This review first appeared in The Scotsman (Books section), April 1st 2017.

Corrupt, carnal and compelling
Sarah Dunant’s blood-drenched tale about the Borgias is gripping, writes Jacqueline Thompson

Was there ever a more notorious family than the Borgias? Using tactics more rotten than the corpses clogging the Tiber, Rodrigo Borgia thrusts his way to supremacy, becoming Pope Alexander VI and one of the most powerful men on earth. By 1502, Alexander’s bastard son Cesare is commander of an army, his daughter Lucrezia a plumptious piece of meat on the marriage market. The trio encapsulates the ‘violent pleasures’ of the Italian Renaissance; but is there any truth to the whispers of incest, murder and madness, or have the facts been embellished as heavily as Lucrezia’s pearl and diamond-studded gowns?

This is the intriguing territory explored in Sarah Dunant’s In the Name of the Family, the sequel to 2013’s Blood and Beauty. The exploits of lusty, capricious Alexander – ‘this monster churchman ripe with corruption’ – and restless, ruthless Cesare – ‘a bastard marauding philistine’ – are vibrant and arresting, but it is Lucrezia’s story which best reveals these sensual, dangerous times.

Lucrezia may wear bedazzling dresses, but she is scrutinized by ‘spies from all over the country, their mission to note her every gesture and to price each piece of jewellery, every yard of cloth.’ She has lost the love of her life through her brother’s brutal machinations, forced to leave her son in Rome as she travels to marry a stranger. The upkeep of her lucrative appearance is ‘hard work; all the plucking, perfuming, creaming, corseting, lacing, powdering…’ Sex is perfunctory, its grotty realities apparent as she mops the ‘leftover liquid’ from her body, noting how ‘women can bruise on the inside as well as out.’

And yet, her mental strength is a source of wonder, her courtly guile likened to warcraft: ‘conquering city after city with charm rather than cannon.’ After wounding trysts with her new husband, Lucrezia is stoic: ‘there is much to celebrate.’ She fights for every ducat of her dowry, knows her worth as the vessel of male heirs, and is adamant in her desire ‘to embrace gaiety’ in the face of sickness and grief. In an era obsessed with women’s wickedness, from Eve to pox-bearing prostitutes, has history slandered Lucrezia?

Meanwhile, Pope Alexander, a rapacious ‘bear of a man’, is ‘in love with women, wealth, orange blossom and the taste of sardines’. He is arrogant, believing himself impervious to a tempest as he stalks his ship’s deck, singing. He has ordered countless assassinations, is changeable as a sprite, but he is also funny and theatrical, embracing life with every atom of his being.

As for Cesare, seen through the eyes of Machiavelli, iconic inventor of ‘Realpolitik’, he seems to care for nothing but war and sex. Cesare’s mercurial nature can spill over into galling cruelty. He is treacherous and animalistic, laughing, alongside his psychotic comrade Michelotto, as they butcher innocents. His sexual jealousy towards his sister – the source of those rumours of Borgia incest – can erupt into acts of shocking barbarism.

Dunant’s poetic style raises the novel above titillating gossip, and her striking imagery renders it as rich as a Pinturicchio fresco, whether describing frosty ground cracking ‘like small animal bones’ or eels circling a fisherman’s wrist like a ‘living bracelet of snakes’. This gripping, sumptuous book shows that, excessive and ferocious as they doubtless were, the Borgias were truly something.

In the Name of the Family
By Sarah Dunant
Virago, 464pp,
£16.99

This review first appeared in The Glasgow Review of Books (22/02/17)

QUEEN OF HER OWN UNIVERSE: TRACEY HERD’S ‘NOT IN THIS WORLD’

Tracey Herd Not in This World (Bloodaxe, 2015)

By Jacqueline Thompson

On the 10th of June 1987, American actress Elizabeth Hartman threw herself from the window of her fifth floor Pittsburgh apartment. Haunted by depression, she was just forty-three when she died. It is Hartman’s face – young, smiling, impossibly fresh – that beams in triplicate from the cover of Scottish poet Tracey Herd’s third collection, Not in This World, a work inspired by Hartman’s struggles as well as Herd’s own experience of clinical depression.

Martin Colthorpe described reading Herd’s second collection, Dead Redhead, as ‘an intoxicating experience, in which you become thoroughly immersed in her world and her obsessions’. Not in This World is no exception, with Herd’s continuing ‘obsessions’ plotting a dark psychological landscape populated by doomed movie stars, broken girls and powerful racehorses, filled with images of blood, snow and wreckages.

As in Herd’s previous collections, the figure of the girl detective makes an early appearance as the speaker of ‘What I Wanted’ sets out:

with my magnifying glass
and pocket torch to follow
the tracks that led off as far
as a child’s eye could see.

In ‘Dreams of Lost Summers and Found Lines’, ‘old green and cream Penguin novels’ (detective stories) appear, as does Miss Marple in ‘The Living Library’, and in ‘The Case of the Inconvenient Corpse’, a Miss Marple narrative is retold from the perspective of a callous male figure. Fairytale heroines also return, with a raging, righteously bitter Snow White narrating ‘Nobody Home’, spitting out thoughts of the woodsman: ‘as if he hadn’t already fucked me over / by leading me into this foul, dark place’. In ‘Reverie’, Cinderella is once more evoked as the speaker refers to her bleeding feet: ‘Glass slippers were never made for dancing’.

There is also a Herd-esque profusion of Hollywood icons: Vivien Leigh, ‘her green eyes slanting in the fire’s feline rage’; Norma Shearer, ‘one eye cast about in a delinquent / skew that parodied beauty’; Joan Fontaine, to whom Alfred Hitchcock ‘casually let slip that the cast and crew / hated’ her, and who Laurence Olivier ‘had no time for’; Olivia de Havilland, whose ‘quiet strength’ pervades; Louise Brooks, her eyes ‘cool and sane’; Mae Marsh, ‘the girl with the bee stung lips, / bee sting, gentle bee sting, blonde, beautiful, bee stung’; and Clara Bow, ‘dancing her frantic Charleston’.

Other pop culture allusions abound, from James Dean and Buddy Holly to The Great Gatsby and the Titanic. Like a poem by T. S. Eliot or a song by Morrissey, these provide the delight of recognition, as well as the desire to Google topics – like the life of Hartman – that require illumination. Indeed, one of the most affecting poems is the final one in the collection, ‘Calling Card’, about Marina Keegan, an American writer who, in 2012, died in a car crash aged twenty-two, five days after graduating from Yale. Knowing the facts makes the poem all the more poignant, and more beautiful too:

Your words couldn’t protect you,
but they never left you,
swirling around your body like moths.

Recurring motifs create a strong sense of unity: champagne; flowers, especially funereal lilies and fairytale roses, their colours mirroring the blood and snow that lace these poems; cuts; ice; glass; mirrors; vehicular crashes; graves; stars; hearts; God; old movies; children; jewels; bullets; and violently removed skin. Indeed, so prevalent are Herd’s icons and so distinct is her voice that it would, quite often, be possible – à la Larkin and Plath – to identify her poems even if they were stripped of her name. This is what Sarah Wardle described as Herd’s ‘strong and singular voice’, and it is arguably the poet’s greatest asset.

However, there are notable departures from broken girls and dead film stars, and, in fact, a wide variety in terms of ideas and perspectives. ‘The Afternoon Shift Are Leaving the Port Talbot Steelworks’, an ekphrastic poem based on a photograph, presents the steady stoicism of these ‘anonymous men’, ‘their tread, heavy and tired, but their heads unbowed’ before the unceasing machines. The titular focus of ‘The Fortune Teller’:

…misquotes Macbeth with gloomy relish
running a ragged nail along lines that speak
of witches, massacres, wild-eyed horses

– foretelling miscarriage before holding out her ‘dirty hand’ for payment.

No matter how arresting the subject matter, Herd’s technical expertise should not be overlooked. Her adept deployment of first person perspective gives a directness and immediacy to poems, even when they take faraway figures and places as their focal point (many are set in America, with references to New York, Vegas, Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Eisenhower, Southern belles and diners). In ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, Herd-as-Hartman laments: ‘I am left behind, a failed actress, / holding the script – which is in tatters’, her pain palpable despite the gulf of decades and miles.

