is already facing on the school bus and more importantly to shield him from knowledge of the institutionalised racism pervalent in the society in which he will grow up, by teaching him to be invisible – something which starts of perhaps figuratively but which quickly becomes literal. Soot sees his father gunned down by a cop in front of he and his Mother, but still seems to be largely shielded from the reality of racism, retreating instead into a world of imagination (including believing his father is still present although dead).
The author is on a book tour to promote his eponymous novel – one which seems to be a huge seller inspiring everyone with its story. The book tour itself is a not particularly subtle satire - taking place against a blur of cities and airports, radio and TV interviews, with a variety of bizarre escorts in different cities, the author largely on autopilot while he wisecracks and sleeps his way around the cities, at the same time under pressure from a manic publicist who senses he has already spent the advance on his unstarted second novel. The first novel itself we come to understand very explicitly does not deal with race (part of its wider appeal) – the author’s father as a child was a brilliant artist but got tied up with guilt over his art only being of white subjects and this guilt seems something the author is determined to avoid. Avoidance seems something of a liefmotif for the novelists life – avoidance of his past (we gradually come to realise the death of his mother from cancer is the core of the novel, but he seems entirely unaware of the reason for his father’s death when he was a child), avoidance of commitment (via wisecracks and casual affairs), avoidance of the news (in particular the police shooting of a black child which everyone else seems to be talking about), avoidance of reality (the author has a condition which makes it hard for him to distinguish reality and imagination – one he is told must stem from a childhood tragedy – one he cannot remember at all). This last point is key to the book as the author is in almost constant dialogue with a young, very dark sinned boy who only he can sense and who seems keen for the author to acknowledge him and his story.
And then almost immediately start to bleed into each other – are the two boys the same, is either of them the novelist, are there any autobiographical elements by Jason Mott himself – and then physically converge as the author’s publicist books him to speak at an event in the home town of the murdered boy, the author’s own home town.
Recommended and a worthy, timely, entertaining while thought provoking winner of the National Book Award.
No rye in Norfolk and no oats to speak of. Just a lot of wheat and barley and sugarbeet. And fresh marsh and salt marsh. This coast of low muddy cl
No rye in Norfolk and no oats to speak of. Just a lot of wheat and barley and sugarbeet. And fresh marsh and salt marsh. This coast of low muddy cliffs and longshore-drift , beaches and estuaries. A flint church every mile or two ….. Samphire, windmills, migratory birds, wide North Sea skies
I came to this book from the “Literary Norfolk: An Illustrated Companion” which lead to me buying a number of second hand literary fiction books set in Norfolk.
This one was published in 1990 by an author born in Norfolk in 1954 although then moving to Japan (where this was written) and Italy.
The book is I think best described as a melancholic almost tragic tale of the lives, loves and unfulfilled yeanings of a family of minor gentry in North East Norfolk, set among a both unchanging and altering world of sailing, horse riding and shooting.
The main family is that of Benedict Dobbell who owns a manor in Morston on the North Norfolk coast and a country house near Tunstead (near the Broads). He is married to Emma (the widower of a Free French fighter pilot Gilles de Nérac killed in the 1950s in the Vietnam war) – the marriage seeming little more than one of convenience for the emotionally and mentally distant Emma. Emma has two daughters – Thérèse (from her first marriage) and Alice (from her second). Thérèse trains in medicine – firstly going to France and then to Asia. Emma deteriorates into alcoholism, then cancer and eventually kills herself by crashing her car.
Alice – desperate for a long time for her father’s affection - falls for Kit Marsh, the college friend of Robert Clabburn the son of the neighbouring farmer to the Dobbell’s. Although Kit is initially lost among the country pursuits and traditions of the Clabburns and overawed by Alice and Thérèse, he is eventually seen by Alice as the more adventurous option and the two move to Italy together (although both seem to love the other more than they love being a couple). When Kit splits with Alice, she returns to Norfolk and drifts into a marriage (with a baby) with Robert who has inherited the family farm. But when Kit returns and Robert sees how much the two still feel for each other he decides to stage a sailing accident to leave Alice to live her own life.
