Passing Time

A nicely eclectic list this half year, traversing the continents and the centuries. Our protagonists move between Nigeria and the US, from Nigeria and Trinidad to London, from Victorian Bath to Borneo, from Somalia to Cardiff. Eneas McNulty travels the world, and migrants from all over the world settle in Linda Grant’s Stranger City of London. We visit Saigon as it falls, mid-19th century Paris, Victorian London and a Swiss village at the beginning of the 20th century. And then there’s a dystopian vision of a future USA, set in 2025… Several authors were new to me, and I hope to read more from Claire Fuller, Philippe Claudel, Emma Stonex, Nadifa Mohamed, Aaron Philip Clark, Chibundu Onuzo and Viet Thanh Nguyen. In addition to those reviewed, a cluster of excellent new crime from authors I turn to regularly: Vaseem Khan’s The Lost Man of Bombay, Luke McCallin’s The Pale House, Russ Thomas’ Sleeping Dogs, Elly Griffiths’ short story collection The Man in Black, Cath Staincliffe’s Fire on the Fells and Jane Casey’s The Secret Room.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Dream Count

I’ve been waiting so long for this! And it was worth the wait. Adichie introduces us to four women, whose lives intersect in various ways, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou. She has said that ‘the point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it’ and that’s what she does here through these four lives, which move us but also challenge us. The Guardian’s reviewer said that it is ‘quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight’.

Kate Atkinson – Death at the Sign of the Rook

Jackson Brodie’s back, in a witty, sharp and very twisty mystery, that plays with/pays homage to the clichés and conventions of the genre, whilst doing it all supremely well so that we’re fully engaged throughout.

Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time

Brilliant, powerful account of three key points in the life of Shostakovich as he tries to live and create under Stalin. Each is rendered so vividly that we can’t take refuge in our own notions of what he ought or ought not to have done. The image of the man waiting outside a lift with his suitcase each night as he expects to be taken away is one that stays with me. But also the humiliation of giving the speech that has been written for him to an audience on a trip to the US, summed up in this passage: ‘There were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live’.

Sebastian Barry – The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

This is wonderful, and heartbreaking. Eneas is an exile, condemned to wander the world because of a judgement passed on him in his hometown of Sligo, which he knows will never let him go. It’s beautifully, lyrically written and whilst its ending is tragic it also conveys a kind of peace.

Frederic Beigbeder – Windows on the World

Two voices here, the first of a father who is with his sons in the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center when the planes hit, and second a writer – presumably Beigbeder himself – who is attempting to find a way to write about the attack but daunted by the impossibility of the project. I didn’t warm to either of them and there was quite a blokey, verging on misogynistic strain in both narratives which was off-putting. Did it work? I don’t know – there were certainly moments in the restaurant which hit pretty hard, and which – for good or ill – made one realise what it might have been like being there as the tower burned, both in terms of the physical effects and the emotional. But overall I was not convinced, and the musings of the author or his surrogate were so cynical and self-absorbed that they undercut the power of the other sections.

NoViolet Bulawayo – Glory

I struggled with the basic concept here. Perhaps I have an overly literal mind, but I couldn’t help but attempt to picture the various goats, zebras, horses, etc driving cars, wearing clothes, and so forth, and it didn’t make sense to me and trying to deal with that was a distraction from the plot and the characterisation. It was engaging and darkly funny, but I’m not convinced that the conceit really works, or what its purpose was.

Octavia Butler – The Parable of the Sower/The Parable of the Talents

Dystopian fiction, written in 1993 but set, rather unsettlingly, in 2025 – the threat here is from (a) climate change and (b) human beings, and it deals very effectively with racial and gender politics too. Compelling and fascinating, and the sequel doesn’t just take events further, it questions the account given in the first book, bringing in other, sometimes sceptical voices, which adds real depth.

Jacques Chessex – Le Vampire de Ropraz

Based, apparently, on a real case from 1903, and written in a very detached, pared down style (it reminded me a little of Heinrich Boll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, one of my favourite novels ever), which doesn’t spare the horror of the crimes or come to conclusions about guilt or innocence, but dwells rather on the response of the villagers and their eagerness to pin the crime on someone who fits their assumptions, regardless of actual evidence.

