Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse

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Book Review, To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong hosted by Heaven Ali

Surrendering to the stream of consciousness

In my teens and twenties I loved Virginia Woolf’s writing, both fiction and factual, and books about the Bloomsbury set. Orlando, the first Woolf I read, and To The Lighthouse, were particular favourites, and I read both across the years several times. So it was with a feeling of pleasure that HeavenAli’s ‘Woolfalong’ beckoned, and January/February Ali invited us to read Mrs Dalloway or To The Lighthouse. So, as the bookshelves contained To The Lighthouse, in a copy I see I bought in 1994, at a time when I was travelling a fair amount, and used to record where/when I bought a book, it was with even more pleasure that I opened a book I haven’t read in twenty years, and found, used as a bookmark, a ticket for Charleston Farmhouse ‘the former home of the Bloomsbury Artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’ which I visited. I was looking forward to re-acquainting myself with a familiar friend……………………

Charleston, the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

And, I have to say, the intervening years have been truthful and kind to how well I remember this book, and to how strongly Woolf’s vision resonated. It is a most potent book. The craft of her writing is stunning. What struck me this time is how very much her writing is almost crossing art forms. To The Lighthouse is both astonishingly painterly and astonishingly musical. She uses arresting images, both images ‘in real’ which people observe, and images rising up out of emotion, to convey telling information. For example, a repeating image detailing one of the central themes – the portrait of a particular marriage – there is the suffering, succouring, Mrs Ramsay, holding it seems the world of nurturing wifehood and motherhood together, expanding into a kind of rapturous bliss of givingness, struck, again and again by the extraordinary image of a brass-beaked scimitar, as her husband, Mr Ramsay, demanded, and got, sympathy, importance, validity

Mrs Ramsay , who had been sitting loosely, holding her son in her arm, braced herself, and half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.

We know that Woolf suffered mental illness, that she took her life, that she was subject to swings of mood of at times unbearable intensity, and that this informed her curious vision, her own swings between visionary rapture and meaning, and dark pain and terror – the moments, both of rapture and of bleakness remind me of the equally blazing intensity of Blake’s paintings and poetry.

     Whirlwind of Lovers, illustration by Blake to Dante’s Inferno

The central ‘happenings’ in the narrative structure of this three section book, seem small – the outside centre stage story is thus :

The Ramsays, an upper middle class Victorian couple he an academic, she ‘artistic’ are on a family holiday in Skye, with their eight children. They open their holiday home to a group of academic and artistic friends. Part One, ‘The Window’ consists of one day. The youngest child, James who adores his mother and hates his father has been half-promised a trip to the Lighthouse on the following day. Mr Ramsay, and another of the guests contemptuously and realistically state that the weather will be poor, and they will be unable to go. Mrs Ramsay cannot bear her child to suffer the pain of disappointment and tries to hold out hope

In Part Two, Time Passes, a scant twenty pages, the most dramatic personal and world stage events are recounted, almost as an aside – the First World War, as a couple of local women are engaged in beating and brushing and dusting the holiday home, which some of the Ramsay Family, and some of the guests from last time, will return to, for the first time for ten years.

In Part Three, The Lighthouse, which also takes place over one day, the two youngest children, James, now in his teens and the youngest daughter, Cam, also in her teens, make that promised trip to the lighthouse with their father.

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?

Some story, you might think, with all the major, events of world and family dramas happening off stage, in twenty pages. What Woolf is interested in is the inner life of character, the ceaseless running commentary inside our heads, which no one hears, no one sees. This is the hidden part of life. At the time I was ferociously first reading Woolf I was also as ferociously reading another writer, Doris Lessing, one who in some ways wrote the politics meets the personal history of twentieth century philosophising. In the first novel of Lessing’s 5 volume ‘Children of Violence’ series, Martha Quest, set in what was Rhodesia, Lessing tells us that if you asked Martha’s mother to describe her day, she would have talked about the activities she engaged in, the undramatic part of daily life. But, as Lessing reminds us what is really going on is the seething inner dialogue, the clash between hidden thoughts, unconscious and conscious feeling, the stray images, words, familiar phrases which pop-up out of unconsciousness, the threads of memory which suddenly bob up, carried along on that conscious stream of inner babble, before sinking down again. THIS, Lessing suggests is as much (if not more) of a life as that in which we ‘do’ in the world, and the world sees

This is what Woolf is exploring.