The book itself is set in Norfolk in a series of almost set piece chapters which describe in detail such pursuits as muck-boat racing in Morston Creek, walking out on the mudflats near Wells, shooting of the grounds of farms, horse riding on both the East Coast beaches and in a race at Fakenham
And all of this is imbued with descriptions of the Norfolk countryside, weather and skies (rendered as the title implies in painter like detail) and of the life around crumbling country family properties (complete with dogs, horses, peacocks, small rowing lakes, decaying outbuildings and dusty rooms)
Raw daybreak at the beginning of year. Blood-orange sun clearing lifeless alder carr, glinting on waterlogged field and lawn. Lane fouled by sugarbeet lorries. Winter wheat sprouting green, a covey of partridges feeding.
Overall I found this a very evocative book – perhaps slightly overwritten and also one whose characters I think will have limited appeal to most readers (both due to their lifestyles and their sense of ennui); the best character for me was the Norfolk countryside.
Here the farm land came to an end, joined almost flush against scalloped summer sea. No more wheatfields, woods, villages. No more rivers snaking through water-meadows past headless windmills, down cascades of watermills where decayed wheels hadn't turned for years, past rushy banks over which sails apparently without hulls dragged themselves across lowlands apparently without water. No more churches standing over fens where grebe and bittern breed, where marsh harriers tilt over reed beds, where old vessels along dykes sink at their moorings. No more churches secluded in oaks and alders by their staithes. Here churches were gaunt fortresses against gales; they reared exposed from the last salt-bitten acres.
2022 Goodreads Choice Science Fiction Novel of the Year but also a major highlight of my literary fiction year.
"Is this the Promised End" – Shakespea
2022 Goodreads Choice Science Fiction Novel of the Year but also a major highlight of my literary fiction year.
"Is this the Promised End" – Shakespeare, King Lear
"August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes there had to be one where there had been no pandemic …… or one where they’d been a pandemic, but the virus had a subtly different genetic structure, some miniscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted" - Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
“hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory" – Emily St John Mandel, Glass Hotel
Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 fourth novel – the post apocalyptical “Station Eleven” (dealing with the aftermath of a deadly swine flu pandemic and beginning with an actor dying from a heart attack in a production of King Lear) was already something of a classic (nominated for various literary prizes in US, UK and Canada and winner of the 2015 Arthur C Clarke Science Fiction award) before enjoying a huge resurgence (for obvious reasons) in 2020 (and getting its own HBO mini series in December 2021).
I came to the book in 2020 when I read it back to back with her fifth novel “The Glass Hotel” – read together (and I think it is by far the best way to read them) the novels were simply brilliantly. “The Glass Hotel” in particular, alongside its exploration of capitalism and white collar crime with its pseudo-Madoff plot, is really an exploration of ideas such as shadow worlds, ghost worlds, lost worlds, counter-factual narratives, doubleness, parallel realities: and what really makes the books work so well together is that “The Glass Hotel” is effectively the parallel universe mentioned in the “Station Eleven” quote where the devastating pandemic does not happen, but the global financial crisis does, but with many other links between the novels.
This her sixth novel, to be published later in 2022, is I think best scene as a companion novel to both of its predecessors.
It is set in the “parallel universe” of “The Glass Hotel” – one which at least until 2021 mirrors our own (no Georgia Flu, but a Financial Crisis including the Alkaitis Ponzi scheme and its repercussions) and with explicitly repeating characters (particularly the two wives – Mirella and Vincent – their post crash encounter in “The Glass Hotel” where Mirella refuses to acknowledge Vincent is replayed here from Mirella’s viewpoint).
