Anne Enright

Anne Teresa Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern culture, preoccupations, spirit of the times.

The Gathering - Winner of the Man Booker Prize

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam.

It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968.

The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

The Green Road - Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016, the 2015 Costa Novel Award, Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015

Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.


The Forgotten Waltz - Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction

If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened.

She saw me kissing her father.

She saw her father kissing me.

The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.

The story is, almost, an ordinary one. A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded – falls in love with an attractive married man she meets at her sister's house. He has a daughter, who seems a bit odd. The affair goes through all the predictable stages: a drunken one-night seduction in a foreign hotel, a clandestine office romance, discovery and family recriminations, the romantic affair turning into a bickering second marriage, the ultimate loneliness of the woman.

But what deepens the mix are two discomforting, awkward and delicately handled factors. One is the sudden death of the sisters' dashing, stylish and gallant mother, who in the face of adversity would "get out the powder and blush" and spray on some Givenchy. Because of her consuming affair, Gina has not paid attention to her mother's illness, and the death catches her by surprise. Parental losses – as, over and over again, in Taking Pictures – are things that Enright understands, and in The Forgotten Waltz this grief is more touching than the grief of desire. The other fine thing is the difficult, insistent presence of Evie, the lover's daughter. First seen as an overweight, overwrought little girl, she grows up and makes more claims on our attention as the novel goes on. We learn her painful story, which changes our view of everyone else in the book, and Gina has to learn how to deal with her. That impossibly difficult yet involving relationship, between the father's mistress and the angry adolescent girl, gives us the last – and one of the best – scenes in the book.  The novel is told in retrospect from the end-point of the snow-bound winter of 2009, when Dublin has ground to a halt and the streets are empty and blanketed.  

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Three great Enright reads, with some wonderfully observed human interactions in each novel.  Notably for me, because the most memorable, is the New Year's Party in The Forgotten Waltz

A Political Memoir

Politics: Between the Extremes

Personally I find Nick Clegg a bit of a dish (shameful admission since he is the same age as my sons) so it was a particular treat to listen to him reading his political memoir, Politics: Between the Extremes, as an Audible production.

Here's the blurb:

Politics has changed. For decades Britain was divided between Left and Right but united in its belief in a two-party state. Now, with nationalism resurgent and mainstream parties in turmoil, stark new divisions define the country and the centre ground is deserted.

As Deputy Prime Minister of Britain’s first coalition government in over fifty years, Nick Clegg witnessed this change from the inside. Here he offers a frank account of his experiences – from his spectacular rise in the 2010 election to a brutal defeat in 2015, from his early years as an MEP in Brussels to the tumultuous fall-out of Britain’s EU referendum – and puts the case for a new politics based on reason and compromise.

He writes candidly about his mistakes, including the controversy around tuition fees, the tense stand-offs within government and the decision to enter coalition with the Conservatives in the first place. He also lifts the lid on the arcane worlds of Westminster and Brussels, the vested interests that suffocate reform, as well as the achievements his party made despite them. Part memoir, part road-map through these tumultuous times, he argues that navigating our future will rely more than ever on collaboration, reforming our political institutions and a renewed belief in the values of liberalism.

Whatever your political persuasion, if you wish to understand politics in Britain today you cannot afford to ignore this book.

Since the disastrous, in my opinion, result of the June 23rd referendum on the UK's place in the EU, I have been politically engaged in a way since never before.  I joined the Lib Dems and now find I belong to the Liberal Elite, a member of a demographic that is being maligned for this pigeonholing.  It is giving rise to humorous posts and comment on one of the 'Remainers' Facebook groups to which I belong:

"Inspired by the cornucopia of fragrance ads on television this Christmas, I am working on my new perfume called 'Liberal Elite'. People will say "What is that delightful aroma" and I will say....... "Shhhh. It's 'Liberal Elite'. A heady combination of books (without pictures), avocados, facts, tolerance and being right."

Lol :)

Some Novels of Ian Pears

I first encountered Ian Pears as a writer back in the very early 2000s.  He has written seven books in his Jonathan Argyll series (art history mysteries).  In addition he has a further five novels of which An Instance of the Fingerpost was the first, being published in 1997.  This was, I think, the second title that a group of us tackled under the banner of our recently formed Book Group in Godalming.  t The book had a mixed reception amongst our number: 
.
Most of the characters are historical figures.  Set in Oxford in the 1660s - a time and place of great intellectual, religious, scientific and political ferment - the narrative centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologian and master spy; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary.

Each one tells their version of what happened and these are contradictory accounts.  But only one reveals the extraordinary truth.