Virginia painted by Vanessa Bell

I mentioned the book is painterly, that she paints shapes, colours, a canvas in her writing. Art, particularly painting, but creative endeavour, the purpose and drive of creativity, is another major theme of this book. The other central theme is the relationship between men’s worlds and women’s worlds, and the difficulties at that time for a female to have an identity outside the expected marriage and motherhood. This is illustrated by the specific examination of one particular family, Woolf’s own. Mr Ramsay, like her father, Sir Leslie Stephens, is an academic, doing important ‘work of the mind’ Mrs Ramsay, both in character, description, personality and ‘life events’ in the novel, mirrors Virginia’s mother Julia. There is another kind of female possibility for destiny explored in the novel – the woman with her own ‘vocation’ and place to make in the world, the woman who has her own place in history to carve, whose choice may be art, not marriage or motherhood. The first part of the book is held together by Mrs Ramsey, it is the creation of her charisma, the personification of the female role to nurture others. Lily Briscoe is an artist, Mrs Ramsay’s friend, pitied by her, for Lily is not beloved by men, Lily ‘with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes’. Lily Briscoe though has her own purpose. Lily paints her picture. Work gives meaning. Interestingly this dichotomy : Children and Art, givers of meaning was also explored in Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful Sunday In The Park With George, which also turned me back to thinking about Woolf’s exploration here

The musical structure of the novel struck me forcibly this time. Part of the ‘inner dialogue’ is the voice of remembered phrases, which might stick forcibly in the mind – words and phrases uttered by others, which stick in the mind. These may serve like a little musical coda, a recognisable theme, and just as in a classical symphony themes and variations on themes repeat, vanish, and teasingly surface again as part of the overall forward journey of a piece, so do words and phrases bob up in the minds of Woolf’s characters.

A chance comment by Charles Tansley, one of the guests in the first part, to Lily Briscoe:

Women can’t paint, women can’t write

is part of the ‘Lily motif’ , if this were a piece of music. But so is the resolution of that particular discordant melody –

I must move the tree to the middle

What I had forgotten, or perhaps not been aware of, last time I read this book, is that it is also funny – there is an kind of surprising humour, under the intensity. And, in this, there are connections to Chekhov’s plays, often performed with deep intensity, but also, like in life, the absurdity of it all, the little flashes of a sometimes spiteful amusement which also exist in our own hidden dialogues, as we observe those around us.

A short excerpt from a TV film of the book. I’m not convinced it would encourage me to read the book though.

In the end, it is going to be Woolf’s voice which works, or doesn’t, for the reader. The reading is certainly different – something she engages in is a kind of subterranean connection of flowing inner dialogues, so the ‘stream of consciousness – or perhaps, most correctly stream of consciousness and unconsciousness’ starts in one person’s mind and suddenly the thinking the feeling, the words and the images are in another person’s inner dialogue. It is the images, it is the phrases, repeated, which negotiate the reader so that it is clear who we are ‘inner with’

For me, I can only say that I surrender willingly to Woolf. This reading after twenty years has been incredibly potent, and thank you, HeavenAli, for your Woolfalong challenge! – just snuck in with this on the Jan/Feb suggested Woolf book!

I couldn’t resist this weird and, personally, not particularly meaningful ‘musical tribute’ to the book. I have no doubt that those who DON’T gel with Woolf might find their distaste for her reinforced. It made me giggle a bit though. Not the book I re-read so happily at all

To The Lighthouse Amazon UK
To The Lighthouse Amazon USA

Charles Lambert – The Children’s Home

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Book Review, Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

Midwich Cuckoos and The Beast

One of the great strengths of Charles Lambert’s eerie, unsettling short novel is that he sets up an odd world, one which seems inherently plausible but he does not attempt to dot the is and cross the ts of logic. There is sufficient day to day, detailed reality to carry the fantastical elements, and the writing style, which eschews whimsy and the ethereal, rather serves to underline the strange normality of its weirdness. This means that the odd and the more usual versions of ‘reality’ sit alongside each other in a kind of delicious tension of opposition

Morgan Fletcher is the heavily disfigured scion of an extremely wealthy family, whose strange family business goes back for at least a couple of generations. The reader (and Morgan himself) is not quite sure what the family business was – some kind of world trade, as his grandfather amassed all sorts of strange travellers’ curios from far off lands.