But it also features a character - Olive Llewelyn – who is an author of a novel “Marienbad” (I assume as a nod by Mandel to the film “Last Year at Marienbad” which per Wikipedia is “famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which time and space are fluid, with no certainty over what is happening to the characters, what they are remembering, or what they are imagining”). For Olive after “three books that no one noticed” her fourth novel pandemic-based dystopian novel (not difficult to see the parallels) suddenly made her feel that she had slipped into a “parallel world ………. a bizarre upside down world where people actually read my work”. That novel (which in one key moment has a character rehearsing a line from King Lear) is now being made into a film so she is touring to promote it – later her book sales take off even more during an actual pandemic. In further self-referentiality Olive, whose first main section of the novel is set during a book tour and the second during a lockdown virtual book tour answers questions about what it is like to talk about a book about a pandemic in a pandemic, how many additional sales she has gathered post pandemic, admits the “scientifically implausible flu” in her novel and is critiqued for the “anticlimactical” death scene of the prophet (all of course explicit allusions to “Station Eleven”).
Now Olive’s book tour takes place in 2203 and while based on the Earth begins from her home on a lunar Colony – because this book even more firmly than “Station Eleven” is a science fiction book, with I have to say a plot that reminds me of Harry Harrison and Dr Who.
The book has a Cloud Atlas type nested structure – and of course it is increasingly clear that Mandel shares much of the same multiverse approach as Mitchell – while perhaps I think exploring the idea with more depth and empathy.
The first part of the book takes place in 1912 – an 18 year old third son Edwin St Andrew St John of a rich and titled English family is exiled (after some uncomfortable remarks about the Empire and his mother’s beloved and much mourned Raj – the first sign incidentally that this is a book about lost and mourned for worlds) to Canada (as a “Remittance man”) where he ends on the Island of Caiette (later of course home of The Glass Hotel – actually called Hotel Caiette). There he has a weird experience in a forest (involving a violin and an inexplicable loud noise) shortly after meeting a mysterious priest – Roberts - with a strange accent.
The action then moves to 2020 – as Mirelle waits outside a concert by Paul (to see what she can find out about his sister Vincent) they are joined by an odd man – Gaspery Roberts – who is keen to find out about a glitch in one of Vincent’s forest-based videos which Paul has set to violin music, and who Mirelle recognises from a traumatic childhood incident.
We then move forwards to Olive’s book tour – and an encounter with a journalist who shares a name Gaspery-Jacques – with a character in Marienbad and who is keen to understand about an odd scene in her novel (which seems to have echoes of Edwin’s trauma and Paul/Vincent’s video – a man playing violin in an airship terminal and a sudden juxtaposition of a forest) – one she admits may have biographical elements.
And then in 2401 we meet Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a hotel detective from the Night City on the moon, who is co-opted into a programme to investigate anomalies in time and we return to each of the previous stories in turn.
Interestingly for me this part contains an interesting reflection on bureaucracy “bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-preservation” which had strong (if controversial) resonances for me of some of the ways in which the UK COVID response has played out. I do not think this was in any way intended but (just as with “Glass House” and “Station Eleven”) it is the strength, universality and topicality of Mandel’s writing that it sets of such unintended resonances.
Olive’s sections start with her literary musings on dystopia and pandemic literature (why one would write it, why readers are attracted to it) in ways which beautifully explore why “Station Eleven” has proved so popular. Later we get extremely resonant reflections on a pandemic – how the world of home can feel like a lost world when one is travelling for work, but how the world of work and travel can feel like a lost world in lockdown.
Overall this is a book which in a science fiction sense moves beyond parallel worlds to explore time travel and the nature of reality against simulation, but which really in an thematic sense (and like all of Mandel’s trilogy of recent books) is much more of a both a love letter to and requiem for our current world, an exploration of belonging, loss, of technology, of relationships, of what provides ultimate fulfillment and where value is ultimately found.
As a standalone novel I am not fully sure how this works (and I do not think it matches the complexity of "Station Eleven") – as part of a body of work it is brilliant.
My thanks to Picador, Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley...more
This book is along similar lines – a collection of written accounts of Norfolk (mainly rural) life compiled by the Norfolk Federation of Women’s Institutes.
This volume though, rather than being specially commissioned, was based entirely on an after the event compilation of entries to a 1970 competition for European Conservation Year and written by NFWI members (who are listed in the back of the book). This does make the book very female focused (my impression was that the other book did include men’s accounts) albeit a small number of correspondents did interview older male relatives. The timescale is also a little earlier (more say 1880 to 1940 - the WWI years feature very briefly) and narrower (with a particular focus on 1900-1910 which seem to dominate the entries).
