Amanda Brookfield's Blog, page 2

An Unforgettable Tune

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is one thing to be an internationally acclaimed wildlife scientist, awarded for non-fiction books on nature, and quite another to be a masterful storyteller. Delia Owens is both, as 'Where the Crawdads Sing' evinces beautifully. It is a novel that I raced through, from the first page to the last, sucked in and swept along by the effortless, galloping prose, which of course is not effortless at all, only genius enough to appear so.

The bedrock of this novel - the aspect of the writing that grabs you and roots the story from the get-go - is the dizzying detail with which Owens describes the marshy coast of North Carolina where her central characters live, eking out a living amidst an eco-system of plants and creatures that has no need of humans. This is Owens the scientist shining through, crucially not 'showing off' her knowledge, but embedding it into her remarkable story - 'using' it not just as a background, but as a character in itself. The central figure in the novel, through whose eyes we learn about this extraordinary, half-submerged world, is little Kya the 'Marsh Girl', born into a troubled family and forced to make her own way from the age of six. She has to become adept at navigating her harsh, wild, watery surroundings in order to survive, but at every step of the way she learns how to love and respect it too, converting us as she goes.

Set in this rich context, the plot of 'Crawdads' takes off like a rocket, leaving you clinging on until the end. For, as Kya learns, the community beyond the marshes is far more threatening to her than the wildness in which she has to learn to thrive; and yet she needs it too, if she is to find any sort of companionship beyond her own wits and imagination. For, like all humans, Kya longs not to be entirely alone, to be loved. With every interaction however, Kya runs the risk of mocking prejudice for being the 'Marsh Girl', often inviting the wrong sort of attention, from men like the greedy, spoilt Chase Andrews, on the hunt for entertainment with words as smooth as his looks.

When Chase Andrews is found dead, it is only a question of time before the finger of blame swings Kya's way, turbo-charging the already compelling story with the pace of a thriller. There is a case to solve and Owens tackles it with the forensic attention of the scientist she is. Every angle is examined, every possibility scoured, and yet nothing turns out quite the way the characters - or the reader - expects. We are left guessing almost until the final line.

No wonder 'Where the Crawdads Sing' is a bestseller. Suspense, heartache, a natural world that sings (the title is spot on), a plot of ingenious contortions, a love story - this novel has everything! I finished it many days ago now and it is still with me, humming its lovely, unforgettable tune at the back of my head.



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Empty Eloquence

Turning for Home by Barney Norris

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


It's a horrible feeling when you don't like a book that you had expected to be engrossed by. It introduces a sense of frustration - of having wasted one's precious time. Worse, if you happen to be a novelist yourself, you feel guilty because you know only too well that this was an endeavour that took time, sweat and hope, and so what right have you, the reader, simply to dismiss it as a failure?

Therefore, although I could only bring myself to give Barney Norris's 'Turning for Home' one measly star, I do so with respect, at the same time acknowledging the possibility that maybe it was a book that reached the top of my to-read pile when I was least in the mood for it, as can happen with one's reading matter. It also goes without saying that Barney Norris is an accomplished writer - I couldn't put down his 'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain' - and despite leaving me cold, and being over-riddled with heavy, obvious images, 'Turning for Home' nonetheless displayed a certain undeniable eloquence. It was just that none of that eloquence convinced or got under my skin. It just fell - and felt - flat.

But how easy it is to criticise! So let me do my best to justify that criticism:

'Turning for Home' is full of noble themes - an unloving mother, a traumatised accident-survivor, the loneliness of old-age, the atrocities of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, young love, family bonds, the politics of truth... Actually, there were too many noble themes and they simply did not hang together. Like ingredients of a complex recipe that hadn't received the necessary blending.
Instead, it was like the reader was expected to do all the blending - working out for themselves why the various flapping threads of the story supposedly held together and mattered. I am familiar with the wise 'less is more' mantra, but that wasn't what was going on here. Actually, it just felt a little lazy.

