Category: Fiction

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Sara Baume, Setting, Tramp Press

‘Seven Steeples’ by Sara Baume

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Tramp Press; 288 pages; 2022.

The rhythms of nature and the passing of time are the central themes in Sara Baume’s latest novel Seven Steeples.

Set over the course of seven years, it tells the quiet, contemplative story of Bell (Isabel) and Sigh (Simon), who both ditch their menial city jobs — Bell waiting tables, Sigh packaging TVs in a factory — to move into a rental house, “a drab, roofed box girdled by countryside” at the bottom of a mountain.

They bring their two dogs — Pip, a lurcher, and Voss, a terrier — with them and live a simple life supported by social welfare payments and dwindling savings.

After the excitement of moving in together for the first time (the pair met at a party), taking minimal furniture and an odd assortment of belongings with them, their lives quickly settle into a routine. Morning walks. Trips to the nearest town for supplies. The occasional spot of gardening.

A quiet, misanthropic life

Their nearest neighbour, a farmer, has a nodding acquaintance with them, but for the most part, they keep themselves to themselves. They make no friends and they deliberately cut ties with everyone they know in the city.

Four years and seven months passed without a single visitor.

And as time passes, they carry next to no upkeep on the house, whether inside or out, and it slowly begins to fall into ruin — but they don’t care:

They had grown accustomed to disrepair.

Their lives become reduced to a 20km radius of the lichen-encrusted house and they have little interest in the outside world. They demonstrate an alarming lack of curiosity about anything. It takes them three whole years before they wonder about the mountain, the only thing that never changes, behind them.

The landlord was called to unblock the drain. He came armed with rods and rubber gloves. As he crouched on the gravel to rummage and bail, Sigh finally remembered to ask him about the mountain – whether or not it was commonage, and if there was a path all the way to the top. Yes and yes, he told them, though it was probably overgrown because nobody went up there. The mouth of the path was through the farmer’s yard behind the milking parlour and he himself had never climbed it, though for a long time he had been meaning to. […] They say there is a wild goat who lives up there, the landlord said, the last surviving member of an indigenous flock. They say that from the top, the landlord said, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples.

By the time the seventh year swings around — measured in the passing of seasons, all forensically described in Baume’s careful but elegantly detailed prose — they’ve worked up enough wherewithal to climb it. And when they do, they see a whole new perspective on the world below and make a surprising observation about their own, closely entwined relationship.

Exquisite prose

Something about Seven Steeples didn’t entirely work for me. There’s no dialogue, no plot and the characters are aloof, perhaps because there’s no interior life and we don’t ever get to know what they’re thinking or feeling.

And while the prose is exquisite, particularly in the way Baume chronicles the weather, the passing seasons, the plant life and the animals that inhabit the countryside, there’s far too much exposition. I quickly grew bored of Bell and Sigh’s life, their passivity and their inability to follow through on the things they realised needed to be done or addressed.

However, as an exploration of hearth and home, Seven Steeples offers us a glimpse of an alternative lifestyle, one in which the busyness of the modern world is rejected and the rawness of the natural one is embraced.

For other takes on this novel, please see Claire’s review at Word by Word and Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal.

The book has just been shortlisted for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers.

I have previously reviewed Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking, both of which I loved.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Author, Book review, Deirdre Madden, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Birds of the Innocent Wood’ by Deirdre Madden

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Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 164 pages; 2014.

Deirdre Madden’s The Birds of the Innocent Wood, first published in 1988, is a mysterious, opaque tale about dark family secrets and strained relationships spanning two generations.

It reads a bit like a thriller, helped by a few fast-paced early chapters, before settling into an intriguing if downbeat story where nothing is fully spelt out — or resolved. It’s even hard to know what era this book is set in because there is a timeless quality to everything about it, and Madden’s adoption of a third-person omniscient narrator lends the entire novel the feel of a fairy tale or fable.

An orphan’s tale

Set in rural Ireland, it focuses on Jane, who is orphaned as a toddler when her parents die in a house fire. Taken in by an aunt who does not want her, she’s sent to a convent boarding school, where she delights in telling others of her terrible loss to gain sympathy.

Every time she told her story she felt as if she was leading the unsuspecting children to a vast black pit, and when she had taken them right to the edge, she would suddenly draw back and abandon them there. She craved their pity and their sense of horror; and at the same time she utterly despised the other little girls for allowing her to induce these feelings in them. It was her tragedy, and she was never so weak as to cry for the loss of her parents.

When she finishes school, friendless and isolated, she meets James, a local farmer, and marries him to ward off the loneliness. She moves to his farm, where he lives with his widowed father and their farmhand, Gerald, but never feels that she truly belongs. She takes against their neighbour, Ellen, whom she feels is too close to her husband, even though Ellen eventually marries Gerald.

Jane’s story is interleaved with that of her teenage twin daughters, Catherine and Sarah, who are both cold and odd and just as sociopathic as their mother. The twins, however, are vastly different from each other. Catherine desperately wants to become a nun, while Sarah sets her heart on the local boy, Peter, who is Ellen and Gerald’s son.

As the twins plot against each other for reasons that are never fully explained, there are hints of family secrets and untold histories, but again nothing is obvious or clear-cut. Madden grants her readers the intelligence to figure it out for themselves, something her compatriot (and my favourite writer) Jennifer Johnston also does with aplomb.

Carefully controlled prose

Putting aside the plot, and even the characterisation, both of which are excellent, it’s the writing and the mood of the story that makes this novel such an engaging read. Its bleakness and gloomy outlook are only matched by the restrained, carefully controlled prose.

And Madden’s clever use of avian imagery, whether crows being shot out of trees, songbirds announcing the arrival of dawn or nests being discovered in unlikely places, act as metaphors and signifiers of events going on in the characters often sad and troubled lives.

Despite the fact it comes in at under 170 densely written pages, there’s a lot to unpack in this one.

The Birds of the Innocent Wood won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1989. These awards are for writers under the age of 30 and there are normally multiple winners each year.

Simon from Stuck in a Book has also reviewed it.

Deirdre Madden is from County Antrim in Northern Ireland and has eight novels (and a handful of children’s books)  to her name. I’ve read four of her novels and regard her as one of my favourite authors.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Author, Book review, Edna O'Brien, Faber and Faber, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘August is a Wicked Month’ by Edna O’Brien

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Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 208 pages; 2016.

Edna O’Brien’s fourth novel, August is a Wicked Month, was first published in 1965 and subsequently banned by the Irish censors for the story’s sexual candour.

That candour comes in the form of the book’s protagonist, Ellen, a 27-year-old Irishwoman separated from her husband, who goes on a solo holiday to the French Riviera that doesn’t quite work out as planned.

It’s a relatively bleak tale, punctuated by moments of fleeting happiness, joy, excitement and danger, as Ellen seeks solace from her loneliness and emotional isolation.

A trip to the sun

When the book opens Ellen’s husband offers to take their young son  — who divides his time between both parents — on a camping trip to Wales. This frees her up to enjoy her summer vacation from her job as a theatre critic by becoming  “a sort of tourist doing tourist things” in London.

A week into her leave,  a male friend she’s known for about a year drops by and kisses her in the garden. They go to bed together and Ellen finds herself besotted — “Not for years had she felt more happier, more content and therefore youthful”  — but she gets sick of waiting for him to call. To punish him, she decides to go away and books a trip to the south of France.

Her husband and son would not be back for a week or more and she would lie in a strange new place and let strange new things happen to her.

In France, everything is, indeed, new and strange. She has sex on the brain and flirts with almost every male she sees, including the man sitting beside her on the plane. But her judgement is skewed and her choices are poor. Nothing really works out as she would like.

When she falls in with a crowd attached to an American movie star, things look more promising. There are parties in big houses and plenty of attention from rich, powerful men. (Think The Great Gatsby but set in the sun of the French Riviera.)

But she clashes with one of the young American women in the star’s orbit and seems to come at everything from a different angle than everyone else. She tells her new acquaintances that she’s English to avoid uncomfortable conversations about religion and Catholicism. (Early on in the novel there is a brief reference to her having spent an “awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed” but with no further explanation, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. )

Mid-way through the book the mood of frivolity and sexual abandonment comes to a screeching halt when something happens to remind Ellen that independence comes at a cost.

Evocative and lyrical

I’ve read a handful of Edna O’Brien’s novels in the past, but August is a Wicked Month is by far my favourite.

It’s so evocative of a time and place and she writes so lyrically about being on holiday and experiencing new things. It’s also a fascinating insight into a woman’s interior life, her sexual desires and her hunger to live life to the fullest.

But it was the switch in mood — from light to dark — that really made an impression on me. It was like a kick to the stomach and suddenly the whole story took on a different purpose and became so much more than I had imagined at the start. It made me think about so much and I can see from having re-read the earlier sections that O’Brien had carefully plotted the entire story arc.

It’s a brilliant, brave and frank book. More, please!

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘A Woman of my Age’ by Nina Bawden: A woman begins to question everything about her life and her marriage when she goes on holiday to Morocco with her husband.

