Leonora (Book Review)

The painter Leonora Carrington, at least as she appears in Elena Poniatowska's 2011 novel, sounds like she would have been exhausting company. As a child, if she was not playing with her imaginary friends (known as sidhes) she was telling anyone who would listen that she was a horse.

Her later success as an artist who specialized in equine surrealism is, Poniatowska suggests, less a matter of choice than temperament. When her father yells, "You are a truly impossible child!", one hears "truly impossible" as a piece of prophetic art criticism that describes the fantastical figures of "The Pomps of the Subsoil" or "The Giantess".

Currently the subject of a retrospective at Tate Liverpool, Leonora was born into a life of wealth and ambition. Her father, the major shareholder in ICI, loved his only daughter, but planned a life for her of debutante balls. Leonora was her father's daughter, for good and bad. Possessed of his determination and drive, she also found in Harold Wilde Carrington the perfect person against which to rebel.

Before the Fire (Book Review)

This is a novel about Stick (or Kieran to his mum) and about burning anger and how that can manifest itself. It’s about violence and depression and anger internalised and then realised in a fit of fury and directionlessness. It’s about going nowhere fast.

In June 2011, Stick and his best friend Mac are preparing to celebrate turning 18 by packing up a shitty second-hand car and driving to Malaga to live the high life of sun, sex and sangria. The night before they leave, Mac is stabbed to death in a seemingly random attack. Stick tries to come to terms with Mac’s death but when external forces – his parental units, the justice system, friends – let him down, he turns to numbing himself with weed, booze and running around at night. Then he meets J, an equally damaged teenager, who has long since decided that dreams of escape from their estate in Manchester are futile. As they crash towards August, and violence and rioting in London spreading across the country, Stick and J have to confront their rage and grief and decide how best to channel it.

Sarah Butler’s novel is a slow burn of a book. Her ear for teenage dialogue, neuroses, tiny details about mannerisms, dress, opinions, are well-researched and feel authentic. The descent into rage and anger is well-paced and Butler manages to keep the external threats to Stick’s resolve throbbing away. The book revels in the diversity and mystery of young people. It never tries to imitate the “innit”-ness of other authors who fling out slang as a substitute for character development. Instead, Butler’s prose is microscopic, delicate and honest.

The book is good at showing how one kid from one estate with one history might end up caught in the madness and violence and looting and rioting that happened in August 2011. Instead of trying to condone or condemn all young people, Butler is more interested in telling a human story about grief and how that can manifest itself in unflinching anger, no matter our age.

The Kindness (Book Review)

The canny reviewer tries not to spoil the reader’s potential enjoyment of a book by spilling its secrets. Sometimes this can make it very awkward to write the review; to be both true to the book and helpful to the reader. Polly Samson’s second novel (she’s also the author of two acclaimed collections of short stories), is just this sort of narrative. It may not begin like a thriller, but it produces, without warning, some of the twists and reverses of one. Reader beware, things are not as they seem.

The Kindness begins in a naturalistic style, in the baking summer of 1997, at Firdaws, a picturesque cottage deep in the English countryside described in lush, lyrical prose, where Julian, “an old man of twenty-nine”, lives alone, ill and mourning the loss of his three-year-old daughter, Mira. There are no photographs of Mira now, “no sticky bottle of Calpol” by the bed, the house has been “cleansed of her existence”. This is a wringing evocation of grief. Firdaws was once Julian’s parents’ home, and redolent with older memories. His organizing

mother arrives with his stepfather, Michael, who is also his literary agent – Julian is the author of bizarre-sounding dog stories and film scripts for children – and the pair of them urge him respectively to eat and work. They’re followed by Katie, his childhood sweetheart, spurned years ago in favour of Mira’s mother, Julia (yes, Julian and Julia!), but now back living in the village, raw from her divorce, two little boys in tow, and with renewed designs on Julian.

As he fields these unwelcome incursions on his lonely vigil, Julian revisits the past. We learn how as a student he first met his beloved Julia while she was flying a hawk on a windy hillside. Decade-older Julia, once a teenage runaway before marrying an abuser, reflects later that she “would feel safe and comforted for the only time in her life” with Julian. She became pregnant. Julian gave up his studies to support her. She lost the child. They moved to London where Julian forged his career and Julia, too, grew happy, running a garden design business with her friend Freda. Finally, after years of childlessness Mira was born. Then Julian unwittingly spoiled everything by moving the little family down to the back of beyond, and stress and bitterness entered his and Julia’s relationship.

All this Samson recounts while moving dexterously back and forth in time, sustaining a single, seamless narrative, though it’s vital for the reader to stay alert. We bask in the charming, genteel, bohemian sensibility of her writing. Woven into it, however, like a sinister black thread, is the heart-wrenching account of Mira’s long struggle with cancer.

Then, two-thirds of the way through the novel, comes the mother of all twists. The burden of the narrative passes to Julia, but five years further on, and this apparently all-cards-all-the-table novel abruptly changes procedural tack. For a while the reader flounders, caught by the authorial sleight-of-hand, forced suddenly to review everything they thought they knew. There were clues, yes, but is there really a sense of an unclear picture now moving sharply into focus? Is it fair to dupe the reader about something all the characters knew but the reader didn’t?

