Rohase Piercy's Blog, page 2

A God-struck child remembers ...

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This vivid and atmospheric retelling of the Nordic myth of Ragnarok - Twilight, or more accurately translated, Judgement of the Gods - is a delight for any reader who relishes the power of myth.
This is of course the story of the reckless, fallible Gods of Valhalla - Thor with his thunder and bluster, Tyr the one-armed Hunter, beautiful Baldur, long-haired Sif, Frigg the passionately grieving mother, wise, maimed Odin who for all his foreknowledge cannot forestall his pantheon's demise, and or course Loki the fiery trickster who with his monstrous, Giant-born children wreaks havoc amongst them all. A S Byatt cleverly interweaves flashbacks to her childhood self, evacuated in wartime to the countryside and finding solace in reading and re-reading Dr W Wagner's 'Asgard And The Gods'. This is a clever device which allows the author to reflect and comment upon the fearful events so vividly described (eg the binding of the wolf Fenris, the journey to the domain of Hel, Queen of the Dead) with the psychological plasticity of an innocent child who accepts the myth for what it is - a commentary upon the true Nature of Things.
The 'thin child' greatly prefers the loud, passionate Gods of the Norse pantheon to the pale, insipid 'Gentle Jesus' of her Sunday School lessons - a guilty preference I can wholeheartedly endorse, because as a child I too was drawn into the world of Gods and Goddesses (in my case, the classical Pantheon of ancient Greece and Rome).
I really appreciated the autobiographical Afterword, in which Byatt ponders the meaning and function of myth, and compares her childhood self to the God-struck subject of W F Turner's poem 'Romance' ("Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, they had stolen my soul away"): 'I recognised that state of mind, that other world', she says. 'The words in my head were not Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, but Ginnungagap, Yggdrasil and Ragnarok'. Again, I can completely identify, well remembering the thrill that would course through my veins whenever I read or heard the names Aphrodite, Zeus, or Athena.
There are, of course, so many parallels between the myths of differing cultures, as is only to be expected when touching upon the Nature of Things: the sacrificed God, the grieving mother determined to retrieve her child from the Underworld, the wily trickster, the warrior maiden, are all universal. So although the Norse Gods are not my Pantheon, I felt quite at home in their company and I share Byatt's calm acceptance that since 'homo homini Deus est', the Gods of Valhalla share humanity's 'lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed ... and a biologically built-in short-sightedness', even in the face of their own demise. An apt reflection on the situation we find ourselves in right now ...



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Queer Prophets - mostly of the Christian kind.

The Book of Queer Prophets: 21 Writers on Sexuality and Religion by Ruth Hunt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Edited by (Baroness) Ruth Hunt, 'The Book Of Queer Prophets' brings together the testimonies of twenty-four LGBTQ people of faith (or in a couple of cases, of lost faith) in the form of short essays.

I should say at the outset that it's very Christian-heavy - I'd like to have seen a greater variety of faiths represented - there's one Muslim, one Jew, and one Indian Christian with a love of Hindu Goddesses, but that's your lot out of the twenty-four.

However if one can accept that this is basically a critique of the Christian LGBTQ experience (and probably should have been presented as such), it's a very eloquent and insightful one, with solid theological scholarship presented alongside moving personal testimony. Christians of varied denominations, both lay and clergy - some of whom have changed denomination in their quest for acceptance as a Queer follower of Jesus Christ - recount their struggle for recognition within a Church which is at worst openly hostile and condemnatory and at best placatory and prevaricating. Their persistence in claiming their right to both a sexual and a spiritual identity (and after all, the search for spiritual fulfilment is one of humanity's 'givens', along with sex, food and community) is admirable and inspiring as well as illuminating and instructive. There is no hesitation, for instance, in putting that oft-quoted passage from Leviticus 20:13, which states that it is 'an abomination for a man to lie with a man as with a woman' in context alongside the similarly proscribed 'abominations' of eating shellfish or getting a tattoo.

This book is a wake-up call to the Church, calling it to account for its failure to fully recognise and accept on equal terms the lives, loves and spiritual needs of LGBTQ Christians; a call endorsed by (heterosexual) celebrity priest Rev Kate Bottley in a humble but eloquent Afterword. Progress has undoubtedly been made over the last decade or so, but there's still a long way to go. Every would-be priest or Christian minister should read 'The Book Of Queer Prophets!



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Musings and mutterings on Raynor Winn's 'The Salt Path' ...

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is an extraordinary memoir, written by a clearly extraordinary woman – someone whose response to insolvency and the loss of her home was to take herself and her terminally ill husband on a 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path, from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset, carrying only their tent and backpacks and with only £48 per week in tax credits to survive on.