The Bernini Bust by Ian Pears

Published in 1993 this is the third title in Pears' series centring on a team consisting of detective art historian Jonathan Argyll who works with two members of the (fictitious) Italian Art Squad: Flavia di Stefano (deputy) and General Bottando (head of the squad).

Argyll is also a dealer and the hardest part of being an art dealer is having to sell your beloved works. For Jonathan Argyll, the pain is soothed when an American billionaire agrees to pay a vast sum for a relatively minor piece.

Arriving in the Californian sunshine eager to collect his cheque, Jonathan bumps into one of his less scrupulous colleagues, and discovers he is not the American's only seller. A bust of Pope Pius V is being smuggled out of Italy, and trouble is following in its wake.

Within hours, Jonathan's billionaire is dead and both the smuggler and his bust have gone missing. Thinking things can't get any worse, Jonathan calls for the help of the Italian Art Theft Squad – and instead finds himself the killer's next target…

The plotting is convoluted; you have to concentrate and juggle the twists and turns and the machinations of the players in your mind.  There is a final surprising turn in the final pages.  A classic whodunit.

Natura regionis

There is much synchronicity in the lives of Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin, authors of the books featured below.  They knew each other, were friends.  Robert wrote a fulsome celebration of Deakin's writing for the Guardian  after Deakin's death in 2006.

"A month ago, I drove to Mellis to see Deakin for the last time: held his hand, talked a little, until he fell asleep. The next day, I went with two friends, who had also known him, out to the north Norfolk coast. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, and in the evening we read aloud the pages from Waterlog describing that magnificent coastline. We slept in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock he had lent me, and half of it down on the needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin. Roger died a week later, still in the house that he had built around himself 38 years earlier."

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

"The Wild Places" is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space.

Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones - recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin

Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. Wildwood. He is the author of Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the river Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in

Wildwood is about the element wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives.
From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees.

Meeting woodlanders of all kinds, he lives in shacks and cabins, travels in search of the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan, goes coppicing in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bush plums with Aboriginal women in the outback.

Perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Colin Tudge, Roger Deakin's unmatched exploration of our relationship with trees is autobiography, history, traveller's tale and incisive work in natural history. It will take you into the heart of the woods, where we go 'to grow, learn and change'

'Enthralling' Will Self, New Statesman

'Extraordinary . . . some of the finest naturalist writing for many years' Independent

'Masterful, fascinating, excellent' Guardian

'An excellent read - lyrical and literate and full of social and historical insights of all kinds' Colin Tudge, Financial Times

'Breathtaking, vividly written . . . reading Wildwood is an elegiac experience' Sunday Times

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker in 1999.

FASTING, FEASTING takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family.

Anita Desai's novel of intricate family relations plays out in two countries, India and the United States. The core characters comprise a family living in a small town in India, where provincial customs and attitudes dictate the future of all children: girls are to be married off and boys are to become as educated as possible. The story focuses on the life of the unmarried and main character, Uma, a spinster, the family's older daughter, with Arun, the boy and baby of the family.  Aruna gets married.

Uma spends her life in subservience to her older demanding parents, while massive effort and energy is expended to ensure Arun's education and placement in a university in
Rather a series of events from a life than a complexly plotted work. We follow the fortunes of Uma and Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day to day living.
The novel is in two parts. The first part is set in India and is focused on the life of Uma who is the overworked daughter of Mama and Papa. She is put upon by them at every turn, preparing food, running errands. In the early part of the novel we see her struggling at school. She is not very bright but loves the sisters who teach and appreciate her. Finally she is made to leave school and serve her parents.

Uma's parents attempt to marry her off on three occasions; on the first occasion the chosen man fell for Uma's younger sister, Aruna. On the second her parents accept her marriage on behalf of her before finding out later that their dowry has been spent and the engagement is cancelled. On the third occasion a marriage took place but it turns out the Uma's new husband already has a wife. She lives with his sisters while he lives in another town spending her dowry on his ailing business. Uma's father quickly spirits her home.  We are also told of the episode of Anamika's (Uma's cousin) sad fate. She has won a scholarship to Oxford but her parents insist that she get married. She does and fails to please her husband by providing him with children. He keeps her for a time as a servant but eventually she dies by burning. It is strongly hinted that her in-laws killed her. The final scene of Part 1 is the immersion of Anamika's ashes in the sacred river.

In Part 2 we meet Arun, Uma's privileged brother. He is attending college in America and during summer holidays he lives with the Pattons an all American family. Again, plot is not complex or intricate. The events are told in a serial manner as Arun encounters them.  Of note is his intense dislike of American food and cooking methods. He is dismayed at the behaviour of Melanie, the daughter who is deeply troubled and suffering from bulimia. Although Mrs Patton seems to care about Melanie, she does little to help.  While apparently close, the family are actually distant from one another, something very different from Arun's experience of family life in India. Arun spends most of his time alone and isolated. Arun tries his best to escape from the western society but in vain.

The Ultimate Reading Crowd Pleaser

Lee Child  was born Jim Grant on 29th October 1954.  He is a British thriller writer known for the Jack Reacher novel series.   The books follow the adventures of a former American military policeman who wanders the United States. His first novel, Killing Floor won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Here's a bit about the man:
After being made redundant from his job due to corporate restructuring, Grant decided to start writing novels, stating they are "the purest form of entertainment." In 1997, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published, and he moved to the United States in the summer of 1998.     His pen name "Lee" comes from a family joke about mispronunciation of the name of Renault's Le Car, with "Child" indicating where Grant would place his work on bookstore shelves, i.e., between crime fiction stars Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. 

Grant has said that he chose the name Reacher for the central character in his novels because he himself is tall and when they were grocery shopping his wife Jane remarked: "'Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.' ... 'I thought, Reacher — good name.'"  Some books in the Reacher series are written in first person, while others are written in the third person. Grant has characterised the books as revenge stories – "Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge" – driven by his anger at the downsizing at Granada. Although English, he deliberately chose to write American-style thrillers. 

There is something about the success of this man that appeals to me.  Whilst he may not have been down on his uppers when he was made redundant nevertheless he seems to have taken up writing as something he could turn his hand to.  Like J K Rowling. 

I've nibbled away at the impressive list of Jack Reacher novels.  There are 21 to date and I have just read number 7, Persuader. 

Never forgive, never forget.

Jack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. But he has a burning desire to right wrongs.   The book is written as a first person narrative, the second Jack Reacher novel to be treated in this fashion.  Jack Reacher is working unofficially with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down a boy's father, Zachary Beck, who is an arms smuggler. By pretending to save the boy from his supposed kidnappers, Reacher gains access to Beck and gradually gains his confidence by working as a hired gun/bodyguard. While workind undercoverr he regrettably has to eliminate a few of Beck's minions to prevent them from exposing him. Reacher's primary motivation in getting involved at all in this off-the-books operation is to have another go at Francis Xavier Quinn, a former Military Intelligence agent who brutally mutilated and murdered a female military colleague of Reacher's ten years before. Reacher had originally presumed Quinn to be deceased after their last little encounter but eventually found that assumption to be incorrect after running into Quinn in public. It's ten years later and Quinn somehow just happens to be Zachary Beck's boss in a supremely lucrative, international gun-running enterprise. As always, it is Reacher's all-consuming obsession with revenge, or at least with his personal interpretation of doling out justice, which pushes him far beyond the normal boundaries of physical endurance and acceptable risk.

 

Olde Worlde Murder Mysteries

The Red House Mystery is a "locked room" whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel.

Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882-1956) is most prominently remembered as the author of the well-known Winnie-the-Pooh tales, written for his son, Christopher Robin. Milne was born in London and raised in his father's private school, Henley House, after which he attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. By 1925 he had published 18 plays and 3 novels, including "The Red House Mystery". This was Milne's first and final venture into the detective and mystery genre, despite its immediate success and an offer of two thousand pounds for his next mystery novel.

The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound.

Milne lets his readers inside the head of his amateur detective, disregarding the clichéd romance or violence of other detective novels, as the mystery becomes a puzzling sort of parlour game for the novel's characters and readers alike.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitze

As a professional pasticheur, Anthony Horowitz has already copied (and pasted) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming. Here he turns his attention to Agatha Christie. The first 200 or so pages are a perfect parody of a typical Christie mystery by one Alan Conway featuring his regular detective, a German refugee called Atticus Pünd. It is the Fifties and, in an idyllic country village, a nasty housekeeper and then her employer, the ghastly Sir Magnus Pye, are found dead. There are lots of suspects and lots of secrets. So far so good.

However, Horowitz, much to his credit, wants to have his fake and beat it. The last chapter of the Magpie Murders typescript is missing so Conway’s editor goes in search of it — and, when the obnoxious writer is found dead at the foot of a tower, his killer.

It’s almost half a century since Roland Barthes published The Death of the Author — and Gilbert Adair borrowed the title for his 1993 novel — but Horowitz has great fun showing how art imitates life and vice versa. The narrative is full of in-jokes, allusions and anagrams (and unmentioned typos). Somehow he manages to make all the inconsistencies and interconnections hang together while providing a cynical yet accurate portrait of modern publishing. 

