All the Beggars Riding

by Lucy Caldwell

From the author of The Meeting Point (winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, 2011) comes a powerful exploration of love, desire and family.

When Lara was twelve, and her younger brother Alfie eight, their father died in a helicopter crash. A prominent plastic surgeon, and Irishman, he had honed his skills on the bomb victims of the Troubles. But the family grew up used to him being absent: he only came to London for two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street clinic, where he had met their mother years before, and they only once went on a family holiday together, to Spain, where their mother cried and their father lost his temper and left early.

Because home, for their father, wasn't Earls Court: it was Belfast, where he led his other life ...

Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother, All the Beggars Riding is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past just as she realises that the time to get any sort of answers is running out.

Genres: Fiction, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Ireland, Novels, Contemporary, Book Club

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2013

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely lyrical story about the second family of a Belfast surgeon. The children of the family in London were told their father's skills were desperately needed in Belfast to save bombing victims during The Troubles so he spent most of his time there. They were told it was too dangerous for them to live there (very plausible) and so they only saw him every other week-end.

When the older daughter, Lara, was 12 the father was killed in a helicopter attack where he was called in to save military lives. And with his death, all the dirty little secrets come tumbling out and the two families are left to pick up the pieces. This is Lara's story of how she came to terms with her childhood.

I disliked Lara's mother very much. She was just a stubborn woman who really didn't care how her actions effected anyone. She was just bound and determined to prove her decisions as right and didn't care for any of the fall out. She just had to be right. She was realistically portrayed and I have known women like her in real life that I find equally annoying. She could have walked off the pages because she was that real.

I can't wait to read more from this author. Belfast in the 70's and the 2000's were depicted beautifully and really sang.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book at bedtime:
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Trad.)

After the death of her mother, Lara Moorhouse finds herself besieged with questions about her childhood that she never had the courage to ask her mother when she was alive. In particular, questions about her father.
When Lara and her younger brother Alfie were children, their father, an eminent surgeon, died in a helicopter crash. He had been largely absent from their lives, spending much of his time working in Belfast during the Troubles and only coming back to London two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic where he had first met their mother years before.
For unbeknownst to her, Lara's father had another life in Belfast; a wife, other children: another family.
As she delves into her parents' lives and the story of their relationship, Lara confronts her own past, and theirs, and discovers an unexpected legacy from her father's hidden double life.
All the Beggars Riding is Lucy Caldwell's third novel. In 2011 Lucy won the The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was awarded the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize for her second novel 'The Meeting Point'. A playwright and novelist Lucy's theatre credits include the award-winning 'Leaves', 'Guardians' and 'Notes to Future Self'. For radio she has written the Imison Award-winning 'Girl from Mars', 'Avenues of Eternal Peace', 'Witch Week' a dramatization of Diana Wynne Jones' novel for BBC Radio 4 Extra, and most recently she adapted her stage play 'Notes to Future Self' for Radio 4.

Read by Anne-Marie Duff
Abridged by Doreen Estall
Producer Heather Larmour.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r5g2t

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal.and redemptive.Brilliant.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been blown away by Irish author Lucy Caldwell's short stories in the past, and have been keen to pick up one of her novels, to see how the form compares.  All the Beggars Riding was the first which I picked up, as I was kindly gifted a copy for my birthday.  The novel is Caldwell's third, and was first published in 2013.

All the Beggars Riding focuses upon Lara Moorhouse and her younger brother Alfie, who grew up in London during the 1970s and 1980s.  Their father worked as a plastic surgeon in Northern Ireland for part of each week, helping to reconstruct the faces of those injured in bombing attacks during the Troubles.  He then spent a day or two in an exclusive Harley Street practice.  When Lara's father passes away in a helicopter crash, the truth about his life is revealed; he had another family, a wife and children, who lived in Belfast.  Lara's mother 'was, in fact, his mistress'.

The novel marks Lara's attempts to confront her past, in which she makes herself revisit 'troubling memories of her childhood to piece together the story of her parents' hidden relationship.'  In the present day story, Lara is thirty-nine years old, and is grieving following the death of her mother.  Of this, she comments on the turmoil which she feels: '... inside, I was alternately blank and lurching with grief, thick and oily, like waves, that would rise up and threaten to swamp me utterly...  People kept saying, time will heal, and in a terrible, clichéd way, it does: every day life pastes its dull routines over the rawness, although the rawness is still there.

