Tag: fathers and daughters

Author, Book review, Claire Fuller, Fiction, Fig Tree, Germany, literary fiction, London, Publisher, Setting

‘Our Endless Numbered Days’ by Claire Fuller

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Our-endless-numbered-days

Fiction – hardcover; Fig Tree; 304 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The world has ended. Everyone is dead — except for two people: eight-year-old Peggy and her dad, James, a survivalist, who has been preparing for this exact situation for years.

That’s the scenario that first-time novelist Claire Fuller presents in Our Endless Numbered Days — but there’s a twist: Peggy’s dad, who is a “North London Retreater”, has made up the bit about the world having ended. It’s simply a ruse to prevent Peggy asking questions after he’s whisked her away from their London home to live in die Hütte, a wooden cabin in a remote forest somewhere on the Continent.

But why would her father do that? Why has he kidnapped her and told her that her mother is dead? And how will the pair cope living off the grid?

Nine years in the forest

When the book opens it is 1985, and 17-year-old Peggy has returned to her childhood home in Highgate, London (their home backs onto the famous cemetery), after having spent nine years living with her father in the forest.

Her story is narrated flashback style in a naive, intimate and compelling voice. It begins with that long hot summer of 1976 in which her father taught her hardcore survivalist skills — how to trap, skin and cook squirrels, which mushrooms were safe to pick, and how to light a fire without matches — while her German mother, a celebrated concert pianist, went away on tour.

When I should have been in school, the garden became our home, and the cemetery our garden. Occasionally I thought about my best friend Becky and what she might be doing in class, but not often. We sometimes went into the house to ‘gather provisions’ and on a Wednesday evening to watch Survivors on the telly. We didn’t bother to wash or change our clothes. The only rule we followed was to brush our teeth every morning and evening using water we brought to the camp in a bucket.

These skills become vital when her father takes her “on holiday” and then announces that an apocalyptic event has meant everyone else in the world, including her mother, has died.

Initially, it’s somewhat of an exciting adventure for Peggy as they set up their new home, explore the woods around them and settle into a new routine, all of which is beautifully described in Fuller’s evocative prose.

But it soon becomes clear that her father is obsessive — the silent piano he carefully crafts and then teaches her to play is but one example — and a creeping unease sets in. Existence is fraught, especially in winter when the snow arrives and food is in short supply, and a dark claustrophobia descends on die Hütte.

As the years progress, Peggy’s unquestioning acceptance of her father’s authority and knowledge is called into question, particularly when she believes that there’s another man living in the forest near them. It doesn’t help that James’ seems to be descending into a sort of madness, putting both their lives at risk…

A grown-up fairytale

I won’t be the first reader to compare Our Endless Numbered Days with a grown-up fairytale — think Little Red Riding Hood meets Bluebeard, or perhaps Goldilocks crossed with Hansel and Gretel — but it’s also reminiscent of those dystopian stories I read as a teenager in the 1980s when nuclear war was a very real threat (I’m specifically thinking of Robert C. O’Brien’s Z is for Zachariah) and everyone was intent on making sure they could survive an apocalypse.  It also reminded me of David Vann‘s terrifying wilderness adventures in which parent-child relationships are tested to the limit by psychological threats rather than physical ones.

But that’s not to say this isn’t an original story, because it’s quite unlike any exploration of father-daughter relationships I’ve read. It’s also an interesting analysis of a marriage between a highly strung musician (no pun intended) and the much younger foreigner she fell in love with: their compatibility doesn’t seem to extend outside of the bedroom, with devastating consequences in the long run.

The structure of the book — the flashbacks and the slow drip feed of information — make it an exceptionally tense read. Apart from a small lull in the middle, I kept furiously turning the pages, trying to work out what happened next, desperate to know how Peggy escaped the forest and returned to London. It’s not a thriller as such, but it brims with suspense and you know it’s building towards an uneasy climax.

Indeed, the revelations that unfold near the end are unexpected and shocking, making this one of the most astonishing — and memorable — debuts I’ve read in a long time. I immediately turned back to the start to see if I could spot the clues…

Lots of other bloggers have reviewed this book, including A Life in Books, Consumed by Ink, Word by Word and The Writes of Woman (with an author Q&A). Feel free to leave a link in the comments if I have missed yours.

Note, the author was kind enough to take part in Triple Choice Tuesday last month: you can see her choices here.

Amity Gaige, Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Schroder’ by Amity Gaige

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Schroder

Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 269 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Eric Schroder has told lies his entire life. And then, aged 40, they catch up with him in a spectacular way and he’s jailed for kidnapping his six-year-old daughter, Meadow. The book is written in the form of a letter to his estranged wife — an uptight but beautiful Catholic, if you believe his version of events — explaining how things turned out the way they did. It’s an exhilarating, adventure-filled account.

The strength of Amity Gaige’s Schroder lies in the voice. Eric is not a person we should like and yet it’s hard not to feel for him. He’s tender, emotional and full of love for his daughter, but he’s also a poor decision maker and slightly deluded. He can’t ever seem to see that his actions will have disastrous consequences for himself and others.

