Category: Books

If I Gave the Award

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Having just posted the review for the last of the shortlisted books for the 2020 James Tait Black Award, I find it is time for my feature, where I decide if the judges got it right. This time it’s going to be a hard one, for none of the nominated books struck much of a chord with me. Usually, I judge the books by how I reacted to them, as most people would do, I think.

Often, I start with the book I liked least, but I am not even sure which one that is. So, I guess I’ll start with the winner, Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. This book is by far the most experimental of the four shortlisted books, which I’m guessing is why it’s the winner. It is mostly one 1000-page sentence—except for short passages of regular narrative—and it breaks just about every rule of fiction I can think of. I felt that Ellman got details wrong for her character, a middle-aged American Midwestern housewife. She seemed too old and too British. The novel was compelling enough in an odd way for me to finish (that is, I kept wondering why I was still reading it), but didn’t have much of a payoff.

A lot of people are calling linked short stories novels these days. The James Tait Black award is for fiction, but almost every entry I have read so far has been a novel or a novel of linked stories, so Sudden Traveler by Sarah Hall is an anomaly. That is, it is definitely a collection of short stories rather than linked stories making a novel. Some of these stories are slice of life and some quite fantastical. Although I liked another book I read by Hall, I am not generally so comfortable with short fiction (although I like the linked story novels) or with the fantastic, and I found some of the stories perplexing. If this book had any overarching theme, I guess it might be girl power.

Although I liked Girl by Edna O’Brien, it is definitely the least experimental of all the entries. It is a very short, straightforwardly told story about a young Nigerian girl who is kidnapped and the results of that even after she is returned to her family. O’Brien’s writing is beautiful and the novel is affecting.

I’m ending with Travelers by Helon Habila, a novel of linked short stories about the plight of African refugees in Europe. Does that mean I liked it best? I’m not even sure. If I had to pick a winner, I guess it would be either Girl or Travelers. I had more of a response to Girl but think it is slighter than Travelers. Do I think the judges got it right this time? If they are awarding for experimentalism, maybe, but I’m not even sure whether Ducks, Newburyport deserves all the accolades it got. I think that sometimes reviewers in any genre of media get excited because something is different, and this may be a case of that.

Review 1885: Travelers

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When I first began reading Travelers, I thought I would be disappointed in it, because the bio said Habila had won several awards for his writing, but I found a misplaced modifier in the first few pages. Can’t help it—I’m a grammar nerd. However, I soon found the novel compelling.

It is structured as six novellas, which are linked by the presence or acquaintance with the unnamed narrator. He is a Nigerian student who is supposed to be finishing his dissertation in Washington when his American artist wife receives a fellowship in Berlin. Their marriage has been suffering since she had a miscarriage, and they see the move as an opportunity for a new start, but while his wife works hard, the narrator seems to be aimless, wandering around Berlin and ignoring his work. He becomes interested in a group of activists living in a squat and taking part in demonstrations. Several of them are refugees from Africa, including Mark, a transgender artist.

In this first novella, we meet Manu, who we learn about in the second novella. As Manu’s family crossed the Mediterranean in a derelict boat, the boat sank and he lost track of his wife and baby son. Every Sunday, he and his daughter search the area around Checkpoint Charlie for his wife and son.

In the third story, Portia, a Zambian studying in England, has traveled to Basel to meet Katharina, who used to be married to her brother David. She has gone there to understand her brother better, a man who always seemed to want to leave home, but also, at her mother’s behest, to find out why Katharina killed him.

In the fourth story, after meeting Portia and traveling with her to Basel, the narrator listens to the tale of a Somalian whom he meets on a train. This man and his son have suffered unimaginable hardships trying to find a place for themselves and their family. However, in a moment of confusion, the narrator loses his identity papers and finds himself incarcerated in a refugee camp.

This novel examines the state of many east and west African countries and the plight of African refugees in Europe. Habila is a master at quickly involving readers in the lives of its many often incidentally encountered characters. I read Travelers for my James Tait Black project.