Herd’s use of rhyme is also skilful but unobtrusive, as in ‘Vivien and Scarlet’, which maintains its a/b/a scheme throughout and ends with a couplet, juxtaposing structural tidiness with the decidedly non-fairytale ending of the actress’s life. In ‘Leaving’, the regular aa/bb/cc scheme of its two-line stanzas creates a greetings card effect, encapsulating the simple but profound pathos of its subject: ‘the bow of a ship sailing out into evening. / Somewhere, someone much loved is leaving.’

Herd’s use of repetition, such as the phrase ‘eyes of the palest blue’ in ‘Norma Shearer’, is also artfully handled, with the internal rhyming of ‘white’ and ‘light’, ‘knew’ and ‘skew’, as well as the alliterative ‘sexy suffering in satin gowns’ and ‘Retire a rich woman, / royalty of sorts’, creating a musical soundscape that is both jaunty and strangely unsettling, evocative of the dark underbelly of old-school fame.

In ‘Five Seconds’, Herd deploys a conversational tone that belies the horror of the sheer bad luck of Ritchie Valens dying in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly (Valens, a support act, won a coin toss for a seat on the flight, a flippant gesture that determined the teen’s fate): ‘Funny how five seconds…never mind’. Continuing this theme in ‘The Music Men’, Herd’s arresting imagery takes centre stage:

Out into the dark, star-laden night,
the snow piling up like gambling chips
all over the state.

Buddy’s horn-rimmed glasses merge with the unseeing eyes of oculist ‘Doctor / T.J. Eckleburg’, the looming billboard from The Great Gatsby which gazes blindly over the soul-sapped inhabitants of America like the God of Mammon.

Herd’s greatest strengths are, perhaps, also her greatest weaknesses, depending on how one approaches her poems. Her strong narrative drive can occasionally feel as if plots are being retold, as in ‘The Case of the Inconvenient Corpse’ or ‘Joan Fontaine and Rebecca’, in which the events of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca are described at length, albeit from intriguingly skewed angles. Her persistent ‘obsessions’ with dead girls and forsaken icons mean that some readers may feel at a remove from the poems. Andrew Neilson commented of Dead Redhead that Herd too often wears ‘the mask of personae’ and that ‘it would be nice for its sequel to feature a little more of Herd herself.’ Any reader hoping for a radical departure from the themes of Herd’s earlier collections will be disappointed.

However, it could also be argued that every poem betrays something of its creator, no matter how veiled in persona that poem may appear, and Herd’s own experience of depression suggests that she dominates these poems as surely as Hartman does. A poem like ‘The Unicorn Seat’ has a distinctly personal feel, written as it is ‘for Elsie and Lucy’:

…I have one little hand
in each of mine and you both stare up
at the arching evening…

So, too, does ‘Just One Request’, whether the figure who walks

slowly out into the waters of the Mar de Plata,
the malignancy blooming for a second time
without cease, as unstoppable as spring

is known to the poet or not. Either way, the figure’s grace and stoicism in the face of illness is just as powerful: ‘There is a dignity in knowing when to leave’.

Not in This World is further proof of Herd’s enormous talent, her ability to draw her readers into the hinterland of her fascinations and surprise, challenge and delight us with the blistering force of her perceptions. Dark they may be, but these are poems that are a joy to savour, beguiling enough to bear repeated readings, each one throwing up fresh ideas thanks to Herd’s keen wit and kaleidoscopic knowledge of popular culture. The most potent element of the collection is the solidarity between Herd and Hartman, uniting as it does these artists from different worlds. The closing lines of ‘Cemetery in Snow’ are eerie and sad but ultimately redemptive, encapsulating Herd’s power to simultaneously unsettle and console:

Somewhere, I think, someone has lit a fire.
The warmth comes from another world entirely.
Hold my hand, friend. We will not be lonely.

My shortlist:

 1. Siri Hustvedt. The Blazing World

 

Hustvedt, Siri. The Blazing World

I have adored everything Siri Hustvedt has written, but when I first read this, months before the JTB judging began, I cast it aside, unfinished. I found the protagonist, artist Harriet Burden, irritating, and the fragmented nature of the book frustrating. However, on re-reading it for JTB, and actually finishing it this time, I found it to be fascinating, gripping and amazingly inventive. I realised that I had, on first reading it, fallen into the exact trap that so many of the critics who dismiss Burden in the novel fall into. Because she possesses traits that make for a compelling and charismatic male figure – she’s big, tall, loud, opinionated, well-read, scarily intellectual, angry – the critics are ‘put off’, and I was too. Hustvedt duped me just like Burden dupes her critics.

Burden rages at the world for largely ignoring her art and treating her as the mere appendage of her successful art dealer husband. She hatches a plan to expose the misogyny she feels is at the root of this, and devises three new art installations, each one presented to the world by a male artist who acts as her ‘mask’. However, something goes wrong with the third show. The artist fronting it, the handsome, egotistical and mysterious Rune, claims the work as his own. He dies not long afterwards, a bizarre death caught on his own video camera.

The narrative is presented as the critical work of editor I. V. Hess, written after Burden’s death, and is comprised of fragments from Harriet’s cerebral, meandering, alphabetised notebooks, as well as written and spoken accounts given by her daughter, son, lover, friends, acquaintances and critics. The narrative jumps from the past to the present to the future, and flits back and forth between strikingly differing perceptions of Burden. Each character is exceptionally well drawn, with their own particular ways of speaking and seeing the world around them, so that you feel that there are many lives and worlds going on between the pages.

Hustvedt is a genius at describing art installations so that you feel as if you are actually standing inside them. From the heated, life-size bodies Harriet creates, to the rooms which get progressively bigger as you walk through them so that you feel infantilised by the end, or the maze of the third show, which you can only escape if you pay close attention to the clues scattered throughout, the works of art here are eerie, evocative and enchanting.

The Blazing World deserves to win the JTB award because it is a gripping story presented in a complex and imaginative way. It is a novel which raises big questions about life, art, perception, masks, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, gender, and so much more besides. A compelling and thought-provoking read, I highly recommend it for the shortlist.

Johnston, Bret Anthony. Remember Me Like This

Remember Me Like This is about a boy, Justin Campbell, who goes missing from his family home in a small Texan town; but this is not a whodunit or even a whydunit. We know who the boy’s abductor is, and the reasons for the abduction are deliberately never fully explored. This is, instead, an account of what happens when the boy is found and returns to family life. As a study of a family’s complex, shattering grief and almost unbearable relief, the book is extremely successful. The boy’s mother, father, brother and grandfather are deeply convincing characters who each have their own conflicted thoughts, feelings and idiosyncratic coping mechanisms. Hearing the innermost torments and desires of the boy’s mother is particularly arresting, not to mention moving. The atmosphere of the Texan town is richly evoked by Johnston – the oppressive weather, the neighbours who know everyone’s business, the skate park where local kids hang out, the excitement over the forthcoming shrimp jamboree – and the dialogue feels flowing and true to life.

However, because Johnston deliberately side-steps why the abduction took place, and what exactly happened to the boy whilst he was missing – for over four years – I felt that too much was omitted. I wanted to know why the man who abducted Justin did what he did. I wanted to know what exactly Justin had suffered. I don’t think that this is salacious; I just could not make sense of Justin without knowing what he had experienced throughout these four years. The fact that his own parents and sibling never ask him what he has gone through seems bizarre to me. This left me feeling ultimately dissatisfied with the book, despite it being well written and engaging.

 

 McCall Smith, Alexander. The Forever Girl

Set on the island of Grand Cayman, this tells the story of Clover, a girl who falls in love with a boy called James when they are only six years old. Despite the fact that James does not seem to return her affections, at least not in a romantic sense, Clover remains in love with him, even as they grow into adulthood and attend university in Edinburgh. As their story unfolds, a parallel plot takes place with Clover’s mother, who realises one day that she has simply and startlingly fallen out of love with her husband. The lush landscape of the island is beautifully drawn by McCall Smith, and the maze of emotions felt by Clover and her mother are subtly navigated. Clover’s constancy, particularly when set against her mother’s seeming capriciousness, is affecting and wonderfully observed by the author (who seems to have been a teenage girl in a previous life). There is a neat change of direction at the end, not quite a twist but a sweet surprise nonetheless. A delicious book, I read it in one sitting, but it feels more like an especially high quality holiday read, the kind of book you could devour on the beach in one day, rather than an inventive, prize-winning sort of novel.

 

McEwan, Ian. The Children Act.

