Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

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I was lucky enough to win a copy of Gillespie and I through LibraryThing Early Reviewers but even if I had paid the full price for this book I would have considered it money well spent. I thought it was brilliant. It seems I’m one of the few people not to have read the first book by Jane Harris, The Observations, and I’m not sure how I managed to miss that one as it sounds like something I would love. I’ll certainly go back and read it now that Jane Harris has been brought to my attention.

But this post is about Gillespie and I. Or, I should say, Gillespie and Harriet Baxter. We first meet Harriet in 1933 as an elderly woman looking back on her life and promising to share with us her recollections of Ned Gillespie, a talented artist who was never able to fulfil his true potential. Harriet then proceeds to tell us the story of her acquaintance with the Gillespie family, whom she met in the 1880s during a trip to Scotland to visit the International Exhibition in Glasgow. She quickly becomes a friend of Ned, his wife Annie, and the other members of the family – but then disaster strikes and the lives of Harriet and the Gillespies are thrown into turmoil.

After a leisurely start, the story soon picked up pace and became very gripping. But as well as the compelling plot there were many other things that made this book such an enjoyable read. I connected immediately with Harriet’s sharp, witty and observant narrative voice. The other characters were vibrantly drawn, though the only one who never really came to life for me was Ned himself, which was the only disappointment in an otherwise excellent book. I also loved the setting. I’ve read many, many books set in Victorian London and it made a refreshing change to read one set in Victorian Glasgow instead.

Halfway through the story something happened that made me start to question everything I’d read up to that point – and even after I’d finished the book I still had questions. I was very impressed by how cleverly Jane Harris managed to control what I believed and didn’t believe at various points in the novel. I can’t really explain what I mean without spoiling the story but suffice to say there are some stunning plot twists that leave you wondering whether things are really as they seem – and this doesn’t happen just once, but several times throughout the second half of the book. At times it even felt like a Victorian sensation novel to me, which probably explains why I enjoyed it so much! Gillespie and I has been one of my favourite reads so far this year.

A Word Child by Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch is not a writer I’m very familiar with. A few years ago I read her Booker prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea, but have never investigated her other books. And so I’d like to thank Open Road Media for making A Word Child available through Netgalley and re-introducing me to Murdoch’s work.

The ‘word child’ of the title is Hilary Burde, our narrator.  Following an unhappy childhood Hilary’s future prospects looked bleak, until he discovered a passion for words and languages and embarked on a promising academic career at Oxford. However, when we first meet Hilary at the beginning of the novel, he is working as a low grade civil servant in London. We don’t know at first why he left Oxford, but we are given hints that he had been involved in some kind of scandal there – and when Gunnar Jopling, a figure from his past, comes to work in Hilary’s office building, everything starts to become clear.

The book has an interesting structure, with each chapter headed by a day of the week. Hilary has tried to establish order and routine in his life by having certain things that he always does on certain days of the week (dinner with friends on Thursday, visiting his sister on Saturdays, for example) and the novel follows him as this monotonous cycle of events is gradually thrown into disarray. Murdoch’s writing never becomes over descriptive or flowery, yet she manages to convey vivid images of the stations on the London Underground, the yellow fog that hangs over the Thames, the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. She also gives an amusingly accurate portrayal of daily office life, where Hilary is relentlessly teased by two of his colleagues, and there are other moments of humour involving Hilary’s lodger, Christopher.

Hilary himself is not an easy character to like. He controls every aspect of his sister Crystal’s life and the way he behaves towards his poor girlfriend, Thomasina, is even worse. And yet I could still empathise with him at times because his dysfunctional relationships and desperate attempts to stay in control are signs of the unhappiness and inner turmoil from which he’s suffering. I really wanted Hilary and the other main characters to have a happy ending and although I’m obviously not going to tell you whether they did or not, I did think the ending was stunning: dramatic, surprising and very satisfying.