Something has happened, some kind of breakdown in society, and Morgan lives in isolation. His wealth means there are various retainers and servants about the place, but no one sees Morgan except his housekeeper, Engel, who arrived some time ago. Outside the walls of Morgan’s empire, there were at some point violent encounters between citizens. We assume as a result of some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society. Various myths have probably circulated about Morgan’s terrible disfigurement, and it’s quite possible that everyone is as afraid of seeing the terribly damaged man as he is of being seen. So one myth which Lambert’s book is hinting at is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – and of course, in the fairy tale, the Beast is actually possessed of far more beauty in his soul than most of the ‘unbeastly’, of unexceptional physiognomy. There are mismatches between the outward mask and the inner beings of many. And Morgan is clearly a good man. However, children begin to arrive at his domain, no one is quite sure from where, or indeed, why. And Morgan’s goodness is shown by the fact he gives them sanctuary. And, pleasingly, the mysterious children are not repelled or frightened by his damaged appearance. Instead, they trust him.

Figures In The Mist, photographer Vtal, Deviant Art, Commons

The children are not quite what they seem. They have some curious abilities – their ferocious intelligence, their speeded up development, for one thing. Another literary memory being used is John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. The reader, like the children, like Morgan, begin slowly to become a little less sure of their own, or anyone else’s agenda. There is also a ‘good doctor’ who comes initially to take care of the children’s health, and a firm friendship develops between Morgan and Crane, as they try to understand where the children have come from, who they are, and what is the purpose which Morgan is playing out in their lives.

There are also sinister forces outside, figures of authority, who threaten the children.

Lambert’s great skill is to start his story in the sweet and light, and by increments to turn those lights down, to create shadows, twilights, rustlings, and slowly leave the reader feeling more and more unsettled and uneasy.

As others have noted, this book crosses genres – it is a literary fiction, post-apocalyptic, science fiction-ish horror fantasy thriller digging around in dark myths and imaginings.

And its knotted up genres are brilliantly woven together. Lambert leaves the reader (well, for sure he left this one) with the feeling that there are probably further allusions to be found. There is some very dark and shocking stuff – but the darker Lambert gets the more delicately and subtly he describes things. He understands that less is far, far more, he really does

it set me thinking about those books we were given to read as children, about travellers and shipwrecked sailors. How they found themselves in strange lands. magical lands where time went backwards or animals spoke their language. But they weren’t strange or magical to the people who lived there, were they? The people who lived there were normal. How formless it all is until an outsider gives it form

I recommend this strongly – and suggest it is best read when the nights are still quite long, for full uneasy hairs up the back of the neck effect!

I was very happy to receive this as an ARC, from the publishers, Aardvark, via NetGalley. This is the second book I’ve read from Aardvark – on this showing, a most interesting publisher, going outside the mainstream

I was alerted to this wonderfully satisfying and strange read by Fiction Fan. You can read her great review with unsettling graphics here

The Children’s Home Amazon UK
The Children’s Home Amazon USA

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

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Alienation, Art, Attachment Theory, Book Review, Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive”

I’ve been a keen reader of Olivia Laing, since discovering her first book, To the River, an account of a walk along the length of the River Ouse. Laing inhabits a new kind of academic writing, which to me seems to warrant the epithet ‘holistic’ It also seems somehow to be a particularly feminine approach, though not all female academics employ it, and there are also male writers in the canon.

To explain, this ‘holism’ is different from the kind of distancing, objective, detached ‘scientific’ approach which has been part of, for example, literary criticism. The ‘scientific’ view of literature divorces the writer from the writing – ‘the biographical fallacy’ and dissects text, or history, or landscape or whatever is being analysed and assessed, as if there is an 100% objective reality to what is being observed. The fact that the viewer themselves has a subjective response, a subjective viewpoint which influences what they see, that they have a relationship with the observed, is ignored. Subjective response is always in there. Sometimes we are prepared to acknowledge it, and I must admit I like a writer who owns their bias, where they come from, as Laing always does.

What writers like Laing are doing as they engage with their own particular field of interest and enquiry, is to enter into their relationship with the material. This is poles away from arm’s length. Other writers in this kind of territory include Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk, Kathleen Jamie in her nature writings.

                   Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942

Laing’s writing is deeply, sometimes laceratingly, personal and revealing. However it is much more than mere autobiography or confession. Subjective experience and objective analysis flow in and out of each other. Laing’s subject – whether her walking along the Ouse, exploring the landscape, history, geography whilst walking out a personal emotional time and place, or her second book The Trip To Echo Spring : Why Writers Drink, which looks at 6 American writers, has, for me, an extremely satisfying result. Because Laing does not distance herself from her subject matter, rather, she holds the relational space between the other, and herself observing the other, I find myself drawn close into relationship with the examined life she is observing.

Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness

Henry Darger

In The Lonely City, taking as a starting point her own sense of being an outsider, of loneliness, acknowledging this uncomfortable feeling, part, surely of the human condition, she explores how this sense of loneliness, isolation has been a particularly profound springboard for creativity in the work of a group of visual artists. She has particularly focussed on American artists, mainly painters – Edward Hopper, but also mixed media artists – Andy Warhol – and into the work of photographers, film makers, performance artists. She is particularly looking at work in the second half of the twentieth century.

what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near unbearable exposure…………an uncertainty about being seen – looked over, maybe; but maybe also overlooked, as in ignored, unseen, unregarded, undesired

Nan Goldin – Dieter with Tulips 1984

I was struck by the prevalence of a sense of being ‘aliens from another planet’ in the artists she was exploring – some of whom were familiar to me, such us Hopper and Warhol, most of whom I was introduced to, for example Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz. Unsurprisingly, a different sexual orientation, ethnicity, or even an outside the norm family structure, a tendency to introspection and reflectivity when society is functioning in at out-there, high achieving jockish way, can lead to this. Of particular interest to me is her exploration of how some of this sense of not belonging and alienation arises very early in childhood – and some would say can begin in the womb. She weaves in some of the work by John Bowlby on attachment theory, Melanie Klein’s work on infant psychology, and some account of the distressing scientific experiments done on infantile attachment with rhesus monkeys and other mammals.

It might sound as if leaping around from her own loneliness following a relationship breakdown, to exploring the strange world of countertenor Klaus Nomi, unfortunately having a beautiful operatic voice a decade or so before countertenors became loved mainstream opera stars, to analysis of AIDS and the attitudes towards gays in the eighties, political activism, psychoanalytical theory, not to mention the analysis of particular artworks in the framework of all this, might be a hotchpotch. Be reassured, it isn’t. Think instead, a remarkably rich and glowing tapestry, a strong, flexible web.

And, talking of webs…………..I do think a book like this could not have been enjoyed and savoured so satisfyingly more than about a decade ago. The ability to go and search for artworks, you-tube clips of interviews, performances, added immeasurably to the experience

David Wojnarowicz collage

One might think that this would be a depressing, despairing read, accounts of lonely, (even if visible and famous, like Warhol) misunderstood (though highly creative) creative lives. In fact, Laing reminds us how often creative works, perhaps born out of rage, despair or suffering, or from the riches of an interior life of the imagination, totally at odds with what the creator presents to the world (Henry Darger) can illuminate and enrich not only the creator themselves, but those of us who see, or read, or hear and receive that felt, shared, awakening sense of ‘meaning’ that the arts can give. Art itself as a kind of healing, whole-ing not just to the makers.

This is a strange story, perhaps better understood as a parable, a way of articulating what it’s like to inhabit a particular kind of being. It’s about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves out into you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to maintain separation and control. It’s about having a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego; being swamped or flooded, ingesting or being infected by the mess and drama of someone else’s life, as if their words were literally agents of transformation.

This is the push and pull of intimacy

(from a section examining Warhol, and examining the author’s response to Warhol’s life and Warhol’s work)

This is a book which touches on many ideas, feelings, and disciplines of study. I suspect each reader will find individual aspects of it specifically speak more or less loudly to them. It’s a very rich book indeed :

There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd, negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly

And that, to my mind, is just one stunning example of gold, bread, water, diamonds. Rich, rich, needed

As you can probably guess, I was almost overwhelmed by all this book contains, and wanted to include visual after visual of every discussed artist. However, readers must, as I did, find their own immersive journey.

The Lonely City comes highly recommended by me!

I was delighted to receive this as an advance digital copy from the publishers, via Netgalley It is available, according to the Amazons, 3rd March in the UK, and 1st March in the USA

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Amazon UK
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Amazon USA

Anna Hope – The Ballroom

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Anna Hope, Book Review, The Ballroom

Harrowing and beautiful novel set in a ‘Pauper Lunatic Hospital’ in the long, hot summer of 1911

Anna Hope has written a sometimes unbearably painful novel, told through three voices. (third person narration)Two of them are patients: John, a Irish man, diagnosed with ‘melancholia’ who has been on the chronic ward – long term, little chance of release and Ella, a recently admitted patient, following a vandalising action (breaking a window) in her spinning mill workplace, her ‘unstableness’ seen as some kind of hysteria. The third voice is that of Charles, a disappointment to his high achieving, driven, medical professional family. Charles is much more drawn to the arts, particularly music, and is a skilled amateur violinist. He finds what seems like an ideal compromise – a large psychiatric hospital in Yorkshire are looking to recruit another member of the medical team, but are wanting someone with musical ability, to join the small staff orchestra.