Told from the viewpoint of Fiona Maye, a middle-aged High Court judge, The Children Act concerns a seventeen year old cancer patient, Adam, who is refusing treatment on the grounds of his religion. As a Jehovah’s Witness, he and his family do not believe in blood transfusions, and so Fiona must decide whether the court can enforce medical treatment on the boy or not. As a study in ethics, there are some interesting ideas raised here. Passages in which legal cases are described are fascinating but brief, and the parallel plot concerning Fiona’s crumbling marriage feels lacklustre in comparison.

My biggest problem is with Adam, who speaks like no teenage boy I have ever met. His dialogue is just plain weird, precocious, flowery and irritating. He beguiles his nurses with his poetry and his violin, but a scene in which he plays his instrument while Fiona sings by his bedside is hideously awkward and, I felt, unintentionally funny. Seemingly in love with her after one fleeting bedside meeting (although only Jehovah knows why), Adam stalks Fiona to a country retreat and they share a kiss. His motives for doing so are never explained and the whole thing feels odd and tawdry. The ending is meant to be heart-searing but it left me feeling cold and totally unmoved. The grief and torment surely felt by Adam’s parents is basically ignored. Despite dealing with BIG IDEAS, the book felt like much ado about nothing, tedious and strangely lightweight.

 

Moore, Lisa. Caught

Having escaped from prison after being caught smuggling marijuana, 25 year old Slaney must make his way across 1970s Nova Scotia, all the way to Columbia and across the sea, encountering a rag-tag bunch of truck drivers, strippers, sleazy motel owners, drug dealers and undercover cops along the way. Eager to pull off another drug heist that will make his fortune, Slaney’s journey has all the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll you could want from a road trip thriller. However, Moore’s prose elevates the novel above more mainstream thrillers. Her forensic attention to detail, describing the tiny things about a scene which might otherwise go unnoticed – the elephant pattern on a burst footstool, the noise of swishing lupins like the pages of a glossy magazine – renders the book far more memorable than your average cop chase page-turner. Her depictions of people tripping on acid are particularly vibrant and, at times, very funny, and the dialogue is crackling throughout. This is a good old-fashioned yarn, accessible and enjoyable, but it is what it is: a thriller about a man on the run, another great holiday read without the inventiveness that would make me want to shortlist it.

 

Pinto, Jerry. Em and the Big Hoom

This novel is essentially a character study of a woman, Em, who has bipolar disorder. Set largely in their Bombay apartment, Em’s son gives an account of his mother’s wild mood swings, which range from flamboyantly joyful to morosely suicidal. Em’s sense of humour is, at manic times, riotously inappropriate, and she often makes sexually explicit jokes to her young children. Her husband, nicknamed ‘the Big Hoom’ because of the grumpy noises he makes, is a stoical but largely silent figure who has endured his beautiful and capricious wife’s mood swings and suicide attempts throughout the decades simply because he loves her.

There is a lot of humour in the book, despite the often grim subject matter, and the outrageous character of Em is wonderfully drawn. Her disgust at being brought low by her status as mother manages to be funny, feminist and horrible all at once, given that she aims this statement at her own son: ‘[Men] just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you’ve pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you’re stuck with someone whose definition isn’t even herself. You’re now someone’s mudd-dha!’ Em smokes like a chimney (developing a little cauliflower-like tumour on her tongue which mysteriously disappears overnight), develops ‘pica’ in some of her manic phases, wanting to eat the most extraordinary things, and makes statements that are jabberwocky-nonsensical.

My problem with the book is that Pinto often doesn’t allow his dialogue – which is great – to do the work for him. At one point, Em is being so outrageous that all he can reply is ‘mother!’, ‘stop!’ etc. Just as I was thinking ‘his mother has reduced him to exclamations’ he writes: ‘my mother had reduced me to exclamations’. I also didn’t get a vibrant enough feel of Em’s family, or of the apartment and the city in which they live in. What I will remember from this is Em and only Em, and, for me, that doesn’t feel like enough to have taken from a book.

 

Rahman, Zia Haider. In the Light of What We Know

This is a weighty and cerebral tome, 555 pages long and choc-full of ideas about politics, love, identity, exile, roots and rage, with musings on philosophy, finance, class, culture, science, faith, war and everything in between. An unnamed investment banker, wealthy but brought low by the economic crisis and the breakdown of his marriage, narrates the tale, which is basically a conversation between himself and his old friend, Zafar, who turns up on his doorstep one morning looking dishevelled and distracted. The narrative flits between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad as we hear the story of Zafar’s life, from his humble beginnings to his elite education and career, as well as his ill-fated love for a complicated and troubled woman who treats him with disdain. There are so many books, scholars, poems, theories etc. referenced throughout the narrative that Zafar’s mind seems like an encyclopaedia. It can feel quite dizzying, the breadth of topics discussed throughout.

My problem with the book is its structure. Zafar’s long, long story often shoots off into long, long tangents, so that an engaging plot line gets interrupted and isn’t returned to for another hundred or so pages, by which time the emphasis has been lost. I found this repeatedly frustrating and, at times, even confusing. The climax the book seems to be building to (a rape) happens ‘off-screen’ and is deliberately referred to only obliquely, as if some things are too terrible to name. It might be too terrible for Zafar to discuss, but I felt short-changed by this, and eager to know the details, not for any sort of macabre titillation, but so that I could better understand Zafar and his story. I found this to be an arduous read, though I appreciate how skilful the writing is, and how impressive the novel’s scope is. I almost recommended this for the shortlist because of its sheer erudition and depth, as well as Rahman’s ability to locate the personal in the political (and vice versa) and the generally epic feel of the plot – but it would be dishonest of me to suggest that I truly enjoyed this book. It was a slog.

 

Waheed, Mirza. The Book of Gold Leaves

In Kashmir, Faiz, a painter of exquisite papier-mache pencil boxes, falls in love with Roohi, who has dreamed of a star-crossed romance all her life. As the pair’s relationship develops, a violent rebellion takes place in their city. Added to this approaching disaster, Faiz is Sunni and Roohi is Shia, so their love story seems doomed from the start. The first part of the book depicts the couple’s burgeoning love, whilst the second part focuses on the conflict. Having witnessed a minibus full of schoolchildren, as well as his own godmother, caught in crossfire, Faiz is radicalised, and is next encountered trekking across the mountainous border into Pakistan to join the uprising. He becomes known as the ‘papier-mache militant’, making bombs in a camp surrounded by unmarked graves in an uncanny mirroring of his gentle past life making pencil boxes.

The first section of the book feels clichéd, and I never really understood why the pair fall in love in the first place. Roohi is certainly beautiful, but Faiz seems to fall in love with her before he knows anything about her character. The same could also be said of her love for him. Added to the apparently shallow nature of their romance, Roohi is also just too good and too dutiful to be an interesting character, though Faiz certainly is engaging. Waheed shines a light on a conflict that is often wrongly forgotten, and he writes about it unflinchingly, often devastatingly, with wisdom and sensitivity, exploring the region’s religious politics through family dynamics, locating (as Rahman does) the personal in the political. In doing so, he presents the terrible moral toll of war. If the love story had been as convincing as the account of the conflict, and if Roohi had been a more vivid character, I might have recommended this for the shortlist.

Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. Mrs. B

Presented as being loosely inspired by Madame Bovary, Mrs. B’s titular protagonist is a dissatisfied middle-class woman in her late forties, living in Trinidad with her husband Charles and daughter Ruthie. Having had an affair with a married professor during her time as a student in Boston, Ruthie has had a nervous breakdown and returned home to the island. When Mrs. B discovers that her only daughter is pregnant – the daughter who she has pinned all her pride and joy upon – she begins to feel keenly the pressures put upon her by her aspirational and catty social circle. A past secret affair with her husband’s friend feels like unfinished business.

The constant violence in Trinidad – rape, mutilation, murder – is ever present, an eerie and often politically-linked force that has compelled the Butchers to leave the secluded home they loved for a gated community where their neighbours may watch their every move. This creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, oppressive despite the island’s lush beauty, which is gorgeously evoked by the author throughout the narrative. Ruthie’s relationships with the professor, as well as with her friend Monique, are finely drawn, and the distance between her and her parents is subtly and sensitively achieved. Mrs. B’s disaffection from her husband is nuanced and sad, and her childhood, revealed in flashbacks, makes sense of her current predicament – her absent parents and wonderful, bibliophile aunt providing her with a sense of abandonment and love, respectively.