I enjoyed this book very much and loved Murdoch’s insights into topics such as redemption, forgiveness and moving on after a tragedy. It was such a surprise because I wasn’t expecting something so accessible and readable. I’d recommend A Word Child to anyone who may be wondering where to begin with Iris Murdoch.

Room by Emma Donoghue

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It’s been more than a month since I read this book but it has taken me until now to find the inspiration to post about it. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book, but as I’ve said before I find it difficult to write about a book that has attracted so much attention and already been raved about by such a lot of people.

I’m sure most of you will already have seen so many reviews of Room that you won’t need a synopsis, but for those of you who do, the plot can be summarised very quickly. The story is narrated by Jack, a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life living with his mother in a converted shed measuring eleven foot square. His mother had been kidnapped seven years ago and Jack was born in captivity. He has no idea that a world exists outside Room and apart from Ma and Old Nick, the man who is keeping them captive, he has never seen another human being.

The story could have been very harrowing, but I was surprised to find it was less upsetting than I thought. There are a lot of aspects of the plot that are very disturbing and uncomfortable to read about but there are also some positive things that come out of the story: the strong mother/son bond, for example, and the way Jack’s mother uses her imagination to keep him busy and entertained. Being told from a five-year-old’s point of view, there’s nothing very graphic but there are always dark undercurrents beneath the surface. The trauma of Ma’s kidnapping and the abuse she suffered at the hands of Old Nick are only lightly touched on; we know they happened but aren’t given many details because those are things Jack is too young to really understand.

When I first started reading I found Jack’s narration very irritating and I had an awful feeling I was going to have to abandon the book after a few pages. Luckily though, it seemed that I just needed to get used to it. Once I got further into the story I didn’t have a problem with Jack’s voice and even stopped noticing his unusual language after a while. I can see why Donoghue chose to use a child narrator to show the situation through the innocent eyes of a child born into such an unnatural environment. Jack doesn’t know that a different way of life is possible so is quite content with how things are and when Ma finally decides to ‘unlie’ and tell him about Outside, he finds it almost impossible to believe that such a place really exists. His mother was of course fully aware of what had happened and it would have been interesting to have read the same story from her perspective as well, but of course it would then have been a completely different and probably much more traumatic book.

I’m not sure this is a book I would want to read again, but it did keep me completely gripped and I’m glad I’ve finally read it, as it hadn’t really appealed to me when everyone seemed to be reading it last year.

Have you read Room? Do you think I would like any of Emma Donoghue’s other books?

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin

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As you may have noticed, I don’t often read non-fiction (a big clue can be found in my blog name) but this is something I’d like to change. I have heard a lot of praise for Claire Tomalin’s biographies, so I had high hopes for this one.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self is a long and comprehensive biography of an important historical figure, most famous for the diaries he kept during the 17th century. I haven’t actually read the diaries of Samuel Pepys yet but would certainly like to read them at some point in the future. I wasn’t sure whether not having read the diaries would cause problems with my understanding of the biography, but luckily it didn’t seem to matter – in fact, it might actually be best to read the biography first as it helps to put the diaries in context.

The first few chapters deal with Pepys’ childhood and early life (pre-diary) and understandably we don’t have a lot of information regarding this period of his life – we can only speculate about what Pepys may or may not have done. I found these chapters quite boring in comparison to the rest of the book, although I did enjoy learning about a typical day in a 17th century school – and I was fascinated by the description of the operation Pepys had to remove a stone from his bladder. I’ve always had an interest in the history of medicine and it never ceases to amaze me how anybody ever survived at all!