Aaron Philip Clark – Under Color of Law

Spike Lee is quoted as saying (I haven’t managed to track down the source or the context) that everything that happens in the US is about race. And this crime thriller – like those by Attica Locke, and the ‘Darktown’ trilogy from Thomas Mullen – makes that point powerfully. It’s a dark, tough story, beginning with the murder of a young black police recruit, and very well told.

Philippe Claudel – Le Rapport de Brodeck

We are somewhere in Europe, where people speak a language that sounds Germanic but isn’t quite German, after a war that must be WW2, and something has happened, a violent incident involving a stranger in a village miles from anywhere, which brings to the surface trauma, prejudice, fear and guilt from the past. Brodeck has been tasked with writing a report of the ‘incident’, a project which he knows will threaten his own place in the village. Absolutely gripping.

Charles Dickens – The Chimes/The Cricket on the Hearth/The Battle of Life

I re-read A Christmas Carol first, and it was just as wonderful as I had remembered. These lesser-known Christmas stories are a bit harder going, with an over-reliance on melodramatic plot devices and a fair dollop of Dickensian sentimentality and piety.

Janice Elliott – Secret Places

For absolutely no good reason, Janice Elliott is pretty much forgotten and her books out of print. Someone should fix that. I read several of her novels back in the 80s and this one re-appeared from years of exile in the attic and demanded to be re-read. It is subtly and beautifully written, set in a girls’ school during WW2, and concerning the arrival of a German refugee, who generates both fascination and suspicion. I have only just discovered that there is a film of this, which I’d love to see, but I suspect is just as mired in obscurity as Elliott’s books.

Buchi Emecheta – Second Class Citizen

Semi-autobiographical account of an Igbo girl’s struggle to get a proper education in Nigeria, and then to make a life for herself in Britain, facing not only racism but sexism and the dead weight of a feckless husband. Adah has dreams that she holds on to tenaciously in spite of everything, and whilst there is much to fuel anger in the narrative, there’s also hope (not least in the subsequent success of Emecheta herself).

Claire Fuller – Unsettled Ground

It starts with a death, the death of a mother, leaving her children as orphans. These orphans are twins, and they’re 51, but they’ve lived in seclusion from the world, and they have to deal not only with this loss, but with the threat of homelessness, and with the necessity of now dealing with the world that they’d largely shut out all their lives. It’s beautifully done, and makes us see contemporary life through their eyes, the impossibility of navigating a world where everything is complex and everything requires connection. Ultimately, as the Guardian’s reviewer says, ‘Jeanie’s refusal to relinquish her tenuous hold on all the things she loves carries the reader with her on a frightening and uncomfortable journey to the truth, and the possibility of starting again’.

 Robert Galbraith – A Running Grave

An improvement on Ink Black Heart, with a compelling plot. The main problem with this one (and I’m not having a go because it’s JKR, honestly, but as one of the most successful writers of our time, she shouldn’t be immune from criticism either) is her penchant for rendering people’s accents in the dialogue. This is off-putting and largely unnecessary, and the effort of trying to ‘hear’ that person’s voice in Rowling’s rendition of their accent is a massive distraction. Apart from that, it’s a decent crime novel.

Linda Grant – A Stranger Town

Very me, this one. A polyphonic novel of a labyrinthine city. Dickensian, from its opening scene as a corpse is dragged from the river. It plays with fantasy at points, it alludes to Brexit as the source of anxiety about the future for a city of migrants. The Guardian says: ‘the real achievement of A Stranger City is the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the London it portrays. And despite its contemporary relevance, the novel avoids becoming a “state of the nation” tract – it’s far too emotionally intelligent for that. It’s as much a novel of feelings as ideas, and this is what makes it a compelling read. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other. At a time when dangerously inert notions of national identity are on the rise once more, Grant reminds us that humanity is a migrant species: we are all strangers.’

Mick Herron – The Secret Hours

We’re in the world of Slow Horses, but kind of adjacent to the series – the book stands alone, but if you know, you’ll recognise a number of key players, seen as if from a different angle. It’s very cleverly done, very funny, and dark too.