The blurb promises that these upper middle-class characters are carried ‘towards a deeper engagement with their fellow but less privileged islanders’ but this really isn’t the case. A few homeless people are described and referred to, but they have no dialogue and therefore no voice. The family’s servants also have almost no dialogue. We know that horrific violence with political motives is taking place, but it is never properly explained why this is happening and what has led to the island’s shocking predicament. As a nuanced study of a family, this book is excellent and thoroughly enjoyable. I finished it with an excellent feel for the characters of Mrs. B and her social circle, but with little understanding of the political climate of Trinidad and how this affects the island’s lower social strata.

My shortlist

1. Nicholas Shakespeare. Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France
2. Paula Byrne. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
3. Emily Rapp. The Still Point of the Turning World

 

Al Khafaji, Dorothy. Between Two Rivers: A Story of Life, Love and Marriage from an English Woman in Baghdad

 This rough diamond of a narrative relates the story of a young woman from Lancaster who marries an Iraqi man and goes to live with his family in Baghdad. Beginning in the 1960s and unfolding over 18 or so years, Dorothy’s tale centres on her domestic life in Iraq: her pregnancies, the births of her children, her experiences of child-rearing, shopping, socialising and trying to fit in with her in-laws. Through these domestic details, political realities are unobtrusively revealed, from mysteriously vanishing neighbours to tense roadside run-ins with Baathist officials. Al Khafaji quite brilliantly illuminates the gripping and shocking events from this time, which in hindsight read as dark portents of the still more harrowing events to come. Her proximity to Saddam Hussein is a particularly startling aspect of the memoir; her son was a classmate of Hussein’s monstrous son Uday and her daughter was forced to participate in Hussein’s birthday celebrations. People who Al Khafaji knew personally were imprisoned, tortured and killed, including men, women and children. An air of paranoia laces the narrative – the walls have ears wherever she goes – and yet a surprising sense of humour and normality pervades; this is far from a depressing read.

Al Khafaji does particularly well in portraying the status and plight of women in this society, bravely detailing her own abortions and the actions of her often verbally aggressive and seemingly uncaring husband. There are, unfortunately, dozens of typographical errors throughout the text, from missing punctuation marks to a couple of incidences where line-breaks have been unnecessarily added, leaving sentences hanging in a limbo of white space for no reason. Even the cover page fails to give the ‘woman’ of the title a capital letter. This shouldn’t reflect on the story itself, but it is irritating and undermines the work. The author also has a habit of repeating information (at one point remarking that she has yet to mention the issue of abortion in Iraq, despite having described a doctor renowned for carrying out secret abortions) and uses phrases like ‘cheesed off’ when a more forceful word or phrase is required, or exclamation marks that aren’t necessary.

However, on the whole, Al Khafaji’s lucid, engaging, humorous and conversational story-telling style, which often trips back and forth between various decades, helps the narrative to both meander pleasurably at some points and at other points zoom-in on certain incidents with effective intensity. She depicts a vibrant side of Iraq that most people – used to seeing the country only in the bleakest of news reports – will not previously have witnessed, and this is perhaps the book’s greatest strength. This is a riveting read and a good edit would remove its flaws and allow it to dazzle.

 

Byrne, Paula. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

‘Yet this sketch reveals more than has been realised by previous biographers’ (328). This is a typical comment from Paula Byrne’s hugely confident and entertaining biography of Jane Austen. Austen was, Byrne informs her readers from the start, the first novelist to offer accurate representations of ordinary life, without the need for Gothic melodrama. Walter Scott made the comparison between Austen and the Flemish school of painting, and by focussing on ordinary objects such as a writing desk, a shawl, a cushion, a miniature painting etc., building her chapters around each object, Byrne’s format perfectly reflects the Still Life approach so brilliantly executed by Austen. Yet, despite the domestic nature of the items examined, the book does not stay indoors. Instead, Byrne uses these items as platforms from which to launch the connections she makes between Austen’s work and events as far-reaching and dynamic as the French Revolution and the Slave Trade. Not that indoor events are intrinsically safe or boring; the Austen family’s history of madness is a particularly intriguing example of the extraordinary events that can occur in so-called cosy and sheltered domestic worlds.

Byrne’s approach is a bold one, culminating in her discovery of a potentially new portrait of Austen, the evidence for which she conveys in a highly compelling manner. Such boldness is well-founded; she cross-references her seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of Austen in order to contest certain claims. For example, she cites a comment made in one of Austen’s niece’s letters to geographically locate the setting of a watercolour sketch of the author, painted by Austen’s sister – which had previously been of unknown setting. She also cites a shopping spree that Austen went on before her book had made a profit in order to refute a claim made by Austen’s brother that Jane had little confidence that the book would do well. It is a feat in itself to produce a work as fresh, original and enlightening as this when the topic has been discussed so often before.

Byrne readily admits that she is heavily indebted to Deirdre Le Faye’s chronology of Jane Austen from 2006 and Park Hanan’s biography from 1987 and, indeed, there is a lot of familiar territory here for Austen fans (albeit pleasurably familiar territory). But, all in all, Byrne’s admirable quest for new angles, alert attention to minute detail and celebration of small things make this a pleasure to read, as does her accessible writing style and seemingly effortless knack for structuring thorough and nuanced research. Recommended for the shortlist.

Dixon, James. Out of Birmingham: George Dixon (1820-98), ‘Father of free education’

Dixon drops a name or two in his preface (‘Seated beside Sir Stephen Tumin, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, over dinner…’ (8)) and I’m afraid I never fully recovered from this. The biography relates the life of the author’s great-grandfather George Dixon, who played a key role as leader of the Birmingham-based National Education League, campaigning for compulsory free education in nineteenth century England and Wales. According to the author, his ancestor has been overlooked by historians due to the eclipsing fame of Joseph Chamberlain and John Bright, and he wishes to rectify this.

Dixon was renowned for not having a single enemy; Charlotte Bronte, who knew the family, described him as being polite and pretty but ‘without a backbone’ (23). The author talks at length about what a good, mild-mannered. modest gentleman his ancestor was (the fact that Dixon would not have wanted a statue of himself erected is mentioned more than once), which is all very lovely but it does mean that the subject lacks bite, and makes one wonder whether the fact that Dixon has been overlooked by historians might be because he’s just a bit…dull. It’s written with clarity, but there’s an abundance of very short paragraphs which makes the book look like a textbook and creates a more juddering, fragmented reading experience than is entirely comfortable. It’s a dry, if worthy, topic, and there are so many footnotes listing books, their publication details and page numbers, that it feels more like reading an impressively researched thesis than a full-bodied biography.

Hamilton, Duncan. Immortal: The Approved Biography of George Best

The clue is in the title of this hugely romanticized biography of football legend George Best; it is totally unsurprising that this hefty 520-page tome has achieved ‘approved’ status. The praise for Best listed in the book’s foreword borders on the hysterical. He is described by Hamilton as ‘physically perfect’, ‘debonair’ and ‘virile’ with a near Mensa-level IQ. ‘Genius?’ asks Hamilton. ‘He was much more than that.’ Even the blurb states that: ‘Every man envied him and every woman adored him.’ Well, no, not every man envied him and not every woman adored him, and it is this exaggeration that makes an otherwise well-written book rather tiresome.

Best was an undoubtedly remarkable sportsman, and Hamilton’s obvious passion for football and Best himself infuses the book with zest and energy. But, ultimately, Hamilton is so preoccupied with romanticizing past events that, whilst it is no doubt a captivating read for fans of Best and of football in general, non-fans (like myself) will be left bored to tears by large sections of the book and possibly tittering at the photo captions describing Best as a ‘model-in-waiting’ ‘with seldom a hair out of place’, ‘the perfect billboard for his own clothes’, a ‘pin-up’, ‘fashion icon’ and ‘perfect physical specimen’. Indeed, so much attention is paid to Best’s appearance that it becomes comical and, at times, borders on the homoerotic.

Best was, of course, a deeply flawed individual and Hamilton does address his icon’s pig-headedness, his womanising ways, excessive materialism (for example, buying garish and costly shirts that he would wear only once before discarding) and other less saintly character traits. His death by alcoholism at the age of 59 is treated with an admirable sense of compassion, and rightly so. Hamilton paints vivid and endearing pictures of the folk who touched Best’s life, from his salt-of-the-earth landlady Mrs Fullaway to enigmatic manager Matt Busby, and skilfully evokes the varying atmospheres of the shifting decades and the changing nature of our ‘celebrity’ culture. It is undeniably well-researched and well-structured, but left me longing to read an earthier, more honest and altogether less blinkered account of the talented, troubled soul.