The novel begins, rather specifically, on a Thursday morning in May 1972, with one of Lara's memories: 'Early morning, say six, or half six, but the sunlight is already pouring in, through the curtainless window set high in the slope of the roof...  You are standing, face upturned to the window, breathing in the sun.  I can see you, almost: if I close my eyes I can almost see you.'  I liked the way in which Lara occasionally addresses her childhood self, longing as she does to retain some memory of who she was.

One of my favourite elements of All the Beggars Riding was the emphasis which Caldwell places on the unreliability of memory.  Our narrator comments: '... lives aren't orderly, and nor is memory...  We make it so, when we narrate things - setting them in straight lines and in context - whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren't on the surface even related, all at once.'  Later, she muses: 'But it seems to me that in too many books people's memories come in seamless waves, perfectly coherent and lyrical.  Recollections come like that one just did to me, searing, intense and jagged from nowhere, burning bright when before there was nothing.'

The author certainly has a recognisable style; as with her short stories, she searches for the essence of her characters throughout All the Beggars Riding.  One gets a real insight into Lara's thoughts and feelings, and her discomfort with writing a memoir: 'For one thing, it's gruesome using real people's lives, real people's deaths, to try and explain something of mine, I know.  The scales of suffering are incomparable.' 

There is a lot to connect with within Lara's story.  She longs to capture a realistic picture of her past self in this, her exercise of memory.  She probes into the past, often uncomfortably, asking a great deal of questions in her desperation to make sense of things.  I admired the way in which Caldwell, through Lara, went in search of her mother's story, piecing together the concrete facts and imagining her thoughts and feelings.

I am always drawn to stories about families, particularly those in which there is an element of dysfunction within the familial structure, and I am pleased to report that All the Beggars Riding did not disappoint.  I was not as enamoured with the story as I am with much of her shorter fiction; Caldwell's stories are perfect, truly.   Here, as in her other work though, her prose is thoughtful, and her protagonist realistic.  I did feel for Lara and her situation, her uncertain memories, and her fraught relationships with others.  I must admit that to me, though, the ending of All the Beggars Riding felt too neat, and was not entirely satisfying.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not nearly as memorable as The Meeting Point, but still psychologically astute and well written. This first-person narrative by 39-year-old Lara Moorhouse recalls being the ‘second family’ her Belfast surgeon father kept in London. Lara is taking creative writing courses, first through the Irish Cultural Centre along with the old gentleman she is a caregiver for, and then through the Open University, and so she attempts to recreate the story of her parents’ meeting and particularly her mother’s sad existence as a single mum with an entirely secret life. In the final section, Lara tells of going to seek out her half-brother back in Belfast and moving on after this healing experience.

The opening sections felt very weak, full of Lara’s dithering about not being a great writer, not being able to reconstruct a story so full of lies and lacunae – obviously this is all there for a purpose, but I was so frustrated with her indulgent whining that I nearly gave up. Especially off-putting was the first chapter, in which she describes in detail a documentary film about Chernobyl she watches after her mother’s death; though it surely has some symbolic meaning with regard to trauma and survivors, it was overlong and tedious.

Still, this is an interesting meditation on memoir versus fiction: the book only comes alive when Lara attempts to fictionalize her mother’s life. “There is no one meaning, no correct or tidy interpretation, only a maybe-this, a what-if-that...We can never know what it’s like to be someone else, ever, except through fiction.”

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

BABT

BBC BLURBS: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Trad.)

After the death of her mother, Lara Moorhouse finds herself besieged with questions about her childhood that she never had the courage to ask her mother when she was alive. In particular, questions about her father. When Lara and her younger brother Alfie were children, their father, an eminent surgeon, died in a helicopter crash. He had been largely absent from their lives, spending much of his time working in Belfast during the Troubles and only coming back to London two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic where he had first met their mother years before. For unbeknownst to her, Lara's father had another life in Belfast; a wife, other children: another family. As she delves into her parents' lives and the story of their relationship, Lara confronts her own past, and theirs, and discovers an unexpected legacy from her father's hidden double life. All the Beggars Riding is Lucy Caldwell's third novel. In 2011 Lucy won the The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was awarded the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize for her second novel 'The Meeting Point'. A playwright and novelist Lucy's theatre credits include the award-winning 'Leaves', 'Guardians' and 'Notes to Future Self'. For radio she has written the Imison Award-winning 'Girl from Mars', 'Avenues of Eternal Peace', 'Witch Week' a dramatization of Diana Wynne Jones' novel for BBC Radio 4 Extra, and most recently she adapted her stage play 'Notes to Future Self' for Radio 4.