The book has, even more explicitly than its successor been compiled into themes, and each entry has a location (with a helpful map at the back – albeit I was disappointed to see almost no accounts from either Breckland or the Reepham area).
However the actual entries (at least as reproduced) are much more fragmentary than the essays in the second volume (often say one paragraph rather than several pages) - possibly as a result of the idea of grouping by theme.
An interesting companion – although I think the successor is a much better read....more
A bestselling management book which, nearly 20 years after initial publication (2003) and nearly 10 years since updating and expansion (2013 – this veA bestselling management book which, nearly 20 years after initial publication (2003) and nearly 10 years since updating and expansion (2013 – this version) seems to remain the clear leading book on its core (and largely neglected topic) of managing transitions as a business leader (to a new industry, profession, firm, country, role, level, function etc).
The book is in no ways earth-shattering (albeit there is normally something slightly amiss with a business book which does not largely function to compile and synthesise common sense advice) but is well structured and fairly easy to read in large chunks.
The style will I think be familiar to any readers of the Harvard Business Review (whose press publishes the review) – a few anonymous anecdotes/case studies leading into advice rendered in the form of expanded bullet points and simple charts and diagrams.
The book’s key principles (actually taken from the introduction to a companion volume (Master Your Next Move) are as follows:
1 Accelerate your learning. Efficient and effective learning is a necessary foundation for making a successful transition. The faster you learn about the technical, cultural, and political dimensions of your new position or assignment, the more you'll be able to accomplish in the critical first months.
2. Match strategy to situation. Different types of business situations require you to make significant adjustments in how you approach your transition. A clear assessment of the business situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your transition plan.
3. Negotiate success. You need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new manager (or managers). This means planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, and resources.
4. Achieve alignment. Armed with a deeper understanding of the business situation, your manager's expectations, and the interests of key stakeholders, you can define your vision and core objectives. Then you can develop your strategy to realize that vision and achieve your goals.
5. Build your team. Like most leaders taking on a new role, you probably don't get to build your own team; instead, you inherit your predecessor's. You must rapidly assess and reshape the team, and then align, organize, and energize it to achieve your goals.
6. Secure early wins. Getting early wins is essential in order to build your credibility and create momentum. Wins create virtuous cycles that leverage the energy you put into the organization. They create a sense that good things are happening.
7. Create alliances. You can't accomplish much on your own; you need to build alliances to support your key initiatives. This means identifying the most important people whose support you need and developing a plan for getting them onboard.
8. Manage yourself. Throughout your transition you must work hard to maintain your equilibrium, manage your energy, and preserve your ability to make good judgments. You need to be disciplined in deciding what you will and won't do, and you must invest in building and leveraging the right network of advisers.
Each principle has its own chapter with an introductory chapter on Preparation and a concluding one on how to spread the transition principles across the company.
I was gifted this book on Christmas Eve 2021 by my youngest daughter as part of my family’s first celebration of Jolabokaflod and read a number of pagI was gifted this book on Christmas Eve 2021 by my youngest daughter as part of my family’s first celebration of Jolabokaflod and read a number of pages of it that day (sitting on our sofa in front of a fire, drinking hot chocolate, with my wife and three daughters also reading their gifts: (The Irish Nanny, House of Hollow, The Sound of Everything, The Very Merry Murder Club) and my avatar trying to see what she could knock over with her tail-of-mass-destruction. Taking a break for some other books I then returned to this in January 2022.
The book itself is an ambitious one. Ostensibly historical fiction, it perhaps I think is closer in feel to two other genres:
Feminist rewriting of myths: here not one of the feminist recasting of the Greek myths which seem to have dominated recent literary prize lists, but a re-interpretation of the life of a real-life figure (Marie de France – 12th Century poet) about which very little is known other than her writing (the first by a woman of Francophone verse). The lack of knowledge extends to her true identity, and Groff chooses to go with (and completely major on – largely to the exclusion of her writing) one possible identification – Mary Abbess of Shaftesbury, illegitimate Plantagenet and half-sister to Henry II: and in fact the book seems to be far more about an Abbess than a poet.