The plot runs as follows:  when editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway...

But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the very words on the page, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition and murder.

O is for Icelandic nOir - 7 and 11

Two titles in the Detective Erlendur Sveinsson series by the popular Icelandic writer, Arnarldur Indridason.

Outrage

He offered her another margarita, and, as he returned from the bar, he carefully slid the pill into her glass. They were getting along fine, and he was sure she would give him no trouble...

Then 48 hours later a young man is found dead in a pool of blood. There is no sign of a break-in at his flat. The victim is found wearing a woman's t-shirt, while a bottle of Rohypnol lies on the table nearby.

Detective Elinborg, already struggling to juggle family life and the relentless demands of her job, is assigned the case. But with no immediate leads to the killer, can she piece together details of the victim's secret life and solve a brutal murder?

Oblivion

A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light.

Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man’s body falls from a high platform.

Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing. The world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not.

Erlendur Sveinsson is a newly promoted detective with a battered body, a rogue CIA operative and America’s troublesome presence in Iceland to contend with. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out but he is already up to his neck.

Indridason's signature is to run two threads that need solving in the same title. 

Growing up in the Shadow of 'The Troubles'

Two Booker Prize Shortlist nominees, both Irish authors writing about the Troubles, their stories focused on the City of Derry, Northern Ireland.

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston.

Recognised as a small masterpiece when first published in 1977, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A poignant novel about a boy in Derry jolted into early adulthood by harsh circumstances.

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.


Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, shortlisted in 1996

"What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." Seamus Deane

A haunted childhood, lived out in two dimensions. One is legendary: the Sun-fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly; the house in Donegal where children are stolen away by demonic forces. The other is actual: the city of Derry in the Northern Ireland of the 40s and 50s; a place that is also haunted by political enmities, family secrets, lethal intrigue. The boy narrator of Reading in the Dark grows up enclosed in these two worlds, sensing that they are intertwined in some mysterious ways that he both wants and does not want to discover. Through the silence that surrounds him, he feels the truth spreading like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. Claustrophobic but lyrically charged, breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up - in Ireland or anywhere - that has ever been written.

De mulieribus

Three books with a common theme: flawed female characters and relationships, and female friendship

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Described as a 'modern masterpiece' from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila. Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction and with this novel, the first in a quartet, she proves herself to be one of Italy’s great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant and generous in its narrative details and characterizations.


The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is one of those books where, suddenly, everyone was talking about it. Gone Girl a psychological mystery with similar themes.

A psychological thriller, it debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2015 and remained there for 13 consecutive weeks.  Many reviews referred to is as the next

The story is a first person narrative told from the point of view of three women: Rachel, Anna, and Megan.  Rachel, a 32-year old alcoholic reeling from the dissolution of her marriage to Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna has lost her job.   catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them. Their life – as she sees it – is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy.  And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough.  Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar.

Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train…Rachel Watson is a 32-year-old alcoholic reeling from the dissolution of her marriage to Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna Watson. Rachel's drinking has caused her to lose her job.  Concealing her unemployment from her flatmate, Rachel follows her old routine of taking the train to London every day; her train slowly passes her old house, which is now occupied by Tom, Anna, and Evie. She also begins watching from the train an attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom, fantasizing about their perfect life together. Rachel has never met them and has no idea that their life is far from perfect, or that the woman, Megan Hipwell, helps Anna care for her child.   Thus we have the basis for a convoluted plot.  Megan goes missing and Rachel involves herself in the case.  After the denouement which involves a stabbing, when the police arrive, former adversaries Rachel and Anna coordinate their stories to support their actions' having been in self-defence.  In a very rapid turn-around this 2015 novel has premiered in 2016 as a film.

In Astonishing Splashes Of Colour, Kitty is a 32-year old woman, still grieving for the baby she lost. She also suffers from synaesthesia, a condition in which feelings are experienced as colours, so Kitty sees all her family members as different colours. As Kitty's obsession with children leads her to begin to unravel emotionally, she tries to reconstruct her own past. Her mother died when she was three, but when Kitty begins to question her father and siblings about it and other events of her past, the truth seems contradictory and elusive. As bits and pieces of her past come together, the mystery that became Kitty's life begins to take shape. She tries to construct the story of her life, to find out more about the other significant loss in her life - her mother, who died in a car crash when she was three - her four brothers and painter father seem unable or unwilling to help. What was her mother like and why did her older sister run away? Her brothers and father are evasive and tell widely various versions of the 'truth'.   Central to her life is her feeling that she is overlooked, unimportant and 'missing' - from pictures, from her brother Adrian's thinly disguised 'novel' about his upbringing. In fundamental ways, her very existence seems to be denied. Something is wrong and Morrall reveals her mystery artfully and convincingly.  Clare Morrall's novel was nominated for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and has received rave reviews. The Observer says of Astonishing Splashes Of Colour, "Morrall reveals her mystery artfully and convincingly, telling a story that is shocking, heart-stopping and completely absorbing."

