Amanda Brookfield's Blog, page 5

Igniting Truth

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There was nothing I did not like about this book, from the first word to the last. Celeste Ng throws us in at the deep-end from the get-go, with a burning house and fire-engine sirens. Physical drama and unanswered questions. For a few pages I thought maybe I was reading a whodunnit, not my usual fodder, but the story was skating along so smoothly I decided not to mind.

In a way 'Little Fires Everywhere' IS a whodunnit, but it is also so much more. The fire-crisis with which the narrative begins begs the question as to how such devastation came about, and it is impossible for the reader not to want to find out the answer, especially when arson is suspected. Yet instead of embarking on a forensic introduction of suspects, Celeste Ng simply takes us back in time to introduce us to each of the Richardsons, the blessed and well-heeled family who had occupied the home, and to Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl, a less fortunate and itinerant pair whose lives become enmeshed with the Richardsons when they move into a small property they own.

Gradually, and with compelling depth, the background and inner narratives of the large cast of characters is revealed, from all four of the almost-grown-up Richardson children and their successful parents, to the much more mysterious and artistic Warrens. Celeste Ng is so in control of her story, so good at getting us to empathise with each set of predicaments faced by her protagonists, that I soon forgot to wonder who started the house fire and why. All I cared about was the lives of these people and the dilemmas they faced as their lives became entangled. The dilemmas themselves were heart-rending and utterly credible, encompassing everything from penury to emotional rejection, to unwanted pregnancy, to deeply moral issues of cross-cultural adoption. Just writing that list makes me marvel; Celeste Ng crams so much in and yet the novel never for a moment feels overloaded or creaky.

Without contrivance or cliche, we do finally get the answer about the fire. It is a difficult answer, and one that, given all we have learned, makes perfect and terrible sense. What we learn along the way, is that all of our lives are little fires; that we ignite things in each other, things that can be good or fateful, and over which, once set in motion, we have almost no control. Oh yes, Celeste Ng is a master at her craft all right, well deserving of all her various literary awards, and doing that thing all the best writers do, of leaving her readers feeling wiser by the final page.



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Brevity is Power

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Somehow it is common knowledge that Penelope Mortimer's 'The Pumpkin Eater' charts the cut and thrust of her tempestuous marriage to the more famous John Mortimer, successful literary luminary, father of many beautiful progeny and blessed with a wit and warmth apparently so irresistible that to know him was to forgive him all his misdemeanours, of which there were reputed to be many. What, I wondered, could the wife of such a philanderer have to say beyond bean-spilling and bitter recrimination?

The answer is a lot - heaps - all of it in the form of a gripping fictional read that betrays no hint of self-indulgence in front of or behind the scenes. Mortimer is funny as well as painfully self-aware and intelligent. She saves all her fire for her own shortcomings, or rather for those of her protagonist, making plain as she goes that, for all its flaws, the driving force of the relationship being described, even as it disintegrates before our eyes, is pure love.

The novel opens with the protagonist on the therapist's couch. Clearly some terrible meltdown has brought her there, but she parries endearingly with her interlocutor, refusing to see herself as defeated or as a victim. We learn of the nature of the meltdown only gradually, through a series of narrative cut-backs to the past. The marriage is her third, but for her it is the Real Thing. There are many children, both from her previous relationships and this one, though precisely how many is never revealed. I loved this: the general sense of hordes of offspring and her need and passion for them, even as she can see that it is this very need that is sucking the life-blood out of her and of the marriage itself.

A chaotic creature, albeit a loving one, it soon becomes clear why the husband is withdrawing more and more from the family mayhem, hiding in the demands of his working life. We start to suspect his infidelities long before the wife does. Indeed, poignantly and ringing so true, it is the wife herself who is the last to find out. It was there under her very nose and she couldn't see it. Didn't want to see it.

The excellence of 'The Pumpkin Eater' is all about its sparse, gripping often hilarious prose and the total absence of judgement with regard to what is going on. Mortimer simply describes significant moments, showing the unravelling rather than commenting on it. In the process she takes us into the core of a collapsing relationship and the emotional implosion as this impacts on the woman. There is no finger-pointing, no if-onlys. All that matters to the author - and to the reader - is what is being lost.

As the book builds to its climax the heartbreak of it grew and grew. We are being invited to witness nothing less than the end of Love - the big I-need-to-breathe-the-same-air-as-you kind of love that hurts the most because it is so wondrously all-consuming. Step by step we see the protagonist being brought to her knees. She suffers, but never pities herself. Until, saddest of all to me, she ceases to care. It is only by not caring that she herself - let alone the marriage - can survive.