Another massive problem of the story for me was the way it was told. There were two first person narrators - Kate, the traumatised, not-loved-enough, grown-up granddaughter, and Robert, the widowed, ex Northern Ireland serving grandfather, around whose eightieth birthday party-gathering the entire novel is based. It is a familiar structural device this, pulled off beautifully by Ann Enright, for instance, in 'The Gathering'. In that novel the strands of each family member are brought vividly and movingly to life as the scattered clan assemble for Christmas, so that by the time they find themselves under the same roof we are on tenterhooks because of what is in play and at stake. Norris however, never comes close to achieving an equivalent sense of drama. The two narratives are stream-of-consciousness mullings and recollections, devoid of any in-the-moment jeopardy or tension about the supposedly seismic incidents to which the protagonists refer. It got so dull! It made it impossible to care about Kate or her grandfather, or any of the family, because I kept on being TOLD stuff rather than SHOWN it; a fatal - and dare I say, elemental - error for any storyteller.

So, many apologies to Barney Norris. A writing career, like any career, has its hits and misses, and for me this novel did not find its mark. (Apart from one lovely paragraph near the end on love being about wanting to find someone who will put you first, which I thought was wonderful.) I haven't lost faith, however. I will read whatever Norris does next, because he has moved me in the past and I know he will do so again.



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Life as Performance

href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">Actress by Anne Enright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am confident in saying that I would like anything Anne Enright wrote. She has that Irish storyteller's way with words. Her sentences are often short, and seem to leap around, sometimes appearing opaque; but all the while the meanings are floating out, joining up and grabbing your attention - a bit like a vast masterpiece of a painting where you catch fragments of its beauty until suddenly, standing from the correct angle and distance, the entire piece coalesces and makes breathtaking sense.

'Actress' shows off Enright at her skilful best. It tells the story of Katherine O'Dell, single mother to Norah, and an actress - a very famous actress whose star waxed and waned, before crashing spectacularly to earth, taking her sanity with it. The tale is not, to my knowledge, based on anyone in 'real' life, but it felt the whole time as if it was - as if I must have read reviews and celebrity gossip about this Katherine O'Dell, born Katherine Fitzmaurice, a darling of directors, appearing on front pages and in big productions, until emotional problems, advancing years and the solace of alcohol took their respective, predictable tolls.

The story is told through the eyes of Norah, the daughter, allowing Enright to zigzag around between memories and experiences throughout the lives of both women. Katherine, an actress to the world as well as the camera, is maddeningly elusive, even to her beloved child. Not even her name or her nationality are easy to pin down, since she changed her surname several times, and preferred to be thought Irish when she wasn't. Nor will Katherine admit to her troubles to anyone, ever - not even when they have grown extreme. Everyone is darling and everything is fabulous. Whether this is brave or cowardly remains one of the central, subtle questions posed by the novel. For the character of Katherine it ensures an invisible abyss, into which she eventually topples, leaving Norah as the novel presents her, a bereft and damaged narrator, trying to make sense of it all.

The best novels are stories that are not just about themselves, but which resonate with issues and truths in the wider world. 'Actress' is one such story, written with Enright's dry, light touch and wonderful flashes of humour, emerging effortlessly and believably from out of the difficulties encountered by her characters. A tale about an actress with a loving daughter and a stellar career that flounders, Enright shows that it is the 'behind-the-scenes' that matters, as of course it does for all of us, whether we tread the boards or not. Indeed, I don't think it is too glib to describe 'Actress' as one big metaphor. Life IS a performance. Outwardly we function, while our inner lives remain as fragile as seedlings - needing tenderness, nurturing and love in order to thrive.



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Friend of Creativity

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I found my way to this extraordinary book by Olivia Laing thanks to a passing, passionate, intriguing mention of it on a radio programme. I am a big fan of such serendipitous routes to reading matter, but actually, on this occasion, I feel a sort of retrospective fear that 'The Lonely City' might otherwise have passed me by. It is that good. That important. It also happens to be the most perfect book to have opened open during a time of global lock-down.

