Category: Reading Projects

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.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Author, Book review, Fiction, Magabala Books, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, verse novel

‘She is the Earth’ by Ali Cobby Eckermann

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 Fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 96 pages; 2023.

I am partial to a verse novel (although I have only read a handful), so I was keen to read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth, which was longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize.

The book is a luminous love letter to Mother Nature, including her life-sustaining ecosystems, weather patterns and landscapes.

In many ways, it reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, but instead of looking at Earth from above, it looks at Earth from the ground up and presents it as a living, breathing organism.

I am staring
at the new day

it grows brighter
and brighter

the sky and the sea
defined by blue

as if breathing now
the water is tidal

inhaling first
exhaling next

the horizon
a definition
(page 59)

This long-form poem is comprised of meditative, two-line stanzas. It’s minimalistic yet brims with rich imagery and pulses with life.

Repeated motifs — of birth, of breath, of “sun and moon and sky”, for instance — abound, creating gentle echoes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the work as you progress through it.

And just like birth, it begins with a sense of violence…

exhausted I am
unable to breathe

I scratch for air
my mouth a cave
(page 5)

But moves towards a more gentle way of being:

from the cosmos
I learn my place
(page 80)

That “learning my place” is a central theme. References to other life forms, such as birds — brolgas, pelicans, owls, for instance — reveal how everything in the natural world has a role to play — and a path to follow.

do not diminish
the role of the mother

do not diminish
the role of the father

do not diminish
the role of the child

do not diminish
the role of the ant
(page 81)

The author, a Yankunytjatjara woman from South Australia, has long struggled to find her place in the world.

She was forcibly removed from her family as one of the Stolen Generations, which caused long-lasting trauma, powerfully evoked in her extraordinary memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (2012). In 2017 she was the first Indigenous person anywhere in the world to win the international Windham-Campbell Prize.

She is the Earth is her first book in eight years. An eloquent review of it in The Conversation sums it up better than I can:

She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature. Of the works Eckermann has written to date, it could well prove her most enduring.

I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. To see all the books reviewed for this project, please visit my Reading First Nations Writers page. 

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.

Amanda Peters, Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, Fig Tree, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘The Berry Pickers’ by Amanda Peters

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Fiction – paperback; Fig Tree; 304 pages; 2023.

In Australia, state-sponsored programs forcibly removed generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities in what we now call the Stolen Generations.

This shameful separation of children severed significant cultural, spiritual and familial bonds, and caused long-lasting intergenerational trauma, which First Nations people are still dealing with today.

I was reminded of this when I read Amanda Peters’ debut novel The Berry Pickers. Even though the book is Canadian, it explores what happens when Indigenous families are torn apart and disconnected from their culture.

Missing girl

The story begins in 1962 and is framed around a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia who cross the border and decamp to Maine every summer to pick blueberries for the season.

One hot day, four-year-old Ruthie, the youngest child of five, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, was the last person to see her. He left her sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields while he went off to skip stones on a nearby lake, but when he returned, his beloved sister was nowhere to be seen.

A frantic search yields no clue as to where she might have gone. The police, when informed, are disinterested, telling Ruthie’s distraught parents: “If you were so concerned about the girl, you’d have taken better notice.”

Ruthie is never found. Instead, she’s raised by a privileged white family as one of their own under a new name — “Norma” — and knows nothing of her earlier life.

Two perspectives

The book is divided into two separate narrative threads, told in alternate chapters from Joe’s and Norma’s points of view.

Joe’s storyline is told retrospectively, as he looks back on the formative experiences of his life: the loss of his sister; the brutal bashing of his older brother, who dies from his wounds; a serious accident that leaves him disabled; and the love of a good wife, whom he eventually commits an unforgivable act of violence on.

For much of his adult life, he has drifted from place to place and cut himself off from everyone he knows, including his daughter, and is beset by all-consuming rage and grief and guilt. He’s now dying of cancer and is being cared for by his two elder siblings, Mae and Ben, with whom he’s recently been reunited.

Norma’s storyline is told in chronological order as she grapples with an overbearing, overprotective mother and an emotionally distant father. She’s a bright child, with an enquiring mind, but something isn’t quite right.