'The Pumpkin Eater' is a slither of a book. I read it in one gulp. But the brevity is part of its power. If you are brave and see into the heart of things as Penelope Mortimer clearly does, then you do not need a tome to spell out your tale.



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Fearless Storytelling

Darke by Rick Gekoski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


'Darke' may be Rick Gekoski's first novel, but from the opening line to the last I felt as if I was in the hands of a master story-teller. This has to be because Gekoski has led a life immersed in books - as an academic, a rare book dealer and also an author of several non-fiction works - and in the process has somehow soaked up the knowledge of exactly how to go about the novelist's task.

To talk in any detail of the plot itself would give away too much. Suffice it to say, that we are in the head of one Dr James Darke, a character who shares the author's knowledge and love of books, and who appears at first to be an eccentric reclusive. No one is allowed into his house, his head, or his world. Yet he needs to eat and fix things and generally stay alive, which presents certain problems and in the process of describing them Gekoski reveals a wonderful, gentle and highly observant sense of humour. I laughed out loud, even as I began to sense that great misfortune lay behind the situation in which the protagonist finds himself. Though by the end of the book I was as far from laughing as it is possible to be.

For it is only gradually that we realise Dr Darke is a man in the midst of terrible suffering. It turns out he has lost someone he loved and blocking out the world is his coping strategy for his grief. Reality hurts too much. Exactly who he has lost and in what circumstances seeps out as Darke's memories assail him and the outside world starts to muscle its way back in. Darke tries to resist, despite the obvious fact that he is occupying a sort of living death himself and needs to move on in order to survive. The subject is grim, but Gekoski's brilliant writing sweeps us along, offering such an illuminated and wise understanding of the human psyche that I could not turn the pages fast enough.

We root for Darke, that is the other trick Gekoski pulls off. All we want is for this dear man to recover his zest for life. And this is vital, because deep into the narrative there is a bold body-blow of a revelation that demands our loyalty to Darke in order for it to have the right impact. I closed the book thinking hard about right and wrong, and I am still thinking today. We need authors like Gekoski, who can entertain us so skillfully while at the same time tackling the most difficult truths and choices that any of us will ever have to face.



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Perfect Fusion

Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Every so often, without planning for it, reading can offer a wonderful package of one's own personal experience finding echoes and fresh insight through the prism of someone else's imagination. So it was when I opened 'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain', a book handed to me by my excellent local bookshop owner as one that I might find 'interesting'. His recommendations seldom disappoint, but I had no idea that the themes of this unusual and beautifully constructed novel would catapult me back into my own childhood, since the part of England on which Barney Norris focuses is Salisbury, where I went to school for several years as a teenager.

'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain' is one of those books that defies easy categorisation. It has the momentum and tight energy of poetry, but reads as smoothly as the most accessible fiction. It is about the lives of five people who do not know each other - a flower-seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard and a widower - who all live in and around the ancient environs of Salisbury. Barney Norris's descriptions of this part of the world - which he clearly knows and loves himself - are compelling. He takes us back to the converging of the five rivers all those thousands of years ago, to the town that sprang up on the plain as a result, and to the construction of the mighty cathedral, still the glorious focal point of the town today. It was a joy for me to be taken back and given new insights into a place I had once known so well, though the power of Norris's writing needs no familiarity for its magic to work.


As the five stories gather pace, it becomes apparent that the protagonists' very different lives are to be connected not just by this shared geography and history, but by the tragedy of a car accident, as unavoidable as the wending paths of the rivers round which they pursue their lives. The progression of the narrative to this dreadful climax is gripping. Yet Norris also manages to illuminate the hopes that can defy such catastrophe and despair. As the denouement unfolds, it is to the beauty and mystery that lie at the heart of every human endeavour that our eye is drawn. Even in the midst of great loss Norris helps us see the redeeming power of love and the envigorating prospect of what the future may yet hold. Best of all was how all the themes of the novel - water, life, human ingenuity and resilience - came together, fusing so beautifully that by the end it was impossible to separate them.





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Writing Takes Courage

I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Writing about misery is a tricky business. Fiction or memoirs, if you are not careful your reader becomes too depressed to turn the page. The blurb on Ruth Fitzmaurice's 'I Found My Tribe' made me wonder whether I could possibly bear to start reading. It outlines how her gorgeous young husband, Simon, father to their FIVE young children, has reached the 'locked in' stage of Motor Neuron Disease, demanding round-the-clock care and leaving her to manage everything, including grief at losing him, with no solution in sight. Out of her desperation she discovers a love of swimming in arctic seas as a form of escape.

