Category: Wales

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2021, Book review, Heidi Everett, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, Ultimo, Wales

‘My Friend Fox’ by Heidi Everett

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Non-fiction – memoir; Ultimo Press; 182 pages; 2021.

Depression is commonly referred to as the ‘black dog’. In Heidi Everett’s memoir, My Friend Fox, her mental illness is essentially a ‘fox’, a wild, misunderstood animal often viewed as an outsider, a creature of terror and beauty.

In this evocative book, illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the author, we learn what it is like to be a resident on a psych ward, where every facet of your life is controlled by rigid medical protocols and unwritten rules.

Everett, who was born in Wales but emigrated to Australia with her working class parents as a child, has a complicated diagnosis:

I am psych patient number 25,879* (or part thereof). Age: 24. Primary diagnosis: schizoaffective. Comorbidity: major depression, ? juvenile autism. Seems to enjoy music, art. No dependents. No further use for a name.

She spends her time in and out of psychiatric institutions. On one occasion, safe at home where she lives with her beloved dog Tigger, she goes on the run, believing she’s being spied on by cameras in the wall. It’s the middle of winter, cold and dark, and she’s dressed in nothing more than jeans and a light shirt.

I’m not dressed to go out tonight but I can’t go back. This is an emergency; I’ve got to get away. I quickly walk up to the end of the road, turn left and keep walking. Tigger and I won’t stop walking for the next two weeks.

Interspersed with Everett’s terrifying account of running from her own paranoia and her adventures in and out of psychiatric care, are her memories of a happy childhood in rural Wales contrasted with her troubled adolescence in suburban Australia (when her illness began to manifest itself).

She often speaks of her love of the countryside and her admiration for foxes, in particular, the urban foxes she comes across in Melbourne. She wends the tale of a suburban fox on the run throughout her narrative, a metaphor for her own life, misunderstood and never quite able to mix with other people.

She also writes movingly of the love she has for her dog and of her obsessive hobbies — music and drawing — and the ways in which they give her life meaning and take her outside of her illness.

Her lyrical prose is filled with original, occasionally breathtaking, descriptions — a fox she meets has “gemstone eyes”, for example, while the wind blows “a vomit of sea in its mouth” and “the trees begin a free jazz session of syncopated dripping” after a rainstorm.

My Friend Fox is quite an astonishing read — short, powerful and fable-like. The depiction of mental illness and the impact it has on one person’s life is arresting and illuminating. And despite the trauma at its heart, this survivor’s tale brims with optimism — and hope.

This is my 19th book for #AWW2021 

Author, Book review, Cynan Jones, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, UK, Wales

‘The Long Dry’ by Cynan Jones

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The-Long-Dry

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 104 pages; 2014.

Earlier this year I read Cynan Jones’ extraordinarily powerful novel The Dig and was so impressed I quickly sought out his first book, The Long Dry, which was published in 2006 and won a Betty Trask Award the following year. Cut from similar cloth as The Dig, it depicts a world that is earthy, rough and rugged but it is written in such lyrical pared-back language it practically sings with the beauty of the rural landscape in which it is set.

A lost cow

Set over the course of a single day, it tells the tale of a farmer looking for a missing cow. But this is much more than a simple search-and-rescue mission, for as Gareth searches the parched fields we learn about his hopes, his dreams and the love he has for his wife and children.

Central to this is Gareth’s connection to the land — he is a second generation farmer, having inherited the farm from his father who bought it after the war because he no longer wanted to work in a bank — and his community, including Bill, the simple-minded neighbour who was given a few acres of the farm by Gareth’s father, for whom he feels responsible.

We also hear from the wife — in brief, first-person snippets — who is worried that she’s no longer sexually desirable, suffers headaches and depression, and has a dark secret of which she is very much ashamed.

Then there’s the teenage son, who’s more interested in having fun than carrying out his tasks in any kind of responsible way, and the young daughter, Emmy, wise beyond her years and very much-loved and doted on by her father.

And finally, the lost cow’s wanderings — she is heavily pregnant, which is why it is so important for Gareth to find her — are threaded into the narrative, which is punctuated by little fragmentary set pieces, mini-stories within the story, that showcase life and death on the farm.

Nature writing

The Long Dry is very much a paean to nature, which is beautifully evoked in simple yet vivid descriptions, occasionally using unexpected words that not so much as confront the reader but check that you’re paying attention:

Damselflies and strong white butterflies, delicate as hell, are everywhere around the pond, and machine-like dragonflies hit smaller insects in the air as they fly. The reeds are flowering with their strange crests and on the island in the middle of the pond the willow herb is starting to come to seed, and the thistles.

There’s also some unexpected humour, too:

People are seduced by ducks: by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts. In the local town — a beautiful Georgian harbour town which is not lazy and which is very colourful — the ducks got out of hand. […] If you tried to drink a quiet pint on the harbour the ducks were there and they sat squatly and looked up at you and seemed to chuckle superciliously, which was off-putting. If you put your washing out, somehow the ducks knew, and by some defiance of physics managed to crap on it. And duck crap isn’t nice. It’s green like baby-shit. If you fed a baby on broccoli for a week.

But mostly this is a tiny book packed with startling little moments and quietly devastating revelations — mainly about the farmer’s wife and the couple’s young daughter — that come out of the blue and turn the entire story on its head.

The Long Dry is beautiful and sad, poignant and often quirky, but full of human empathy. It constantly spins and shimmers and dances along the very fine line between sex and death — this book brims with both — and the way in which we are all essentially animalistic, in our basic needs, our desires and our behaviour. It explores the fragility of life, of holding on to happiness and how tragedy can strike at any moment. And it’s filled with vivid, sometimes unsettling, imagery that lives on in the mind long after the book has been put down.

It is, quite frankly, an extraordinary achievement to do so much in such a slim volume. I’ll be holding on to this one to read again…

Author, Book review, Cynan Jones, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, UK, Wales

‘The Dig’ Cynan Jones

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The-Dig

Fiction – hardcover; Granta; 160 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Visceral. Violent. Compelling. Those are the first three words that spring to mind when I think of Cynan Jones‘ The Dig, a muscular little novel that is so powerful as to be Herculean.

Set in a Welsh farming community, it could be described as a “rural novel”, but it’s not the bucolic countryside so often depicted in literature. This is nature red in tooth and claw. It feels earthy, rough, rugged — and realistic. Anyone who’s grown up on a farm or in a farming community will recognise the life and landscape depicted here, even if they might not recognise or be familiar with the illegal activities at the heart of the story.

Good vs evil?

The Dig pits two men against each other: Daniel is a sheep farmer; the other, who is referred to throughout as “the big man”, is a ratting man who keeps dogs for pest control.

The big man has a dubious, never-quite-explained criminal history (all we know is that he has firearms offences and a long-ago record for assault) and is currently involved in prohibited activities: he traps badgers, a protected species, for use in badger baiting. This is a cruel and illegal activity in which a badger is put in a pit with a dog and left to fight it out (usually resulting in the death of the badger) for the purposes of “entertainment” and gambling.

Jones’ descriptions of these activities are brutal and stomach-churning, leaving little to the imagination (the one that follows is relatively mild, but will give you an inkling):

The big man took the sack over and dumped it on the table which shook the badger into life so it scuffed on the table and rocked it. A can of beer went over to laughter as they held the table steady and then he punched the badger and it seemed to go still and there was a sense of immediate respect and dislike for him. It’s a big, heavy boar, he said. Then they tipped the badger into the pit.

But The Dig isn’t solely a bloodthirsty, vicious tale, however, because Jones carefully balances this aggressive narrative with a tender love story that shows us the farmer’s softer side. He’s a man who’s constantly holding his emotions in check, even though it’s clear he feels things deeply and his life has been marked by loss.

Beautiful prose

In my opinion, the real strength of the story is the prose style. It is immediate, stripped back, lyrical and, occasionally, hard-hitting, and often reminded me of the Irish writers I love so much. It’s something to do with the incisive way Jones has of getting to the heart of an emotion or a subject using a bare minimum of works in a rhythmic way — his sentences practically sing. And then, every so often, he crafts a sentence that also dances:

A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.

The entire book is also brimful of beautiful descriptions of nature and the weather — in fact, if I underlined all the ones I admired, I’d end up defacing every second paragraph:

It was brewing to rain again, the sky bruising up and coming in from the sea.