Splinter

I have had a few goes at sustaining membership of a Book Group.  My best success was remaining part of a group of residents of Godalming and surrounding villages over a period of six years.  We started in October 2004 and one of our number maintained a list of our reads up to a point......

BOOK GROUP (from October ‘04)

Middlesex – Jeffrey Euginides

Regeneration – Pat Barker

An Instance at the Fingerpost – Ian Pears

Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingslover

The Trumpet Major – Thomas Hardy

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Reuz  Zofon

Persuasion – Jane Austen

Silk – Alessandro Baricco

Small Island – Andrea Levy

And Quiet Flows the Don –Sholokhov

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein

Plainsong – Kent Haruf

A  Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian – Marina Lewycka

The Sea House – Esther Freud

The Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi

The Sea – John Banville

The Fall – Simon Mawer

The Colour – Rose Tremain

The Accidental – Ali Smith

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

The Night Watch – Sarah Waters

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Two Lives – Vickram Seth

Restless – William Boyd

To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Spies – Michael Frayn

Catcher in the Rye – Salinger

An Interpretation of Murder – Jed Rubenfeld

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

The Weekend in September – R.C. Sherrif

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell

The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson

The House of Orphans – Helen Dunmore

A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon

Salmon Fishing on the Yemen – Paul Torday

Mr. Pip – Lloyd James

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

Possession – A.S.Byatt

What was Lost – Catherine O’Flynn

The House of Stone – Christina Lamb

Resistance – Owen Shears

Engleby – Sebastian Faulks

The Gathering – Anne Enright

Notes on an Exhibition – Patrick Gale

Stuart – A Life Backwards – Alexander Masters

The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies

A House by the Thames – Gillian Tindall

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

These Foolish Things – Deborah Moggach

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Here we are at the end of the world – Lloyd James

The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry

The White Tiger – Aravind

The Namesake – Jhumpo Lahiri

The Outcast – Sadie Jones

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

The Behaviour of Moths – Poppy Adams

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

The Lieutenant – Kate Grenville

The Mysteries of Glass – Sue Gee

Catch 22 – Joseph Hillier

Water for Elephants – Sarah Gruen

The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell

Sex and Stravinsky – Barbara Trapido

The Hare with Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell

Trespass – Rose Tremain

The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Evelyn Waugh

Homer and Langley – E.L. Doctorow

The Painted Veil – Somerset Maughan

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Snowdrops – A.D. Miller

Cutting For Stone – Abraham Vergese

Pure – Andrew Miller

The Saffron Kitchen – Yasmin Crowther

Mosquito – Roma Tearne

Painter of Silence – Georgina Harding

Song of Achilles – Madeleine Miller

A Woman in Berlin - Anon

The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng

This list is incomplete which is a pity. The compiler failed to keep track and I think there must be at least a dozen titles which have never made it onto the list.  Then, within a relatively short period of time several of us moved away.  I continued to drive from my Dorset home to Godalming to participate.  This was helped by the fact that my daughter now owned and lived in our family home.  A bout of illness disrupted my pilgrimages and the Book Group slowly disbanded.  Someone in the village to which I moved had not long started a book group locally when we moved to the village in September 2010.  Organised rather differently from my Surrey one (where we met in the evening with wine and nibbles and reasonably regular intervals of four to six weeks) the Winterborne K group met on the second Tuesday of the month at 4 p.m.  We chose books from a list provided by the Wareham library.  The ethos was different in many ways and I slowly lost my enthusiasm. 

But others from the WK group were beginning to feel a bit disenchanted with the rather limiting and lack-lustre choices offered in the library Book Groups catalogue.  Today four of us ate lunch round my table and we talked about the books we would like to read and how we might organise ourselves.  We will choose a day at regular but not fixed intervals, we will take it in turns to host a soup and cheese lunch, we may choose one or two books that we would all like to read, and we will bring and talk about other titles.  It will be all about the love of books and reading. 

So if it all works out, at our next get-together we will talk about our set book, Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel Night School. Other titles in the frame for optional reading and discussion are Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters and Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. 

So where does Splinter come in?  That is what we will call ourselves!

Bonus discipulus

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

During the 70s, 80s, and 90s I read several of Murdoch's novels and then I found new authors and moved on.  It is only with my self-appointed challenge to read the entire Booker Shortlist that some titles unread by me have come to my attention.  The Good Apprentice, her 22nd novel published in 1985,  is one such.