I need not have worried. 'I Found My Tribe' is harrowing. Ruth and Simon set out as the eponymous love-stricken, attractive, successful couple. He makes films and she writes. They produce three children in the early happy years of marriage and seem to romp through life with the sort of effortlessly glamorous ease that most of us envy. When Simon's foot goes 'floppy' they think it will pass. And when it turns out to be MND they throw every ounce of their energy and optimism at how they will defy it. But the disease will not be defied. It does it's thing, bit by bit, narrowing their once free and vibrant existence into one that most of us would find hard to imagine, let alone cope with.

So far so grim. It is a tale of The Worst happening, out of the blue, and I would be lying if I did not say that part of the compulsion to keep reading stems from a sense of one's own, comparable, good fortune. Just like when a newspaper story describes some atrocity and you think, well, I may have problems, but at least they are not those. More importantly however, Ruth Fitzmaurice writes about her life with irresistible fluency and appeal. She chops backwards and forwards between the earlier 'good' times and the current problems in a way that sweeps you along. Her sentences are short, unsentimental, as well as powerfully evocative. They ring with truth. There is no self-pity, not even when she is describing the most indescribable things, like admitting defeat, finally, on no longer sharing her husband's bed, because of the barrier (and noise) of the machines keeping him alive. She manages sometimes to be funny, as well as sad. She loves her husband still. They even produce two more children (twins) when he is in the thick of his illness and all five offspring adore their paralysed father. They are a family being torn apart in one way yet remaining deeply connected in another.

The focus of the book in terms of Ruth Fitzmaurice's private story, how she keeps her head above water (literally) in such gruelling circumstances, is her discovery of a love of wild swimming. In all seasons and all weathers she plunges into the sea, off the coast near her house in Co. Wicklow, along with a group of other stalwart women, all of whom have been or are in the midst of terrible ordeals themselves. They do not plan to become a group in this way, it just happens, organically. 'The Tragic Wives Swimming Club', they jokingly call themselves, but what they achieve through mutual support and enormous physical courage is not to be laughed at, only admired. I am not remotely 'aquatic' myself. Just reading the passages about the swimming filled me with a sort of repulsion - I could think of few things I would hate more than diving into the waves of a freezing sea. But Fitzmaurice made me understand completely how this madness helps her and her friends; how it takes their bodies to limits of survival, leaving them stronger, more empowered to manage the daily travails awaiting them.

My main impression of 'I Found My Tribe' was of the great fighting spirit of its author. She sees the awfulness of her situation and is not afraid to describe it. There may be bravery in throwing oneself into the Irish sea, day after day, but it was the bravery of the book itself - the act of writing it, of fearlessly staring at her demons - that moved me most.




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Hot and Ugly

The Girls by Emma Cline

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had not read anything by Emma Cline before, but judging from the blurb and this book, she is a writer who is on a strong trajectory towards recognition and high sales. 'The Girls' is such a slick clever book. From the start the atmosphere is hot and ugly. A dysfunctional mother and her young teenage daughter face a long baking American summer of not liking each other and having to make do. Their sad back-story gradually unfurls alongside the main cliff-hanger narrative of the novel which follows Evie, the daughter, being seduced into joining an alluring (to her) but deeply disturbing hippie sect.

I am not a fan of gruesome literature, mostly because it can so easily feel gratuitous. Writing that sets out purely to shock is not, to me, great writing. Cline's story however, ingeniously draws you in and sucks you down. The characters are unpleasant, misguided, repellent, but she also shows their humanity and so we care about them. We get hints and glimpses of the horror going on in the cult, but never - until the very end - the full picture. This leaves the imagination jumping, on tenterhooks, filling in the gaps. Indeed, at times it is hard to continue reading because of dread at what might be around the corner; but of course this is Cline's skill, because the hunger for more information is what keeps us turning the pages.

When the denouement finally comes - the full explanation of events - it borders on an anticlimax. To me it also felt, despite the horrific acts humans are capable of, somewhat far-fetched. The vague sense that one had been 'played' crept in, which was why I couldn't bring myself to give 'The Girls' five stars. That said, it is an excellent read and a brilliant book to take to the beach if you want to be kept on your toes as well as entertained.



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Literary Power

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'Gaudy Night' was my first Dorothy L Sayers. I am not a nut about crime fiction so, while I knew that people raved about her, I had been in no hurry to check out why. But then someone whose reading tastes I respect suggested I have a go at 'Gaudy Night' and at last I understand what all the fuss is about. Dorothy L Sayers is a genius. No question.