Once equilibrium is regained, Julia’s narrative plunges into a different community of characters, many of whom we’ve met earlier but are now emerging fully realized from the shadows. We’re grateful for Julia’s viewpoint, and that she answers questions we were troubled by, not least by providing a properly engaging picture of Julian as she first met him, “a windswept boy lolloping towards her across the Downs… His eyelashes were... as long as a girl’s and so thick it appeared he was wearing kohl”. This helps us finally appreciate the depth of Katie’s anguish when she lost him and why, once divorced, she wants him back.

A bit less plausible, on the other hand, is the introduction of a series of odd, schematic events, such as a car crash, that rely less on carefully built-up traits of character than on chance or, in one example, biological quirk. We’re also asked to believe that Julian would act in a particular way that greatly affects the story’s outcome. Samson brings the book round, though, to a most satisfying and believable ending. The Kindness is to be read more than once, not merely to enjoy again the beauty of the writing and the considerable insights into human experience, but to test the earlier narrative with the knowledge of what is to come.

Landmarks (Book Review)

Part poet, part walker, part don, Robert Macfarlane has become our leading writer of a form of neo-Romanticism. Essentially, this is about getting us to pay more attention to the natural world – an attentiveness which, in the face of human depredations and climate change, has taken on a particular moral urgency.

Landmarks is his fifth book and is less about personal journeys through the British landscape than the specific, local language and words referring to it which are in danger of being lost. Having this “shadow language” is, he contends, essential to being able to notice and value nature more precisely. A few (drizzle, scree) are still familiar, but many evocative, useful and beautiful ones, from “Smirr” (fine misty rain, Gaelic) to “monek” (mineral rich ground, Cornish), are not. This book weaves together glossaries of words referring to topography, weather and animals with vivid portraits of the authors who have influenced Macfarlane’s own writing: Nan Shepherd, Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and the “keeper of lost words” Richard Skelton.

As his book progresses, he introduces many of these words into his own text, so that vividly onomatopoeic sentences such as “the wind flung rain against the windows with a fat clatter” are counter-pointed by unfamiliar nouns, verbs and adjectives that sparkle like ammil (a Devon word meaning the effect of morning sunlight on hoar frost.)

The mood is one of celebration, and, inevitably, of defense of what nature is, despite our insistence on reducing everything to cost benefit analysis. Macfarlane is alert to the danger posed by all nature writing of tipping into sounding like Molesworth’s Fotherington-Thomas; these are not the kind of over-ripe ramblings satirized by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop, but the product of an active academic intelligence and emotional generosity, irradiated by a profound sense of wonder.

Landmarks feels like his masterpiece, an exploration on the links between language and landscape that has taken half a lifetime to collect. An especially moving chapter called “Childish” is about the way “what we bloodlessly call ‘place’ is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance”, for which they invent new words. Macfarlane appears not to have lost this rich apprehension himself.

Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly.

The Kindness (Book Review)

The Kindness is a fascinating novel. In less deft hands one could imagine it languishing in the dubious realms of "chick-lit", but Polly Samson spins a subtle and richly complex portrayal of the collapse of a couple's relationship in the wake of a deception conceived as an act of kindness.

In many ways, the plot is a simple one. Julia, a beautiful but unhappily married woman finds love with a promising young undergraduate eight years her junior named Julian. A hopeless romantic, his passion for her is such that an immediate unplanned pregnancy, which leads him to abandon a scholarly career, does little to dampen his spirits or his ardour. "Not much more than a boy," he's "weak against the charm of beauty's powerful glance".

Fast-forward a few years and despite the reservations of their friends and family, all looks peachy. Julian is making a living as a successful scriptwriter; he and Julia have a beautiful daughter, Mira; and they've just bought a dream home in the country. This, however, is when things begin to fall apart. Mira becomes desperately ill and their lives unravel with alarming speed as the huge secret that Julia has been hiding slithers like a snake out of the grass, striking at the heart of their happiness together and destroying the prelapsarian idyll Julian has strived so hard to build for the three of them. The underlying premise is not dissimilar to that of Samson's previous book, Perfect Lives – a collection of interconnected short stories that explored the less than gleaming reality of seemingly flawless lives. But, in its tighter focus, The Kindness reads as the rightful heir to that earlier project.

One of the things that makes Samson such a skilled writer is that she presumes intelligence in her readers. The plot hinges on two revelations, but rather than attempt to keep them from us, she lays a very clear trail – it's her characters to whom they come as a surprise, and much pleasure is derived from the anticipation of the inevitable moment of comprehension.

Most admirable, though, is her ability to inhabit her protagonists' minds so effortlessly, weaving recollections from the past with the reality of the present in one seamless amalgamation of lived experience. She's so good in fact, that when she retreats out of the immediacy of a character's psyche, episodes of dialogue can come across as almost clunky by comparison, but this is nitpicking. Precisely plotted and told in elegant prose, The Kindness explores the often messy and far from perfect complexities of love.

Lord of the Flies (Book Review)

William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first, it seems as though it's all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious & life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic & death. As ordinary standards of behavior collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket & homework & adventure stories—& another world is revealed beneath, primitive & terrible. Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was 1st published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought & literature. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a classic.

The little Prince (Book Review)

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures.