Category: Penguin

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Birchwood’ by John Banville

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Picador; 178 pages; 2011.

Birchwood is John Banville’s second novel, a dizzyingly audacious confection, first published in 1973.

It’s the story of the Godkins, an Anglo-Irish family living in a Big House on the Birchwood estate, whose money and influence are long gone. The dynamics within the family, including power struggles, dark secrets and eccentric, often violent, behaviour, drive much of the plot forward.

Once, in a row with Aunt Martha, when she had flung an ashtray at his head, he snapped his teeth abruptly shut in the middle of a howl of fury and turned on his heel and stalked out into the garden. We sat in silence and inexplicable horror and listened to his laughter booming in the flower-scented darkness outside, and I, cowering in my corner, felt my face grinning wildly, uncontrollably, at this intimation of splendour, of violence and of pain. [page 20]

It’s told through the eyes of Gabriel Godkin, the first-person narrator, who reflects on his upbringing, relationships and experiences. He’s trying to work out how he fits into the family hierarchy and is surprised to discover he will inherit the estate — although certain forces are out to ensure this does not happen.

So Birchwood was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. [page 32]

A story of two halves

Midway through the book, there’s a distinct change in gear and style, as Gabriel runs away to join the circus (yes, really) in pursuit of his long-lost twin sister, who may or may not exist.

But a sister! Half of me, somewhere, stolen by the circus, or spirited away by an evil aunt, or kidnapped by a jealous cousin – and why? A part of me stolen, yes, that was a thrilling notion. I was incomplete, and would remain so until I found her. All this was real to me, and perfectly reasonable. [page 78]

The story is full of eccentric characters, many of whom are badly behaved (Granny Godkins, for instance, is a bit of an old witch, and Aunt Martha is duplicitous), and told through a series of equally eccentric set-pieces that become increasingly more outlandish (and abhorrent) as the book wends its way towards a not altogether satisfactory conclusion.

It feels part black comedy, part Gothic fairy tale, and the section set in the circus — or “travelling theatre” as Gabriel describes it — borders on the surreal.

It’s fair to say that the sum of Birchwood isn’t as good as its individual parts. I can’t help thinking that Banville, then a young author (he was 27), threw all his thematic interests — time, memory, family dynamics, art, sex, guilt, Irish political history et al — into one big pot, let it all ferment and then served up a complex and rich narrative stew, some of which is outlandishly funny, absurd or both.

Despite the lush prose and vividly descriptive writing, the book is uneven in plot and tone of voice. Yes, it’s deeply flawed (and perhaps not a good one to start with if you have never read John Banville before), but I had a thoroughly entertaining time reading it!

So here then is an ending, of a kind, to my story. It may not have been like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily. [page 170]

Cathy has also read this one and her review is much more eloquent than mine.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

You may have noticed that I’m a little behind in my John Banville reading — I was supposed to read and review this one in March — but other things got in the way. I am playing catch-up now and expect to review both my April (‘Mefisto’) and May (‘The Book of Evidence’) reads by the end of this month. Thanks for your patience.

♥ In March Cathy reviewed ‘Christine Falls‘, the first crime novel written under Banville’s pen name Benjamin Black. I have previously reviewed that one here.

♥ My scheduled April read is ‘Mefisto’, published in 1986, and Cathy’s read is ‘Ghosts’. Expect reviews soonish.

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Nightspawn’ by John Banville

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; The Gallery Press; 224 pages; 2018.

Nightspawn is John Banville’s debut novel, first published in 1971.

It’s a slippery story, impossible to get a handle on. It’s full of political, often murderously violent, intrigue, peopled with a cast of strange characters and, despite its Greek island setting, pulses with a darkly Gothic atmosphere.

From an alleyway came the flash of a fang and one red eye, there, gone. (Location 264)

It’s narrated by an expatriate Irish writer called Benjamin White who’s entangled in a devious revolutionary plot he doesn’t quite understand and, for much of the story, he lurches from one strange catastrophe to another as he tries to work out what is real and what is not.

Secret document

At the heart of the story is a mysterious document — “containing certain signatures” and sometimes described as “the little thing, the little thing which means so much” — that could be used to help a cause or put certain people in power.

A revolution is brewing and Benjamin, constantly mistaken for an Englishman (a running joke throughout the book), is advised to leave.

The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music, appropriately enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. (Location 2598)

Murder, kidnapping and violent assaults abound. Their ferocity is only matched by the moody weather, the stormy sea “alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence” and the “uneasiness in the air”.

Out over the sea a gathering of ugly black cloud was smeared like a grease stain on the sky. (Location 78)

A game of chess

Benjamin’s detailed moves — including his steamy love affair with Helen, a married woman, whom on one occasion he rapes — is a bit like a game of chess. (Interestingly, there are characters named Black, White and Knight, which can’t be a coincidence. Even the novel’s title could be a pun on “Knight’s pawn”.)

Toward the end of the story, there’s a quote that perfectly describes the experience of reading this book:

My mind would not work very well; my thoughts were fragmented and dispersed, and I had a vertiginous sensation of planes of awareness slipping and sliding uncontrollably, running into each other and locking, like loose, shuffled pages of a book. (Location 2564)

Not a ‘normal’ novel

Nightspawn isn’t an easy book to follow — but it seems Banville deliberately intended it to be so. In an article he wrote in 1994 looking back on his first novel, he said he had a “deep distrust of the novel form” and “at the age of 25 I had no doubt that I was about to transform the novel as we knew it”.

Plot, character, psychology: such words had me reaching for my revolver. 

He apparently wrote eight drafts, all in the third person; it wasn’t until he introduced a first-person narrator that he felt happy with it.

Do not mistake me: the book holds a dear place in my heart. Whatever its faults, it contains the best of what I could do. It is incandescent, crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious, yet in my memory it crackles with frantic, antic energy; there are sentences in it that I still quote to myself with secret and slightly shame-faced pleasure.

I understand what he means. The prose is astonishingly good; he writes with a painterly eye and has an uncanny ability to make inanimate things come alive:

The fog comes to my window, nuzzles at my window like some friendly blind animal. (Location 1279)

And:

The ancient telephone spoke. One could not say that it rang, for it had an oddly querulous, croaking call, like that of some awkward, ugly and sullen bird. (Location 1672)

And:

Her hands fluttered nervously, and fell together like frightened animals. (Location 2709)

And despite the heavy subject matter — death, betrayal and the Greek junta — humour is never far away:

I took a couple of steps across the floor, and then, in a flash of blinding white light, something hard fell on the back of my head, behind my ear, and I was falling, down, down into total darkn— wait now, wait, I am getting carried away with all this thriller stuff. Backspace, a bit. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and halted. (Location 2142)

Challenging romp

Nightspawn is probably not the right novel for first-time Banville readers, but if you are relatively acquainted with this work, you’ll likely recognise some of his trademarks — a flare for showy writing, wonderful descriptions of art and a focus on the unreliability of memory.

I found it an enjoyable, if somewhat ambiguous, challenging and occasionally perplexing, romp.

It’s the sort of book you read not for the plot or the storyline but for the sheer delight in the wordplay and the stylistic prose. It’s strange and bonkers and beautifully Baroque, perfect if you like that sort of thing.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Newton Letter‘, the last in his Revolutions trilogy, published in 1982.

♥ Next month I plan to read ‘Birchwood’, published in 1973, and Cathy plans to read ‘Christine Falls’, the first book penned under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. (I have previously reviewed ‘Christine Falls’ here.)

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘The Secret Guests’ by B.W. Black (aka John Banville)

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 275 pages; 2020.

The Secret Guests is one of John Banville’s “entertainments” written under his pseudonym B.W. Black.

It’s a story that could have fallen right out of the hands of the scriptwriters of The Crown because it posits what might have happened if the two royal princesses — Elizabeth and Margaret — had been evacuated from London during the Blitz and spirited away to neutral Ireland for safekeeping.

In reality, this would never have happened, but Banville makes the arrangement seem plausible [1]: the Irish Government has agreed to keep the pair in a “safe house” in exchange for Whitehall-sanctioned shipments of desperately needed coal.

Secret mission

Under the top secret operation, the girls are given new names — 14-year-old Elizabeth becomes “Ellen” and her 10-year-old sister Margaret becomes “Mary” — and they are taken to Clonmillis Hall in Tipperary, home of their distant relative, the Duke of Edenmore.

They are accompanied by Celia Nashe, a MI5 agent, who acts as their (reluctant) governess, while Detective Garda Strafford [2] is sent from Dublin to provide police protection.

The legend that had been put about among the servants, who would, naturally, spread it beyond the Hall, was that the two girls, evacuated until the nightly bombing raids on London should have eased, were the daughters of the duke’s grand-niece—there was, of course, no such person—married to an officer high up in the military, who had been posted, along with his wife, to Cairo. (page 64)

Plotwise, it takes a little while for the story to get going as Banville takes his time to set the scene and introduce us to a small cast of characters — the people who run the household and those who live in the neighbouring village, some of whom “have pledged to drive the British out of the North and reunite the country”.

Suspense builds

The threat of politically motivated kidnap lends the novel a suspenseful atmosphere, but there are just as many tensions within the household as outwith. Will Strafford strike up a relationship with Nashe, for instance? Will the servants keep their mouths shut about the real identity of the girls staying at the Hall? Will haughty Ellen and curious Mary keep up the pretence or say something that will put them in real danger?

Throughout The Secret Guests Banville reminds us of the differences — political, personal, cultural — between the English and the Irish. For Nashe, the M15 agent, it’s an eye-opening experience to discover that

her England, a place of rolling downs and country cottages, of Big Ben and the Pearly Kings and Queens, of Yorkshire pudding and seaside ices, could be the object of such violent hatred and contempt. (page 96)

While for Anglo-Irish Strafford, a Protestant amongst Catholics (and the only Protestant detective in the country), the situation merely confirms his position as an outsider.

Yet as a descendant of the land-grabbers who had flooded over from England three centuries before, was he not himself suspended between two worlds, two sets of sensibilities, two impossible choices? Poor Ireland, poor divided little country, gnawing away at immemorial grievances, like a fox caught in a snare trying to bite off its trapped leg.

Eventually, things come to a head in a dramatic climax, making this book an enjoyable romp and one that is hard to pigeonhole — it’s not quite a crime novel, neither is it a thriller; perhaps it’s best described as historical fiction with a literary bent.

My favourite similies

And it’s the literary angle I most appreciated in this novel. Banville has a way with similies, which he often uses in a mischievous, amusing way. Here’s a selection of my favourite from this book:

He sported a small black moustache, like a smudged, sooty thumbprint applied to the groove under his nose, which was a godsend to his opponents, whose nickname for him was ‘Adolf’. (page 8)

♥

Hegarty held his face bent over his plate—like a sheep over a patch of grass, Strafford thought—mashing the potatoes into the fish juices and inserting forkfuls of the resulting mush into his mouth, the process accompanied by small, surely unconscious, mumbling slurps of appreciation. (page 20)

♥

For years this house had drifted along contentedly enough, like a great anchorless hulk in a torpid sea. (page 64)

♥

Strafford had become aware of a vague sense of desperation rising inside him, like seawater in the hold of a foundering ship. (page 66)

♥

Denton took off his cap and set his gun on the table—on the bare wood it looked uncannily like the severed, dried-out haunch of some spindle-legged animal—and went to the sink. (page 215)

♥

What had woken him was the rug slipping from his shoulders and dropping on to the floor behind his chair; it was as if he had shed his own pelt, in one slithering go. (page 253)

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘Birchwood’, his second novel, which was originally published in 1973.

♥ Next month I plan to read his first novel, ‘Nightspawn’, and Cathy plans to read ‘The Newton Letter’.

[1] Perhaps what is less plausible is that he makes Éamon de Valera’s son a Major in the British Army. Éamon de Valera was the taoiseach (prime minister) and no friend of the British.

[2] Readers of Banville’s recent crime series — Snow, April in Spain and The Lock-Up — will recognise Strafford as the main protagonist from those novels. In this book, he is much younger. His boss, Inspector Hackett, also features.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘Bodily Secrets’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 144 pages; 2007.

Bodily Secrets, by William Trevor, was published in 2007 as part of a 20-book series called “Penguin Great Loves”^^ which I bought as a beautifully designed boxed set many years ago.

This slim volume features five short stories — previously published in The Collected Stories of William Trevor in 1992 — all revolving around various forms of love, including unreciprocated love, adulterous love, sexual love and convenient love.

Black comedy

The opening story, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, is a black comedy in which four people — Mike, his colleague Swann, and two of Swann’s friends, Jo and Margo — go on a boozy lunch in London’s Soho that extends long into the night.

During this farce-like escapade, Mike is constantly looking for a phone to ring Lucy (in the days before mobile phones), a woman he is in love with but who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. In all the multiple conversations he has with her over the course of the day, Lucy is unfailingly polite, but he begins to wear her patience:

“Hello, Lucy. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Good.”
“Mike, you telephoned me at four fifteen. Do you know what time it is now?”
“What time is it now?”
“Four thirty-five.” (p9)

These nuisance calls are interleaved with conversations in which Margo beseeches Mike to help her with a personal problem. Her husband Nigel brings home elderly women, “explaining he has been attending some meeting with them and has brought them back for coffee”. But Margo doesn’t know what the meetings are about and is worried Nigel will start bringing home “tramps, grocers, one-legged soldiers”.

To find out what’s really going on, Mike pretends to call Nigel — under the guise of being an official from the Ministry of Pensions — but instead, he rings Lucy for advice. It’s ludicrously funny in places, especially when he reports back to Margo, telling her one lie after another.

The story ends with Mike musing on his need to get over Lucy — “the love of my life” — and to let time work its magic.

Unreciprocated love also features In Love with Ariadne, but this story is bittersweet rather than farcical. Barney, a medical student residing in a Dún Laoghaire boarding house, falls in love with the landlady’s daughter — but nothing comes of the relationship.

Forbidden love

Trevor turns his focus to illicit love between a married man and a much younger woman in Lovers of Their Time. The affair between Norman, a travel agent, and Marie, who is a shop assistant in a pharmacy, begins tentatively on New Year’s Day in 1963.

For the first 12 months, it’s a largely chaste relationship because they have nowhere private to go until Norman discovers a hotel where they can consummate their relationship.

Marriage and the prospect of children beckons, but ever-practical Norman is aware that getting a divorce from his wife Hilda will likely drive him into poverty: is his illicit love for Marie worth it?

This is a beautiful, largely melancholic story, but Trevor upends traditional stereotypes by making Hilda, the cheated-upon wife, as painfully uncouth. She’s lusty and “demanding in the bedroom” and makes Norman feel inadequate and unhappy, while Marie, whom he initially suspects may have a “tartish disposition”, turns out to be “prim and proper” and a genuinely lovely person who thinks highly of him.

Their love affair, gentle, romantic and sweet, offers the prospect of happiness for both of them.

“Oh darling,” she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. […]
“I know,” he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
“I lie awake and think of you,” she whispered.
“You’ve made me live,” he whispered back.
“And you me. Oh, God, and you me.”

Marriage of convenience

In the titular story, Bodily Secrets, a wealthy widow, 59-year-old Norah O’Neill, contemplates remarrying to have a “companion for her advancing years”. Her choice is limited, but the town’s affirmed bachelor Agnew, who is 51, seems the best fit — although her adult children and most of the townfolk think otherwise.

Agnew is a dapper dresser, a good dancer and has been a loyal employee: for 17 years he managed the family’s toy factory until Mrs O’Neill’s son, the angry and opinionated Cathal, shut it down. The only blot on his character (apart from his Protestant religion) is his frequent weekenders to Dublin, where it is thought he sleeps around with women or goes drinking.

Mrs O’Neill, a handsome woman, despises her ageing body and is not seeking a sexual partner. Her marriage to Agnew is ideal. Not only do they have separate bedrooms, but she also gets the emotional support she craves, along with a man who can manage the apple orchard she wants to establish on the site of the closed factory. While Agnew gets the financial security he needs, along with a cover for his homosexuality (the “bodily secret” of the title).

A similar “marriage of convenience” occurs in Honeymoon in Tramore in which a farm labourer, Davy Toome, marries Kitty, the farmer’s daughter, when she falls pregnant to someone else. It’s 1948 and pregnancy out of wedlock is viewed as a sin, so a hurried marriage is arranged. The real father, who is revealed at the end of the story, comes as something of a blow to Davy who had been told it was someone else entirely.

As ever, Trevor’s stories are compelling and expertly crafted and full of memorable characters and incidents. Each one looks at how love — in all its many various forms — profoundly shapes, challenges and transforms the men in these vastly different stories, all set in different periods and locations.

These poignant tales also showcase the complexities and vulnerabilities of human relationships, which is why reading them is such a wonderfully intimate and rewarding experience.

And that’s a wrap! This is the final book in my 12-month project A Year With William Trevor, which I co-hosted with  Cathy from 746 Books. Please click here to see all the books we read between us and to see a brief round-up of William Trevor reviews published on other blogs. If you have reviewed a William Trevor book this year and it hasn’t been included, please do leave a comment (either under this post or the main William Trevor page) and I will update accordingly.

Update: This month Cathy has reviewed Trevor’s posthumously published short story collection ‘Last Stories‘. I have previously reviewed this collection here.

^^ Other books in this series which I have reviewed here are:

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, London, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 224 pages; 1997.

After Rain, by William Trevor, is a collection of 12 short stories which were first published in Antaeus, Harper’s, The Oldie, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

Upside down lives

The stories are all framed around ordinary people whose lives are turned upside down by milestone events such as love affairs gone wrong, divorce, pregnancy and bereavement. The settings move from Ireland, London and Italy (and back again) and are largely focused on fraught relationships between parents and children, or husbands and wives, or within extended families.

Each story is perfectly crafted, but don’t expect any grand finalés or sudden denouements: the endings are sometimes abrupt, giving them an unfinished feel, but I suspect that’s a deliberate ploy by Trevor to allow these characters to live on in your own imagination.

I know I am still thinking about Joanna and her 60-year-old parents from the story “Marrying Damian”.

In this story, Damian is an attention-seeker and a drifter who claims to be a poet but has never had anything published. He experiences one personal disaster after another and always asks his friends if he can “borrow a little money” which he never pays back.

When his third marriage ends, he returns to Ireland “out of the blue” to visit his friends, Claire and her husband, the unnamed narrator of this story. They are happy to see him, of course — their friendship is a long one — but they’re not prepared for their 20-something daughter Joanna, who once declared as a five-year-old “I’m going to marry Damian”, to become romantically involved with him:

Then, quite suddenly, everything was different. Perhaps in the same moment — at dinner two days later — Claire and I were aware that our daughter was being charmed all over again by the man she had once picked out as the man she would like to marry. To this day, I can hear their two voices in my dining-room, and Damian laughing while Claire and I were numbed into silence. To this day I can still see the bright flush in Joanna’s cheeks.

Abrupt changes

There are many moments of similar volte-face in these stories. In “Gilbert’s Mother”,  for instance, a woman suddenly clocks that her adult son (who still lives at home) might have murdered a local 19-year-old girl.

It was always the News, on the radio or the television, that prompted her dread. When a fire was said to have been started deliberately, or a child enticed, or broken glass discovered in baby-food jars in a supermarket, the dread began at once – the hasty calculations, the relief if time and geography ruled out involvement. More than once, before she became used to it, she had gone to lie trembling on her bed, struggling to control the frenzy that threatened.

In “A Day” a married woman discovers that her husband is having an affair and must choose whether to tell him she knows or continue on as normal. In “The Potato Dealer” a man is made an offer of money and land in exchange for marrying a young pregnant farm girl, even though he is not the father. In the titular story, a heartbroken woman holidays alone in Italy after the end of a love affair, but when she sees a painting of the Annunciation she has an epiphany.

All of these are tightly written and evocative. Trevor is an expert at capturing small moments in detail while simultaneously exploring the darkness in human hearts hardened against life and love.

Perhaps the story which left the biggest impression on me is the incredibly dark “Lost Ground”. At 35 pages, it’s the longest in the collection (and the one that follows the normal conventions of the short story because it has a shock ending).

It explores the lengths one particular family will go to when their teenage son Milton behaves in a way they don’t like. Milton claims to have seen the supernatural vision of a Catholic saint in the family’s orchard and now he wants to preach this news far and wide. But his family are Protestant and thinks he’s gone crazy, so they lock him up in his bedroom, where he remains until he manages to escape — with deadly consequences.

More to explore

I’m just skimming over the surface of these deeply human stories, rather than providing a comprehensive review of each tale.

But I came away from After Rain thinking it is probably the most accomplished collection of his stories I have read (so far), probably because they encapsulate all the major themes of his body of work — the complexities of human relationships, the intricacies of family life and the communities in which we live, and the quiet but profound moments of human connection and disconnection.

He is just so good at revealing loneliness, isolation and heartache in his characters regardless of their age, gender or social class.

If you have not read his short stories before, this would be a good place to start.

Cathy has also reviewed this book.

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. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed his memoir, ‘Excursions in the Real World‘.

♥ Next month Both Cathy and I plan to read ‘Two Lives’, which is two of his novellas — ‘Reading Turgenev’ and ‘My House in Umbria’ — brought together in one volume.

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

‘The Silence in the Garden’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 202 pages; 2015.

The residents of Carriglas, an island estate off County Cork, are the central focus of The Silence in the Garden, a mid-career novel by William Trevor, first published in 1988.

The story follows the exploits of the wealthy Anglo-Irish Rolleston family whose troubled history mirrors that of Ireland’s own.

The construction of a bridge to unite the island with the mainland — and which threatens to break open the family’s solitude and seclusion — also acts as a metaphor for what is happening in the country at the time:

By July the iron supports of the bridge had been set in concrete, twelve on the mainland, twelve on the island. Alien, perfectly upright, the line of their height on either side sloping to meet the level of the land, their graceless presence was only ugly. The girders that were to stretch between them lay among rocks and gorse, those resting on the ground lost in a growth of cowparsley and meadow daisies. […] The place of the bridge had already acquired a personality that had not been there before, a fleeting spirit of its own, imposed by labourers.

The family — widely respected because their ancestors helped Catholic tenants during the Great Famine — is headed by Colonel Rolleston, a widower with three children. When he is killed on the battlefield of Paschendale in the First World War, his mother, Mrs Rolleston, takes over.

Kind and generous, she has a particular soft spot for young Tom, the illegitimate child of the household’s long-serving Catholic maid, Brigid, for reasons that become clear towards the end of the book.

While the story doesn’t revolve around Tom per se, the circumstances surrounding his father’s death looms large. Why, for instance, had an IRA man killed him as he travelled along the lane to the Big House during “the Troubles” just a week before his impending nuptials to Brigid? And why had the Rolleston family remained tight-lippped about it given the murdered man — a butler they had “poached” from one of Dublin’s finest hotels — was in their employ?

Trevor takes his time to reveal the details of what happened, which lends the story a quietly understated power.

Period drama

The novel is largely set in 1931 — after the Civil War and the partition of Ireland but before it became a Republic — with callbacks to an idyllic summer in 1908.

That summer is primarily seen through the eyes of Sarah Pollenfax, the daughter of a clergyman, who is a distant cousin of the Rolleston family. She moves to Carriglas as governess to the Rolleston children — two boys, John James and Lionel, and a girl, Villana — and to keep an eye on her younger brother Hugh, who visits during the school holidays.

The children have free run of the island, which, alongside the big stone house, is set in lavish grounds and features an ice-house, a kitchen garden — “where peaches ripened on brick-lined walls” — a tennis court, a boathouse and disused landing stage. There’s also a ruined abbey and a series of “standing stones that marked a burial ground on the hill above it”.

Trevor uses an omnipresent third-person narrator throughout but tells Sarah’s version of events via first-person diary entries, which are italicised in the text. The story follows different characters as they go about their business that fine summer and then follows them again, more than 20 years later, when Sarah returns to the island at the behest of a now very elderly Mrs Rolleston.

Return to the island

The return in 1931 allows Sarah to observe notable changes, both to the estate, which has become rundown and overgrown, and to certain family members, such as John James, who is carrying out an affair on the mainland with an overweight and overbearing boardinghouse landlady he does not love.

Villana, too, is all grown up and about to marry the family’s solicitor, Finnamore Balt, a boorish man 20 years her senior, despite the fact she would be a better match with Hugh, Sarah’s brother, to whom she had once been engaged.

The wedding forms the focal point of the story and gives Trevor the chance to add a dash of black comedy to the mix when John James’ lover turns up, drinks too much whiskey and causes quite a scene. A cast of drunks and gamblers in the local village, and the chatty ferryman, also lend some colour.

Quiet and restrained

But for the most part, The Silence in the Garden is a quiet and thoughtful account of Ireland’s simmering tensions and altered circumstances as seen through the prism of one family’s changing fortunes.

I found The Silence in the Garden to be a rich and rewarding read, one that has grown fonder in my memory as time has passed. I especially loved the close-knit portrait of an Anglo-Irish family grappling with a new, emerging Ireland, and found that the tapestry of timeframes, characters and themes, all relayed in Trevor’s carefully restrained prose, created a deeply contemplative reading experience.

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. Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’, the first William Trevor novel I read, back in 2003. My (rather inadequate) review is here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review the memoir ‘Excursions in the Real World’, while I plan to review the short story collection ‘After Rain’.

Author, Book review, Fiction, France, historical fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, Victoria Mas, women in translation

‘The Mad Women’s Ball’ by Victoria Mas (translated by Frank Wynne)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 216 pages; 2021. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

A tale of two women trapped by circumstance who meet by chance and help each other, this debut novel by Victoria Mas, expertly translated by Frank Wynne, is captivating and immersive.

The Mad Women’s Ball is set in a 19th-century Parisian asylum for women, the Salpêtrière (wiki entry here), which was headed up by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) known for his work on hypnosis and hysteria.

The story, set over the course of 10 days in 1865, is based on the Salpêtrière’s annual grand ball (known as the Lenten Ball), a grotesque affair by today’s standards, in which patients, dressed up in their finery, were paraded for the entertainment of the upper echelons of society.

That ball forms the climax of this fast-paced, plot-driven novel which marries historical fiction with a dash of the supernatural and a bold feminist agenda. It’s told in the third person, present tense which lends a sense of urgency and immediacy to the story.

If you are thinking this doesn’t sound like the kind of novel I would normally read, you’d be right. But Mas does such a terrific job of world-building, scene-setting and writing characters you want to cheer on, that I ripped through the entire book in the space of two afternoons and am now hankering to read more of the same (suggestions in the comment box below, please).

Two women

The Mad Women’s Ball is framed around two women who are thrown together unexpectedly.

Eugénie is 20 years old and comes from a fine, upstanding bourgeois family. She is a free spirit, independently minded and outspoken, characteristics that are antithetical in a patriarchal society. Her burgeoning interest in Spiritism, including spectral encounters with her late beloved grandfather, put her at risk of being locked away because she is living in an era where “problematic” women are just as likely to be deemed unwell as those who are suffering real neurological disorders.

Geneviève, who is mourning the loss of her sister who died aged 16, is matron of the Salpêtrière, where she is known as “the Old Lady”. She has a strict and upright demeanour, runs the hospital efficiently and provides stability for the patients under her care. She idolises her boss, Charcot, and has a keen interest in medicine, although she could never become a doctor because women are forbidden from pursuing such careers. Instead, she helps Charcot run renowned showman-like medical demonstrations — in front of rowdy male audiences — using real-life neurological patients being treated by hypnosis.