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Review 1884: John Saturnall’s Feast

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It’s 1625 when young John Saturnall and his mother are chased up into Buccla’s Wood by religious zealots who term her a witch. She is not a witch but a wise woman with ancient knowledge and stories of a magnificent feast that happened centuries before.

When John’s mother is dying in the wood, she sends him to Buckland Manor in the Vale, the home of Sir William Freemantle. There he learns that his mother worked in the manor before she became pregnant with him. He is taken into the kitchen, where he shows promise of becoming a great cook.

Just as John is becoming a Master Cook and Sir William’s daughter Lucretia is reluctantly betrothed to a wastrel in an attempt to save the Vale, the Civil War breaks out. As the Freemantles are supporters of King Charles I, the household has years of suffering before it.

At the beginning of each chapter is an excerpt from The Book of John Saturnall, written using the culinary language of the times. The novel is lushly written, full of the details of running a 17th century kitchen and household.

I was less interested in the unlikely romance, perhaps partly because Lucretia as a character is poorly defined. However, overall I found this novel deeply interesting.

By the way, the Grove Press edition is beautifully presented, with heavy paper, two colors of ink, and gorgeous woodcut-style illustrations.

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Review 1883: #ThirkellBar! The Headmistress

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Owing to financial difficulties, the Beltons have had to lease the house their family has lived in for 150 years, Harefield Park. It has been leased by the Hosiers’ Girls School, which, having been evacuated from London, had shared space with Barsetshire High School.

Mr. and Mrs. Belton have moved into Arcot House, recently inherited by Captain Hornby at his aunt’s death, which is in the village of Harefield. Although it seems odd not to live in their own house, the person who seems to mind most is their daughter, Elsa, who is away most of the time doing something secret.

Miss Sparling, the headmistress of Hosiers’ Girls School, has not only been sharing the school, she has been living with Barchester High School’s dread headmistress, Miss Pettinger, so she is happy to have her own quarters. The community of Harefield is very welcoming, so Miss Sparling quickly gets to know the village families. She is delighted to find out that the vicar, Mr. Oriel, once studied with her grandfather, a noted scholar.

One of her new acquaintances is Mr. Carton, an Oxford don, who goes around making disparaging remarks about female academics. Little does he know that Miss Sparling’s grandfather was an expert on an obscure poet that Mr. Carton is writing a book about. Further, one of Carton’s few sources is an article published by Miss Sparling herself.

At the Belton’s, Captain Hornby begins discreetly courting Elsa, and an unattractive schoolgirl at Hosiers falls madly in love with Commander Belton, the Belton’s oldest son.

As this series continues, the books become more full of incident, new characters, and references to characters already encountered and thus more difficult to describe. In this one, there is a hilarious description of a working party and a new awareness that the young men may die, although we haven’t heard of any war deaths among our favorite characters (except Lettice Watson’s husband, whom we never met), just of the natural passing of older characters such as the original Lord and Lady Pomfret.

A new character who proves entertaining is the pleasant Mrs. Updike, such a clumsy woman that she is constantly injuring herself. And key to the events of the plot is Mr. Adams, who I fear will become one of Thirkell’s types—a vulgar, wealthy manufacturer who is the father of the aforementioned schoolgirl.

Sometimes Thirkell’s prejudices bother me, such as her overt snobbishness and her disparagement of Dr. Morgan on the grounds she is a woman doctor rather than because she is a nitwit. However, although Thirkell has her tropes and stock characters, I feel that somehow her series is gaining a little substance.

On another note, I will have my usual wrap-up topic for this book with its announcement of the next book next Wednesday, but since that is well into July, let me just say now that the next book is Peace Breaks Out, and that my review will appear one day earlier than usual, on Thursday, July 28.

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Review 1882: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

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After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is Evie Wyld’s debut novel about how family trauma can pass down the generations. In alternate chapters, it follows Frank Collard in the present time and Leon 40 years earlier. Maybe I was dense, but it took me a while to realize that Leon is Frank’s father.