Fantasy: I can see from other reviews that I was not the only reader to immediately think that the main character was Brienne of Tarth inspired, and to be honest I felt that there were strong echoes also of Daenerys and her time in the three cities in Slaver’s Bay, or even Cersei and her attempts to maintain her dynasty. This is not necessarily a complement, as much as I love ASoIaF (see below).
Throw into that mix:
Historical fandom – the book is also a slightly askance tribute to Eleanor of Aquitaine as viewed at a distance, at Court, via correspondence and via rumour and news by Marie who carries a life long lover for the two time Queen (of France and England), Crusader, sustainer of the Angevin Empire, and dynastic plotter and mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John (taking the book almost into Robin Hood territory).
Julian of Norwich like religious visions and mysticism – extended her very explicitly to a feminist recasting and reimagination of Christianity away from its patriarchal capture
A deliberately distanced exploration of modern (particularly Trump era) America – patriarchy. loss of female autonomy, misogyny, untrammelled capitalism, climate change and ecological degradation, even walls – Groff has said she found she could only explore the society in which she was painfully immersed by removing her protagonists from it by a millennium or so.
A treatise on male and female power and how, if at all, they might look differently. This part is I think deliberately ambiguous – much of the book is about Marie making the Abbey an increasingly male free zone and resisting patriarchy in the local town, her religious order and nationally. After her death, there is a brief interlude when a decision by her successor to burn her visionary feminist beliefs is seen as inadvertently preventing an alternative future for the next millennium where the world would not have burned from climate change. However set against this, it seems clear that Marie partly enjoys power for powers sake (even if not prepared to admit it), it is unclear to what extent her religious visions and resulting confidence to usurp both secular and religious powers is truly genuine or self-fulfilling prophecies, and many of her greatest projects (a labyrinth and a dam) have profound ecological consequences – and after all it is Marie who resolves to “Build The Wall”!
Plentiful repeating imagery and ideas – be it labyrinths, protective barriers (physical, relational and reputational), matrix (in its different meanings – environments in which ideas develop, moulds for print, arrays and etymology – pregnancy, mothers and wombs), the visualisation of chants and prayers and so on.
Possible literary allusions and easter eggs. The author has implied in interviews that she scoured through Marie de France’s writings and used those to flesh out parts of her life and provide Easter Eggs throughout the novel. Now not being familiar with Marie’s works (and to be entirely open never having heard of her before this book) I did not expect to find these – but I am a little disconcerted that those on Goodreads most familiar with Marie de France and her writing seem least enamoured of this book.
So huge amounts to like but I feel the plot is perhaps the weakest part of the book. The idea of lesbian nuns seems like a very tired trope and too much of the plot seems to consist of: Marie takes abbey to next level, problem arises which threatens the progress and even existence of the abbey, Marie solves problem with limited ultimate difficulty of cost, Marie takes abbey to next level …..). I referred above to the SoIaF links – but to be honest Daernerys’s times in the three cities are easily the most tedious part of those books due to their similar structure and further I feel that Brienne, Daernerys and Cersei are both more complex characters than Marie and face greater jeopardy in their character arcs.
So overall a book full of great ideas but one let down by the environment, the mould in which the ideas are allowed to form and shape. The weakest part of the Matrix is its Matrix.
Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that cam
Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has both moments of great beauty and of heartbreak. It tells of human triumph and failings, of what is good in people and what is flawed; and what we need, and how in our greed we can destroy precious things. It tells of what stays the same, and what changes; and of honest hard-working folk, clinging on over countless generations, to avoid being swept away by the giant waves of a storm as the world changes. It is also the story of those who lost their grip and were swept away from the land, but who still care, and are now trying to find their way home.
Winner of the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Writing for UK Nature Writing – the book was described by the prize as “the story of an inheritance. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world have been brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things are being lost. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere for us all.”