Edward Baltram, a college student living in London, gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug for a joke. After Mark, still high, falls to his death from a window, Edward is wracked with guilt and depression — worsened by daily letters from Mark's mother cursing him as a murderer.  All this action takes place in the first chapter and is a memorable  opening.  I am reminded of the opening chapter in Enduring Love where a devastating and irrevocable event changes the course of personal histories.

In search of his father, Jesse, Edward sets off for Seegard, the family home, away from the harsh reality of London. As Edward progresses through the novel, he revives somewhat, thanks to the love of his eccentric father and his extended family of supportive women. He eventually finds, however, that he must come to terms with Mark's death.

Meanwhile, Edward's stepbrother Stuart Cuno decides to give up his studies and goes in search of the "pure" life of an aesthete, to his family's bewilderment.   He abandons a promising academic career and takes up celibacy and chastity.  Interfering friends and relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives.  Stuart has a close bond with thirteen-year-old Meredith, the son of Thomas and Midge McCaskerville.

While Edward in order to become Good seeks redemption and sometimes contemplates suicide, Stuart seeks salvation, and Midge is having an affair with her husband's best friend, Harry Cuno - stepfather to Edward and father to Stuart. Her passionate love affair comes to a head after two years when she is disgraced publicly and falls unexpectedly in love with Stuart. Left with a difficult decision, Midge turns to Edward for support.

A convoluted web of complicated family relationships.  This is the stuff of Murdoch. 

An Officer and a Spy

Paris, 1895: an army officer, Georges Picquart, watches a convicted spy, Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of a baying crowd.

Dreyfus is exiled for life to Devil's Island; Picquart is promoted to run the intelligence unit that tracked him down.

But when Picquart discovers that secrets are still being handed over to the Germans, he is drawn into a dangerous labyrinth of deceit and corruption that threatens not just his honour but his life...

"The Dreyfus Affair constitutes one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about."  How true, I have heard The Dreyfus Affair referred to over the years but never really known what it concerned.  Because even among well educated people, amongst which I am fortunate to count myself,  there's often little more than a headline understanding of the issues of anti-Semitism that it embodies and a French miscarriage of justice, Devil's Island and Emile Zola's famous attack on the French establishment's conspiracy against the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus: J'accuse.

But the real story is like something from the imagination of Alexandre Dumas, full of intrigue, wrongful imprisonment and heroic effort to establish the truth. In other words, it's a thriller and there is no more deft hand at work in that genre than Robert Harris. However unlike previous Harris thrillers, An Officer and a Spy is not a hypothetical historical account, but, save for a few small fictional details, an almost documentary-like assemblage of what actually took place.

Dreyfus was convicted of passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island, where he was forbidden even to speak to his guards. But he was an innocent fall guy, fingered by the military and the government because he was conveniently Jewish, while the real culprit was allowed to continue at dissolute liberty to avoid the embarrassment of the public knowledge that there was a non-Jewish – ie authentic French – spy in the army.

          
The hero of the piece, however, is not Dreyfus, who despite his dreadful suffering, is a minor and not particularly sympathetic character. Instead, Harris unearths the tale of Georges Picquart, the French officer who initially played a part in Dreyfus's arrest, only to be struck by a growing suspicion that the wrong man had been sent away. Although not without his own flaws, including a glint of antisemitism, Picquart is a man who can't let anything lie – even when it is beneficial to him. After Dreyfus's incarceration he is made head of a secret intelligence unit called the "statistical section". But he finds himself a victim of a sinister campaign when he begins to ask uncomfortable questions.
While finely attuned to modern resonances of surveillance, cultural identity and patriotic loyalty, Harris stays true to the atmosphere and morals of the period. He has crafted a compelling narrative of state corruption and individual principle, and a memorable whistleblower whose stubborn call can still be heard more than a century later.

Reading this in these post-EU-Referendum days, and in the immediate aftermath of the election of Trump to the White House and the stomach-churning images of Farage cosying up to the President-elect, the cover-up that the French military and secret service exacted makes me think of the turmoil within and outside our own Parliament over the result of the vote, the apparent determination of the Prime Minister and her immediate entourage to railroad Brexit through and most disturbing of all for me is the unprincipled stepping into line of all those MPs in the Tory Party and Labour who are trotting out the lame expressions 'the people have spoken' and 'respecting the will of the British people'.  It makes my blood boil.  That they put the power of their political parties before the good of the country is incredible.  "But that's politics" someone said to me the other day.  The dark side of politics...........