Frank has just split up with his girlfriend when he decides to restart his life. He leaves Canberra and drives to a shack on the eastern coast that his grandparents purchased years ago and where he spent holidays as a boy. He gets an occasional job loading boats. It’s a primitive life, and the loneliness starts to get to him.

Leon trains under his father to be a pastry chef and takes over the bakery after his father, in gratitude for the country that took in himself and his wife, World War II Jewish refugees, volunteers for the Korean War. Leon’s father returns damaged, unable to work, so his parents leave Leon, ending up in the beach shack. Then Leon is conscripted for Vietnam and has his own damaging experiences.

I can’t come up with the reference for this, but I remember several years ago reading a post by someone complaining about women writing like men. The implication was that they were doing so to be taken more seriously by male editors and publishers. In particular, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing was mentioned with the remark that you didn’t even know if the main character was male or female for some time. I didn’t agree that (1) just because you don’t know the sex of the main character means that the author is writing like a man (look at The Towers of Trebizond) or (2) Wyld was writing like a man in All the Birds, Singing. I certainly didn’t have that impression. However, the feel of After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is very masculine, which makes sense with her male protagonists.

The only other observation I have about the novel is that it seemed a bit all over the place for me. Perhaps this is because of my initial confusion about the relationship between the two main characters. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to last names, and Leon’s isn’t mentioned right away. In any case, for a long time I wondered where the novel was going. Also, I didn’t much like either Frank or Leon, although Leon was okay until Vietnam. But Frank’s problem isn’t really explained, and he has major anger issues.

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Review 1881: Death in Kashmir

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A quote on the cover of Death in Kashmir compares M. M. Kaye to Agatha Christie. A more accurate comparison in terms of the type of novel it is—romantic suspense rather than mystery—is to Mary Stewart, although there is just something about a Mary Stewart book that this novel doesn’t quite have. Still, Death in Kashmir is entertaining enough.

The novel is set in 1947, the year before the British left India, and it provides an interesting look at the life of British upper-class people living there at the time, although the natives are mostly only in the book as servants.

Sarah Parrish goes to Kashmir to attend the last meeting of the India Ski Club at Gulmarg in a primitive hotel that is usually only open in the summer. The outing has already been shadowed by the death that day of Mrs. Matthews in an apparent skiing accident. In the middle of the night, Sarah awakens to a scraping noise and realizes someone is trying to break into the room next door, that of another young woman, Janet Rushton. Sarah quietly hurries to Janet’s door to warn her and is shocked to be greeted by a drawn gun. However, when Janet sees someone has tried to enter by the bathroom window, she confides in Sarah that she is an agent for the government. She and Mrs. Matthews discovered an important secret and were waiting for help from their superiors when Mrs. Matthews was murdered.

A few nights later, Sarah and Janet have joined an expedition farther up the mountain to ski and spend the night in a ski hut. Sarah catches Janet ready to ski off in the middle of the night because she has finally been contacted by her people. The next day, she too is found dead.

Returning to Peshawar after the trip, Sarah tries to forget what she has learned, but she receives a letter from Janet’s attorney enclosing the receipt for her houseboat in Srinagar and telling her the secret can be found there. So, she finds herself returning to Kashmir with her friends Hugo and Fudge Creed. There she encounters all of the people who were on the ski trip, with a few extras, like the attractive Captain Charles Mallory.

The Cold War plot seems a little silly when compared to those of some of the masters, like Le Carré (and may more fairly earn the comparison to Christie, who also has some silly Cold War plots), but it leads to plenty of suspense and an unguessable villain. A small criticism is that both sides seem to have so many helpers that it’s no wonder there was a leak. A bigger caveat is that the explanations at the end go on for quite a while longer than seemed necessary.