‘The Summer Before the Dark’ by Doris Lessing: A well-educated woman contemplates her future after 20 years of marriage and motherhood at a time when having a career wasn’t open to all.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Sebastian Barry, Setting

‘Old God’s Time’ by Sebastian Barry

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber & Faber; 272 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Sebastian Barry has long been one of my favourite authors so I was excited to read his latest novel, the first to return to Irish shores since The Secret Scripture published in 2008.

Old God’s Time — his ninth novel —  is set in Dublin in the 1990s and tells the story of a retired policeman who is brought back to help investigate a “cold case”. But this is not a conventional crime novel.

In fact, it’s the kind of novel that refuses to be boxed in. It’s full of contradictions: complex and multi-layered, yet it’s also a page-turner and effortless to read. It’s an examination of memory, love and survival, blackly humourous in places, harrowing in others — but it should probably come with a trigger warning because at its centre is the utterly vile crime of child sexual abuse as carried out by priests in the Catholic Church.

The pursuit of rough justice

Told in the third person but from the perspective of retired detective Tom Kettle, it examines the idea of rough justice (as opposed to judicial justice). It asks some uncomfortable questions about what happens to survivors when no one is listening.

Tom, a widower, still mourns his beloved wife, June, who was violently and cruelly abused by a priest as a child. His two adult children, Winnie and Joseph, are both dead.

He lives in a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle in Dalkey, an upmarket Dublin suburb, overlooking the Irish Sea. For some nine months, he’s been content to live a quiet life, alone with just his thoughts where “he had grown to love this interesting inactivity and privacy”. But when two young detectives from his old division come knocking at his door, the past comes back to haunt him in ways he had never quite imagined.

Mind games

The narrative swings between past and present, and sometimes it’s impossible to determine what is real and what is imagined. Tom’s memories, recalled in exacting detail, seem more vivid than his reality, as the line between thoughts and the real world blur.

Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn’t mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that.

And while there is a dark undercurrent that pulls Tom along, one that leads to a shocking denouement toward the end, there are lighter moments to provide some relief.

The romance between Tom and June is beautifully told and a real joy to read, but it’s often the witty asides that keep things on an even keel. For example, one of the detectives who comes a-calling is described as “a nice big lump of a young man with a brushstroke for a moustache, a touch Hitlerian if the truth were known”. In another example, a barber describes a haircut as a “Number One, like the child’s phrase for taking a piss”.

Exquisite prose

As ever with a Barry novel, the prose is exquisite. He’s a master at crafting original similes: a ruby necklace is “held tense on her lined neck, like insects on the very point of dispersal”; a meal of frankfurters and mash “lay in his belly like an early pregnancy’; and bed sheets are “so full of nylon they were like an electric storm over Switzerland”.

In just a few carefully chosen words he can conjure up visual images that leave an impression in a reader’s mind. Instead of saying a character is fat, for instance, he says “good lunches and dinners had kept the lines out of his face”. And here’s a filmic description of girls being put to work in an orphanage that still stays with me:

Nuns cared more that the huge floors were polished, the girleens down on their knobbly knees, a long row of them, fifty, with the big polishing cloths. The hands lost in them like stones in snow.

Old God’s Time traverses some complex psychological territory but Barry handles harrowing issues with great sensitivity and humanity. It takes you on an emotional rollercoaster, from happiness to anger— and back again — and will leave you wrung out at the end. But this is a wonderfully haunting novel that has an important story to tell.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Miss Gomez and the Brethren’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 264 pages; 2015.

Reading William Trevor’s books in chronological order is proving to be an interesting exercise because Miss Gomez and the Brethren bears many striking similarities to Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, the novel immediately preceding it.

Both revolve around intriguing female characters, outsiders thrust into a new community, where they disturb the equilibrium and exhibit signs of eccentricity — although the opening line in this novel puts it more bluntly:

‘In my opinion,’ said Miss Arbuthnot, ‘the child is not in her right mind.’

Both stories also feature disturbing male characters who visit prostitutes or sexually harass women, but Miss Gomez and the Brethren dials up the dark side of human behaviour much more than its predecessor.

A Jamaican orphan

The story, which is set in the late 1960s, begins in Jamaica, where we meet Miss Gomez, an 11-year-old orphan whose parents perished in “the Adeline Street disaster” in which 91 people were burnt alive.

At Arbuthnot Orphanage the legend grew that she was a mad girl, rendered so by the strange circumstance of being the only one spared in the Adeline Street disaster. Occasionally she accepted the legend herself and saw in it the explanation of all that was worrying in her life and her mind. She certainly preferred being mad to being stupid. With such thoughts the child grew up. As the years went by, her legs became excessively long; thin and dark, like autumn twigs. She was troublesome, the staff continued to repeat, because of some streak in her: she took no interest, she didn’t ask normal questions like other children. She overheard them talking about her and didn’t much mind when they were unpleasant about her.