Tenebrae criminibus

Five titles which reveal the emphasis I have placed on choosing crime reading.  When my life is taken up with a rolling programme of visitors and visiting, with all the supporting fielding activities that such a life entails, in order not to lose my personal plot, crime and detective novels which necessitate sustained reading sessions where the urge to page-turn is strong are welcome opportunities to switch off from all the practicalities of life and relax with an engaging read.  And, often,  to fall asleep...........

Let's start in the frozen North.  Snowblind (Dark Iceland Series) by Ragnar Jonasson is set in Siglufjorour: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, accessible only via a small mountain tunnel, is where no one locks their doors. Snowblind is an impressive debut from a new talent.

Enter Ari Thor Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik - with a past that he's unable to leave behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the 24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness - blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose. Taut and gripping,

I listened to Snowblind on Audible and it was read by an Icelandic actor, Thor Kristjansson.  Whilst using a native affords verisimilitude to a reading of the novel, I found the heavy Icelandic accent often distorted the pronunciation of the English translation and was a distraction to concentration.

In contrast I read Arctic Chill (Reykjavik Murder Mysteries) by Arnaldur Indridason in hard copy.  A dark-skinned young boy is found dead, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood.

The boy's Thai half-brother is missing; is he implicated, or simply afraid for his own life? While fears increase that the murder could have been racially motivated, the police receive reports that a suspected paedophile has been spotted in the area.  Detective Erlendur's investigation soon unearths the tension simmering beneath the surface of Iceland's outwardly liberal, multi-cultural society while the murder forces Erlendur to confront the tragedy in his own past. 

Racial tension was to me a surprising theme to crop up in an Icelandic crime novel.  Preoccupied, as we are in the UK, with the extreme racism as well as xenophobia which has manifested since the result of the EU referendum, and aware these are issues that prevail in our immediate European neighbours such as France, I had not expected that this sociopolitical problem had extended its nasty tendrils as far as an apparently tolerant and liberal nation such as Iceland.

Freeze Frame (The Enzo Files) by Peter May implies another novel set in the chilly North.  In fact, the setting for this novel in the Enzo Macleod series is a small island off the Breton coast.  A promise made to a dying man leads Enzo Macleod, a Scot forensic expert who's been teaching in France for many years, to the study which the man's heir has preserved for nearly twenty years.

The dead man left several clues for his son there, designed to reveal the killer's identity but ironically the son died soon after the father. This opens the fourth of seven cold cases which have been written up in a bestselling book by Parisian journalist Roger Raffin.  Enzo has rashly boasted that he could solve these cold cases and he has been successful with the first three.

On the tiny Breton island Enzo must confront the hostility of locals who have no desire to see the infamous murder back in the headlines. There are possible suspects and the crime scene is frozen in time.  A dangerous hell hole (Trou d'Enfer) up on the cliffs and a collection of enigmatic messages as clues, add to the gripping narrative.  There are red herrings along the way, the solution is satisfying and it makes for an enjoyable read.  .

Mo Hayder can always be expected to grip her reader and turn out a crime thriller which breaks out of the traditional mould of plotting. As a crime writer she is fast-paced and addictive; Hanging Hill centres around a pair of estranged sisters—one a cop, one a coddled wife fallen on hard times—and the gruesome homicide of a teenage beauty, which exposes the nightmares that lurk at the edges of our safe domestic lives.

One morning in picture-perfect Bath, England, a teenage girl’s body is found on the towpath of a canal. Hanging Hill is a much better than average thriller with a masterful twist in the ending.  Always a bonus.

Why was she on the towpath alone late at night? Zoe Benedict—Harley-riding police detective, independent to a fault—is convinced the department head needs to look beyond the usual domestic motives to solve the case, but no one wants to hear it. Meanwhile, Zoe’s sister, Sally—recently divorced and in dire financial straits, supporting a daughter who was friends with the dead girl—has begun working as a housekeeper for a rich entrepreneur who seems less eccentric and more repugnant, and possibly dangerous. When Zoe’s investigation turns up evidence that the teenage girl's attempts to break into modeling had delivered her into the world of webcam girls and amateur porn, a crippling secret from Zoe’s emerges.  All roads seem to be leading to one conclusion: there’s something very wrong at the house on Hanging Hill. But will Zoe and Sally put their differences aside and fit all the pieces together before it’s too late?

Often one saves the best till last.  Not in this case though.  I was given a copy of Silken Prey (John Sandford) by an American friend who found he had two copies.