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Review 1880: The Castle of Otranto

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I first read The Castle of Otranto too long ago as assignment for high school and thought it was very silly. However, it was the first gothic novel, written in 1764, and led the way toward a fascination with Gothic culture in a country littered with ruined Gothic churches and abbeys as a result of the so-called “Bloodless Revolution.” So, I put it on my Classics Club list to see what I think about it now.

Well, it’s a silly book. It is represented in the Preface as a manuscript written sometime between 1095 and 1243. Practically the first thing that happens in it is that Conrad, the son of Manfred, prince of Otranto, has a gigantic helmet fall on him out of nowhere and crush him to death on the day he is to be betrothed to Isabella, the Marquiz of Vincenza’s daughter. This is the first supernatural event in a very short book that includes walking portraits, statues crying tears of blood, and various enormous body parts appearing in the castle.

Why? It appears that Manfred’s grandfather took the castle unlawfully, and the legend is that his family may hold it until its real owner grows too large to inhabit it. Hence, the enormous body parts.

This novel exhibits all the hallmarks of the subsequent gothic novels, many of which aren’t that palatable to modern readers—overblown speeches, submissive and virtuous women (Manfred’s wife even being so submissive as to agree to her own divorce), a nearly insane villain in Manfred, a hero in disguise, a lot of fainting, and supernatural events.

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Review 1879: The Good Turn

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Garda Peter Fisher doesn’t make the report of a kidnapped girl a priority because the information is conveyed in a garbled form, but when he questions the witness, he begins to take it seriously. When he gets a lead on a possible escape vehicle and Sergeant Cormac Reilly is busy with the family, he goes out alone to intercept the suspect. The suspect drives his vehicle directly at Peter, so he shoots him. Then the girl is found unharmed.

Cormac’s boss, Brian Murphy, refused him extra resources when the girl was reported kidnapped, and now he suspends Cormac, labeling the case a complete fiasco. But Cormac believes Peter reacted correctly and the suspect was guilty. In the meantime, Peter is sent to work under his own father in his small home town.

Peter thinks a murder case has been closed prematurely, so he begins investigating it properly. Soon he begins to suspect someone has murdered two old men and is killing his own grandmother.

Cormac gets on the track of corruption in his station and begins working with Interpol. In the meantime, his relationship with his girlfriend seems to be going south.

This is another interesting crime novel by McTiernan with a complex plot.

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Review 1878: Edinburgh

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Fee is a 12-year-old mixed race boy (Korean-American) who feels out of place in his home in small-town Maine. Not only does he not look like his peers, but he likes boys. He is deeply in love with Peter, his best friend.

When Fee joins an elite boys’ choir, he thinks he recognizes in the choir director, Big Eric, a person like himself. But he soon realizes that Big Eric is a predator, who systematically abuses the soloists and keeps them from telling by threatening to cut them from the choir.

Fee conflates his homosexuality with Big Eric’s abuse and is so ashamed that he tells no one even when Peter is given a solo part. Eventually, Big Eric approaches the wrong boy, and the truth comes out. But this also has disastrous consequences for his victims, two of whom commit suicide.

Moving forward in life, Fee continues to be haunted by these events during his teen years and early adulthood. He is finally managing a happier adulthood as a swimming teacher in his home town with a loving partner when he meets a young student who reminds him of Peter and is involved in the early events in a way neither of them understand.

I had mixed feelings about this novel, which I won from Adam of Roof Beam Reader. It is beautifully written and incorporates lore from the Korean side of his character’s background. But it also feels removed from its characters, which is probably necessary as it feels at least somewhat autobiographical. There are some times when the lyrical language doesn’t seem to mean anything and is written more for its sound and images. But mostly, I am disappointed in the ending of the book.

Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers. I don’t usually include them, but I felt I had to in order to express my opinion of the book. It seemed to me that his succumbing to the boy, even though it was mutual and the boy was much older than he had been, is still a predatory act because of the teacher-student relationship. Also, I could not believe that he could teach a student without knowing his last name. There are rosters, reports to be filled out. That was just unbelievable.

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