It's beautifully written, and the scenery, the wildlife, the constant ebb and flow of the tides, the call of the gulls and the salty tang on the air invade the senses at every turn of the page. I'll swear I could feel the sun on my face and the sweat on my back, the ache in my shoulders and the damp, cold clothes clinging, taste salt on my tongue and hear the hiss and suck of waves on shingle even as I found myself increasingly challenged by the lackadaisical attitude of the narrator and her other half to almost every practical consideration pertaining to the choice they'd made ...

Okay, so it's a personal reaction, but one I just can't help. It's partly to do with my OCD, and partly because although I've never been homeless I have had to live hand to mouth, counting every single penny as it came and went from a weekly allowance. I just can't understand, for instance, how they could have forgotten to cancel an insurance direct debit on a home they no longer had when they knew they were going to have to survive on £48 a week, or how when the cash machine coughs up only £32.75 one week they 'didn't care where the other £16 had gone, or if the £32 should have been there at all, or that it was Tuesday when we thought it was Thursday ...[we] held the notes like precious gems'. I began to suspect it was this kind of carelessness that had got them into dire straits in the first place – what kind of hippy arrogance had made them represent themselves in court without even bothering to research the correct procedure for presenting new evidence? Could they not have borrowed the money for proper representation, or entered into a 'no win, no fee' agreement?

It seemed that whenever the reader was supposed to feel sorry for Raynor and Moth, I only succeeded in feeling annoyed. Constantly hungry, wet, tired and smelly, they encounter hostility from the public when mistaken for tramps and barely disguised disapproval whenever they admit to being homeless in conversation. But how could they 'forget' to fill up their water bottles on two occasions, so that 'the thirst overtook the hunger in a primal craving for water'? How could they have forgotten to pack sunblock, setting out at the height of summer? And maddest of all, how could they have forgotten to pack the medication prescribed specially for Moth's cortisobasal degeneration (CBD), a condition his GP had described as terminal?

Although they constantly berate themselves for their own irresponsibility ('Supid, stupid, stupid... to think we could walk this path, to not have enough money, to pretend we weren't homeless, to get the court procedure wrong, to lose the children's home' …) it's such a thin veneer of self-criticism over such a solid block of self-pity that I was unable to supply the expected contradiction, especially as their children at the time were students and still in need of a parental rock to cling to. At one stage they even forget to charge their phone – 'we'd forgotten we had it, and hadn't looked at it for days' – and when they finally do recharge it they find 'a mass of texts from the kids' … absolutely unbelievable.

And yet, and yet – there are also passages like this: 'The sun was setting, lighting the sky in late July tones of gentle southern colour. The land ahead turned blue in the falling shadows and the lagoon fell silent, birdlife fading away as the water receded … a small boat made its way back to the shore, a black shadow weaving quietly along rivulets of molten sky, disappearing as mud and stone blended together in the low rays of the last reflected light. A mist began to lift as the air turned silver and night blue, the reeds becoming dark silhouettes against the line of the pebble bank and the dimming sky.' Beautiful, vivid descriptions of coastal light and the beneficence of Nature, and of being at one with the natural world, without the tacky overlay of unnecessary possessions and artificial pursuits that most of humanity deems essential. 'We were everything we wanted to be, and everything we didn't. And we were free, free to be all those things, and stronger because of them..... This second in the millions of seconds was the only one, the only one that we could live in.'

So Raynor and Moth find something real and precious on their wanderings, and as it turns out they also find a reversal of fortune – the offer of a home, and a stay of execution for Moth as it transpires that the weight-bearing, repetitive exercise of walking over 600 miles carrying a backpack has actually halted, or at least slowed down, the CBD! 'I don't know what you're doing, but just keep doing it!' says his bemused GP – wrong-footed, like me, over the issue of prescribed medication.

So that's me told! It all works out for them, and with the success of this remarkable book, their financial security and that of their children is presumably assured! Good on them, and although I can still only view their adventure with blank incomprehension rather than the admiration and envy it's inspired in others, I can only wish them well.