In the early days, she’s plagued by “dreams” of another mother and a sibling — which are clearly, unbeknownst to her, memories of her Mi’kmaq family — and as she gets older she’s puzzled as to why her skin is darker than her parents. This anomaly is spirited away with explanations that she’s a “throwback” to her Italian grandfather. But even when she grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher and gets married, there’s always a niggling feeling in the back of her mind that her past doesn’t add up.

Poignant tale

Right from the start, it’s obvious these two storylines are going to converge in some way, so this isn’t a novel that offers up a mystery in need of being solved (although exactly how Ruthie came to live with her white family **is** intriguing). Instead, the author is focused on showing us two sides of the one coin: what happens to the family left behind when a beloved child goes missing, and what happens to the missing child if they are raised with no knowledge of their biological family?

By adopting this approach, Peters, who is of Mi’kmaq heritage, is able to explore the repercussions on a First Nations family when the police fail to treat the disappearance of an Indigenous child with the seriousness it deserves, and she’s also able to show how a young person’s identity is impacted when they are uprooted from their culture.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s well-plotted, fast-paced and suspenseful. The characters are wonderfully realised (Norma’s Aunt June is a standout) and the individual voices of the two protagonists are distinct so there’s never any doubt whose perspective is being told. Peters also writes beautiful descriptions of landscapes, people and places.

This is a poignant and heartfelt story about racism, grief, guilt, betrayal, hope, curiosity, love — and the pull of family.

I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which focuses on literature by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but may occasionally include First Nations writers from other parts of the world. In this instance, the First Nations writer is from Nova Scotia, Canada. Amanda Peters is of mixed European and Mi’kmaq heritage and belongs to the Glooscap First Nation.

You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. 

A Year With William Trevor, Reading Projects

A Year with William Trevor wrap-up: What I learned from reading 12 books in 12 months

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Last year I read 12 books — one per month — by the late Irish writer William Trevor (1928-2016) as part of a project I co-hosted with Cathy from 746 Books.

Immersing myself in his work like this, a kind of extended binge read if you will, was a fascinating experience. I learned so much about his writing and yet I still feel I know so little about him as a man. Or do I?

Award-winning writer

Most people associate Trevor with the Booker Prize, for which he received five nominations over the years, but he never took out the top gong. He had better luck with the Whitbread Prize (now known as the Costa Book Awards), winning it three times (for The Children of Dynmouth in 1976, Fools of Fortune in 1983, and Felicia’s Journey in 1994) and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, which he won once — for his 1965 novel The Old Boys.

He had an honorary CBE and a knighthood too.

But that’s not why I wanted to devote a year to reading his work.

Trevor has an esteemed reputation as a fine chronicler of human life in all its many facets and was regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the English language. But he didn’t just write short stories. He wrote novels, novellas and plays, too.

Since beginning this blog almost two decades ago, I have read and reviewed a few of his novels and found them heartbreaking (The Story of Lucy Gault), slightly disturbing (Felicia’s Journey and Death in Summer) or gentle depictions of rural life (Love and Summer and Nights at the Alexandra).

It wasn’t until I’d read three of his early novels — The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966) — published in one volume, that I understood there was more to Trevor than the melancholy tales I had previously associated him with.

Those early novels were satires, up roaringly funny in places. All were set in London, rather than his native Ireland, and each felt like they might have fallen out of the Ealing Comedy playbook [1].

I was happily surprised by this discovery and wondered how he had gone from writing black comedies to writing sombre tales about outsiders and outcasts. Where did this change in direction occur? What else did I not know about his writing?

19 things I discovered

The only way to find out? To read all his work, preferably in chronological order so I could spot the deviations (or the commonalities) in tone, style and characterisation. Here’s what I discovered:

  • His early career novels (up until 1966) are black comedies set in London and are wickedly funny
  • His work takes on a darker edge, albeit with an eye on the funny side of life, with the publication of his fifth novel, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), a style that he maintained for around five novels
  • The publication of Fools of Fortune (1983) represents a major turning point in his career — it was the first book to be set in his native County Cork and the first to use a first-person narrator
  • From then on, his work shifts between English settings and Irish settings, but with a preference for rural Ireland
  • He loves an ensemble cast and rather than tell his stories through a single narrator he often uses multiple voices, switching the focus from character to character, all of whom have rich backstories
  • Pretty much every book features a character who is deaf or someone who has a learning difficulty or a mental health problem
  • The orphan count across his backlist is very high!
  • He is quite partial to children who have had terrible childhood experiences but somehow survived
  • There’s always a male character who is a cad or sexual deviant, while the women characters are often “troubled” or mentally disturbed in some way
  • Characters who are obsessed with something such as an idea that they can’t let go of or a dream they want to achieve feature pretty highly
  • He likes to write about middle-aged women, love affairs and the corrupting effect of religion
  • He’s not afraid to cover taboo subjects such as abortion, alcoholism, prostitution and mental health disorders
  • He fills his books with outsiders and outcasts, including drunks and thieves, and gives voice to people we would normally never hear from
  • His books set in England always have a reference to Ireland, usually in the form of an Irish character
  • His books set in Ireland often include references to the intricate dynamics between Protestants and Catholics, but this is rarely the main focus of his stories
  • He tends to write in the third person
  • His storytelling is always empathetic and compassionate; it is never judgemental
  • Not everything is spelt out; he regards his readers as intelligent people who can figure things out for themselves and if that gives rise to some ambiguity then so be it
  • There’s a timeless quality to his writing, but most of his work is set in the 20th century before the advent of mobile phones, the internet and social media

Immersing myself in William Trevor’s world taught me a lot about how he viewed the world himself. He championed the underdog and was adept at writing about people of all ages and backgrounds. His compassionate eye highlighted the quiet struggles and sorrows of ordinary people with empathy and a keen understanding of the human condition.

He has a soft spot for loners and those seeking love or human connection in any form they can.

If you have never read him before and are not sure where to start, read Two Lives, which is two novellas — Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria — brought together in one volume; the first novella is typically melancholic and heartbreaking, the second is a black comedy. From that, you should be able to figure out which style you prefer and then you can work out whether to explore his early career novels or his later work.

But of course, you might be like me, and appreciate almost everything he’s ever written!

My reviews

Here are the 12 books that I reviewed this year, a mix of novels, novellas and short story collections.

The only book I wasn’t convinced by was Elizabeth Alone, which felt like it was trying to do too much and didn’t feel like a cohesive story, more a collection of shorter tales, but on the whole, I enjoyed every single one of these amazing books.

If you wish to read my reviews, simply click on the covers below.

Thank you and a reminder about this year’s plans

Undertaking A Year with William Trevor was definitely a rewarding experience.

Special thanks to Cathy for keeping me company (you can read all her reviews here) and to those blog readers who (1) tolerated the avalanche of William Trevor posts here (2) responded to my reviews or (3) joined in and read and reviewed a Trevor book or two along the way. The support has been amazing and much appreciated.

I’m now greatly looking forward to repeating this exercise in 2024 — but with a different writer in focus: the great John Banville. This will be another project co-hosted with Cathy. You can read more about it on my dedicated A Year with John Banville page — expect the first review later this month.

[1] Ealing comedies are a series of British films made in the late 1940s to early 1950s that were known for their dry wit, social commentary and ensemble casts. They are wonderful fun but often have a dark edge to them.

Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, David Whish-Wilson, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Fremantle Press, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘True West’ by David Whish-Wilson

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Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 264 pages; 2019.

We all know that teenage life can be angst-ridden and problematic, but for the 17-year-old protagonist in True West, by David Whish-Wilson, it is positively deadly.

In this gritty crime thriller, Lee Southern is on the run from the Geraldton-based bikie gang he betrayed. His father was the first president of that gang, but now he is missing and rumour has it he has been murdered. As payback, Lee torched the gang’s marijuana crop and now there’s hell to pay.

The story is set in Perth in 1988 against a backdrop of abhorrent hate crimes associated with the neo-Nazi Australian Nationalist Movement (rebranded here as the Australian Patriotic Movement, APM). This lends True West a visceral, political edge and a ring of authenticity.

Perth underworld

Lee, unfortunately, gets caught up in the APM’s extremist agenda. As he flees hundreds of kilometres south in his uncle’s old Ford F350 truck, he finds himself in Perth, an unfamiliar city, where he tries to make a living as a rogue tow truck driver. But when he unwittingly competes with an existing monopoly, he’s severely beaten up.

From there, it’s all downhill as he is coerced into the “employ” of people who don’t have his best interests at heart. Instead, they want to use him to progress their own hate-filled white supremacist agenda, roping him into all manner of violent crimes, including armed robbery, firebombing Asian-owned businesses and murdering a high-profile political figure.