This inability to fit in gets worse when Miss Gomez emigrates to England as a young woman — part of the Windrush generation — and finds herself in London, where everyone seems to be suspicious of black people. She has a succession of menial jobs before she lands a lucrative position as a “dancer” in a Soho club where she’s told that a “black girl naked in glasses […] was an excitement for all-white afternoon clients”. This later paves the way for a short stint as a prostitute in “Mrs Idle’s pleasure house”.

But then Miss Gomez is saved by religion when she answers an ad placed by the Church of the Brethren of the Way back in Tacas, Jamaica. A postal correspondence ensues with the Church founder, Reverend Lloyd Patterson, who encourages her to pray for criminals she reads about in the daily newspapers.

Miss Gomez becomes rather evangelical in this pursuit, and when she takes a job as a cleaner at the last two occupied buildings — the Thistle Arms and nearby Bassett’s Petstore — on a South London street earmarked for demolition, her “God bothering” is ratcheted up to the point where she predicts a “sex crime” that attracts the attention of the police.

A cast of motley characters

At Crow Street we get introduced to a small collection of odd characters — Mr and Mrs Tuke, who run the Thistle Arms, and the three people who live with them: their teenage daughter Prudence; Mr Batt, their 81-year-old lodger and veteran of the First Wolrd War; and Alban Roche, a young man who had previously been convicted as a peeping Tom but now works at the pet shop at the end of the street. Mrs Bassett, the pet shop owner, is a secondary character, as is Atlas Flynn, an Irish labourer who has a “thing” for Mrs Tuke and won’t take no for an answer, even though he knows she is married.

The increasingly derelict Crow Street is almost a character in its own right, providing a sufficiently creepy and isolated backdrop for the drama that unfolds when Miss Gomez infiltrates the street’s motley collection of residents.

Indeed, the street’s changing fortunes could be seen as a metaphor for the larger societal changes that are in play. London’s population is changing. There’s a steady influx of Irish labourers rebuilding the suburbs, and black immigrants are pouring in from the Caribbean.

Racism is rife. For example, Mrs Tuke claims she’s scared of Miss Gomez because she’s a “savage” (I will spare you other racist jibes because they’re offensive but Trevor is always careful to show it is his characters and not him expressing these abhorrent views.)

And there’s always the hint of escalating crime and violence. Miss Gomez, of course, is on a mission to pray for those committing such acts, and her scouring of the newspapers to find people to pray for elicits this:

Another judge, trying another case, said that in his opinion there was sickness everywhere. A woman couldn’t go out to post a letter without running the risk of God alone knew what. There were people walking the country’s streets and byeways who shouldn’t be walking anywhere. There were lunatics abroad and people obsessed with murder, violence, and sexual cruelty. His own niece had been insulted on a tube train. He’d heard of a woman who’d received a telephone call from a man who put intimate proposals to her. In public places advertisements were obscenely defaced, radio and television brought filth into decent folks’ sitting-rooms. In a hotel in Scotland he’d had to walk from a television lounge because of the one-track nature of a late-night show. Women with drinks in their hands, he said, had been sitting in the television lounge laughing.

Admittedly, Miss Gomez and the Brethren does head into some dark territory, but it’s all implied rather than outlined in detail — Trevor knows when to reign it in — but of his early novels, this is definitely the most sombre. And while there are occasional moments of black comedy, on the whole, it paints a rather unsavoury picture of human nature…

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Love Department’.  I reviewed the same book in 2019. My review is here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Hill Bachelors ’. and I plan to review ‘Elizabeth Alone’.

Fiction, literary fiction, England, Australia, Martin Boyd, Text Classics, Author, Setting, Publisher, Book review

‘A Difficult Young Man’ by Martin Boyd

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Fiction – paperback; Text Classics; 325 pages; 2012.

A Difficult Young Man is the second novel in Martin Boyd’s ‘Langton Quartet’ about an upper-middle class Anglo-Australian family caught between two worlds during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It’s semi-autobiographical and is based on Boyd’s upbringing, the youngest of four, in a rather rich and well-travelled family, littered with eccentrics and artistic types, who divided their time between England and Australia, often with forays to Italy and other Europen countries.