Interwoven with the stories of her three characters are philosophies, politics, and ideologies influenced by Darwinism at that time – most powerfully, the idea of Eugenics.

Politically, there were the prospects of general strikes looming. Working conditions were often appalling, wages dreadful. Poverty and destitution was equated, in some circles, with feeblemindedness. It was interesting, reading Hope’s afterword, to see how strongly, in some quarters of government, ideas about Eugenics were being considered. There were some curious bedfellows who wished to exert control over who might be allowed to have children and who might not – Winston Churchill, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

‘Mental hospitals’ have of course, across times and across countries, been used to incarcerate people who fall foul of received thinking of the times. Class politics, political and religious ideologies, gender, sexuality, race, may all render an individual more likely to receive a diagnosis of mental illness.

Hope draws the reader in most skilfully, and the central three characters, and two other patients, Clem, a young middle class woman, and John’s friend Dan, another patient, a gypsy, all have changes, developments and trajectories to follow. Some move towards wholeness, some towards disintegration, and Hope makes sense of all journeys.

Character, narrative, individual voice and indeed the authorial voice are skilfully done.

Whilst reading, I noticed that Hope seemed to be using words I had never come across before, which did not exist in my dictionaries – words like tallacky, chelping, gawbers. Her interesting language made sense in context, and I found myself ‘knowing’ I thought, what these made-up words meant……..on finishing the book and reading her afterword, I discovered she was using North Yorkshire dialect words, probably long fallen into disuse.

This novel also arose out of a personal, family association for Hope. There had been a ‘real’ asylum, in Yorkshire which Hope’s asylum was modelled on : Menston Asylum, opening in 1888, and originally called the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Hope’s great-great-grandfather, an Irishman from County Mayo, was transferred there from the workhouse, in 1909. Poor and destitute, ‘pauper lunatic’. That asylum, like Hope’s imaginary one, had a spectacular large ballroom.

I had some slight disappointment or reservation over the final coda scene, feeling perhaps that authorial chance was providing a satisfying wrap which I couldn’t quite accept as likely, but in no way does that detract from my absolute recommendation

I received this as a digital review copy from the publishers, via NetGalley.

And my thanks to Cleopatra Loves Books – her excellent review alerted me to this, and I now want to read Hope’s first novel, Wake. She is one to watch, for sure.

The Ballroom Amazon UK
The Ballroom Amazon USA

Paraic O’Donnell – The Maker of Swans

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'Magic Realism', Books about Books, Irish writer, Paraic O’Donnell, The Maker of Swans

Of roses, swans and the ordering of fine things in great rooms……….

Paraic O’Donnell’s strange, seductive, immersive Gothic literary creation had me pretty well hooked from the off.

Set in a time which is not immediately clear, it has an eerie, crumbling quality which feels almost Gothic Victorian – except that the dramatic opening involves the arrival of cars to the crumbling mansion which is the main setting. However, at a later point in the novel, where some back story of one of the central characters will be revealed, the mode of personal transport appears to be horses, with the theft of ‘a good horse from a coaching inn’ . As some of what is going on in the book is tied in with a secret society, mysterious powers, and some indication that those connected with the society seem to age more slowly than the rest of us, it’s perfectly possible some kind of Rip Van Winkle effect is happening………………

This is a difficult book to categorise in some ways. It inhabits some kind of nether world which is not exactly magic realism, not at all faery, somewhat fantastical, whilst at the same time much involved with reality, and, even more so with the power, mystery and magic of artistic creation itself. Particularly writing. It’s also a mystery, a thriller. And beautifully written.

Millais – The Lady Of Shallott 1854

Where Paraic O’Donnell has particularly scored is in his creation of character and relationship. Clara is an unusual young girl, an astonishingly gifted artist, and someone with an imagination of great intensity. The true potency of that imagination and artistry will become clear as the story progresses.