Tomalin explains that what makes Pepys’ diary so interesting and noteworthy is that he records a mixture of both public events and personal experiences. Pepys lived through a fascinating and eventful period of English history and his famous diary covers such events as the Restoration of Charles II, the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. I was slightly disappointed that more attention wasn’t given to the plague as it’s a topic I find fascinating to read about (I hope that doesn’t sound too morbid!) but as Tomalin explains it was something that didn’t affect Pepys personally and so he doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about it.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were the descriptions of daily life. While I confess to struggling to get through some of the chapters about Pepys’ political and business activities, I found the more personal sections completely gripping. I thought Tomalin stayed very objective throughout the biography, drawing attention to both the good and the bad aspects of Pepys’ character (and to be honest, he didn’t seem to be the most pleasant of people). But I can tell that even though Tomalin doesn’t shy away from discussing his negative points, she has a lot of enthusiasm and liking for her subject. She also fleshes out the characters of other important people in Pepys’ life including his wife Elizabeth, with whom he had a very complex and volatile relationship. He could be very cruel to her and both physically and verbally abusive, but they did appear to have some genuine affection for each other and Tomalin describes some of the happy times they had together as well as the bad.

For someone like myself who doesn’t often read this type of literary biography, this was quite a challenging book but worth the effort. If I had tried to read this book straight through from beginning to end I probably wouldn’t have managed to finish it, but reading it over the course of a month, a few chapters at a time between reading my usual fiction books, worked perfectly for me.

Have you read any of Claire Tomalin’s biographies? Which ones would you recommend?

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

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As you may know, the winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction will be announced on 8th June. I’ve read three of the six books from this year’s shortlist but I’ve been so far behind with my reviews this year that I haven’t yet posted on any of them – even though it’s now been a while since I finished reading them. I’m beginning to catch up now so hopefully I’ll be posting my thoughts on all three books this week. As for the other three shortlisted books, I would still like to read them eventually.

The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht’s first novel, was one of the Orange titles I was most looking forward to reading and although I did enjoy it, I felt that it didn’t quite fulfil its promise. There were parts of the book that I loved, but I thought the story was made up of too many separate elements that in my opinion never really came together as a whole.

Set in an unnamed Balkan nation, The Tiger’s Wife is an unusual mixture of myth, magic and reality. The main thread of the story follows Natalia, a doctor who is on a goodwill mission to inoculate the children at an orphanage in the fictional town of Brejevina. When Natalia discovers that her beloved grandfather has died, not at home with her grandmother as might be expected, but in a village not far from the orphanage where she is headed, she decides to investigate and find out what he was doing there.

Interspersed with Natalia’s story are accounts of important events in her grandfather’s life and some of the Balkan folk-tales she remembers him telling her. One of these is the story of an escaped tiger living near a remote village in the mountains and a young deaf-mute woman said to be the tiger’s wife; another involves Darisa the bear hunter. I particularly enjoyed reading about the grandfather’s encounters with the ‘deathless man’, a mysterious individual who can predict the deaths of other people without ever dying himself. However, some of these tales were so long and involved that by the time we returned to the present day storyline I found it difficult to pick up where we had left off. And to be honest, I found Natalia’s grandfather and his magical stories a lot more interesting than the character of Natalia herself.

Although the country in which the book is set is never named and any towns and villages that are mentioned are fictional, it’s not difficult to tell that we’re reading about the former Yugoslavia. The city in which Natalia lives is referred to only as ‘The City’ but is probably Belgrade. But despite the anonymity of the setting, Obreht still conveys a great sense of place through her wonderfully descriptive writing.

I can see why this book has been getting so many accolades, but for me, I think it may have been a little bit too ambitious and the disjointed structure of the book stopped me from loving it as much as I had hoped to. The ending of the book left me feeling confused and with the impression that all the separate threads of the story hadn’t been adequately pulled together. If only the author could have found a way to weave the various parts of the novel into a more coherent story The Tiger’s Wife had the potential to be an excellent book, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Téa Obreht does next.

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane

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3 March 1943, London: The air raid sirens sound in Bethnal Green and the residents begin making their way to the tube station which is being used as a public air raid shelter. As the crowds begin to descend the steps into the station there’s an accident, the entrance becomes obstructed and 173 people are crushed to death.