Living on his nerves and doped up with illicit substances, Lee uses the survivalist skills — instilled in him by his father, a Vietnam vet with a “prepper” mindset — to navigate his way through Perth’s violent underworld. It’s touch and go whether he will come out the other side in one piece.

Compelling story

If it sounds like a page-turning dramatic story, it is! But it also incorporates a tender love affair between Lee and his teenage sweetheart, Emma, which showcases his humanity and softer side.

There’s no doubt that True West is a tense, suspenseful read, full of not-very-nice people doing not-very-nice things, but it’s the teenage protagonist that lends the novel a certain charm.

As a likeable rogue, Lee is resourceful, practical, a roll-up-your-sleeves type of kid. He might do dubious things on the wrong side of the law, but he’s got a good heart and knows racism is a repellent justification for horrific acts of violence.

This is a terrific read — and I am now looking forward to the follow-up, I Am Already Dead, which was published earlier this year.

David Whish-Wilson is a local writer, who lives in Fremantle and teaches creative writing at Curtin University. I read this novel as part of 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. 

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

‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016.

Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991.

It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

Both Mary Louise Dallon, who stars in Reading Turgenev, and Emily Delahunty (Mrs Delahunty), from My House in Umbria, are childfree and financially secure, but they are lonely and yearn for romance.

And perhaps because they don’t fit into the templated lives that society deems “normal”, both experience a kind of insanity. Mary Louise, moves into an attic to escape her much older alcoholic husband and his controlling sisters, and is later committed to an asylum, while Mrs Delahunty’s behaviour, fuelled by drink, becomes increasingly more unhinged as her past comes back to haunt her.

Innocence versus experience

Of course, they are also vastly different. Mary Louise is sexually inexperienced, having entered a marriage that has never been consummated, while Mrs Delahunty was sexually abused as a child and once supported herself through prostitution.

Mary Louise is quiet and introverted; Mrs Delahunty loud and convivial. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she married into; Miss Delahunty dreams of finding a family she can call her own.

The tone, style and setting of both novellas are also different. Reading Turgenev employs a third-person narrator to tell Mary Louise’s sad and melancholy story. It also features a dual timeline that intertwines the story of an unhappy marriage with Mary Louise’s confinement in a psychiatric institution for more than 30 years

By contrast, My House in Umbria is narrated in the first person using a jolly, upbeat and deeply intimate voice.

The former is set in Ireland in the mid-20th century, the latter in Italy in 1987.

So, what are the stories about? Let me briefly explain each in turn.

Reading Turgenev

Reading Turgenev is about a farm girl who secures her future by marrying Elmer Quarry, a man much older than her — “the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around” — who runs a drapery store in town with his two (meddling and not very nice) spinster sisters, Matilda and Rose.

And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop.

The marriage does not get off to a good start, because Elmer, who is normally a teetotaller, gets drunk on their honeymoon and passes out. The pair never consummate their relationship, even when they return home, and consequently never have children, to the puzzlement of many, including family (his and hers), village residents and busybodies.

But the issue is never discussed between the pair. Instead, Elmer deals with it by drinking in secret, while Mary Louise begins bicycling out to visit her impoverished aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love since she was a young girl.

It is Robert who reads the works of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev to her, hence the novella’s title, but their relationship is a clandestine one, which is what makes it all so heart-rending when he dies unexpectedly.

In her bereavement, Mary Louise becomes increasingly more introverted and isolated, with dire consequences for her own sanity. When she is seen buying rat poison, the sisters believe their lives are being put at risk… but is that really the case?

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

My House in Umbria

My House in Umbria is about a romantic novelist who survives a terrorist attack on a train in Italy and invites fellow survivors from her carriage to spend their convalescence at her villa free of charge.

This brings together a diverse group of individuals, including a British general, a German man whose fiancee was killed in the bombing, and Aimee, a young American girl who has been orphaned and has now retreated into silence.

Mrs Delahunty delights in the company of this new “family”, especially as their imagined lives and backstories will provide fodder for her next novel, but everything is thrown into disarray when Aimee’s uncle, a rather aloof man called Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home.

Our narrator, who has a troubled past — her sideshow parents sold her to a foster family and her foster father later “satisfied his base desires” with her — becomes infatuated by Mr Riversmith and sets her amorous sights on him. When she overhears him saying not very nice things about her, she’s even more determined to have her way with him.

He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch.

The book ends with all the patients returning to their respective homes and Mrs Delahunty renting out her spare rooms once again to tourists, but something has irrevocably changed in her: “Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not,” she muses. “Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it.”