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Review: 'Kindred' by Olivia E Butler

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Why have I never come across this book before? Why had I never heard of this author? Octavia E Butler, who died in 2006, is best known for her science fiction novels, but for 'Kindred' alone her name should be on everyone's lips!
This story feels so modern and relevant that it's difficult to believe it was published back in 1979. A young African American woman, Dana, living with her husband in California, suddenly develops a strange and terrifying ability to travel back in time to mid 19th Century Maryland where her great-grandfather, a slave owner named Rufus Weylin, is struggling to deal with his physical and mental wellbeing in the years preceding the Civil War. As a black woman in the ante-bellum South, Dana is not only in constant physical danger, but also has to find a way to adjust temporarily to the life she's expected to lead on the Weylin plantation as she struggles to understand how and why she's constantly being called upon to help this complex man, both vulnerable and brutal, on whose life her own existence depends.
Rufus Weylin is a man of his time, and even though he comes to accept Dana's explanation for her sudden appearances and disappearances, and to grasp that she comes from 'another time', he's incapable of treating her as an equal. On one trip Dana's (white) husband Kevin is yanked out of 20th century California with her, and his parallel but different process of adjustment to life on the Weylin estate is described with remarkable psychological insight.
Butler pulls no punches in describing the physical and mental torment of enslaved life, and the psychological screens erected in order to survive and cope. At one stage Dana laments, 'I never realised how easily people could be trained to accept slavery!' - and she's talking about both blacks and whites.
Dana's complex and fragile relationship with her white ancestor is terrifying to watch as it unfolds towards a brutal climax, as is his relationship with the black woman who is destined to become her great-grandmother. It's really visceral stuff, and the reader, like Dana herself, can only reach for the comfort of foreknowledge, with the heroism of Harriet Tubman, the upheaval of the Civil War and the eventual abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 just three decades away as the story ends.
A sensitive and harrowing exploration of a period of history that's undeniably shameful, but also far from straightforward.



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Review: Jeoffry The Poet's Cat by Oliver Soden

Jeoffrey The Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What a wonderful little book! Oliver Soden imagines what life might have been like for the cat famously adopted by 18th century poet Christopher Smart during his confinement in a mental asylum (for a condition that would nowadays most likely be diagnosed as bi-polar disorder).
'For I Will Consider my Cat Jeoffry' is the best-known section of Smart's long religious poem 'Jubilate Agno' (Rejoice in the Lamb); rediscovered in 1938, it has been widely anthologised, set to music by Benjamin Britten and described as 'the greatest tribute to a feline ever written'.

'For I am possessed of a Cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom I take occasion to praise Almighty God', writes Smart elsewhere in his poem; and here Soden, a fellow cat lover, imagines a life for Jeoffry starting, appropriately enough in a 'Cattery' (ie a brothel) and ending in Devon in the house of a (fictional) Mrs Ramm who takes care of him when poor Christopher Smart is finally committed to a debtor's prison. It's a good long life spanning twenty-two years, and Joeffry's adventures are many and various, including an encounter with another famous historical cat, Samuel Johnson's Hodge - an encounter that could well have happened in real life, as the two literary gentlemen were friends. Other, more obviously fictional encounters feature renowned actor David Garrick, novelist Fanny Burney, a young boy by the name of Sam Coleridge, and even, briefly His Majesty King George II.

Described by Mrs Ramm as 'all over stripes, & the colour of autumn leaves', Joeffry is vividly brought to life in all his moods and situations, and his eventual demise, on Mrs Ramm's lap where he creeps to take his final breaths, is so tenderly described that I defy any cat-lover not to shed a tear. A beautiful read.



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Review: King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I think this is my favourite of Philip Hensher's books so far! No idea what the title refers to, but I just loved his depiction of the good townsfolk of Hanmouth, Devon as he delves into the seemingly quiet and conventional neighbourhood to unearth double lives, bizarre hobbies, gay orgies, disturbed and quite frankly disturbing individuals, and personal tragedies.

Given that this story features child abduction and two deaths, it may seem inappropriate to describe the narrative as 'hilarious', but it's laugh-out-loud funny in many places as the misunderstandings and embarrassing faux-pas pile up; and such is Hensher's genius that the the downright awfulness of what happens to some of the characters is actually highlighted by the muted and mundane language in which the incidents are cloaked.

One could honestly say that 'all human life is here', depicted in both loving and unflinching detail: the greed-obsessed half-life of the local council estate mirrored by the greed-obsessed pretentiousness of the middle classes; the rage and turbulence of teenagers; the quiet despair of the unattractive singleton; the tender awkwardness of family relations; the loneliness of the bereaved; the perpetual outrage of the 'woke'; and the unsung acts of courage, sacrifice and even heroism that ordinary folk are called upon, in unexpected moments, to rise to.

A second five stars for this author from me!