'The Lonely City' defies easy categorisation. It is partly a memoir, encompassing the period when Olivia Laing moved to New York in the wake of a failed relationship in her mid-thirties. She therefore approaches her descriptions of the city in the shadow of that personal loss - focusing on the sensation, familiar, surely, to all of us, of the heightened acuteness of being alone while surrounded by thousands of people. Every sentence is arresting, Laing having that knack - possessed by all the best writers - of inhabiting her deepest experiences at the same time as ingeniously making sense of them. Yet, this is no 'misery memoir'. She craves and seeks out solitude - it suits her fragile, introspective state - but not for wallowing. Instead, it is the creativity of the lonely state that Laing explores, casting pearls as she goes. Like this early, brief example:
"Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place; a city in itself."
Wow.

As the book progresses, the memoir aspect expands to include examinations of how four specific New York based artists experienced and deployed loneliness in their work. These include Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper whose life-stories and creations Laing picks apart like a detective, making tender and compelling observations to highlight how the lure of solitude formed the engine and the essence of their output. This made 'The Lonely City' a page-turning art lesson on top of everything else, and a heartbreaking one too, since the artists she chooses had lives filled as much with suffering as with genius.

Threaded through the narrative, the heartbeat behind the scenes, is the bigger journey of emotional healing being undertaken by the author. Compassionate, candid, insightful, Olivia Laing's voice reaches out to the reader like a wise friend. I learnt so much. I was moved. As a writer myself, in lock-down, fighting my own battles with isolation and a book to finish, the central message of 'The Lonely City' also happened to be exactly the one I needed to hear: that a sense of alone-ness is the ally, not the enemy of creativity, something to embrace rather than fear.



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Unforgettable & Vital

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How to do justice to this book. I think Linda Grant, who wrote the introduction of my copy of Vasily Grossman's utterly extraordinary 'Life and Fate' summed it up best: "It took three weeks to read and three weeks to recover from the experience." It took me longer than three weeks to read and I am still recovering.

'Life and Fate' is an epic story of an entire nation - Russia - told through the trauma, hopes and fate of one family, the Shaposhnikovs. It is set in the Second World War, as the bloody and barbaric siege of Stalingrad is reaching its climax, the final turning point in Russia's against-all-odds defeat of the advancing German army. The world Vasily Grossman takes us to is therefore torn apart - by starvation, death, disease, atrocities of a magnitude beyond our conception - all the more powerful for the way it is depicted through the personal struggles of the scattered Shaposhnikov family. Whether at home or close to the action, they are each fighting to survive, not just the obvious enemy - Hitler's Germany - but also the far more insidious threats from within their own repressive regime. This is the reign of Stalin. Being a hero in battle, making scientific breakthroughs in developing weapons, keeping your Jewish faith discreet, being a good citizen - no virtues afford protection against anything. Friends tell lies about friends. No one can trust or be trusted. One suspected treacherous thought - let alone action - and torture, death and incarceration are minutes away. Such was the reach of the iron rod of fear and cruelty.

In such a world no single pocket of life is safe. The terror - at home, at war - is unspeakable and yet Grossman dares to speak it. Before turning to fiction, he was a journalist who reported from the thick of the Stalingrad siege for the Russian newspaper The Red Star. This means that his writing has the forensic power of fact, coupled with the depth of emotional insight that can only come from personal experience. Grossman's own family suffered in exactly the ways the Shaposhnikovs do. This is why the truth of what the characters endure in the novel rings so true, and why at times it is almost unbearable to read.

Vasily Grossman did not write 'Love and Fate' until the 1950s, completing it in 1960. Even then the contents were seen as such a threat by the authorities that the book was banned from publication and confiscated by the KGB. Four years later Grossman died from cancer. 'Love and Fate' only reached this country sixteen years after that, in 1980, thanks to a microfilm of the novel being smuggled out of Russia. 1980! I was twenty years old and reading books and newspapers, and somehow - how? - this momentous publication passed me by.

We are surrounded by things we do not see, by things that need calling out, things that matter. If a writer's duty is to bear witness, 'Love and Fate' offers no greater example. Grossman's vivid exposition of the siege of Stalingrad and its aftermath will stay with me; but even more seared on my memory are the horrors of the Stalinist regime, horrors that linger on in the Russia we know today. Guilt and innocence become meaningless when a state decides the nature of reality. Anyone will confess to anything if the war with truth and morality has already been lost. The question is, how can humans hang onto their humanity in such conditions?