Read by Anne-Marie Duff Abridged by Doreen Estall Producer Heather Larmour.





2* The Meeting Point
2* All the Beggars Riding

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was brilliant. A very moving telling of a childhood lived as part of a "second family". Lara, now an adult tries to tell her story, building to her 12 year old's discovery that her father had another 'first' family, over in Belfast. Trying to understand how her mother could have made the choices she did, Lara then decides to write her mother's story, as a novel, for the second half of the book. It's very moving and amazing how Lara journeys into her mother's early life and decisions - motivated more by a desire to understand than condemn.

The telling of both stories (her own childhood and her fictional version of her mother's story) is facilitated by Lara's current situation, and present voice. As a carer (and being lonely after being left by her partner) she has befriended an elderly client who she accompanies to a creative writing course, which in turn gives her the encouragement to tackle her mother's story. It's a fairly tricky device to pull off - you can see it's pretty complex (and I haven't even tried to tell the other bits of the 'now' story where she's also been meeting her half siblings from the first family etc!)- but I do think it works. It works overall because of the powerful way that Lara wants to understand - both her mother and herself - and the sense of discovery and redemption that comes through that. And it is beautifully written.

This book reminded me of how much I'd enjoyed Lucy's first novel (there are some familiar themes and settings), and I think this third one is more ambitious but equally (or even perhaps more?) rewarding

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here is another situation where I think Goodreads should have half star options ! This book promised more than it delivered and was a little repetitive in the first half. the way the " secret " was revealed was really an anti-climax .

[Tobey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was The One Book One Community Book in Belfast,Ireland this spring. I read it be because I saw this when touring Ireland. I was disappointed by the story and found it quite boring.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Even our own stories, we’re unequipped and essentially unable to tell”

All the Beggars Riding, by Lucy Caldwell, is a tale told by thirty-eight year old Lara Moorhouse, an agency carer who has lived in London all her life. She is writing down her memories as a way to come to terms with how she was raised, and the effect this has had on her life since. What prompted the project was a television documentary Lara watched, on Chernobyl, made a decade after the disaster and focusing on survivors. Lara has been taking one of her patients to a weekly creative writing class where she listens in to the advice given. She finds that she learns a great deal about herself and her wider family by recreating their past selves.

The book is divided into sections that focus on: the inspiration for the story; Lara as a child; her mother, Jane; what happened next. As Jane died a year previously much of the narrative is an imagined account of events. Lara comes to realise is that all memoir is essentially fiction.

“it’s going to be impossible to get inside the past, to really be true to it. We can only see it from the outside, squinting back at it, and it changes utterly depending on the mood and circumstances and point from which we happen to be regarding it.”

Although trying her best to tell her story in a manner that makes sense to the reader, Lara struggles to write a linear narrative. There are too many interdependencies and unknowns. Children rarely understand their parents as people rather than in relation to themselves – and vice versa.

“lives aren’t orderly, and nor is memory; the mind doesn’t work like that. We make it so, when we narrate things – setting them in straight lines and in context – whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren’t on the surface even related, all at once.”

Lara and her little brother, Alfie, lived in a flat in Earls Court until Lara was twelve. Their mother was mostly their sole carer as their father, a surgeon, worked in Belfast more often than at the private clinic in Harley Street that employed him. It drew in wealthy patients wanting ‘an Irish surgeon’ for the skills learned in Belfast due to the Troubles.

The summer Lara turned twelve her family went on their only ever holiday – to Fuengirola. It was not a success. The fallout from this was that Lara learned the truth of her parents’ relationship. Her father, Patrick, had another family in Belfast. When, four months later, he was killed in an accident, the Earls Court flat was sold by his wife and the Moorhouses were cast adrift.

Lara’s anger at her parents for raising their children in this way colours her subsequent development. In confronting her memories and trying to piece together why Jane and Patrick acted as they did she seeks closure but also understanding. All her mother ever told her was that she loved their father. Lara needs to unravel how and why their family set-up lasted as long as it did without change.

The writing is fluid and piercing, getting to the heart of easily fractured relationships between parents and their children. All are individuals yet rarely treated in this way within a family unit. Alfie has reacted to the same circumstances very differently to his sister. Jane and her mother also had a troubled relationship that proved difficult to bridge. Across the generations, concern and expectation hammer in wedges. When Lara tried to talk to her mother, just before she died, she was met with resentment.

“You’re trying to trap me, aren’t you? Trap me with my own words.”