Muirhead, Fergus. A Piper’s Tale: Stories from the World’s Top Pipers

This is more a collection of brief interviews with various musicians than a cohesive exploration of piping. Each quick chapter discusses the career of a different piper/group and the book isn’t tied together in any other way than this. The conversations with the likes of the Red Hot Chilli Pipers do give a good insight into the life of a musician; the dedication it takes to become skilled in the art of piping, life on the road and so on. Muirhead’s writing style is unfussy, lucid and flowing, but the book is filled with jargon that outsiders aren’t likely to understand fully and, for me, became tedious when things like tuning were discussed, or when competitions were listed as if they were already familiar to the reader. The forewords by Eddie Reader and Carlos Nunez are also pretty poorly written and that’s not a great way to begin a book and goes to show that great musicians/singers do not necessarily make great writers. This is probably a pleasurable read if you’re a piper yourself, or even a musician in general, but for non-musical folk like me it felt like being on the outside looking in at a world I’m not particularly interested in. One for the fans.

 

Norman, Jesse. Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet

A book written by a Conservative MP, with an endorsement from Boris Johnson on its front cover, is hardly likely to be 100% palatable to a non-Tory reader, and Jesse Norman’s biography of Edmund Burke is no exception. Norman’s writing style is, for the most part, lucid and flowing and is laced everywhere with the author’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject. The first half of the book, focussing on Burke’s life, is generally successful and often stimulating. The second half, focussing on Burke’s work and how this relates to politics today, is less successful. With regards to Burke’s life, Norman’s references to Burke’s contemporaries, including womanising, squint-eyed John Wilkes or wealthy playboy Charles James Fox (who lost his virginity to a Paris Madame when he was just 14), are highly entertaining, and actually left me wishing I could follow their stories instead of well-behaved Burke’s. Not enough attention is paid to Burke’s personal life; though Norman admits that ‘Burke took care not to allow private matters to intrude into his public life, but there was no great gap between the two’ (97), he almost completely ignores Burke’s wife Jane. For example, he refers to her miscarrying a child but dismisses the topic in less than a sentence.

Indeed, Norman mentions Mary Wollstonecraft’s dislike of Burke’s ‘patronizing and offensive view of women’ (142), especially his discussion of beauty in the Enquiry, and readily admits that Burke ‘has little of interest to say about women’ (279). The same, sadly, could be said of Norman, since references to women in this book are fleeting. Burke’s defence of the poor and abused, especially the Irish peasantry, is inspiring to read about, but the fact that he did not support extension of the franchise cannot be ignored. The result of this is that Norman’s incessant need to relate Burke’s work to politics today becomes irritating and intrusive. Norman states at the end of the book that ‘The political context was quite different from that of today, of course’ (228), and that ‘some key aspects of Burke’s thought may strike a modern audience as wrong, irrelevant or merely offensive’ (279). He’s right, which wouldn’t be an issue if he didn’t keep trying to make Burke seem particularly relevant to our modern society. In short, the first half of this book is generally entertaining and enlightening, but the second half is dust-dry and tries too hard to drag Burke’s political inclinations into the 21^st century.

 

O’ Kell, Robert. Disraeli: The Romance of Politics

O’ Kell reads Disraeli and his career through his novels rather than vice versa, and this is a refreshing angle to take. It gives dual weight to Disraeli’s status as a novelist and politician, which here seems thoroughly justified. The literary and political aspects of Disraeli’s career are united by O’ Kell’s focus on Disraeli’s imagination and his ties to romance. He claims his book is not a ‘typical biography’, nor a critical study, but is instead a narrative focussing on Disraeli’s dual careers and the emotional intensities inherent in both. This approach gives coherence to O’ Kell’s portrait of Disraeli which, even if it is a partial portrait, does result in a generally entertaining end product. However, at over 600 pages long this is a very long partial study, featuring numerous very long plot summaries of Disraeli’s novels and a sometimes tiresome, self-argumentative style. It is an extremely detailed work and draws a great variety of sources together in a neat and nifty fashion (novels, speeches, memoranda, newspaper articles, pamphlets and letters) but, despite the entertaining subject matter, it is an ultimately arduous read.

 

Rapp, Emily. The Still Point of the Turning World

Reading the blurb of this might well lead some people to dismiss it as another dismal misery memoir. The story relates the moment and aftermath of the author’s son being diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease when he was just nine months old, a degenerative and always fatal condition. It’s the kind of book I normally swerve to avoid. Yet this story is filled not with misery but with a deeply philosophical sense of what it means to love, to live, to grieve, and how to turn this grief into art. It questions the danger of placing one’s self-worth in ambition and the pursuit of goals, the quest for happiness not in the present but in some sunny always-in-the-future ideal. Rapp’s style is contemplative but lucid, free-flowing but exceptionally well-orchestrated. Her approach is pragmatic and contemplative: ‘this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you – to tremble, always, on the edge of loss.’ (23)

Rapp challenges media representations of disabled people as being either objects of pity and sadness or achieving magnificent feats. She cites a remarkable letter that Mary Shelley wrote to James Hogg just hours after her child had died, relating her own experiences of grief to those before her. Rapp challenges the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness, its elevation of high achievement, ambition, capitalistic cravings, the need to strive, to have purpose, to be the thinnest, smartest, funniest, best, most famous, most rich. How can any of this relate to her son when he has no future? How can any of these things matter to her now that the worst has happened? Such things are all about transformation; if I achieve this my life will be better. Her son will never transform and can only degenerate: does this mean his life has no value? This is a seam of questioning with rich rewards.

High-flying Rapp had to unburden herself of such preoccupations and misconceptions, and it’s an interesting process to be made privy to. She describes how the parents of her writing students wanted to know how many hours tuition their kids would need before their work was publishable, dissecting the commodification of children, the way certain parents look at their children as some sort of investment; how she too did this before the awful diagnosis was made. She details the way in which the Tay-Sachs gene was the result of persecution and isolation, of Eastern Europeans forced into shetls and thereby having to intermarry and develop the mutant gene. She dismisses images of angels and heaven as insincere and useless in the face of overwhelming grief, the existence of luck, and the warped hierarchy of people’s grief, as if grief is ever quantifiable.

Rapp writes that to turn grief into art it must be revised, the words shaped. She describes her experiences with Reiki, its principle that healing should not be regarded as the means to an end goal but as a moment-to-moment thing, writing sensuously of placing a pine needle under her son’s nose or rubbing his bare feet in the soil. Rapp draws on the work of C. S. Lewis, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda and a host of other writers who have addressed death and grief, a sort of literary therapy. She writes beautifully of what it is like to love and lose an infant, evoking all the smells, textures and sounds of her son so that he becomes not just a symbol of grief but a living, tangible human being whose brief life meant something. All these elements combine to create a work of honesty, intelligence and a deep-felt sense of humanity. I recommend it for the shortlist.

Shakespeare, Nicholas. Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

This thrilling tale relates the life of the author’s beautiful and glamorous aunt Priscilla, who was sent to live in Paris as a child and, as a young woman, remained there throughout the German occupation during WWII. Because she owned a British passport she was one of the 4,000 British women sent to an internment camp in Besancon near the Swiss border, where open cesspits, frostbite, pneumonia, diarrhoea, malnutrition, food poisoning and dysentery were a daily grievance. It is a subject about which not much has been written. As Shakespeare comments, on discovering accounts of this terrible time: ‘I had the freakish impression of being taken by the wrist and being led down, through a procession of unlocking doors, into the cellars beneath one of the most fascinating and yet, in spite of all the literature on it, incompletely explored moments of the twentieth century – a period over which France continues to draw firm bolts: “Four years to strike from our history,” is how the French still refer to it.’ (217).