An intense read

The Dig is an intense and immersive reading experience — on so many different levels: in its use of language, its characterisation and its depiction of rural life and crime. It is genuinely shocking in places, but it’s also heart-rending. There were times when it made me feel sick, occasionally I wanted to cry, mostly I felt my heartbeat escalating in fear of what was about to happen next.

It is dark and thrilling, definitely not for those with a weak disposition, and left a marked impression on me.  I have no doubt that even though it was the first book I read this year, I already know it will be in my Top 10 for 2015. I’ve already gone out and bought Cynan Jones‘ entire back catalogue…

To see what other bloggers thought of this novel, please see the reviews at Savidge Reads, Farm Lane Books Blog and Asylum.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mary Mayfield for pointing me to this great interview with the author on her blog.

Author, Book review, England, Marjorie Wallace, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, true crime, UK, Vintage, Wales

‘The Silent Twins’ by Marjorie Wallace

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Silent-twins

Non-fiction – paperback; Vintage; 304 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I first remember reading about identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons when I was a teenager. They were featured in an article in Reader’s Digest magazine (my parents were subscribers), which explained that the girls did not communicate with the outside world because they had developed their own private language.

A complicated history

The Silent Twins, first published in 1986, updated in 1998 and reissued in 2008, explores June and Jennifer’s complicated history. It is written by an investigative journalist, Marjorie Wallace, who founded the mental health charity SANE on the back of her experiences writing articles on schizophrenia for The Times.

In fact, after years of incarceration — the sisters were sentenced to Broadmoor after going on a five-week crime spree when they were teenagers — both June and Jennifer were diagnosed as schizophrenic. Wallace, who befriended the girls as part of her research for this book, argues otherwise.

The label seems to fit awkwardly the profound and complex problems of their twinship. […] I have met many people with schizophrenia and have read many of their letters and writings. In the million or more words written by the twins I read in preparing this book, I have not yet found any sign of the fragmentation of thought so typical of this illness. Nor do the twins appear to suffer the more florid symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hearing voices. In any of my conversations with them I did not feel the fundamental disintegration of personality; or those moments of vacancy which can make communication so difficult. The twins are certainly not normal. They do suffer from feelings of paranoia — the people are watching them or reading their minds, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. But how much was that paranoia an extension of their own experience of reading each other’s mind and their jealous vigilance over each other?

Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you a bit about the twins when they were youngsters and what made them so unusual.

Identical twin girls

They were born in 1963 to a West Indian couple, where they were brought up on an RAF base in Wales (their father was a technician in the RAF). But from the age of three the girls rejected communication with everyone around them — they would only talk to each other, and even then it was in a soft but high-pitched voice in a private language no one else could understand.

Because of this, they lacked social skills and failed at school (they weren’t sent to a special school until they were 14, by which time it was too late). The older they got, the more private — and reclusive — they became. By the time they were 16, they’d dropped out of school, were living on benefits and rarely left the bedroom they shared with a younger sister. Most of their time was spent writing purple-prosed novels, which they would send off to be published by a vanity press.

But when editorial success eluded them they decided to seek their fame and fortune in other less legal ways: they went on a five-week crime spree involving petty thieving, breaking-and-entering, and arson. They were caught and sentenced for an unlimited period to Broadmoor, the only facility prepared to accept them.

Wallace charts the girls’ lives from birth until their release from Broadmoor in 1993.

Diaries reveal their secret lives

Throughout their teenage years and beyond, the girls kept incredibly detailed diaries to which Wallace had access. These show that they were intelligent and that they cared deeply for their parents and siblings, even though they were unable to show emotion and unwilling to communicate with them.

And it reveals how they made a childhood pact to only communicate with one another, often through the subtle use of body language or eye contact. The pact became so all-consuming they were never able to break out of it.

What emerges is a powerful study of two siblings caught in a peculiar bond in which they loved and hated each other in equal measure — when they were separated, which the psychiatrists would do as part of their “treatment”, they pined for each other to the point of illness, but thrust back together they would fight violently, tear their hair and scratch each other’s faces.

Truth is stranger than fiction

The book is written in an easy-to-read narrative style and there were times when I had to remind myself it was not fiction. Truth can, at times, be stranger than fiction, and no more so than the case of The Silent Twins. It’s a compelling and tragic tale.

You can find out more about June and Jennifer Gibbons via this Wikipedia entry — but be warned, it does contain plot spoilers.