  All hell has broken loose in the Washington. An influential state senator has been caught with something very, very nasty on his office computer. The governor find this incredible.  In his view the senator is too smart to be caught out like that. It does not make sense.  As Davenport investigates, the trail leads to a political fixer who has disappeared, then—troublingly—to the Minneapolis police department itself, and most unsettling of all, to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons in manipulation. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work—along with the money, ruthlessness, and cold-blooded will to make it happen.

This is one in the Lucas Davenport series and the author is talked up as a writer with "trademark razor-sharp plotting and some of the best characters in suspense fiction."  I didn't find that a convincing opinion.  There are more than twenty titles in the 'Prey' series but I am not tempted to tackle another.

Cold War Themes

Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982) and his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin no. 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."

Chatwin was born near Sheffield, England. At 18 he went to work at  Sotheby's in London, where he gained an extensive knowledge of art and eventually ran the auction house’s Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. In 1966 he left Sotheby’s to read archeaology at the University of Edinburgh, but he abandoned his studies after two years to pursue a career as a writer.

The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin in 1972. He travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and André Malraux. He left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, which resulted in his first book. His work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers.  Married and bisexual, Chatwin was one of the first prominent men in Great Britain known to have contracted HIV and to have died of an AIDS-related illness, although he hid the details. Following his death, the gay community criticised Chatwin for keeping his diagnosis secret.

Utz follows the fortunes of Kaspar Utz who lives in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Utz is a collector of Meissen porcelain and finds a way to travel outside the eastern bloc to acquire new pieces. Whilst in the West, Utz often considers defecting but he would be unable to take his collection with him and so, a prisoner of his collection, he is unable to leave.

Continuing with the Cold War theme, in The Noise of Time Julian Barnes gives a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It is a narrative in which nothing much happens: a man waits for a lift; a man sits on a plane; a man sits in a car. All the action takes place in Shostakovich’s head; in each of these three sections we find him at a moment of reflection amid a larger crisis, the “skittering” of his mind represented by short bursts of text that flit between memories and the present.

Crisis Number One is the Great Terror. The story begins with Shostakovich on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting for the lift that will bring the secret police. This is 1936 and Stalin’s great purge is under way. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met with Stalin’s personal disfavour and the composer has been denounced in the press: a clear sign that the cogs of murderous bureaucracy have been set to grind. It can only end one way: in an interrogation cell in which a “confession” awaits a signature, and a bullet the back of a neck.

As Shostakovich waits, he thinks of his childhood, of past lovers and, compulsively, of the train of circumstances that led to his fall. He remembers the disaster of the debut of his First Symphony at an open-air venue in Kharkov, when the music had set the local dogs barking. The louder they played, the more dogs barked. “Now his music has set bigger dogs barking,” Barnes writes. “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

Waiting for the lift, Shostakovich recalls being summoned to “the Big House” where he is interrogated by an agent called Zakrevsky. They want to know about his relationship with his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, who stands accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. Shostakovich realises that he is a dead man. But even during the Great Terror you can get lucky; Zakrevsky is himself purged, leaving Shostakovich reprieved, for a while at least.

Shostakovich’s next crisis – his second “conversation with Power” – occurs 12 years later, in 1948, when he is blackmailed into attending a Soviet-funded Peace Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. As the star of the Russian delegation, he is a target for the anti-communist intellectuals who have infiltrated the conference, specifically Nicolas Nabokov (the novelist’s cousin), an exiled Russian composer who humiliates Shostakovich by asking questions that expose how obediently he is forced to follow the party line.

The third crisis occurs after a gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by which time things have loosened up a little under Khrushchev. Shostakovich no longer fears for his life but faces a new attack on his integrity. It has been decided that he must join the Communist Party as an endorsement of the new direction taken by the Soviet Union. He had avoided joining the party while Stalin was alive but now, try as he might, he cannot escape what has been ordained.

In writing his account of Shostakovich's life Barnes does know what he is talking about. While Barnes is known for his Francophilia, he also studied Russian at school and university. Soviet Communism was a subject of frequent debate among his famous Friday lunch club. In the late Seventies a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy lunches at a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis, was by all accounts the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan.

Barnes, for his part, had first-hand experience of what life was like in the Soviet Union, having taken a road trip through Eastern Europe to Leningrad in 1965. He continued to visit the Warsaw Pact states in the following decades.  

In The Noise of Time, Shostakovich is forced to reconcile his own fragmented memories of his life with the story the state wants to tell about him. He is forced to participate in the degradation of his public self, as his family and his music are held hostage, and is tormented by his own complicity and duplicity. He clings to his music, hoping it will drown out the noise around him.

Towards the end, Shostakovich realises “he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself”.This was often the way with artists,” Barnes writes, “either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment… The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old.”