 ‘What art must do is attempt, as nature has, to assemble the tissues of beauty for itself. It must construct its own rose from the raw air, endow it with its colour, its small weight, its tender volutes – even its scent. Art must set this thing before us, must assert its reality in the void of our disbelief. It must make it live’

Clara strains against the impulse to yawn, She is thankful that she has never been made to go to school. It is this sort of thing, she supposes, that children must endure in classrooms all the time 

Clara is also mute, and in some ways self-sufficient. She is not emotionally withdrawn, though, and her strongest connection is Eustace, who is a kind of minder, retainer, butler, major domo, possessed of both brains and muscle, and employed by the owner of the crumbling mansion, Crowe. Crowe is dissolute and louche, a genius of a writer, though exactly what he is writing is again, something to discover. He might almost be the writer of everything which ever was. Crowe, Eustace and Clara exist in some kind of equable state. Unfortunately this is shattered at the start of the novel. Definitely the worse for drink, and in a squabble over his latest woman, Crowe kills a would be rival, unleashing the forces of retribution. Those forces will be implemented by shadowy members of the strange secret order Crowe belongs to. Eustace, who is the central character, the central point of view, for most of the novel, is the one who will try to salvage things, to prevent the un-spelt out punishment which Crowe must suffer, as the murder has broken an immutable law of the strange society. Eustace is deeply loyal, there is some strange history to be discovered between him and Crowe, but most of all, he wishes to protect Clara, the mysterious child, and keep her from harm.

Altered Reality Royal Photographic Society Ribbon. Photographer Michael Maguire: Morning Mist

The agents of harm are also a little strange. Chastern is a dying academic, deeply envious of Crowe’s creativity, deeply disdaining his crudity and indulgence in fleshly pursuits. Chastern has his own ‘minder, major-domo, retainer and all the rest, – a sinister, watchful, highly intelligent, dangerous and deadly one.

There are definitely god-games being played, and things get remarkably dark and messy

O’ Donnell creates his immersive story wonderfully well. The book is not presented in linear fashion, there is a lot of cutting back and forth, in time and place, but for the most part this is managed really well, and I enjoyed the gradual unpicking of the past as the story progressed insistently towards ‘what happens next’ page turning suspense

I must confess to a sense of disappointment in the ending of the book, the two final confrontations. The games played with the reader (well, this one) the hints and allusions had been most enjoyable and atmospheric, but I fell out of complete surrender at the end

Nonetheless, a very impressive first novel. If you were intrigued by, for example, The Night Circus, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for both quality of writing and the compulsive, authentic strangeness of the created world, I think this will appeal. Like those two novels, it is much more literary than fantasy fiction.

I must also comment on the delectable cover image, which drew my attention to the book. It is both beautiful, and, having read the book, is in keeping with major themes; far more than ‘the title is swans, a picture of swans’ . The artist is Sinem Erkas

I received this as a review copy from the publishers via NetGalley

The Maker of Swans Amazon UK
The Maker of Swans Amazon USA

Patrick Flanery – I Am No One

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Book Review, I Am No One, Patrick Flanery

Through the looking glass, and down the rabbit hole : the world of the watcher and the watched

Patrick Flanery’s third novel takes the reader almost immediately into a shifting sands world.

We are never quite sure, for example, where the narrator, a middle-aged History Professor, now teaching film studies, back in New York after 10 years in Oxford, is, in time. He appears to move between a something-has-happened future, a present where something-is-about-to-happen, and his earlier, settled Oxford past. Except that he begins to take the lid off that past, and there are further shifts, Not least of which is identity and origin. Jeremy O’ Keefe is not allowed to be American in America – influenced by his 10 years in England, his fellow Americans are convinced he is a Brit, but, despite his attempts to ‘acculturate’ himself in England, he was firmly not allowed to forget he was American.

At the start of this book, O’ Keefe’s voice is measured, precise, almost pedantic, a correct, dry, considered and intelligent academic voice. O’Keefe (in the voice which Flanery gives him) is very much the didact, donnish, instructing the reader at all times. It’s a little like sitting in on a lecture, with cultural references offered, and you, as reader, are expected to engage and get the references. But this voice begins, subtly, but inexorably to shift, becoming a little waspish, sharp, sarcastic, full of asides that indicate that all is not quite as we, the readers, might assume about Jeremy O’ Keefe. Is this a narrator to be trusted? Is he an unreliable narrator? Might he be disordered, even deranged?

I was very quickly floundering, anxious, confused – and Flanery was deliberately taking me to that place, because this uneasy, doubting world, so different below its surface, is the world the narrator inhabits. A world where nothing is quite as it seems. Jeremy O’ Keefe appears to be under surveillance. And may have been so, for quite some time.