Having found boxes filled with his mysterious aunt’s letters, diaries, photographs and stories, Shakespeare decided to write the story of Priscilla’s life, and it is a very juicy story indeed, filled with love affairs, tempestuous family relationships, infidelities and a whole lot of mystery. ‘It was a period which encouraged doubles and pseudonyms’ (271) and, indeed, the author clearly had to do a lot of detective work in order to piece together the accounts of Priscilla, her lovers and her friends. That Priscilla chose to remain in Paris during the war, when she could have escaped to begin with, is one such mystery. Once she remained she was stuck, and it is at this stage that the tale takes on the air of a thriller in which Priscilla had to follow the ‘rules of concealment that John Buchan imposed on his hero Richard Hannay […] “If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land there is only one chance of escape. You must stay in the patch and let your enemies search it and not find you.”’ (276)

When the war was over, and having had love affairs with Germans (possibly even Nazis), Priscilla was in a dangerous situation. Women accused of sleeping with the enemy were often stripped naked, their heads shaved, and paraded through the streets as traitors. Not that men who had slept with German women were victimised, as Shakespeare notes: ‘Horizontal collaboration was a crime uniquely pinned on French women, for whom sleeping with the enemy may have been the only way to feed their children’ (336). Shakespeare’s sympathetic exploration of the plight of women is one of the book’s strongest points. Indeed, at the book’s conclusion, Shakespeare writes that his aunt’s ‘life is a reflection of how hard it was to be fulfilled as a woman, even until recently. The two things she had wanted to do, she could do today, without the help of a man: she could have told her story honestly, and she could have had a child out of wedlock’ (405).

What a wonderful insight into the life of a remarkable but damaged woman this is: a beautifully written, well-structured, sensitive, evocative, intriguing, moving and engrossing read. Highly recommended for the shortlist.

 

Victor, Maria Paez. Liberty or Death! The Life and Campaigns of Richard L Vowell

 I felt bombarded with information reading this biography of an obscure British Legionnaire. You have to wade through 12 pages of background and 6 pages of maps and diagrams just to get to chapter one, and the whole thing feels much more like reading a dense history textbook than a biography with a linear, unifying plot (not helped by the tiny text and large page-size). I also found the abundance of endnotes distracting. In chapter one alone there are 34 notes, despite the chapter being only 6 pages long. The subject is an interesting one, and the sheer amount of research that has gone into the project is evident and impressive. If you are passionate about nineteenth century wars in South America, and have a background knowledge of the subject, then this book may well have great merit for you. However, with the (what feels like) thousands of names and dates that swarm over every page, added to the author’s fondness for long sentences, I found it a frustrating and inaccessible read. A skilled writer of biography should be able to make extensive and detailed information accessible to a wider audience and I do not believe that the author achieves this here.

My shortlist

1. Kirsty Gunn. The Big Music.
2. Liza Klaussmann. Tigers in Red Weather.
3. Fiona McGregor. Indelible Ink.

Arnold, Gaynor. After Such Kindness.

After Such Kindness is inspired by the true-life tale of Lewis Carroll’s troubling relationship with Alice Liddell. Set in the Victorian era, it relates the story of Oxford scholar/photographer John Jameson and his attraction to his friend’s little daughter Daisy. The character of Jameson is extremely well drawn, and it soon becomes clear that his interest in Daisy and little angelic girls in general is not sexual, no matter how shocking his behaviour might seem by our modern standards. When he photographs Daisy naked he looks upon her as you would a statue of a classical cherub; it’s revolting, but somehow not.

This ambiguity is brilliantly rendered by Arnold: whilst you believe in Jameson’s essential innocence, you can’t help feeling there might be more to what’s going on here than meets the eye. When Daisy is grown up and cannot have sex with her new husband (she finds him physically repulsive in this context, especially his chest hair) it becomes apparent that she has suffered some sexual trauma in her childhood that she has blocked from her memory. The obvious assumption is that Jameson has molested her, but when it is revealed who is in fact responsible (and just what exactly went on to make her this way) the results are astonishing.

My only issue with the book is that this sort of thing has been done before, by Arnold herself in her last book Girl in a Blue Dress (a fictionalized account of the marriage of Charles Dickens) and in other more expansive books like Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (which covers a lot of the themes here, from the questionable Victorian treatment of children to repressed memories). It’s a delicious slice of Victoriana, very well written, insightful and full of well-handled flashbacks and suspense, but I’m not sure if it’s new or inventive enough to be shortlisted.

 

Boyt, Susie. The Small Hours.

I found the protagonist of this book, Harriet, irritating to begin with. She has a rapid, machine-gun style of speaking, uses plummy language and has an altogether ‘larger than life’ personality. However, as the condition of her mental state unfolds, the description of Harriet actually becomes spot-on. Boyt offers a fascinating insight into a troubled psyche so that we become deeply involved with Harriet, absolutely on her side and willing her to triumph. Harriet is living under the shadow of a family which has abused her psychologically and physically throughout her entire life. She has endured mental institutions, endless counselling sessions and the oppressive weight of her mother, brother and father, whose passive aggression is brilliantly wrought throughout the book. Despite how grim this sounds, the book is in fact rather joyful to read. Harriet buys a large house and sets up a nursery for five year olds, finding joy in domestic details, in baking and flower-arranging and other intricate, homely pursuits. The Small Hours is filled with beautiful descriptions of food, fashion and flowers, with many vivid descriptions of colours, smells and tastes rendering the book wonderfully evocative. The language used is, at some points, stunning. The narrative is well-structured and paced, its flash-backs deployed deftly and effectively. It’s short, sweet and a little slight, however, so not recommended for the shortlist.

Crook, J. R. Sleeping Patterns.

At just 108 pages long, this book is split into 15 extremely brief sections, presented to the reader out-of-sequence, so that the first section we read is section 5, the second section 1, the third section 11, and so on. This is clearly meant to reflect the fragmented, dream-like quality of the narrative, and it’s an interesting idea. It calls the interplay between fiction and memory into question, as well as the relationship between writer and reader. Unfortunately, the result is at times confusing and frustrating. The plot is too thin to stretch and cover this experimental style and, ultimately, the characterisation is neglected because there is never enough space in each fleeting section to really get to grips with who each person is.

The disjointed nature also results in characters appearing to the reader for the first time half-way through their own narratives, and characters we are familiar with being introduced 5 sections after we have encountered them. The fleeting nature also makes it difficult to care about the characters or, indeed, to remember who they are. There is a lot of deliberate repetition throughout the narrative, which quickly becomes tiresome. For example: ‘…It was the way in which the flashing light of the tallest glass tower came through her windows at night. And it was the way in which he could not stop it …It was the way in which Christmas would soon pull her away. And it was the way in which that watchful arm would soon wrap again around her shoulders …It was the way in which things were left unsaid. …It was the way in which he… It was…’ (54). Note: the ellipses are the author’s own.

This is an interesting writing exercise, but not sustained or executed well enough for the book to be shortlisted.

Crow, Matthew. My Dearest Jonah.

This is comprised of a series of letters sent back and forth between Verity and Jonah, who are introduced through a pen-pal scheme but have in fact never met. The plot is intriguing. Jonah has just been released from a long imprisonment after a terrible crime committed in his youth. After his release he is stalked by the sinister Michael, who was involved in the crime and seems to have some sort of hold over Jonah. Verity, through an unfortunate series of events, becomes an exotic dancer in a seedy nightclub ‘The Iguana Den’ and becomes embroiled in criminal underworld activities that eventually lead to the murder of her best friend.

The plot is interesting, but Jonah’s and Verity’s style of speaking, or rather writing, to one another is often too formal and, at times, verges on grandiose. Take this section of a letter from Jonah to Verity, with whom he shares his deepest secrets and darkest thoughts: ‘I am truly sorry if you interpreted my previous missive as in any way accusatory. I can assure you this was not my intention and for any upset caused I apologise. That is not to say I entirely condone the recent tangent you seemed to have happened upon…’ (8). He is writing to his only confidante in the entire world but sounds like he is writing to his solicitor. There is also a fair amount of tell-and-don’t-show in Crow’s character descriptions. For example, his description of Jack: ‘Jack was a large man with few morals and a steady aim. He […] was considered the most volatile of the bunch…’ (102-3). A few lines of well-chosen dialogue/action could have revealed these character traits in a far smoother, demonstrative way. Strangely enough, I would have preferred this book if it wasn’t in letter-form but was instead presented simply as two interwoven narratives.

 

Dobbs, Sarah. Killing Daniel.

This story flits between classic it’s-grim-up-north Manchester and slick, exotic Tokyo, telling the story of two women, Fleur and Chinatsu, who were friends as girls but split apart by various circumstances.

There are some lovely observations scattered throughout the book, such as Chinatsu slipping a shoe onto a stocking-clad foot, which ‘still reminds her of that shell-to-ear sound’ (269). Dobbs gets inside the heads of her two protagonists, as well as Chinatsu’s disturbed husband Yugi, and their thoughts convey their various stories in a well-orchestrated sequence. There’s an elegance to the narrative, a pleasing fluidity that makes it extremely readable.