Parents cannot fully know at the time the lasting impact their actions will have on their children. Children cannot fully know the personal factors at play that drove decisions made.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story, both its voice and structure. A gratifying and resonant read that makes me want to seek out more of the author’s work.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read more here: http://adammcallister.com/?p=29

‘All The Beggars Riding’ takes its name from a Yorkshire saying: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I’m not sure I like that saying, it just says that beggars have a wish. But that isn’t a revelation… Maybe I just don’t get it. And the title doesn’t actually do a very good of a job of saying what the book is actually about. But in spite of the title, I loved this book.

Lara, the main protagonist, is nearly 40 and childless. She watches a documentary on television about chernobyl and realises it relates to her own life somewhat – a tragic disaster the repercussions of which are still being felt 25 years later. Lara’s father had a second family in Belfast, with her mother and brother living in a small flat in London. However it turns out that Lara’s family is actually the second family. A plastic surgeon in Belfast during the troubles, he spends most of his time there and it is where his wife and children live.

Lara’s life begins to unravel in an Aqua Park in Spain while she and her family are on holiday. On top of a huge slide, she looks down at her parents and realises that something isn’t right. Her father is tanned despite him apparently being in rainy Belfast for the past few days. Caldwell handles this revelation expertly. We’re right there with Lara while her skin prickles.

Halfway through the text, Lara gains the courage to tell her mother’s story. We move to fashionable 70s London, when her mother falls in love with a surgeon who freelances at her clinic. Throughout this section, Lara’s voice pops in, but it’s always welcome and always adds to the story. The writing is just incredible. It never feels disjointed, descriptions of setting, character and actions are just spot on.

This book was selected as the centrepiece of the ‘One City, One Book’ campaign in Belfast, which aimed to get loads of people in Belfast reading the same book in the month of May. I’m a little late to the party, having just picked this up at the very end of May. But I read it in just a few days and absolutely loved it. I’d recommend it to anyone.

[Mary Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is in three parts. In the first, Lara revisits her memories of an unusual family life. Having left it too late to talk to her mother about it, in Part 2,Lara uses her newly acquired writing workshop skills to write the story from what she believes would have been her mother's point of view. Finally, she tries to establish contact with the family she has not so far met.

Lucy Caldwell's spare, elegant but soft and rounded style combines with a new take on an old story for an interesting and satisfying read. Her descriptions of Belfast are kind and clever.

The opening is especially good- with thoughts and images tumbling round and round. There is an element of wondering afterwards what it was all about, but it would be just as pleasant to re read this novel as it was the first time.

[Debumere · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! I had expected not very much from this, because of the naff cover and random title, but wow.

Fantastically written, not a happy moment to be read but just brilliant. Only 4 stars because I won't read it again, the cover was sh*t and there was a soppy, crappy page near the end where Lara (named after Dr Zhivago's lady friend) finds happiness. I hate that. Just let a character carry on their miserable, meagre existence.

It was a good read but not a cool, awesome read so yah, 4.

High 5 to Lucy Caldwell.

[Clare Lydon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good writing style, but I preferred the second half of the book to the first. Grabs the emotions throughout.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lara, the first person narrator, is coming to terms with the loss of her mother and her partner, and looks back at her strange childhood. Her father, a surgeon from Belfast, kept a second, secret family in London, which he visited regularly in connection with his private practice. Lara and her mother and brother lived an isolated life in his flat until his sudden death, when all was revealed to the world (and the second family left unprovided for). By the end she has established contact with one of her half-siblings and has moved on to a new relationship, and come to terms to some extent with the past. The whole secret scenario was an interesting concept, as well as such things like how do arrangements like this made in the first flush of romance actually play out later on if not brought to an end - and how could all the logistics work for so long? (At one point she asks the question herself, why did the wife in Belfast not ever want to visit the London flat, which she knew about? No satisfactory answer to this). The Chernobyl extract at the beginning, while interesting and making a point about love, seemed overdone in the context of this story. A good story, though, and although you want to shake Lara's mother at times you can see how she allowed herself to be sucked in to a highly risky and ultimately very damaging situation. Not exactly a "Troubles" novel but the Belfast situation 1970s/1980s and then more recently is there in the background.

[Mel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about All The Beggars Riding. The stream of consciousness style at the beginning frustrated me and I found the narrator doubting herself very contrived. I didn't warm to the narrator Lara, or her brother as an adult. Overall, I felt all of the characters were weak and a bit flat. Oddly, the only character who had any gumption and I felt anything towards was Veronica; and she only featured in a one page letter written by herself.
I felt the plot was a good idea but the execution let it down. The topic should have (and deserved to) give the reader an emotional punch, but unfortunately this didn't happen.