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Review: 'My Lovely Wife' by Samantha Downing

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An absolute corker of a debut from Samantha Downing! Difficult to write about without giving too much away, but basically it's the story of an upwardly mobile married couple with a shared secret life, unsuspected by their teenage children as well as their friends and neighbours.
However, in addition to the secret they share, they each have at least one secret that they're keeping from one another ... and when a notorious serial killer seems to have returned to their affluent neighbourhood, kidnapping and killing women and sparking panic and speculation everywhere, their seemingly watertight relationship begins to crumble.
Ideally, I'd have liked to see a little more character depth and development... but this is such a fast-paced thriller that I didn't let that hold me back. And just for good measure, there's a twist at the end that leaves you questioning everything you've just read ....



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Review - 'Scenes From Early Life' by Philip Hensher

Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel is actually a memoir - the narrator being the author's husband, Zaved Mahmood, who grew up against the background of Bangladesh's struggle for independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s. The fact that these are real memories made the narrative all the more interesting for me, and the fact that they're the memories of someone the author loves make for some beautiful, tender detail that bring the characters - the narrator's extended family - vividly to life.
The 'scenes' do not follow chronological order during the first half of the novel, which is mildly confusing initially - though as more pieces of the jigsaw fall into place it become less so, and of course this is the way memories work, one sparking off another with scant regard to the Arrow of Time. The later chapters do follow chronologically, and tie everything up with a final 'What happened to them all?' as a finale.

I'm not reading Hensher's books in order of publication, so I'd already enjoyed 'The Friendly Ones' which also involves a Bangldeshi family and delves into the country's turbulent birth and recent history. This meant that I was excited when, near the end of the novel, Nadira-Auntie leaves with her new husband for Sheffield, where 'The Friendly Ones' is set - a nice piece of dovetailing!

I've learnt a lot about Bangladeshi history and culture from reading these two books, and in Scenes From Early Life there are even some photos included to give visual clues to the streets, parks and buildings described. It was a privilege to meet this family of quirky, brave and memorable characters and to share the narrator's remarkable story, courtesy of his husband's equally remarkable writing skill.



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Review - 'Pleasured' by Philip Hensher

Pleasured by Philip Hensher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


New Year's Eve. The year is 1988, soon to be 1989. A car breaks down on the transit road between Berlin and the West German border. The driver is an Englishman named Peter Picker. The two passengers he's taking back to West Berlin from Christmas visits to their respective families are: Friedrich Kaiser, layabout, part-time bookstore employee and frequenter of dubious nightclubs; and Daphne, nee Charlotte, student and political agitator, whose boyfriend Mario, a defector from the DDR, is expecting her back in West Berlin by nine-o'clock (spoiler – this doesn't happen).

These four characters, thrown together by chance, are destined to change one another's lives during what will prove to be a life-changing year all round for Germany, East and West.

Philip Hensher is so good at getting beneath the skin of his characters and detailing all the small but significant minutiae of their lives, histories and consequent attitudes within a leisurely but arresting (and occasionally hilarious) narrative. As the months pass and relationships between Picker and Friedrich, Daphne and Mario, and Friedrich and Daphne blossom, pall and then pick up again, we find out so much about life on both sides of the Berlin Wall, both as lived in reality and as imagined by those on the 'other side'. By the time political events have come to a head on 9th November 1989 – ironically, the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht - we've been party to farce, betrayal, deception and disillusionment on both a personal and political level.

The phrase 'the grass is always greener' comes to mind as the Wall falls and Berliners begin to realise that what was on the other side was always more of an idea than a reality. 'A solution has gone now. The idea of the East, it was always a solution, wasn't it?' says Friedrich as he and Picker stand in a deserted Sanssouci, former palace of Friedrich the Great in Potsdam. 'But it will be back, because we need a solution so much, we need the opposite of what we want, so that we can live our lives. So that we can say, well, our lives may not be what we want, but at least we don't have to live – over there.'

The book ends with a tragedy, and a kindness, and seems oddly applicable to these present uncertain times. Thoroughly recommended.



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An extract from 'The Coward'...

This week the wonderful Weird Sisters, Ink are featuring an extract from The Coward Does it with a Kiss on their blog, to celebrate Oscar Wilde's Birthday month.

Reading through the extract, I'm reminded both of how much fun it was to write about Oscar and his milieu, and also how eye-opening it was to stand in his wife's shoes and narrate the story of his rise and fall, and in particular of his relationship with Bosie Douglas, from her point of view. As the blog says, poor Constance Wilde is still so often overlooked, dismissed, or even forgotten about altogether.

Since its first publication back in 1990 more information has been discovered about Constance Wilde from the publication of some of her letters; also, there's been some research into the nature of the illness that ended her short life, long believed to have been either a spinal injury or syphilis, now almost certainly known to have been MS. I have incorporated some of this information into the new edition, published back in 2019, from which this extract is taken. Hope you enjoy it!

https://weirdsistersink.blogspot.com/