My House in Umbria was adapted for American television in 2003, starring Maggie Smith.

Trevor’s trademark best

Together these two novellas pack a powerful punch and demonstrate Trevor at his trademark best: showing us the remarkable interior lives of two ordinary but highly resilient women getting by as best they can. The first showcases his melancholy life-in-an-Irish-village style, the second his black comedic style.

If you have not read him before and want to get a taster for his different types of writing, this would be a good one to start with.

Both are highly engaging reads, but if I had to choose between the two, I preferred My House in Umbria, only because the voice was more comedic and the story less gloomy. I found Mrs Delahunty larger than life and her antics ludicrously entertaining, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Eckdorf in his 1970 novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, and also Miss Gomez in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Finally, there’s an eloquent review of both published in the New York Times, which describes Two Lives so much better than I ever could.

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 also reviewed ‘Two Lives’.

♥ Next month Sadly, December will mark the end of ‘A Year with William Trevor’. Cathy plans to read ‘Last Stories’ (which I have previously reviewed here) and in a slight change to our schedule, I plan on reading the novella ‘Bodily Secrets’, which was published as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

I also read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

1001 Books to read before you die, Author, Book review, Fiction, Giorgio Bassani, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 240 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, first published in 1962, is the third book in Giorgio Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara” six-part series but can be read as a standalone.

At its most basic level, it is a story of unrequited love between two Italian college students, but it’s so much more than that. It touches on issues related to Italian Fascism, racial discrimination (all the characters are Jewish) and class, and explores memory, loyalty, friendship and family.

The story is told by an unnamed first-person narrator looking back on the events of his life in the northern Italian city of Ferrara some 20 years earlier. We find out right from the start that members of the Finzi-Contini family, with whom he was close, perished in a German death camp during the Second World War.

And then we are plunged into a slow-moving tale of how he befriended brother and sister Alberto and Micòl even though he was from a lower socio-economic class, and how he later fell in love with Micòl, who had

…weightless blond hair, with streaks verging on white, the blue, almost Scandinavian irises, the honeycoloured skin, and on her breastbone, every now and then leaping out from her T-shirt collar, the little gold disc of the shaddai.

Dangerous times

The narrative cleverly weaves in the changing political circumstances of the time to show how decisions by those in power directly affected the lives of ordinary citizens.

The story is set mainly during 1938 and 1939, right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Racial laws have been introduced that restrict where Jewish people in Italy can socialise.

Alberto and Micòl open up their private tennis court, in the walled garden of their grand family home, to friends who have been ousted from the town’s official tennis club, and this is how our narrator grows close to the Finzi-Contini siblings and their slightly older friend, Giampi Malnate, a Christian and socialist with strongly held views that put him at odds with Italy’s Fascist rulers.

The foursome soon becomes three when Micòl heads to Venice to write her thesis. While she’s gone, our narrator, who is working on his own thesis, is expelled from the Public Library, so he is invited to use the personal library of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini which contains almost 20,000 books, “a large number of which — he told me — concerned mid-  and late-nineteenth-century literature”.

With an entire, specialized library at my disposal, and besides that, being oddly keen to be there every morning, in the great, warm, silent hall which received light from three big, high windows adorned with pelmets covered in red-striped white silk, and at the centre of which, clad in mouse-coloured felt, stretched the billiards table, I managed to complete my thesis on Panzacchi in the two and half months which followed.

Being let into the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis like this also allows our narrator to develop a personal relationship with Micòl’s father, who becomes a mentor, valued for his kindness, intellect and anti-Fascist beliefs.

This warm, nostalgic tone imbues most of the novel, but there is a  dark, almost self-pitying undercurrent because while our narrator is forced to contend with large political issues beyond his control, on the personal front, things aren’t much better. His desire for Micòl comes to a head in a confronting scene towards the end of the book, one that could be construed as a violation (at worst) and sexual harassment (at best).

Later, frustrated by Micòl’s lack of sexual interest in him, he convinces himself that she is seeing someone else, which is why she has not returned his love.

Distant voice

Interestingly, the narrator is the same one who features in Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and like that book, the narrative takes a while to warm up. At first, the voice is staid, distant and almost bitter, but later opens out to be more thoughtful, introspective and self-aware.