This is the theme of the book : the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance society, particularly in democracies. Surveillance is not only something confined to totalitarian societies. Developed democracies, and advanced technology allowing advanced surveillance. coexist and feed each other. Watching, being watched.

Flanery is a wonderfully crafted writer who writes ‘about stuff – big stuff’, but, at least in his first two novels, without polemic. Character, place, narrative, relationship, authenticity in character, voice and action are the authentic containers for the philosophical ideas Flanery wishes to explore.

Unfortunately, with this, his third book, I began to feel, from about half way through the book, that the ‘about’ had become more central than the fictional framework.

Something Flanery has done brilliantly in his previous novels, is to offer complexity through having more than one narrator, more than one point of view, each of which is fully engaged in, so that a depth and range of arguments can be explored. In I Am No One, we really are only taken into Jeremy’s point of view. Initially, whilst O’ Keefe is unsure what it going on, and it seems as if he could be having some problems with his memory – at least, this is his initial, quite rational conclusion – the reader is satisfyingly presented with a few choices: Is Jeremy a reliable narrator? Are the things which are happening really happening? Is he suffering from paranoia? Does he have some neurological physiological or psychological trauma? Is he perhaps suffering from paranoia and yet right to be paranoid, because the things that are happening are real?

So far, so good. We learn, fairly early on, that Jeremy is writing the sequence of events which are happening, for some reason. There comes a point as he begins to reveal more of his past to the reader (and whoever, in the novel might be the recipient of his writing) where we see what the answers to all the above questions might be. And most importantly, some of the revelations the reader is given not only answer our questions about what is going on, but, surely (as Jeremy knows his own history) would have answered his own questions, too, at an earlier stage. Without plot spoilers, which I don’t want to indulge in, it is difficult to explain. But the result is the wonderful unsureness which the reader experienced before Jeremy comes clean about what is happening retrospectively, then has to seem authorial contrivance (Flanery’s). And as O’Keefe is a history professor with a particular interest in surveillance society – he specialised in the Stasi – he knows what might alarm States. I felt as if the ‘ambiguities’ about what was going on, as far as the reader is concerned, were being artificially maintained for us, by Flanery, and I couldn’t quite believe the narrator’s questioning of the ambiguity of what was going on, in terms of is-it-real-or-am-I-imagining-this?

A further example of where I think Flanery ended up fumbling and dropping the balls he was juggling, is the often resurfacing dark hints which Jeremy drops about how, at an earlier stage in his academic life, before Oxford, he failed to get tenure in his previous post in American academia. The narrator returns to that, time and again, and I kept waiting for the revelation of what had happened. But it never comes.

It’s been a real struggle to review this. Patrick Flanery is a wonderful writer, and I Am No One is still a good and important book. Unlike his earlier books, however, I think this one is more of a cerebral book, challenging to the intellect alone. One of Flanery’s strengths as a writer is to take the reader into the mind, heart, gut of his central characters, to come inside their idea of the world, to understand and believe their authenticity. It was accepting O’Keefe’s authenticity which I began to struggle with after the ’I-won’t-reveal-the-spoiler’.

Part of the problem is that Jeremy, being the man he is, rather stands outside his own emotional and visceral experience. There is a kind of aloofness in his voice. He observes himself, and doesn’t quite come close inside himself. He is more of a watcher, and we don’t have anyone else presented from their ‘inside’ – we only have Jeremy’s view of how they are viewing him.

I suspect, had I never read any Patrick Flanery before, I may have liked this more warmly and enthusiastically than I do. I don’t think I would have surrendered to it, I don’t think I would have loved it, but I would have liked it more decisively – because I would not have those two extraordinary novels to make comparisons with, and would not have seen what I am missing, with this. That I believe it is worth reading is given that, until about half way through, even this early in the year, I thought this was going to be one of my books of the year, which both previous novels had easily been

Do read it – even in my disappointment I can see how good a writer Flanery always is, and this is still a pertinent and thought provoking novel.  And then, if you don’t know them already, do read Absolution, and do read Fallen Land.