Susan Hill – In the Springtime of the Year

I remember reading this, probably in my early 20s, and that my Mum read it too, and both of us loved it. I recalled one scene in particular, a young woman hanging out washing who suddenly feels appalling desolation and pain and knows that something has happened to her husband. Reading it now, I’m even more moved by the totally convincing depiction of sudden widowhood but also how the process of grief is tied up with the changes in the seasons and the rhythms of ongoing life.

Stephen King – Never Flinch

This doesn’t exactly break new ground for King but never mind about that, it’s King on form. This one features Holly Gibney, who we first met in the Mr Mercedes trilogy and subsequent novels that sometimes venture into the supernatural (or, one might say, sometimes the supernatural lurks just out of view, or whispers just out of earshot), sometimes not. But as with all of those recent novels, they’re brilliantly done, they make you care and make you keep turning the pages, and it’s good to see that he’s still on top of his game.

Ian McEwan – Lessons

I have reservations. First of all, the somewhat clichéd plot trope of a schoolboy being seduced by a beautiful mature woman doesn’t quite convince, even though the damage (to both parties) is explored sensitively and intelligently. Secondly, and I fear this is another example of some writers being too big to copy-edit, McEwan gives his teenage protagonist, in 1962, cultural reference points that were at least a year premature. I checked some of the details quickly on Google and Wikipedia – surely, he could have done that, or his publisher could have done that? I know I get perhaps disproportionately annoyed about such things but when I read anachronistic or otherwise inaccurate stuff like this it takes me instantly right out of the narrative. It seems lazy, and arrogant. In this instance, the timing was clearly very significant, because it is the tension around the Cuban missile crisis that informs some of the key events. So why not make sure that your cultural reference points make as much sense as the political ones? Apart from that I quite enjoyed it. He can write, obviously, but it isn’t the first time I’ve felt rather cross whilst reading McEwan, for similar reasons.

Nadifa Mohamed – The Fortune Men

This is based on the real case of a Somali man wrongly arrested for murder, and ultimately hanged, having failed to get anyone to really listen to him – and having failed to understand how the system would work and to make it work for him. Mohamed not only inhabits the central character, Mahmood Mattan, but the family of the murder victim too. She brings to life the multiethnic community of Tiger Bay in the early 1950s, and the inflexible legal system that refuses to listen to or see the injustice it is perpetrating. Interestingly, I watched an excellent dramatisation of the Ruth Ellis case (see my screen blog) – not a miscarriage of justice in the same way, since she unquestionably did it, but another illustration of how once the legal system has decided, it cannot allow itself to admit that a mistake is being made. And a reminder, should we need it, of how mistakes and miscarriages are unundoable when a sentence of death is carried out.  

Abir Mukherjee – Hunted

We’re a long way from the Raj (the setting for Mukherjee’s Wyndham & Banerjee crime series) in this stand-alone thriller – it’s a gripping read, starting with a terrorist attack on a shopping mall, and following the search for the perpetrators by the FBI and other agencies, and (for different reasons) by the parents of two of those implicated. Nothing is as it at first seems, and things get very complicated, but Mukherjee never loses control of his story, and it has both tension and heart.

Thomas Mullen – The Rumor Game

Set in 1942 in Boston, Mass., where a newspaper writer specialising in debunking rumours and an FBI agent find themselves working together against the activities of anti-semitic organisation the Christian League (fictional but based on real organisations of that ilk at the time). Both protagonists are outsiders, the reporter because she’s Jewish and the FBI man because he’s a Catholic. Mullen’s Darktown trilogy, about black cops in Atlanta in the late ‘40s/early ‘50s conveys brilliantly the sense of always being hyperalert that comes from being the representative of a minority within an organisation and within the wider community, and The Rumor Game is just as skilful and compelling.

Irene Nemirovsky – Le Maitre des Ames

Nemirovsky’s own story (a Russian Jewish emigrée to France, arrested, deported and murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis) and the story of her last, unfinished book, Suite Francaise, not published until 2004, tend to overshadow her earlier, very successful publications. This one was published in 1939, before the Nazi Occupation. Her protagonist is an immigrant from Eastern Europe, struggling to make ends meet as a doctor, but with a burning conviction that he can be successful, at whatever cost. He’s not exactly a sympathetic character but Nemirovsky makes him comprehensible, pitiable at times, and his situation is vividly conveyed. She’s a sharp, some say cruel, writer – some of the peripheral characters in Suite Francaise too are almost monstrous, though always depicted with humour.