The two women meet when Eugénie’s father has her committed to the hospital, believing that the spirits she claims to see are symptomatic of a mental disorder. Geneviève finds her new patient challenging — Eugénie claims to know details about her long-dead sister that couldn’t possibly be known — and locks her away in an isolation unit, frightened that she might be dealing with a witch.

Engaging storyline

Throughout this novel,  Mas’s storytelling is engaging and expressive, and her protagonists are well-drawn. As well as Eugénie and Geneviève, who dance around one another before coming to a mutual understanding and forming an alliance, there’s a raft of other characters, including Eugénie’s brother Théophile, Charcot’s star patient Louise and the always-knitting Thérèse, who add extra depth to the plot.

Perhaps only the men, such as Eugénie’s father, seem to be too thinly drawn and reliant on stereotypes, but I’m inclined to think that was the author’s intention.

Her tale not only explores the misogyny at the heart of science and medicine at the time Charcot was pioneering neurology, but it also looks at how the women incarcerated in the asylum were dehumanised and often treated as curiosities and playthings, sexual or otherwise. Many were locked up simply for being outspoken and causing “problems” for their families.

The Salpêtrière is a dumping ground for women who disturb the peace. An asylum for those whose sensitivities do not tally with what is expected of them. A prison for women guilty of possessing an opinion.

The Mad Women’s Ball gives voice to those who had none and tells a story of gaslighting, courage and the will to buck convention. It can be read for entertainment value alone, but there’s enough meat on the bones to provide something to chew on for those who want more from what they read.

Finally, please note there are two sexual assault scenes in this book — they are not gratuitous but add levity to the wider story being told about the dangers faced by women in 19th-century Paris. Some might argue, not much has changed.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘The Doll Factory’ by Elizabeth MacNeal: a young woman dreams of becoming a painter in 1850s London but must put her reputation on the line to do so.

‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue: an English nurse goes to Ireland in the 1850s to oversee an 11-year-old girl said to be surviving on nothing but thin air — is it a hoax or a miracle?

I read this book for #WITMonth, which runs throughout August and encourages people to read books by women writers in translation. Note I now have a #womenintranslation tag on this blog so you can find all my reviews in one place.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Fools of Fortune’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 211 pages; 2015.

As I continue to work my way through William Trevor’s extensive backlist in chronological order (as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books), I’ve been waiting to discover the book that would signal a turn in direction. Fools of Fortune is it.

First published in 1983, Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Prize (precursor to the Costa) in 1983. It is a mid-career novel that moves away from Trevor’s typically English setting to an Irish one. He substitutes black comedy for a more serious and sombre tone. And the third-person voice is eschewed for a more intimate first-person narrative.

The story, which spans the years 1918 to 1982, looks at the long-lasting and far-reaching impact of trauma on the Quinton family, who own a flour mill and live in a Big House, called Kilneagh, in County Cork. They are Anglo-Irish protestants but have Home Rule sympathies —  Irish independence leader Michael Collins, for instance, is a semi-regular visitor, and a defrocked Catholic priest is a live-in tutor for the family’s young son, Willie.

But this is not a political novel. While it’s about murder and revenge during Ireland’s troubled history, it’s really an examination of intergenerational trauma and follows what happens to a small cast of characters caught up in a conflict beyond their control.

A story of two halves

The story is divided into two main sections; the first part is told through the eyes of Willie Quinton; the second is from the perspective of Willie’s English cousin, Marianne, with whom he later falls in love and bears a child.

The crux of the novel almost happens off the page: one of the mill workers is suspected of being an informer, so he is lynched by the Black and Tans, who cut out his tongue and hang him from a tree as a warning. They later set fire to the Quinton’s house, resulting in the death of Willie’s father and his two sisters.

After the devastating arson attack, Willie and his mother move to a smaller house in town. Willie is given succour by a school teacher, Miss Halliwell, who suffocates him with pity and unwelcome affection. It’s only when he is sent to boarding school that he is able to free himself from her overbearing attentiveness and fall in with a group of boys who take pleasure in sending up their professors.

It is in this short part of the novel that Trevor adds a dash of his trademark black comedy — Willie and his friends, for instance, dub the headmaster Mr Scrotum, and there’s an excruciatingly funny scene in which they play a devious prank on a maths teacher that is outrageous in its audacity and crudity. But this humourous take soon gives way to romance — all beautifully evoked — when teenage Willie falls in love with his English cousin during a visit home.

That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Haye’s shop and looked down at the city, at the distant green hills that always reminded me of Kilneagh. […] We strolled by the river and railway track […] Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand.