[Karen's World · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took me a long time to read as it does not keep you enthralled as it is about Laras life and family. It makes you annoyed about her father, well and her mother as she was so weak. I met Lucy Caldwell at a book event in Folkestone and I can understand why she wrote this book. I think we all want to write down what affects us as a child and sometimes it does help. Many emotions are involved in this story and it definitely comes across in the writing. Well worth a read if you are considering writing a memoir.

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid four stars, would of been more but I wasn't overly impressed with the ending. The story follows Lara trying to piece together her early part of her childhood after her mother's death. The second part of the story Lara writes from her mother's perspective. The story finishes with her return to Belfast to locate distant family. A story of broken families, secrets and loneliness. Nice to see the Belfast references .

[Gemma · Rating 2 out of 5]

struggled to rate this one a little bit. I wasn’t a fan of the writing style, however the second half of the book was much better than the first! I think Lara’s rambling and constant questioning got a bit repetitive and tiring? The plot has so much potential to be something really great, but the book felt unfinished, almost as if I was reading a draft? so I think I’m giving two stars to the plot and some of the writing in the second half was quite enjoyable.

[Lynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really admired the construction of this novel which combines life writing with story telling to great effect. You , the reader are invited by an unreliable narrator to reflect on the unreliable nature of memory from a variety of perspectives and to ponder on large themes of love and betrayal

[Gayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book good in places, but felt that some of it was difficult to follow. I felt the last part was probably the best, although earlier parts were very description and emotional, maybe if the book had been written in a straight forward way it may have been more enjoyable.

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title comes from a saying "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride". The theme here is the same as that of Caldwell's earlier novel "The Meeting Point": a woman allows herself to form a strong attachment to the wrong man, and things become more and more complicated. In that previous novel the impossibility of the relationship is resolved when the two protagonists are physically separated into two different worlds; but in "All the Beggars Riding" nothing can be resolved, ever, because she gets pregnant (twice) by the man. The novel focuses on the woman and her predicament, but the man, although he's distant and has another life in another place, with his existing family, is in just as big a predicament because he's as generous and kind, and helpful as he can be, throughout until he is killed in an accident. But we never learn all that much about him; the focus is on the lifelong suffering of the woman struggling to live and bring up these two children, as recounted by the first of the two children, her daughter. There are mad journeys to Belfast just to see the house where her father lived, and desperate phone calls. The book has an interesting structure that begins with a deliberately disjointed series of attempted accounts of what happened, each one then abandoned, until the "author" (the protagonist) finally finds a way to write the story of her mother that has a proper beginning and a proper end. Some of the other characters are not fully rounded and sometimes it's hard to remember who they are. However if you let that go, the book is a very strong and well written series of episodes that really engage you. The writing is rich and effective, with brilliantly evoked descriptions of places, people events, and small details. I would ignore the tendency to characterise Lucy Caldwell as a rather sophisticated kind of chick lit; this is serious writing of the highest level and has depth to it that invites the reader to reflect on their own experiences.

[Silvia Traverso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mi è piaciuta molto sia la trama sia il modo originale di raccontarla, con il punto di vista dello scrittore - protagonista della storia.
Una storia intensa, che tratta i legami familiari, ufficiali e non è la visione dei genitori come essere umani .

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great fictional exploration of memories and what we inherit from our parents. What happens to the kid whose Dad has two families? How do kids parse that?

[Janine Cousins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a slow paced book by Caldwell that the first half just made me expect more from it than I ultimately received.

[Tracy Hollen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Gabrielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Lucy Caldwell's writing.

[Maria P · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5

“At the start of this narrative I’m obsessed with knowing. I’ve come to realise that you can never know: but you can understand, and that’s what fiction does, or tries to do.”

[Susanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/6 points, vivid characters drawing me into this secret second family of already married man, touching family drama

[Angelique · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way Lucy Caldwell writes. It engages me. And I liked this book, but didn't love it. Because it didn't feel like a book, but a fragment of one. I wanted more or less. And it seems to come to no real conclusion, it just randomly ends with the the reason for the title. But man, I was hooked from page one. Especially when it talks about how the affair started. I felt like my heart was on a roller coaster ride. It's smart and easy reading. Easy as in it flows beautifully. And I also can't believe that the people from Belfast would have those thick Belfast accents.