I wait, eagerly, for Flanery’s next novel

I received this as an ARC from the publisher, Atlantic Books

Although the book is available in hardback and Kindle in the UK from February 4th, American readers will have to wait until July for a wood book copy, though the Kindle is available from 4th February

I Am No One Amazon UK
I Am No One Amazon USA

Ulla-Lena Lundberg – Ice

Tags

Äland Islands, Book Review, Finland, Finnish Literature, Ice, Thomas Teal (translator), Ulla-Lena Lundberg

Fishing, Farming, Faith and Community: Finnish Island Life, in spacious Fin-Lit-Fic

Forget the gloomy darkness of Scandi-Noir, what we have in Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s Ice is a carefully crafted, slowly unfolding sense of reading relationship, where characters are met, the reader can both quickly gain an instant, workable impression and find themselves deepening into understanding and friendship with them. There is, for sure, narrative, but the narrative is less driven by the over-blown, operatic demands of fast pounding scene building two-hours or less block-buster film making or airport reading suspense, and more the narrative imposed by the normal events of daily lives, carried out in particular times and places.

In this case, the time is 1946, the place the Örland (Äland) islands, off the Finnish and Swedish coast. My sense of Finland’s geography and history, before reading Lundberg’s novel, originally written in Swedish, and wonderfully translated by Thomas Teal, was far less than could have been written on the proverbial postage stamp. Now, it is considerably more, Lundberg painlessly, not to mention fascinatingly instructed me through the story of characters, and sent me to gain more understanding via the web. I was surprised, for example, that Lundberg was writing in Swedish, particularly as she is Finnish, and that language is the language spoken by the majority of Finns, though Swedish is the second language. Except……….that Lundberg comes from the Älands, and though the Islands are now “an autonomous part of Finland”, the language spoken by the vast majority is Swedish. The Äland archipelago has a complex relationship between its powerful mainland Scandinavian territories, and Finland as a whole an even more complicated history, squeezed between the historical rapacity of both Germany and Russia, and the complicated twentieth century conflicts. So there was a lot of interesting learning about background. Lundberg sensibly chooses to avoid having a character deliver lectures to enlighten the reader, much is throwaway information, which a reader can either choose to immediately accept, perhaps with a small cloud of minor puzzlement, or can choose, as I did, to want to grapple with in ‘on the side’ research.

What the reader is instantly drawn into is how a small community, with the normal alliances and enmities which any small community might have, lives out its lives. If you welcome a book which describes a much more visceral life than one lived in cities, this should fascinate, because the detail of the seasons, the food, the culture of lives lived by engaging with the land itself is wonderfully done

No connecting bridges in ICE, though their construction is part of the story………

The main storyline concerns a novice Lutheran priest, Petter Kummel,his wife Mona, and their young daughter, Sanna, who arrive on Älund. Petter is there to be the new pastor. It is of course a brilliant way to introduce the reader to Älund life, as the central characters also are in the process of learning! Much happens, trials, tribulations, celebrations, friendships, rivalries, complex family and community dynamics. And, arching over all, a deep love of, and relationship with landscape, from the author, and from her characters.

Their third winter, Petter has lived through every kind of weather out here on the Örlands and moves easily on land and water across his parish. The darkness is not completely dark. Because the islands are not covered with forest, the land lies open to the sky. Starlight and moonlight can reach it, or the gliding streak of light between sky and sea. “out here we’re always in touch with heaven!” he says to people who ask if he’s not afraid of getting lost in the dark

Petter himself is warm, energetic, compassionate, though there will be some history for the reader to discover; he is far more than a saintly cipher. He is the kind of man who sees the best in others, and so calls that forth. Mona is irascible, energetic, no-nonsense, intensely practical. The two are both foils for each other and excellent partners. Their relationship is deeply loving and supportive, though their natures conflict as much as support each other. They, like the reader, will get deeply involved into caring about the community, and the land they live by, with, on, from.

For much of her adult life, the resources have been so meagre and the need in some cases so pressing that it seemed to her more and more that there was a fixed, inadequate quantity of things in the world. If someone comes up in the world and basks in the sun a bit, then that well-being and sunshine are denied someone else. It’s the same way with things like joy and success. The sum total is paltry. If a little love and happiness come our way, someone else is deprived of them. Envy, which is such a stone in our path, derives from this insight, as does our reluctance to reveal our good fortune to others.

The structure of the book is a mite curious, we drift into third person, first person, changing points of view, but it works rather wonderfully. There is a bookend voice, and one which marks major changes, that of the post-boat pilot, Anton, who ferries change and provisions and contact between the Örlands and the wider world, to-and-fro. Anton is like some mythical boatman between worlds. What he does is absolutely real, but there is an undercurrent of messengers from classical mythology, who travel between realms. The nature of his work, in these sometimes frozen, isolated seas, makes him introspective and open to intuitive sensings.

I warmly recommend this, which I received as a review copy from Amazon Vine, UK. Published 4th February in UK and US

Ice Amazon UK
Ice Amazon USA