His siblings all became artists — Merric was a potter, Penleigh and Helen painters — and they in turn produced children who became famous. Merric’s son was the painter Arthur Boyd (1920-99) and Penleigh’s son was the influential architect Robin Boyd (1919–71). In fact, the whole extended Boyd and à Beckett (his mother’s) family is filled with people who found success in the creative arts, but they also had influence in the legal, military and brewing spheres.

Martin Boyd (1893-1972) was the only one to become a writer. He had initially trained for a religious vocation and later studied architecture before joining the British Army during the First World War. He apparently led a nomadic life afterwards,  dividing his time between England and Australia, and later moving to Rome, where he is buried in the same cemetery as the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His bibliography includes novels, poetry and memoirs.

Is it important to know all this? Probably not, but I found it useful context because it’s clear that Boyd mined his family’s history for this novel, which was first published in 1955.

Out of print Penguin UK edition

Second in a quartet

A Difficult Young Man is the follow-up to The Cardboard Crown (which I read in 2013) but it works as a standalone.

The story is told in the first person by the same narrator, Guy Langton, and is set in pretty much the same locations — the family properties in Melbourne and the greater Melbourne area, and Waterpark, their estate in England, not far from Frome in Somerset.

The main focus is on Guy’s older brother Dominic — the “difficult young man” of the title — who is set to inherit everything as the firstborn son. But he’s also the black sheep of the family, prone to being misunderstood and making bad decisions, regarded by many as being reckless, eccentric and risking the reputation of the Langton’s good name — on both sides of the world.

Dominic was the eldest, and certainly in his own eyes, the most important of the cousins. He soon acquired an added importance to that of primogeniture, but it was only what was called by the politicians of the 1930s “nuisance value”. This sounds as if he was an unsympathetic character, but many people found him quite the opposite. Only a few disliked him, and when they did they repudiated and detested him absolutely. Women found him extremely attractive, especially nice women. The other sort, though they may have at first been excited by his sombre handsome face, soon found something in his nature that disturbed them, a requirement which made them feel inadequate and therefore angry.

Told in episodic fashion, the story charts Dominic’s childhood antics, his bad behaviour and his romantic liaisons — which include a broken engagement and a bad marriage to the bad-tempered social climber Baba — all filtered through Guy’s often disbelieving eyes.

But the novel is as much about Guy as it is about Dominic. We learn about his early childhood; his love for his parents and extended family members, including his beloved grandmother Alice; his happiness at school in Australia and his hatred of it in England; his interest in religion and his failed pursuit of it as a vocation; and the constant struggle to fit in, always feeling like an outsider whether in Australia or England.

Social satire

Full of wit and charm and peopled by eccentric characters often doing farcical things, A Difficult Young Man is essentially a social satire set in the years leading up to the First World War.

It depicts a peripatetic lifestyle as only the rich could live it: the Langton family move from one side of the world and back again in a short space of time, and enjoy multiple long holidays to Europe and Tasmania along the way. The narrative meanders a lot, perhaps as a reflection of the Langton’s way of life, which is always on the move and rarely settled.

It’s told in brilliantly observed detail and written in warm, nostalgic-tinged prose.

A Difficult Young Man won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1957. Sue at Whispering Gums has also reviewed it.

There are two more novels in the set — Outbreak of Love and When Blackbirds Sing — which I will read in due course. Thanks to Bill at The Australian Legend for reminding me about the quartet and encouraging me to read this second volume. I believe Bill will also review A Difficult Young Man shortly.

Author, Book review, dystopian, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Harper Collins Australia, Publisher, Reading Projects, Sara Foster, Setting, UK

‘The Hush’ by Sara Foster

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Fiction – paperback; Harper Collins; 356 pages; 2021.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale meets Joanna Ramos’ The Farm in this brilliantly compelling novel by Australian-based English-born writer Sara Foster.

The Hush is set in the UK in the near future, about a decade after “the pandemic” (presumably Covid-19) began. Now there’s a new health crisis wreaking havoc, one that’s resulting in an epidemic of seemingly healthy babies dying at birth.

Within a few nightmarish months, almost every hospital across the country had experienced such an event. At first it was one in ten births, then one in eight. Now the ratio is creeping closer to one in five. Caesarians don’t help. It doesn’t matter how rapidly a neonate is plucked from the womb — if it’s an Intrapartum X baby it will go limp the moment it’s touched. The babies demonstrate no sign of pain, and no will to stay in the world. They are pristine human specimens.

They just won’t breathe.

The Government, hellbent on trying to figure out what’s going on, introduce sweeping new powers to monitor women’s well-being, including the compulsory wearing of waterproof watches that track ID, credit card payments and health data. This is under the guise of keeping women safe, but it’s really a way to keep tabs on their reproductive systems. Under the law, the simple purchase of a pregnancy test now requires the presentation of ID, and the test must be taken onsite, the “results recorded and the health authorities notified”.