My trouble with the book is the rather worrying message I believe it sends to its readers. Fleur and Chinatsu are treated terribly by men throughout their lives. Fleur is sexually abused by her stepfather, who kills the only boy she ever loved. Her husband is cruel to her and they have hideous, rough and emotionless sex. Chinatsu was basically sold into marriage as a very young girl by her dominant father and is taught by her mother to be a silent and submissive wife, to think of sex as just another wifely duty that must be borne. Her husband is a murderer who hurts and kills prostitutes for sexual pleasure.

Yet in the end, though it is suggested by Dobbs that the two women save each other, it is actually men who save them, in the form of Fleur’s new partner, Nick, and Chinatsu’s new partner, Tao. I think it would have been so much more empowering and satisfying if the narrative had ended with Fleur and Chinatsu taking control of their lives on their own terms without the aid of men. It is also not totally clear why the two women continue to share a connection, and the moments where they recall one another feel slightly forced. Likewise, the reason why Yugi starts to find torture and death sexually arousing as a child is never fully explored but merely suggested, which leaves his motivations as a character unresolved.

 

Doyle, Roddy. Two Pints.

I read this book in a lunch hour. It’s very short and very funny, just 89 pages of two men chewing the fat in a pub in Dublin over the course of a year, taking in everything from the euro crisis to the Queen’s visit. The dialogue is completely authentic and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, the men’s dead-pan humour and extremely coarse language making a whole range of political issues accessible, thought-provoking and, above all, extremely human. The humour isn’t at all ‘safe’. A sample exchange between the two men:

• They met outside the boozer a few weeks after the smokin’ ban kicked in. And John arrived soon after.
• That’s kind o’ nice.
• There now.
• They still together?
• Actually – he died. The husband.
• That’s rough.
• She was pregnant as well. A girl. Know wha’ they called her?
• Wha’?
• Cancer.
• Fuck off now. I’m not listenin’ to yeh.
• A tribute to his memory.
• Fuck off.
• D’yeh want to know the surname?
• No.
• Ward.
• Cancer Ward?
• A lovely kid. A breath of fresh air.
• Fuck off. (10-11)

It’s deliciously wicked stuff, but in my opinion it’s altogether too brief and light to be shortlisted.

 

Flanery, Patrick. Absolution.

Absolution tells the story of Clare Wald, renowned South African author and critic, as she is interviewed by young American scholar Sam Leroux, who is writing Clare’s biography. Apartheid casts its long shadow over the narrative as Clare – rather cagily and unwillingly – talks to Sam about her past, and speaks internally to her absent daughter Laura. She hides as much from Sam as she divulges, and Sam does exactly the same with Clare. It soon becomes clear that Sam’s past is entangled with Clare’s, as well as Laura’s. Whilst Clare fought against the censorship imposed by the South African government during Apartheid, and seems politically left of field, Laura seems to have embroiled herself in nationalist activities, with all the secrecy, undercover operations and bomb detonations this entails.

The narrative is multi-layered, with some accounts stemming first-hand from Sam, some first-hand from Clare, some in the third person, and some as flashbacks of the same incident told from the perspective of different characters, which often vary greatly in content. For this reason, we are never quite sure who to trust, just as many people living in South Africa at the time of Apartheid would not have known who to trust. The final line of the book, uttered by Clare, referring to Sam, is: ‘I do not trust him, and never shall’ (385). This ambiguity and uncertainty that runs throughout the narrative is deftly handled by Flanery. There are some moments of real suspense, such as when Clare is fantasising that her daughter Laura was captured by authorities for her nationalist activities and caged by them, with the cage hung from a cliff face so that the heat of the sun and the wash and sting of the salt water will torture and slowly kill her. When Clare’s house is invaded in the night by a masked group of men it is genuinely terrifying.

What has prevented me from shortlisting this book is that, because of all the interwoven sections and the deliberate uncertainty of each account, added to the suspense, I expected a really dazzling conclusion which gathers together all of these things in a surprising and satisfying way. I felt that the book didn’t quite pull this off, ending with more of a whimper than a bang, but it is still a terrific book, informative, powerful and moving.

 

Gunn, Kirsty. The Big Music.

This book is unlike anything I’ve encountered before; fresh, inventive and totally unique. Part family narrative, part historical account of the Highlands and the pipe music born from them, part musical composition, it’s a work of fiction presented by Gunn as a collection of papers gathered together as part of a work of research, complete with impressively extensive footnotes and appendices. Despite the scholarly nature of this, the narrative – though it is full of deeply compelling plot lines – is written to a rhythm more than anything else, with certain phrases repeated throughout the book and certain themes returned to again and again. It’s difficult to describe how a book can be written to the rhythms and patterns of Piobaireachd (Highland bagpipe music), but this is precisely what Gunn achieves.

Set in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands and centering round ‘The Grey House’, The Big Music begins with the house’s aged owner, John Sutherland, stealing a baby away across the hills so that he might compose a piece of pipe music from the experience. Everything is experienced here by John in terms of music, from the baby’s cry, to the perceived horror of what he has done, to the skylarks, their ‘little High “E” notes striking through the light’ (9). This last remark is accompanied by a footnote explaining that ‘E’ is known as the ‘echoing’ note in the bagpipe scale, just one example of how the beautifully poetic details of the book are paired together with informative, scholarly information.

The themes which resonate throughout the book include loneliness, leaving and returning, mothers and their children, fathers and sons, and the importance of domestic life. The way in which all the characters seem to leave the house in their youth – to study, to work, to have families – but always return is paralleled with the Highland Clearances (another theme referred to throughout the book): ‘So they may have lived in Nova Scotia or New Zealand or somewhere far away, on the other side of the world, yet they remained here amongst the hills.’ (53). The refrain ‘I’ll not be back!’, uttered by John when he first left the house and the dominance of his oppressive piper father, is heard again and again throughout the narrative, highlighting the fact that John did come back, as does his own estranged son Callum.

There is an intense loneliness to John, who has deliberately isolated himself from everyone around him, and he feels this keenly as he approaches death: ‘For what else is there but to hear the sound of the past coming up behind you as you walk towards the end? Only love.’ (177). There are two single mothers in the book; John’s old lover Margaret, who has a daughter out of wedlock, and the daughter herself, Helen, who is the mother of the baby John steals in the beginning. Margaret gains strength from her physical intimacy with John, reflecting: ‘That kind of strength. It only comes from a bed.’ (32). Again, the importance of intimacy and companionship is highlighted.

We are given access to John’s memories of his mother, who as a young glamorous woman was whisked away to the Grey House only to discover that her husband – John’s father – ‘was a silent kind of man, and frightening, she discovered after their first night together in the bed.’ (258). John himself ‘longed to escape that man’s musical and physical dominance.’ (207). His mother, however, is maternal and tender, and he remembers her ‘lovely sharp and flowery scent right there at her neck when he puts his arms around her and she lifts him up.’ (118). Later, when he is grown, John embraces his now tiny mother and feels she is ‘like a stalk, like a little branch, but something of the blossom about her still.’ (120). This is just one example of the delicate but powerful observations of love and intimacy made by Gunn throughout the narrative.

Women are a dominant force throughout the book, their lullabies referred to as ‘soft songs’ (188), their stories referred to as ‘quietly told’ (197), with ‘strength coming from them but no power’ (197). When John’s mother gives birth to him within the house she thinks, as the women take the baby from her to be cleaned: ‘Just give him to me now. I could lick him clean.’ (259). This is a brilliantly primal maternal reaction, rendered perfectly by Gunn. It’s always gratifying when a book contains as many intriguing and memorable female characters as it does male.

All these fragments of narrative relating the love, pain and secrets shared by a family, of historical information, of accounts from different points of view, of footnotes and appendices (and so much more besides), form together to create a unified work of immense intelligence and originality. The impressive scale of The Big Music, set alongside its startling newness, makes it a worthy contender for the prize and I highly recommend it for the shortlist.

 

Jacobson, Howard. Zoo Time.

Zoo Time is narrated by a grumpy, cynical old Jewish writer (ahem) called Guy Ableman, who fancies his vivacious wife Vanessa’s alluring mother Poppy. Mother and daughter are inseparable and Guy moons about after them being grumpy and cynical and rather lecherous. It’s an unquestionably well-written book, covering a range of universal themes including the ageing process, disappointment, unfulfilled ambitions, the burden of family ties and the quest to write a great novel. It’s just that the narrator is so deeply unlikeable. He is an intellectual snob of the first order and describes gay men, women and sexual relations in a nauseating manner. He has a gorgeous, clever wife and a successful career but refuses to be happy with his lot. He is bitter, cynical and snide.