It is a question which Grossman asks and answers, with wisdom, courage and every ounce of his own humanity, shining a light in the dark. No stars are enough for ‘Love and Fate’. This is a work that must be read.











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A Wow of a Memoir

My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Lemn Sissay's memoir, 'My Name is Why', is one of those books written with such understated honesty, such lack of bitterness, that at times you have to remind yourself that what is being described is close to indescribable. As Benjamin Zephaniah said: "The most amazing thing about this book is that it's not made up. This actually happened."

Lemn Sissay began life thinking his name was Norman Greenwood. He lived with his white foster family and sounds like the sweetest child - cheerful, personable, and bright as the proverbial button. Then, when he was eleven years old, the family decided to send him back into the care system, for reasons that remain profoundly dubious, and which were never properly explained to Lemn himself. The hurt of this alone, is hard to imagine. 'Norman' then spent six years in the care system, being moved from one failing institution to the next, hanging on to his self-esteem by his fingernails and somehow - HOW? - retaining a glimmer of faith in the world that had let him down so badly.

The biggest shock however, was yet to come. Just before his eighteenth birthday, 'Norman' is given his birth certificate, thus discovering that his real name is Lemn Sissay, that he is a British Ethiopian, and that his mother had been pleading for his safe return since his birth. The anger, the damage, the bitterness of these revelations, coming on top of years of continued rejections from the foster family, refusing even to see Sissay despite his pleas, are literally impossible to contemplate. And yet, in this remarkable account from the victim of these injustices, it is not acrimony or revenge that we hear in Lemn Sissay's voice, but rather one seeking only to understand in order to make good what has gone so badly wrong.

Lemn Sissay is one of our best-loved poets, and so it is little wonder that this book is written with great lyricism and the sort of word-power that grabs you by the throat as you read. Throughout the telling of his tale, Sissay also cleverly includes actual extracts from the correspondence between the various organisations in charge of his fate. These have a remarkable impact, both by way of validating each dark fact, and for how they offer the most banal counterpoint to the tragedy being played out. They allow us to see the full horror of the story: the life of a little boy, at the mercy of a clunking, narrow-minded, prejudiced system which seemed to prioritise every single petty consideration above the only one that should have mattered - the emotional well-being of the child himself. Like I say, it was at times a hard read.

And yet, this is not a sob story. Lemn Sissay's poems, one of his coping mechanisms through his difficulties, are also scattered throughout the chapters, rays of light in the dark. There is not one hint of self-pity anywhere. Instead, as Sissay takes us, diligently, intelligently, through the facts, there is no disguising the joyful, winning force of his personality. What we are left with is an account of how good can prevail over bad, how a love of life can resist the lure of disintegration, as well as a celebration of the redemptive power of creativity. Lemn Sissay himself shimmers through each sentence like the golden thread in a tapestry - brave, funny, wise and healed. Wow. My jaw is still on the floor.



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Truth & Fiction

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once upon a time there was fiction and there was memoir and there was autobiography. Sometimes fictional works were labelled as 'autobiographical', either with or without an author's acquiescence. In the 1970s however, a new genre called 'autofiction' emerged, thanks to the French writer Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term for his novel 'Fils' which was a fictional account of events in his own life. Recently, perhaps because of our growing appetites for 'reality' entertainment, this genre has suddenly gained new impetus and popularity. Writers are at it wherever you look. But if you want to read the best-of-the-best example of how powerful this type of writing can be, then you should rush to your local bookshop (or Amazon) and buy the remarkable Ben Lerner's 'The Topeka School'.

The protagonist of the novel is Adam Gordon, a bright student in Senior School, an accomplished debater, orator and would-be poet, who, through a lot of agonised effort, is also part of the cool set.
This is a pretty accurate profile (as Ben Lerner testifies) of the author in his youth, as is the fact that, Adam, like Ben, has parents who are psychologists and a mother who has written a famous book on the subject. There is no doubt that knowing of these parallels adds a certain frisson for the reader. For it is impossible not to experience a shiver of, 'OMG, what do his loved ones/friends think of him saying that?' whenever the author makes especially personal revelations, with say, references to sexual indiscretions or other darker events that take place in the story (no spoilers).