Into this maelstrom of surveillance and paranoia and the wearing down of women’s reproductive rights, pregnant teenagers begin to vanish without trace. A young activist, dubbed PreacherGirl, draws the population’s attention to their plight but her videos and website are taken down by the Government — and girls continue to disappear.

A thrilling dystopian tale

An exciting mix of dystopia and thriller, The Hush is framed around a tenderly depicted relationship between a mother and daughter who are drawn into an ever-deepening conspiracy reminiscent of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. 

The story, fast-paced and full of urgency, alternates between both characters’ viewpoints. Emma, who is an overworked stressed-out midwife, has witnessed hundreds of stillbirths and knows what is at stake, while Lainey fears for a  pregnant school friend who is one of the disappeared.

A third character, Emma’s own estranged mother, comes into the story a little later on to help fight the good fight. She’s a renowned feminist who lives in Australia (sounds like someone familiar) and just so happens to be in the UK on a book tour at just the right moment!

There’s a wider cast of supporting female characters that showcase how women can achieve — and overcome — anything if they band together. (Not as cheesy as it sounds!)

But what gives the book its real edge and power is the believability of the setting. Foster depicts a world teetering on the brink of chaos and fear, where climate threats, anxiety, populism, terrorism and media hysteria combine to create something that feels as if it is lifted from today’s news headlines.

The Hush has been optioned for development as a television series.

I read this book for Bill’s Australian Women Writers Gen 5 Week, which was held on 15-22 January, but typically, having recently started a new job, I am waaaaaay behind in my reviewing obligations. Better late than never, I guess!

And because the author resides in Perth (she moved here in 2004 and has recently completed her PhD at Curtin University), the book also qualifies for my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project here and see what books I’ve reviewed from this part of the world on my Focus on Western Australian Writers page. 

3TimesRebel Press, Author, Basque Country, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, Katixa Agirre, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Spain

‘Mothers Don’t’ by Katixa Agirre (translated by Kristin Addis)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; 3TimesRebel Press; 176 pages; 2022. Translated from the Basque by Kristin Addis.

I have Stu at Winstonsdad’s Blog for bringing Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t to my attention. This novel, translated from the Basque, feels like something Australian writer Helen Garner might pen if she blended her true crime reportage with fiction, and there are nods to both Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby and Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea in their dark depictions of women who carry out abhorrent acts against children in their care.

Mothers Don’t is billed as a novel but it reads like an extended essay. And it’s probably one of the most thought-provoking — and confronting — books I’ve read in a long while.

A tale of two mothers

The story focuses on two mothers who knew each other in a past life: one went on to become an award-winning writer who accidentally falls pregnant with her Swedish boyfriend; the other, an artist, married a rich older man and bore him fraternal twins after undergoing infertility treatment.

But this is just the back story to the novel’s shocking premise: the mother of the twins drowns both in the bath when they are 10 months old and is put on trial for their murder.

The award-winning writer, who narrates the novel, is so shocked by this crime that she decides to write a book about it in a bid to try to comprehend the incomprehensible. She carries out research on infanticide — who does it, why they do it and how society punishes, or doesn’t punish, the perpetrators —  attends the trial and examines her own feelings about motherhood.

Along the way she undergoes all kinds of psychological contortions as she tries to figure out what drove Alice to do what she did — was it postpartum psychosis? insanity? deliberate self-destruction? or perhaps a conspiracy cooked up with her husband to go back to a child-free life?

A sensitive subject

There’s no doubt that Mothers Don’t deals with some very dark subject matter, but it’s written sensitively and with a desire to try to comprehend the worst of human nature.

Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me. Defective. We are defective. I am.

That “muddy territory” is infanticide. And when the author claims she is “defective” what she is really saying is that we all have the power to carry out this abhorrent act but most of us never do. Indeed, infanticide has been widespread throughout human history, as a form of delayed birth control or to simply dispose of unwanted children:

Children have always been killed, even today, even though we are more shocked by it nowadays. And indeed, we are very shocked by it. The child molester, the kidnapper in the park, the predatory child killer, these are the worst monsters imaginable. And yet, the massacre of the innocents goes on, as you must all surely know.

The book is also good at examining the ways in which the legal system works (or doesn’t), especially when there are no established protocols around cases of this nature, highlighting the fact that trials are “a contest of stories”:

Basically, there are two opposing stories, very different from each other, that are in effect two artefacts obtained by combining the same elements – the mythemes – in different ways. Don’t hire a lawyer, hire a good writer. Because it’s not the truth that will win, but the person who tells the best story, the most coherent and believable one. In other words, the most mythological story, the one best able to fit the world view of the jurors. The prosecution presents a piece of evidence and provides an interpretation. The defence proposes a different way of interpreting the same piece of evidence. The jury has to decide which one to go with. Which story and which body and which spirit to believe.