Whilst this is deliberate on Jacobson’s part, it makes it difficult to tune into the book’s humour. I had a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the intellectual snobbery and ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’-type statements were coming straight from Jacobson’s mouth, unfiltered through Guy Ableman, and were prompting readers to respond with a knowing smile rather than repulsion, which is what I felt. For example, when Guy has been told his books aren’t selling he muses: ‘None was suitable for the three-for-two. None featured a vampire. None was about the Tudors. None could be marketed as a follow-up to The Girl Who Ate Her Own Placenta.’ (27). He is against social media and the right of non-intellectuals to swap opinions: ‘If you’re going to blame anything you should be blaming myBlank and shitFace and whatever else was persuading the unRead to believe everybody had a right to an opinion.’ (27-8). He truly believes that writing great novels is ‘a dying profession’ (31).

I think we’re meant to feel triumphant that Guy’s wife, after she leaves him, writes a great book herself, but she is also such a detestable character by this point that I was willing her to fail. It’s a generally unkind and unpleasant book and, deliberate or not, this made it a tiresome read for me. I believe that reading and learning and sharing should be totally democratic. OK, the Twilight books aren’t ‘great literature’, but they’ve fired the imagination of a great many readers who might never have felt this way about reading. Hilary Mantel might write about the Tudors but she is an exceptional writer.  Zoo Time feels like eating a big batch of sour grapes.

Klaussman, Liza. Tigers in Red Weather.

This wonderfully atmospheric, intelligent book has elements of Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ellen Feldman’s Next to Love, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, but it’s so unique in itself that it’s hard to liken it to any one thing. It tells the story of Nick and her cousin Helen and the different paths their lives lead them down, paths largely dictated by the men they marry. Set in America from the end of WWII through to the sixties, we see the ways in which the two women’s lives are shaped by who they choose to marry and have children with, as well as where their husbands decide to take them. Later, we see Helen’s son Ed and Nick’s daughter Daisy forming a friendship and making a gruesome discovery in their childhood one summer which has repercussions that will ripple through the years to follow.

From the way Helena is manipulated by her shady, con-man husband (he essentially takes her money and turns her into a drug-addict, even prostituting her out to some Hollywood bigwig at one point), to Nick’s war-haunted, sexually repressed husband Hughes, the two women are trapped in uniquely unhappy marriages, producing offspring who are clearly deeply affected by their parents breakdowns in communication. Told from five perspectives – Nick’s, Daisy’s, Helena’s, Hughes’s and Ed’s – the narrative ranges from an account of an awkward adolescent girl’s burgeoning sexuality through to the sinister, disturbed psyche of Ed, a truly chilling (but incredibly complex) character. Nick’s narrative in particular stands out as a triumphant piece of writing, her wasted sensuality and misplaced sexual power a particularly beguiling part a book full of secrets and discoveries.

Tigers in Red Weather combines a ‘literary’ quality of writing with a tense, skilfully crafted and suspenseful plot. It is full of glamour and sensual, evocative details, details which help to weave a tale of fidelity, betrayal and despair with a light yet lasting touch. This is an extremely sophisticated first book, and I highly recommend it for the shortlist.

 

McGregor, Fiona. Indelible Ink.

I read the blurb of this and ignorantly assumed it was a bit of ‘chick lit’ (hideous expression), a story about a recently divorced, middle-aged woman with empty nest syndrome who decides to go a bit ‘wild’ and get lots of tattoos. This actually is, in a nut-shell, what the book is about, but it’s so much more than that. This is a book about human nature and the human condition, and whilst it is largely domestic in its setting, it is truly epic in its ambitions. Set in modern-day Sydney, it offers a snap-shot into the lives of Marie King and her grown-up children. Marie, after a lifetime of submitting herself to the role of affluent wife, mother and housekeeper, finds herself with actual, real freedom and sets about having some fun. She joins the dating scene, drinks like a fish and gets more and more tattoos.

Her increasingly alarmed children dislike this new side to their mother, especially since each has problems of her/his own. Career-woman Blanche has a husband she doesn’t feel any passion for and a baby on the way that she’s not sure she wants. Leon is homosexual in a still homophobic society, tied to his mother in a touching but also troublingly intimate way. Clark is divorced, with an increasingly obese little daughter with whom he has a strained relationship, and his career is going nowhere. When Marie becomes seriously ill with stomach cancer, her self-absorbed children begin to squabble over inheritance and matters of real-estate. Marie continues to get tattoos and strikes up a friendship with her tattooist, Rhys, and a man she meets in her care-home, Brian, people with whom she would never have mixed prior to her divorce.

The ageing process, death, the plight of women, the body, sickness, freedom, autonomy, creativity, passion, sex, motherhood, parental bonds, career woes, failed ambitions, the class system, homophobia… in terms of what the book covers, the list goes on and on. Never preachy, never up on its soap-box, never trying to offer up any morals, Indelible Ink made me look at the world afresh, and though Marie is over twice my age and lives continents away, I felt I was completely inside her head. I felt, in fact, that I got inside the head of every character, despite how different from me they all are, so skilled is McGregor’s characterisation. The language is beautiful, the landscape and interiors perfectly rendered through economically deployed descriptions, and the plot is extremely moving (its resolution thoroughly satisfying). I would certainly recommend this for the shortlist.

  

Raine, Craig. The Divine Comedy.

Raine’s poetic eye for detail and invention is apparent throughout The Divine Comedy. Whether he’s referring to margaritas with ‘a crushed necklace of salt on the rim of the glasses’ (129) or describing the tip of the penis as having a ‘goldfish mouth’ (3), his metaphors can be beautiful, funny and surprising. However, this book is offered up to readers not as poetry but as a novel and it is on these grounds that The Divine Comedy falls down. Just as I felt drawn into the narrative sections of the book I was pulled out of them in order to listen to Raine philosophising on some topic – invariably penises – usually involving an anecdote relating to one of his many, many celebrity friends. Then, just as I was beginning to relish these titbits I was pulled out of them and dropped back into another fragmentary narrative. The stories contained here are more like Polaroid shots into people’s lives, but they aren’t sustained long enough to create an overarching, unified feel (although, if you’re as obsessed with penis sizes as Raine is – he is particularly keen to discuss the penis lengths of famous writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot – then this is the book for you).

Raine makes numerous sweeping generalisations about sex, women and the female body that made me want to hurl the book across the room. For example, statements like: ‘Women never ask to be wanked off. They ask to be wanked.’ (60). I don’t know a single woman who would make that particular request in quite those particular words. He also contradicts many of his own statements. At one point he writes that female genitalia: ‘differs from even the crudest pornography’ (45) which seems a pretty feminist, right-on thing to say. He then later writes a description of sex which is so pornographic it sounds as if it was written by a porn-obsessed teenage boy, referring to a man ejaculating on a woman, the first spurt of semen ‘too high for her to lick’ (109). It’s little wonder this book was recently short-listed for the Bad Sex Award. It deserved that award. It does not deserve this award.

 

Webster, Hayley. Jar Baby.

I was drawn into this plot from pretty much the first chapter. It’s gripping and suspenseful, but it’s also the quality of the language that is impressive. Whether referring to tins of tomatoes as canopic jars or a dress as a ‘violet Miss Jean Brodie Dress’, Webster’s imagery is fresh, evocative and inventive. The sea-side landscape is wrought beautifully, as are the high-fashion outfits crafted by the protagonist’s fashion designer uncle. The dialogue feels perfectly natural, the characters well-drawn, and the central motif of the baby in the jar is at once horrific and consistently compelling. The section in which Diana, the protagonist, recalls a section of her childhood in which she spent a whole week without leaving her bedroom, not even to eat or drink or got to the toilet, then eventually foraging about the house and garden by night, gorging on bizarre combinations of food without speaking to another living soul for six weeks, is truly stunning. It is a brilliant evocation of a neglected child’s thought process and imagination.

My problem is with the whole idea of the protagonist’s eventual quest to discover who her parents are and discovering they’re two people she’s known all along. This whole ‘Luke, I am your father’ thing that you find in so many novels: it just isn’t a satisfying resolution to what is, up until this point, a complex and intriguing plot. I felt disappointed by the final section of the book and for this reason I wouldn’t recommend it for the shortlist, though I believe Webster is an extremely accomplished writer, and one to look out for.