The real revelation however, is that the genius (for me at least) has virtually nothing to do with the 'crime' element of the story per se. In fact by the end of Gaudy Night, which is based around events at an Oxford college and has a huge cast of characters and possible malefactors, I was somewhat muddled as to who had done what to whom and why. So no danger of plot-spoilers - I couldn't remember the intricacies of what happened even if I tried! The real power of the book lay in the depth of Sayers' observations and the quality of the writing: not a sentence out of place, and each one so tightly packed with intelligence, irony and humour that I kept finding myself thinking how thrilling she would be to talk to in person; an experience that would perhaps prove not unlike Sayers' own brilliant description of Harriet Vane being accosted in conversation early on in the novel by a particularly robust and formidable college tutor called Miss de Vine.

"After ten minutes, during which Miss de Vine ruthlessly turned her victim's brain inside out, shook the facts out of it like a vigorous housemaid shaking dust from a carpet, beat it, refreshed, rubbed up the surface of it, relaid it in a new position and tacked it into place with a firm hand, the Dean mercifully came up and burst into the conversation."

Carpet cleaning as a metaphor for conversation! It's funny, ingenious and incisive. I defy anyone not to be bowled over by such command of the English language.

I also loved 'Gaudy Night' for its many references to the mysteries and challenges of being a writer, cleverly allowed for by the fact that Harriet Vane, as well as being an amateur sleuth, is herself a detective novelist. One senses Sayers' delight in the opportunities this choice of career for her star character afforded for analysing her own craft. Indeed, at times the novel felt like an echo-chamber of ideas resonating between the creator and her creation, lending both a pleasing ring of truth to the narrative while at the same time granting fascinating glimpses into the intellectual and emotional make-up of Sayers herself. For all her success, Sayers' personal life was often fraught, and I found these glimpses profoundly affecting. But I know that is the novelist in me speaking! Rest assured, 'Gaudy Night' is an excellent whodunnit read without any such layered interpretations.

Then of course there is Lord Peter Wimsey, the most dashing and romantic Leading Man a novel could wish for. He and Harriet have 'history', as is famously known, another skilfully more-ish thread that Sayers weaves throughout her books. To my delight Gaudy Night presents Harriet and Peter at the most deliciously poised period of their mutual interest. Their razor-sharp conversations, their evident pleasure in each other's mind-sets, the way their air fizzes when they are close...I couldn't get enough of it.

Perhaps the most important point about Dorothy L Sayers however, is her glaring modernity. She may have been born in 1893, but this novel is bursting with debate about the rights and powers of women, not in a brow-beating way either, but with a clarity of vision that would serve many feminists well today. Her honesty about the tension between being a successful woman and a love-torn one struck me especially: Harriet is bonkers about Peter, and wants to defer to him in everything; but she is also highly intelligent and capable in her own right and struggles to reconcile these two things. For all the great leaps forward in gender equality since that time, I am sure I am not alone in saying that such struggles still strike a chord.

'Gaudy Night' may have been my first Dorothy L Sayers, but it certainly won't be my last.



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His Baffling Project

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I found this book somewhat baffling. I can only think that this was Graeme Macrae Burnet's intention, although in the acknowledgements he gives no hint of such an aim: "This is a novel," he writes, "and as such I have taken some liberties with historical fact and, at some points, as novelists do, made stuff up."

The protagonist, seventeen year old Roderick Macrae, in jail and writing a confessional memoir of the triple murder of which he stands accused, has the same surname as the author. Is he a relative, or is it just a pleasing coincidence, the trigger perhaps for Graeme Macrae Burnet to turn something he came across in nineteenth century Scottish legal archives into a fictional narrative? This question niggled at me as I read.

If 'His Bloody Project' is purely fictional, as its creator reassures us, then why does it go...nowhere? Maybe I wasn't in the mood - books can misfire if they land on a reading pile at the wrong time - but I just kept wishing something would HAPPEN. Roderick Macrae is accused of a heinous crime to which he confesses, in detail, both in interviews with his legal representative and in his prison memoir. His young life was fraught with hardship - a loveless family life and a bullying tyrant of a neighbour, whom he murders; but he loves the tyrant's daughter so why kill her too? There really is no need for spoiler alerts because all of this becomes apparent so quickly. The drive of the narrative, apart from the harrowing account of Roddy's actions as set down in the memoir, which is ghoulishly page-turning, comes from the question as to whether he can escape punishment for what he has done.

For this drive to be effective the reader has to want Roddy to be forgiven. However, too many aspects of the triple murder were simply unforgivable. His legal advocate goes to great trouble to unearth pioneering psychiatric theories emerging at the time, but in the end the basis of his legal appeal is that Roddy has written the memoir. This didn't wash with me. So what if the murderer could articulate, in written form, what he had done? Yes, Roddy was remarkably well-educated given his humble and suffering life, but that seemed to me a very weak argument on which to base a request for the forgiveness of his atrocious crimes. Ruthless people can be stunningly clever and coherent. Literacy, sadly is no indication of virtue. There were so many other much more persuasive and powerful arguments the advocate could have made.