(As an aside, Janet Malcolm also discusses this at length in her book Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial).

Mothers Don’t also highlights the challenges that confront writers who use true crime cases as subject matter:

I debated with myself how far I was prepared to go. Would I be a lawyer for the defence or the prosecution? What did I want to be? Was it the writer’s job to be the judge? Or was that task better left to the reader? Was it acceptable to use fiction, or should I tell the story as it actually happened, in a factual, journalistic style, without attempting to shine a light on what I did not and could never know? And, critically, if I decided against the journalistic approach, what style would I adopt? Was it even possible to stylise this most heinous of crimes: violence against children? The question made me shudder, so I set it aside for the time being.

Mothers Don’t is a hard-hitting book that puts a horrendous, rarely talked about, crime in the spotlight but it does it in a way that is free from sentiment and sensationalism, always giving the accused the benefit of the doubt:

UNSTABLE, NARCISSISTIC, EGOCENTRIC, CHARISMATIC, HATEFUL, out of touch with reality, foolish, overwhelmed by neuroses, low self-esteem, manipulative, selfish, liar, impulsive, arrogant, sneaky, troublemaker, incomprehensible. All of the above, without a doubt. But capable of murdering two small children in such a cold and calculated way? Her own two children, brought into this world with so much effort, defenceless and tender, defenceless and loving, defenceless and beautiful? No.

At all times it brims with humanity, positing the idea that there are no easy answers and that motherhood, in all its various shapes and sizes, can be a tough gig. But it’s also a fascinating look at the judicial system and the challenges that confront writers who tackle taboo subjects.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 3 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world. 3TimesRebel Press focuses on translating female authors who write in minority languages. It is based in Broughty Ferry, Dundee, Scotland. Find out more via the official website.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 281 pages; 2015.

William Trevor’s fifth novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel was first published in 1969. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.

It carries the black humour married with pathos that marks his early work. It also features a cast of truly eccentric characters, none more so than the titular Mrs Eckdorf who is, quite frankly, one of the most bizarre (and annoying) people I have ever come across in fiction.

A house of ill repute

The story is set in central Dublin, specifically a once-plush hotel that is now better known as a house of ill repute. 

Mrs Eckdorf, an English-born woman who resides in Germany (having married a rich German), arrives in Ireland to visit the hotel. She’s a photographer by profession and she wants to satisfy her curiosity: she had been told a story about the hotel by a barman on an ocean liner and it has intrigued her ever since. She’s convinced something tragic happened that changed the fortunes of O’Neill’s and she wants to hear all about it.

When she arrives she discovers that Mrs Sinnott, the deaf-mute owner, is about to celebrate her 92nd birthday. This is the perfect opportunity for Mrs Eckdorf to interrogate her under the pretence of photographing proceedings for a lavish coffee table book.

She moves into the hotel without having made a booking and then tries to ingratiate herself with its motley cast of characters. They include Mrs Sinnott’s feckless 58-year-old son, Eugene, who is addicted to drink and gambling on the horses; O’Shea, the loyal hotel porter, whose faithful greyhound follows him everywhere; Eddie Trump, the barman in the hotel’s Excelsior Bar; Morrissey, a man in his mid-thirties, who is a pimp and uses the hotel’s rooms for his clients’ “appointments”; Agnes Quin, who sleeps with men for money; and Father Hennessey, the local Catholic priest. 

‘As mad as a hatter’

It’s not an easy ride. They think she’s “as mad as a hatter”. Or, as Eugene says:

‘Your woman above in the hotel has a touch of the sawdust about her.’
‘Is that what she is?’ said Agnes Quin. ‘Out of Duffy’s Circus or something?’
‘Ah no, no.’ Eugene paused […] ‘You could see her on the back of a horse going round in the ring. She’s that type of woman.’

O’Shea has more time for her, believing that she’s here to buy the hotel and he longs for the establishment to return to its glory days, the kind of place that attracted the rich and famous. Mrs Eckdorf does not disabuse him of this notion, using it to try to get information out of him about the tragedy she suspects happened in the past.

‘O’Shea, what happened once in the hall of the hotel?’ He shook his head. The only thing he could remember that was of note, he said, was that a bookmaker called Jack Tyler had once fallen over the bannisters and landed in the hall and had not been hurt. He had not been sober at the time.