The author was already well known for his previous autobiographical book “A Shepherd’s Life” – a book which has generally very favorable reviews on Goodreads – although I note with interest that a number of reviews criticise the book for its anti-intellectual inverted snobbery.
This book is effectively a tale of two family farms – one rented by his late Father in the Eden Valley (between the Pennines and the Lake District) and where the author grew up, and one owned by his grandfather in the Lake District which the author now farms.
The book is in three parts:
Nostalgia (which broadly is the author’s reflections on his Grandfather’s more traditional approach to farming around 40 years ago in an already changing era – his Grandfather a late resister to the changes around him)
Progress (which mainly sets out the way in which farming changed rapidly – firstly on his Father’s farm and then in the farming the author inherited with: machinery replacing hands on manual labour, artificial fertilisers replacing manure, larger fields; silage replacing traditional feeds; bigger barns: modified crops and livestock; as well as economic pressures from global competition, supermarkets squeezing down prices, banks tightening the screws – and the resulting impact on farms and on the nature they used to support)
Utopia (which explores the author’s attempt to bring back some traditional ways to his farm and in particular to support diverse wildlife)
Each of the chapters is named slightly ironically: the first chapter does not hide some of the brutal realities and precariousness of his Grandfather’s approach; the second commendably tries to be partly even handed about the change (recognising what it has done to enable more people to be fed alongside concentrating on all that has been lost) and the third is far from a utopia but a very deliberate compromise the author has made which he knows will disappoint both “die hard production focused farmers” and “extreme wilderness-loving ecologists”
The main thrust I think of the author’s arguments is captured in this compromise. At its worse this seems to be rather resentful of both sides: he seems to share equal dislike for the world of neo-liberal free-trade and globalised economics (economists in particular seem to be his rather odd bête noire) and for left-wing extremists (George Monbiot is not named in the book but the two seem to have a history of opposition). But more commonly he argues against entrenched positions (that farmers are either all bad or all good) and bifurcation (for example colleges which turn out either economics focused MBA farmers or nature loving ecologists but without ever bringing the two into dialogue).
Although seemingly close to Isabella Tree (and her “rewilding” at Knepp) his focus is not on rewilding (which in its fullest sense he sees as firstly impractical on any scale, and secondly as leading to either even more intensive and damaging farming on the land left for growing food or to the import of food and the exporting of the environmental damage) but on altering the practices of farms in lots of ways which improve their impact and on altering people’s attitudes to the quality, convenience and price of what they eat. He argues that any natural system has an alpha predator and that enlightened man has the potential to be the best such alpha.
A few other comments:
I must admit I struggled with the first part of the book and the description of apparently traditional and generally benevolent farming from around 40 years ago. My own recollection of farming from that time was of widespread use of pesticides, polluting stubble burning (with the added “bonus” of accidental destruction of pesty field boundaries), destruction of hedgerows, the deliberate concealment or obstruction of rights of way – and that things are much better in almost every sense since - but I think industrial farming hit East Anglia a long time before the author’s corner of the lakes.
Perhaps related to this the solutions the book puts forward does seem to focus on a particular type of farm – highland, small scale which I cannot relate to many farms I know – and I suspect the upcoming book from the head of Conservation on the Holkham estate will be of much greater interest to me (see for example this New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)
There are some parts I was not so keen on – I can see the anti-snobbery point that was criticised in the earlier book : the author for example seems to believe that people deep down hate working in offices and living in Cities (doing only from economic necessity) - which is I think simply not true. And perhaps this gets to a wider issue which is endemic in so much nature writing of this type – any book which harks back to tradition/past generations/trying to resist change tends to have an (at least) implicit diversity issue (of race, descent, class, location), and of course the idea of native-born and native adapted animals makes its inevitable appearance. There is also a rather bizarre part where anti drink driving laws are blamed for their adverse effect on social solidarity in the country.