This tragic true story is the subject of Jessica Francis Kane’s new novel, The Report. Although hundreds of people were affected by what happened, Kane’s story concentrates on just a few of them: eight-year-old Tilly and her mother Ada, two survivors of the crush; Bertram Lodge, a young clerk who was heading towards the shelter as the crowd began to push forward; James Low, the chief warden of the shelter, who is stricken with grief and self-blame; and the Rev McNeely from St. John’s church in Bethnal Green who attempts to give hope and comfort following the disaster. Spending time with each of these characters before, during and after the incident gives the story a very personal touch and allows us to see things from several different perspectives.

Thirty years later a young filmmaker, Paul Barber, decides to make a new documentary about Bethnal Green and pays a visit to Laurence Dunne in search of answers. Dunne is the magistrate who was commissioned by the Home Secretary to write a report on the tragedy – which he did within three weeks, having interviewed a large number of witnesses, survivors, medical staff and other officials. When Dunne agrees to cooperate with the documentary, some new details about the disaster and Paul’s own past are brought to light.

This was the worst civilian disaster of World War II and yet I think it’s safe to say that even today it’s not something that many people have heard about. I was vaguely aware of it, but only because it was briefly alluded to in another book I read. I had never read about it in any depth and had no idea what caused the disaster or what happened afterwards. Something that becomes clear as you read the book and learn the details of Dunne’s inquiry is that no one person was to blame for what happened – and yet almost everyone involved blamed either themselves or someone else to some degree. What Dunne wanted to avoid was making one person or group of people into a scapegoat and he had to make some important decisions as to what he would and would not include in his report.

An interesting blend of fact and fiction, The Report manages to be both informative and moving, without ever becoming too sentimental. The theory that Kane puts forward at the end of the novel may or may not be close to the truth, but either way I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn more about such an important historical incident.

Guest Post: Alison Pick – author of Far to Go

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Something slightly different today: a guest post from author Alison Pick! You may remember that I recently posted my review of Alison’s new novel, Far to Go. Alison is visiting She Reads Novels today as part of her UK blog tour and here she tells us what inspired her to write Far to Go.

Growing up, there was a secret in my family. We went to Church, and celebrated Christmas, but we weren’t really Christians. We were hiding something. I didn’t know what.

I got older. There were clues. My great-grandparents had died in Europe. It had something to do with a camp, and with my grandmother’s pearls that she’d smuggled into Canada in a jar of cold cream.

I understood the truth in stages. My great grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. Why? Because they were Jewish. Which meant their children, my grandparents, were Jewish too. Which meant, of course, that my father was the same.

I both knew this, and did not know it.

The reason for my psychic ambivalence was a moratorium on discussion. My grandmother forbid any and all questions about her parents, their deaths, or their backgrounds. In retrospect this makes perfect sense. Granny was a young woman when she arrived in Canada. Although culturally Jewish, she’d never practiced. Her own parents, who she had been very close to, were supposed to meet her in Canada, but they never made it out of Europe. It was out of a horrific lifelong grief that our family’s silence was sewn.

When my grandmother passed away in the year 2000 I was bereft. I wrote poems about her life following the Holocaust. Although she probably wouldn’t have liked the poems, they were my tribute to her.

Still, they weren’t enough. I grew as a writer, and the desire to write something bigger to honour my history grew too. Finally, in 2007, I began work on the novel that would become FAR TO GO. Paradoxically, I knew that the book would not tell my grandparents story in a literal sense. I wanted to write a gripping novel, one that would keep the reader turning the pages, and I didn’t want the constraint of “what really happened” to get in my way.

In other words, I wanted to forsake their particular story to tell one that was more universal.

Well, it’s done. FAR TO GO sold in five countries, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and has been optioned for film. More importantly, it has given me incredible pleasure to write something for the family I never knew, and for my grandmother, who I did know and who I miss terribly. I’m not sure what she would have thought. Secrets die hard, especially ones like hers. I have a hunch, though, that she would have been proud.

As Jews around the world say on the anniversary of a loved one’s death: May her memory be for a blessing.

~

Thanks for visiting us today, Alison!

See what Alison said yesterday at Catherine, Caffeinated and don’t forget to visit Get On With It tomorrow to hear more from her!

For a full list of tour stops please see the blog tour button in my sidebar.