Cleverly though, what also hangs in the air is uncertainty as to the exact boundaries between what Lerner is reporting on and what he is making up, for of course the writer's imagination is at play too, and there is no way of constantly monitoring the veracity of the twists of the plot. All of this gives the novel an alluring ambiguity, which in itself feels like a profound truth. For what can we really be sure of in this world? If things exist purely in our heads, does that make them any the less real? Where do the boundaries between truth and falsehood - between fact and fiction - lie anyway? And who decides them?

More importantly, 'The Topeka School' is a beautifully and brilliantly written novel, brimming with thrilling intellectual insight and penetrating psychological sensitivity. Lerner sweeps us back and forth through Adam's growing up in a way that is irresistibly engaging. He is a young man trying not to fall apart, striving to be taken seriously, and clinging to the hope that the world he occupies can, if analysed rigorously enough, be understood. Every aspect of his privileged white - very male - education and family circumstance have told him that it can. Yet bad things happen, and Adam finds himself very poorly equipped to deal with them. Gradually, his world, his sense of self, implodes. At which point the reader starts to realise that this is not a story of one young man, but of an entire generation, misled and lost among sets of social rules that no longer work, if they ever did. Ben Lerner may be Adam Gordon, but he is also every other educated young white man on the planet.





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Enormous Talent

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had already read and enjoyed 'Normal People', Sally Rooney's excellent second novel, and so I was curious to see how 'Conversations with Friends', the debut book which set everyone buzzing about her precocious talent, compared.

In many ways both novels share the same focus, namely the zigzagging muddle of relationships, the ins and outs of loving and not loving, of being desired and rejected, and of the pressures, wonders and disappointments of sex. Whereas 'Normal People' concentrates on just one couple however, through school and their student years, doing a gripping job it has to be said, I preferred 'Conversations with Friends' because its scope is so much more ambitious. Instead of two main characters there are four: two twenty-something girls, Bobbi and Frances, who are still friends despite having had an intensely passionate relationship, and an older married couple, Melissa and Nick, who play life by different rules and who are the catalysts for how the relationship between the girls develops.

Sally Rooney writes beautifully, like an English grad student but with buckets of originality and not one hint of youthful gaucheness. Indeed, the fact of how wry and at home she is exploring the bottomless quagmire of physical and emotional relationships, while still barely into her twenties, is truly remarkable. There is such poise to her style, such a sureness of touch. Nor do her quartet of characters ever follow simple or obvious plot-paths. No easy black and white answers exist for how they are feeling or the decisions they take. Instead, just as in our daily lives, their interactions constantly shift - moving apart and becoming re-entangled - through the most nuanced, and often misconstrued, signals. After all, so much of human interaction is about trying - and failing - to read each other, and Rooney captures this wonderfully.

'Conversations with Friends' is in many ways a less perfect book than the one that followed. At times Sally Rooney's four protagonists felt slightly in danger of representing certain personality types rather than being totally believable in themselves; but I definitely appreciated its broader canvas. There was also something deeply unsettling and highly credible about an older couple toying with the lives - and emotional well-being - of a much younger pair. All concerned are 'adults', well past the age of consent in all regards, and yet it was impossible to shake off the sense of something being amiss. The married pair are older and wiser. The younger two, while being feisty and hell-bent on pursuing their own ambitions, are nonetheless at an inherent disadvantage through their relative lack of experience. I am sure Sally Rooney intended this, and it was one of the many layers of psychological complexity that I enjoyed.

Endings often let novels down - all those unnaturally neat loose-ends tied off - but the conclusion of 'Conversations with Friends' managed to keep me guessing while at the same time feeling completely plausible. This is no mean feat. And Sally Rooney also happens to write brilliantly about sex - candid without being toe-curling, tender without being corny. Oh yes, this is one enormously talented novelist and I can't wait to see what she does next.