We learn pretty early on that Schroder has difficulties with the truth. Indeed, his whole life has been a lie. From a young age he reinvented himself as an all-American boy, even though he was an immigrant who fled East Germany with his father under mysterious circumstances (we never truly find out what happened to his mother, for instance). He gives himself a new surname — Kennedy — and tells everyone he grew up in affluent Cape Cod. Many assume he is related to JFK, and he never disabuses them of the notion.

“I have told stories, in fact, that were elaborate — you could say — fictions, and although these fictions were not meant to defraud or injure, I always knew — I knew in fact — that they would. Which is an admission that I — even now — can’t put straight to you, because I think it might be possible — it’s possible that if I made it explicit, if I took the blame, I would be singled out, struck down, and die.”

Not even his wife — the woman of his dreams — ever finds out the truth until he spills the beans in this grand narrative that spans his American childhood (in a seedy suburb of Boston), his marriage, his success as a realtor (prior to the global financial crisis of 2008), the birth of his only child, his separation and then the “accidental” kidnap.

Much of the book focuses on the kidnap (which he describes as nothing more than “over staying my access visit”). This involves a rather exciting road trip in a “borrowed” Mini Cooper across three states in which the pair have a grand old time eating ice-cream, swimming and staying in “hidden” locations. And while it does, at times, seem reminiscent of Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb (in which a man kidnaps a young girl for nefarious purposes), the narrative never strays into creepy territory: Schroder’s intentions are well meaning, an act of desperation, if you will, to save a love that he feels is being threatened.

Amity Gaige’s Schroder is a bold, smart novel. Often exhilarating, it also has a quietly devastating effect on the reader. It’s a wonderful, if somewhat offbeat, exploration of father-daughter relationships, of our powerful need for acceptance and of the desperate acts we carry out when life has gone awry. But be warned: if you pick it up, make sure your schedule is clear, because it’s the kind of book that is rather difficult to put down once you start.

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Grove Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Richard Flanagan, Setting

‘The Sound of One Hand Clapping’ by Richard Flanagan

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Soundof

Fiction – paperback; Grove Press; 425 pages; 1997.

I seem to be on a roll with Australian books. This one, my third in a matter of weeks, is by Richard Flanagan, who first came to international prominence with Gould’s Book of Fish, which I read several years ago and loved very much. The book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

Prior to this Flanagan had written two other novels: Death of a River Guide, in 1994, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in 1997. Like Gould’s Book of Fish, both are set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, where the author resides.

At its most basic level The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the strained relationship between a father and daughter, but it is far more complicated than that, touching on a wide range of issues including poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and wartime atrocities, all set within the social and historical context of Australia’s immigrant past.

This is a book that possesses a strangely heady mix of bleakness and despair, tempered by moments of clarity and joy. Initially I wrestled with the writing style, because Flanagan is prone to overly-long sentences that sometimes so twist and bend out of shape you feel like you’re riding a rollercoaster:

In that long Autumn of 1959, when elsewhere the world was sensing change so big and hard in its coming that it was like the trembling of the earth announcing the arrival of a yet to be seen locomotive, in that month of April in the city of Hobart, nothing much looked like it could ever change around a town that had grown used to never being anything but the arse end of everything: mean, hard and dirty, where civic ambition meant buying up old colonial buildings and bulldozing them quick and covering the dust promptly with asphalt for cars most people were yet to own, where town pride meant tossing any unlucky ferro found lying in the park into the can, and where a sense of community equated with calling anybody with skin darker than fair a boong bastard unless he worse snappy clothes in which case he was a filthy wog bastard — in that month of April when the cold slowly began its winter’s journey, spreading its way down over weeks from the mountain’s steel-blue flanks, on an early Saturday morning, an FJ was wending its way through the scummy back streets of north Hobart to the home of Umberto Picotti.

And it can be hard to get a foothold on the essence of the story when the narrative is non-linear, shunting backwards and forwards in time, and told from two different perspectives.

But in many ways this is what makes The Sound of One Hand Clapping such a wonderfully rich and beguiling read. Hypnotic and unbearably sad in places, it’s a very human tale about two people locked together by a shared past who struggle to rise above the pain of their circumstances.

The story begins in 1954 when Slovenian couple Bojan and Maria Buloh, both scarred by the horrors of the Second World War, immigrate to Australia. Bojan, along with hundreds of other European immigrants, finds work as a labourer on a construction project to build a massive hydroelectric dam in the rugged Tasmanian highlands. Here the weather is harsh and living conditions primitive. One stormy evening Maria packs her bags and leaves her husband and three-year-old daughter Sonja behind. She is never seen alive again.

What enfolds over the next 35 years is essentially the nub of this compelling novel. Bojan drowns his grief in drink and struggles to make a decent life for his daughter. Sonja, unbearably miserable, eventually flees to the mainland. It is only when she is about to become a mother herself that she decides to re-establish contact, returning to Tasmania to make amends with her now elderly father. Her life’s story is then told in a series of flashbacks intercut with chapters from Bojan’s point of view.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a book about new beginnings that shatters the myth of Australia as the “lucky country”. It does not shy away from presenting white Australians as uncouth, uncultured and racist at a period in the country’s history at which immigration was running at an all-time high. For that reason alone, it is a refreshing — and challenging — read.

This critically acclaimed novel won the 1998 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Best Novel, the 1999 ABA Australian Book of the Year Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. It was made into a film directed by Richard Flanagan in 1998.