When she finally meets Mrs Sinnott she rudely reads the notebooks her visitors use to communicate with her (Mrs Sinnott cannot lipread and does not know sign language), thinking she might find some clues there. When she’s confronted about this, she shrugs it off.

‘I’ve read every page of those exercise-books.’
He stared at her and continued to stare. He said: ‘Those are private conversations. Those are the conversations that people have with Mrs Sinnott.’
‘Yes. And I have read them.’ 

A funny farce

The book is comprised of set pieces, largely involving Mrs Eckdorf (but not always), that are blackly funny. It’s almost like Mrs Eckdorf doesn’t have a filter between her brain and her mouth, and so she says the most outrageous things, or waffles on in a nonsensical manner. She’s loud and rude and narcissistic.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that she’s having some kind of mental breakdown and losing her marbles. 

But she’s not the only one who’s odd or behaves badly — and that’s what makes the book such a richly comic read.

Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel is a wonderfully farcical story featuring brilliant characters. It raises issues about madness, manners and declining morals. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month Cathy is reviewing ‘The Boarding House’. I reviewed this same book in 2019. You can read my review here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Love Department’ and I plan to review ‘Miss Gomez and the Brethren’.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Daunt Books, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting

‘The Dry Heart’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Frances Frenaye)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 120 pages; 2021. Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye.

The Italians, I’ve discovered, do a nice line in misery. I read a handful of Italian books last year and not a single one was cheery. This novella by Natalia Ginzburg, first published in 1947, exemplifies that.

Portrait of a marriage

The Dry Heart is a portrait of a marriage that goes terribly wrong. In fact, it could be argued that the marriage was never right in the first place, as their relationship is so one-sided: the wife is more devoted to her husband than he is to her. On the opening page, she shoots him dead. They had only been married for four years.

He had asked me to give him something hot in a thermos bottle to take with him on his trip. I went into the kitchen, made some tea, put milk and sugar in it, screwed the top on tight, and went back into his study. […] and I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

She calmly leaves the house, visits a local cafe to drink a coffee, and then walks haphazardly around the city in the rain reflecting on their relationship. The narrative spools back to explain the early days of their courtship, their eventual wedding and the child they had together. It is not a particularly happy story.

Misplaced romance

The pair met when the woman was living in a boarding house. Alberto was a much older man and she was intrigued by him. They went on long walks together and developed a friendship. But whether out of loneliness or misplaced romanticism, the woman decided she wanted to fall in love with him, almost as if it was a switch you turned on, and they agreed to get married.

But from the outset, it’s doomed to failure. Alberto is a secretive man, who often disappears on so-called work trips using his colleague Augusto as an alibi, but our narrator knows he’s having an affair. The telltale sign is the book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke that he packs in his luggage whenever he goes away. She knows he is reading those poems to his lover.

The sad thing is that when she first confronts him with the knowledge that he’s lying, he refuses to engage — and then makes a startling admission but won’t elaborate.

“I’m sleepy and tired,” he said. “I don’t feel like talking.”
“Augusto was here all the time,” I said. “I saw him on the street. Who were you with?”
“Alone,” he answered. “I was alone.” We got into bed and I put out the light. Suddenly Alberto’s voice rose up out of the darkness.
“It was anything but a pleasant trip,” he said. “I’d have done better to stay at home.” He edged up to me and held me tight. “Don’t ask any questions,” he added. “I feel worn out and terribly sad. Just be silent and very, very still.”
“Is she as bad as all that?” I asked.
“She’s unfortunate,” he said, running his hands over my body. “She can’t help being unkind.”

Melancholic tale

This novella, written in cold, clipped prose, drips with melancholia and an aching sense of thwarted love and potential. But there’s a sense of mystery, too, which makes it such an intriguing read.

Yes, we can see how Alberto’s absences, his gaslighting and his lies, could contribute to a wife wishing to kill him, but there’s so much more here that remains unsaid. Our narrator never expresses hate for her husband. She always gives him the benefit of the doubt. Her desire to be with him is stronger than her desire to leave him (the pair talk about breaking up but that’s all it is — talk). So what is it that finally pushed her over the edge?

The Dry Heart is described as a “feminist classic”. The blurb on my edition describes it best though when it says it is a “psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder”.

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily and wrote dozens of books, many of which have been reissued by  Daunt Books Publishing, an independent publisher based in London, in handsome livery. If this book is indicative of her style, I’m keen to explore more of her work…

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 3 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world. Daunt Books Publishing was set up in 2010 and grew out of Daunt Books, an independent chain of bookshops in London and the South-East of the UK. You can find out more about them here.