I liked the way it contrasts the narrator’s family upbringing with that of the Finzi-Continis and shows how there are class divisions within the Jewish community. And yet, for all their class and privilege, or maybe because of it, the Finzi-Continis did not survive the Holocaust.

Frankly, this is a sad book, but it is punctuated with moments of joy and quiet scenes of normality that belie the tragedies that will soon unfold — and perhaps that’s what gives The Garden of the Finzi-Continis such astonishing power. We know what’s coming, but the characters at the heart of this story do not.

I read this book for The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Karen, which ran between 16-22 October 2023, so am reviewing this a little belatedly. 

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’, by Giorgio Bassani, first published in 1963, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as a novel of “corrupted innocence and blighted talent and opportunity”, one that is also an “indictment of ordinary citizens too blind to see the threat of creeping authoritarianism and prejudice”.

A year with John Banville

Revealing our author of the year for 2024

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So, after last week’s teaser, Cathy (from 746 Books) and I are happy to reveal who we will be spending 2024 with — in a literary sense, of course.

Congratulations to Cherie, who guessed John Banville in the comments on my original post, and Glenda, who also guessed correctly on my Facebook post. I think the two of you know my reading tastes too well!

Why choose John Banville?

John Banville (born in Wexford, Ireland in 1945) has long been a favourite of mine. In fact, in my early 20s, he was my favourite writer of all. I think that’s largely to do with the fact he was one of the first literary novelists I’d read. Prior to that, my tastes were largely commercial fiction, horror and crime.

But when I read the extraordinary Book of Evidence, first published in 1989, I discovered someone who could write compelling stories that appealed to the darker side of my nature. I later went on to read The Revolutions Trilogy but then I discovered other Irish writers and by the time I set up this blog, in 2004, my love affair with Banville had waned a little.

Over the years, I’ve read a mix of his crime fiction (written under his Benjamin Black pseudonym) and his literary fiction, and every time I’ve been reminded of why I love his writing so much.

He is a writer who loves language. His sentences are expertly crafted. He creates new words through the use of double-barrel adjectives and his similies are second to none. His penchant for describing characters, the clothes they are wearing, their hairstyles and facial expressions, is extraordinarily detailed and vivid.

He also has a wicked sense of humour.

There are many common themes in his work, including identity, memory, truth, art, acting, science and crime.

His extensive backlist is ripe for exploration, which is another reason to spend a year reading his work. It includes all kinds of wonderful stories, including an ongoing historical crime series starring the Dublin-based pathologist Quirke, loads of standalone literary fiction (including his 2005 Booker Prize winner The Sea) and a handful of trilogies from his early career.

Our reading schedule

Cathy and I have come up with a proposed reading schedule and we’ll be posting our reviews in the first week of every month, between January and December 2024.

MONTHCATHYKIM
JANBirchwoodThe Secret Guests (Benjamin Black)
FEBThe Newton LetterNightspawn
MARChristine FallsBirchwood
APRGhostsMephisto
MAYAthenaThe Book of Evidence
JUNThe UntouchableGhosts
JULEclipseAthena
AUGA Death in SummerA Death in Summer (Benjamin Black)
SEPThe InfinitiesVengeance (Benjamin Black)
OCTMrs OsmondHoly Orders (Benjamin Black)
NOVThe SeaEven the Dead (Benjamin Black)
DECSnow The Singularities

A guide to his books

We’d love you to join us on this year-long literary project. Regardless of your tastes and interests, there’s bound to be something that appeals. Check out his backlist below.

Standalone novels (including Benjamin Black)

The Revolutions Trilogy

The Frames Trilogy

The Cleave Trilogy

Quirke series

Quirke & Stafford series

The ones I have reviewed

If you’re not sure where to start, it might be helpful to read my thoughts on some of his books. The ones I have reviewed are as follows:

The Sea (2005)
Christine Falls (2006)
The Lemur (2008)
Elegy for April (2010)
Ancient Light (2012)
The Blue Guitar (2015)
Prague Nights (2017)
Snow (2020)
April in Spain (2021)
The Lock-Up (2023)

Please join in

Feel free to follow our schedule as above, or read whatever John Banville/Benjamin Black novels you have to hand. If you decide to join in, whether on your own blog or social media accounts, please tag us both and use the hashtag #JohnBanville2024.

Do let us know in the comments below if you are keen to take part or perhaps recommend a favourite Banville book. We can’t wait for the year-long celebration to begin!