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Modern Tragedy

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ is a story set in an Ibo village in Nigeria at the turn of the century, when old tribal ways are being turned upside down by their first encounters with colonialism and Christianity. Achebe takes us deep into the customs of the tribe by focusing on the tale of Okonkwo, a respected senior with several wives and children, describing the man's rise from humble beginnings and then charting, with unrelenting detail, the slow implosion of his fortunes as the story unfolds. At times the events described make for hard reading; the ways of the tribe can be brutal and unforgiving, and how they clash with the supposedly more 'civilised' forces of the outside world only makes matters worse.

Critics have compared this novel to classical Greek tragedy and it is easy to see why, since Achebe manages to highlight universal truths through minutely focused attention on the detail of individual lives. Through the rise and fall of Okonkwo we see the inextricable links between individual ambition and the bigger patterns of destiny that can crush such ambition in an instant. We also see that this story, like life, is not based on simple patterns of Right and Wrong. Instead Achebe cleverly makes us consider a much bigger picture, one in which ancient tradition, individual aspiration and invading foreign systems collide in the most problematic way; nor does he offer any glib, easy answers for his characters to find a way out of the mess.

The lyrical directness of Achebe's prose style makes 'Things Fall Apart' all the more compelling. It reminded me of the visionary power of Alan Paton’s ‘Cry the Beloved Country’ – an equally heart-rending novel about the destruction of rural tribal life in South Africa and the sickening corruption of apartheid. Both books are written in an affectingly simple style that masterfully belies the darkness and complexity of the subjects they are examining. Both stories might make you weep. Yet I also defy any reader not to marvel at the sheer power of the written word; how Achebe, like Paton, through deploying insightful and poetic compassion to depict the worst of humanity, manages to illuminate the redemptive qualities that still give us all cause to hope.



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Might and Mystery

a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There are always books that one feels one 'should' read, because the world has declared them classics or masterpieces or both. Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' was one such for me. Somehow, despite years of studying and loving English literature, as well as seeing many productions of Oscar Wilde's plays, I had never picked up this famous novel. And when I did, I was prepared to be disappointed (so many 'masterpieces' do not live up to their hype), or at least to find it in some way dated.

I could not have been more wrong. 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is indeed a masterpiece, as well as a classic! On the face of it, the story is so simple. A stunningly beautiful, and still relatively innocent young man, Dorian Gray, has his portrait painted by an artist called Basil Hallward. The picture is a stunner, capturing the essence of the sitter's extraordinary, youthful beauty. But then the darkly motivated Sir Henry Wotton pays a visit and deploys his mastery of words to persuade Dorian Gray to turn his back on virtue and instead worship all the sensual pleasures that life offers, including beauty itself. During the course of this seduction Dorian makes a wish - which, as in a fairy tale, is granted - for the wondrous portrait of him to endure all the ravages of time and vice, while his own glorious looks stay ageless and in tact.

Okay, so it might sound weird, but such is the power of Wilde's writing - the power of the words Wotton uses in his seduction of Dorian - that the scenario is easy to believe in. For the reader there is also a compelling, almost voyeuristic, sense of intrigue as the story continues and we follow Dorian deeper and deeper down the paths of depravity that he then begins to explore. No sinful indulgence is resisted; instead, a bit like the addict seeking an ever-stronger hit, Dorian is sucked not only into the extremes of deviant and abhorrent behaviour, but also treats those in his everyday dealings with increasing ruthlessness, regardless of their vulnerability or trust in him. In short, he becomes utterly despicable. No crime or cruelty is too much.

Through it all, the portrait remains Dorian's touchstone. He keeps it in a secret place, checking it furtively and with a sickening heart, as - in accordance with his own wishes - the face it depicts begins ghoulishly to disintegrate while his own features remain magically unaltered. The temptation to reveal spoilers is strong, but I shall resist, because the twist in this novel is as spellbinding as the storytelling.

The novel gallops along, packed with Wilde's razor-sharp intelligence and humour, as well as unsettling and ingenious insights into the human psyche - how are minds and hearts work, and why. Above all else however, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is an examination of the mystery and might of the human imagination, how it can take you to the best and worst parts of yourself, as potentially lethal as any bomb and to be handled with exactly the same amount of care.





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