Later, after finishing his education, Willie returns home to begin his career at the mill, still thinking about Marianne and trying to work up the courage to confess his love to her (via letter). But then his mother, who has numbed her pain and grief with alcohol for many years, takes her own life and he has other things to worry about.

Marianne’s tale

When we hear Marianne’s point of view, in the second half of the book, we discover that she feels similarly about Willie. Their romance kicks into gear at the time of Willie’s mother’s funeral, but it’s short-lived: Marianne has to go to finishing school in Switzerland, something that has been prearranged by her parents, for a few months.

While in Montreux, under the care of an English professor and his wife, she not only has to fight off the advances of the lecherous professor, who is in his sixties, she also learns that she is pregnant with Willie’s child. Knowing that this will bring shame on her family — her father is a rector in Dorset — she heads straight to Ireland to tell Willie the news. But Willie is no longer in Ireland and no one will tell her where he has gone or why.

The narrative jumps forward considerably when the story is taken up by Marianne’s school-age daughter, Imelda, who is an inquisitive and imaginative child and is, unknowingly, bearing the burden of her family’s past — in particular, Marianne’s difficult decision to become a single mother at a time when such decisions were condemned.

To compensate for being teased and bullied at school for being “illegitimate”, Imelda constantly daydreams that her father, whom she has never met, will sweep in to rescue her. This fantasy soon becomes an obsession, one that develops into a form of insanity…

Devastating tale

Fools of Fortune is a quietly devasting but hugely mature novel in Trevor’s extensive oeuvre.

The storytelling seems more reigned in, more gentle and nuanced, and less prone to exaggerate human behaviour than his earlier work. Everyone’s just trying to get on with their lives as best they can but their happiness is often thwarted by circumstance, politics and societal conventions rather than the untoward behaviour of psychologically damaged people that often characterise Trevor’s stories.

There are more than 60 years of history crammed into this compact novel, which is tinged with sadness and asks many more questions than it answers. How does Ireland’s story affect the personal, lived histories of its citizens? Who takes responsibility for past actions?  How can we overcome trauma? And how is it passed on?

For other takes on this novel, please see Ali’s review at Heavenali and Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers.

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. Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘Death in Summer’, which I have previously reviewed here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’, the first William Trevor novel I read, back in 2003. My (rather inadequate) review is here. I plan to review ‘The Silence in the Garden’.

This is my 16th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it on Kindle in March 2022.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Salley Vickers, Setting

‘The Gardener’ by Salley Vickers

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 297 pages; 2021.

Salley Vickers’ The Gardener is an easy-going, almost old-fashioned, story about a woman moving to the Shropshire countryside to begin a new life.

Told in a gentle and soothing voice, it’s the kind of absorbing tale that feels like a tonic or balm. I read it over the course of a wet and windy weekend and adored it.

Move to the country

This sweet and simple story goes something like this…

The impossibly named Halcyon Days — or Hassie, as she’s better known — and her older sister, Margot, use their inheritance to buy a rundown Jacobean house in a small rural village near the Welsh Marshes, a short drive from Shrewsbury.

Hassie, who is a children’s book illustrator, plans to live there permanently, but Margot, who has a city job in finance and is a proper snobby “townie”, will simply visit on weekends or stay over when she needs a respite from London life.

The house, which is called Knight’s Fee, has an intriguing history and is set in an extensive but overgrown garden in need of repair. It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires a local man, Murat, an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife and is in need of a job, to help her.

Although neither of them has any real horticultural knowledge, they work together to weed the overgrown garden beds, mow the lawns, repair broken trellises and plant new plants.

The healing power of nature

For Hassie, this physical labour acts as a form of therapy. It gives her a chance to process her father’s death, think about her unhappy family upbringing and reflect on a love affair she had with a married man that went painfully wrong, the story of which is told in snatched flashbacks tinged with drama and excitement.

Much of the novel charts Hassie’s attempts to ingratiate herself with the locals, which include the outspoken and cantankerous retired schoolmarm, Miss Foot, and the friendly local vicar, a widower, who claims not to believe in God.

This might make the novel sound genteel and a little bit clichéd, and while Vickers does depict an idealised version of village life she does, occasionally, let the real world intrude — there’s a low level of social commentary in the storyline related to prejudice against immigrants, domestic violence and child poverty.

A run-in with a young girl, Penny Lane (there are a lot of weird names in this book, it has to be said), creates a tipping point in the story, which is perhaps the only bit that doesn’t quite ring true.

But overall, The Gardener is a delightful tale about resilience, fresh starts and hope for the future. It’s written with psychological insight, tenderness and poignancy.

This is my 8th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it in Readings Hawthorn when I went to Melbourne for a long weekend earlier this year. I was delighted to discover it because Salley Vickers is a favourite author but I had *no idea* she had a new novel out.