But maybe all the things I am picking holes in were 'facts', and this highlights the chief problem for me with based-on-a-true-story fiction (or tv for that matter). The reader does not know what to trust as 'truth'. This means that, unless very carefully handled, there are limits to which one will be moved by a story. If that is exactly the sort of opacity that Graeme Macrae Burnet is aiming for, then, hooray. However, I am sure he had also hoped to write a satisfying novel and ultimately I didn't find it so. Too much was unexplored or unanswered. The ending fell flat. I knew I was meant to see Roddy Macrae as a deserving soul, more sinned against than sinning, but I just couldn't manage it.





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A Siege About Love

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ann Patchett is one of those writers with the chameleon-like ability to occupy different worlds. No two novels are remotely the same, not even in terms of narrative voice. This makes her exciting to read, always surprising, always original and - most impressive of all - always believable.

Bel Canto, written in 2002 and awarded the Pen/Faulkner prize, ticks all these boxes. It is essentially a novel about a siege, begun when kidnappers storm an international gathering hosted by a poor Latin American country, only to discover that their intended target - the President - is absent. It turns out the President preferred to stay at home watching his favourite soap rather than attend a function promoting foreign trade; a lovely detail which highlights the other key thing about Ann Patchett's writing, which is that it is not just knowing, but often very funny.

The 'siege', thus begun unwittingly, continues for a long time, throwing together the most unlikely cross-section of characters from among the hostages and their captors: A beautiful American opera diva, a Japanese CEO who is her biggest fan, an unassuming and brilliant translator called Gen, the wild young terrorist, Carmen - these and so many more have their worlds turned upside down by their unexpected and prolonged incarceration together. Politics simmer in the plot, yet above all else Bel Canto is a story about Love in all its guises - romantic, married, as well as the deep nourishing love of beauty. Patchett's observations on such aspects of being human are extraordinary, so simply put but so profound, that I often found myself reading passages several times in order to wring out every last drop.

A siege is a state of stasis, but somehow the narrative of Bel Canto motors along, as suspenseful as it is unexpected, and interlaced with sublime moments as the relationships between the protagonists develop. Early on I began to wonder how on earth the story was going to end. I kept trying to guess but nothing prepared me for the final turn of events - so shocking but, as with all the best fiction, ringing so true.




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How Lucky Are We

The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl's Life in the Siege of Leningrad by Lena Mukhina

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'The Diary of Lena Mukhina' was a Christmas gift and to be honest I was doubtful about it, mainly because the blurb overtly likens it to the uniquely powerful and moving diary of Anne Frank. Uh-oh, I thought, here is something trying to ride on the coat-tails of something else....

It turns out however, that the parallel is justly drawn. Lena Mukhina's journal entries never reach the heartbreaking candour and disintegrating innocence of Anne Frank - the quality of the writing simply isn't as good, nor is there the depth of observation - but the reader is drawn in nonetheless, gripped by the drip-drip, harrowing testimony of what it is like to experience the iron fist of war, seige and famine closing round a once ordered world.

The diary starts in the spring of 1941 when Lena is an ordinary teenage schoolgirl, worrying about homework and boys. By June, Hitler has broken his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. Almost immediately Leningrad is besieged and the fight to survive for Lena, her family and the rest of the city begins. Within months hundreds of thousands are literally starving to death, their struggles made worse by the bitter cold of the Russian winter. Lena records it all, from the daily viewpoint of a 'normal' family, having suddenly to forage for truth as well as food and money.

Even to 'criticise' such a book feels wrong. Impossible. The very fact of its existence is testimony to the most formidable resilience and courage of its young author. What struck me most as I read was the way in which all her early lively everyday concerns shrink so steadily and rapidly to one sole preoccupation: How to eat. A stale crust of bread, a handful of raisins, a half teaspoon of sugar, one match, a piece of firewood - by such tiny threads does Lena's life hang. During one period she even learns to boil up glue in order to make a sort of jelly, having learnt that it contains a shred of nutritious benefit thanks to its fish bone origins. Most astonishing of all is her determination to live. Time and time again she writes: I will stay alive.

Whether she does or not, I will leave for future readers to find out for themselves. That aside, The Diary of Lena Mukhina is a book that should be read by all of us fortunate enough to live in freedom with roofs over our heads and food in our bellies. Sometimes we need to be reminded that everything we take for granted is a luxury.



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