But overall this is an enjoyable and thought provoking book – some of the writing is really very strong and literary with some great use of description and similes and the book is a lot more nuanced that I had expected: so that overall this was a book which was more poetical and less polemical than I had expected....more
A very brief stocking-filler of a novella, which takes place I think between the fourth and fifth of the main Ruth Galloway series and is perhaps mostA very brief stocking-filler of a novella, which takes place I think between the fourth and fifth of the main Ruth Galloway series and is perhaps most notable for Cathbad repurposing the eponymous tree (rather ruined by Flint and Kate) as Yggdrasil and hung upside down in line with Sea Henge....more
#3 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#3 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”).
The geographical focus here shifts from West of the North Norfolk Coast (scene of the first novel and Ruth’s home) to what seems to be the extreme east of that Coast (albeit as the author seems to acknowledge at the end, the cliff erosion is perhaps more consistent with the North of the East Norfolk Coast – for example Happisburgh).
In a cove beneath the house of a vocal MEP which sits on a crumbling cliff, a group of archaeologists find a group of bodies killed by gunshots who they establish by forensic investigation, lead by Ruth, are of German origin and date from the mid 20th Century.
It seems very likely that they must be of German soldiers and there must have been some involvement of the local Home Guard (lead by the MEP’s father) – this seems confirmed by the involvement of a German investigative journalist contacted by one of the Home Guard members (a known socialist and pacifist) but both the socialist and another member die in quick succession apparently from natural causes and then the journalist (who meanwhile has started an affair with the MEP’s young daughter) is found murdered and Ruth and DCI Nelson are directly involved again in one of their signature police and forensic archaeological investigations.
As an aside it seemed a shame to feature a Norfolk Home Guard without any reference to the nearby filming of Dad’s army.
Generally I felt this was a stronger novel than the first two in the series – less rather bizarre pagan or Roman references, less jeopardy around the main characters (unfortunately this re-emerges at the book’s climax).
They instead have to navigate Nelson’s unacknowledged (except to Ruth and he) parentage of Ruth’s baby Kate (Ruth herself struggling with the contradictions and complications of late, single motherhood) and this adds some depth the novel.
There is an interesting side story of Ruth’s earlier investigation of war graves in Bosnia and her involvement with the mother of a missing child.
The villain in this case was I felt a little too obscure to be fully satisfactory while still involving rather too much coincidence.
Increasingly I found that the book has rather too much unfaithfulness and infidelity – every character seems to have had, be having or contemplating an illicit relationship with another – albeit this is all I think part of developing the side characters, it might just have been nice for the author to think of a different way of developing a story arc.
But this still remains a series I will follow....more
#2 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#2 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.
In particular while at secondary school in Norfolk, I participated over many months in archaeological field walking around the site of a suspected Roman villa a few miles away from Swaffham.
And this novel opens with an archaeological investigation – lead by Dr Max Grey – into a Roman site a few miles from Swaffham (albeit rather incongruously on a hill).
However the main crime to be investigated occurs in Norwich as some children’s bones are discovered in a Victorian mansion (previously a Catholic Children’s Home) being demolished by Edward Spens – a local property developer magnate. When the Father who founded and ran the home confirms that a boy and a girl (of about the right age) disappeared many years previously – the initial assumption is that the body is that of the girl, but forensic investigations prove that the body is around twenty years older and over time suspicions as to the identity of the girl switch twice.
There is a recurring image of Janus – god of boundaries, openings and doorways which picks up on the pagan/Druid liminal imagery in the first book – which I enjoyed, much more so I have to say than the rather bizarre series of Roman-inspired demented diary entries which are threaded through the book as clues leading to the real victim and villain.
One issue with the first two books of the series is that both rely rather 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 coincidental (in both books too many of the story lines overlap in an insular fashion) and implausible (how often are forensic witnesses really dragged into cases).
But most seriously having the main tension in the book around threats to someone who is the protagonist of a crime series removes the concept of jeopardy almost entirely (even if it is I think more of a genre than a series flaw).
But the developing “relationship” between DCI Nelson and Ruth as they try to come to terms with the latter’s unplanned pregnancy from their shock induced one night stand in the first novel works well and adds a maturity to the main story.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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