Viet Thanh Nguyen – The Sympathiser

The fall of Saigon and the Vietnamese diaspora through the eyes of a Viet Cong agent (this isn’t a spoiler, he tells us right at the start that he’s a spy/spook, a man with two faces). This is brutal, but brilliant, and often very funny. The description of the fall of Saigon and the desperate attempt to get out as bombs fall on the runway is stunningly powerful, and thereafter the narrative takes us to unexpected places – and an unexpected resolution.

Chibundu Onuzo – Sankofa

Onuzo’s protagonist is a middle-aged woman, recently separated from her husband, and having lost her mother. She’s the daughter of a white mother and Bamanian father (Bamana being a fictional West African country), and the questions about her identity with which she has wrestled all her life have suddenly become more urgent. This leads her on a quest for her father, whose name she now knows, through diaries she finds amongst her mother’s things. Her father is a fascinating character, full of contradictions, all of which Anna has to navigate. Excellent.

 Ann Patchett – Run

Two family groups heading out to a public lecture, and for reasons we don’t at first realise, on a collision course with each other. The reasons emerge fairly quickly but the outworking of this connection is what drives the narrative. It’s subtly done, beautifully written, and as always with Patchett, there’s warmth and hope.

Donal Ryan – The Queen of Dirt Island

A family saga, focusing on female resilience across four generations. It’s full of opposites, as the Guardian review says: compassion and cruelty, fragility and strength, joy and despair. The writing is musical, but never shies away from brutality either. Deeply moving and memorable.

Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners

This 1956 novel is gloriously polyphonic, musical, using the rhythms of Caribbean speech to portray the lives of Windrush generation immigrants as they navigate life in London, trying to reconcile their hopes and dreams to its drab and often hostile reality. It’s frequently funny, but very touching as well. A delight.

Georges Simenon – Le Passage de la ligne

An odd book. I think I’d picked it up second-hand years ago, assuming it would be a Maigret, and finally got around to reading it, having realised it wasn’t. The protagonist is hard to identify with, because he doesn’t really engage with other people except in a transactional sense – he shows no signs of empathy or even sympathy, and some of his behaviour is not only morally dubious but repellent. I am still not sure what it was all about – it reads like a confession, a statement of his life, or even a suicide note?

Francis Spufford – Red Plenty

Interesting to read this after Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, because it took me back to the paranoia and the oppressive party of Stalinist Russia (and beyond). Spufford focuses on the economics of the regime, in an account which sometimes reads like a novel, sometimes like non-fiction, with a LOT of exposition. The latter is sometimes a slog, but he writes it well, and it is often both enlightening and darkly funny. I would also recommend not reading it as an e-book – there is a very helpful cast list at the front of the book, but referring back to it whilst reading on Kindle was rather a faff.

Emma Stonex – The Lamplighters

Inspired by the true story of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900, this gothic narrative moves between the lead-up to the disappearance (in 1972), the investigations, and the lives of the women left behind. It’s atmospheric and mysterious, and it leaves us room to take or leave supernatural explanations, because really what it is about is the people, the traumas of their lives, the effects of isolation.

Rose Tremain – Islands of Mercy

Not my favourite Tremain, but she’s far too good a writer for there not to be much to enjoy here. Primarily, the interweaving lives of the female characters, Jane, tall and contrary, a gifted nurse, Clorinda who has made her way from Dublin to Bath to set up a tea room, Emmeline, Jane’s artist aunt and mentor, and Julietta, a married woman with a penchant for female lovers. The men in the story are less satisfactory and the part of the narrative set in colonial Borneo doesn’t entirely convince.

Anne Tyler – Three Days in June

Wonderful. A slightly awkward, abrasive protagonist, dealing with family dynamics at her daughter’s wedding (the three days are the eve of the wedding, the wedding itself and the morning after). It’s very funny, and very touching. I should note that whilst I read it only a few weeks before my own daughter’s wedding, my situation and my feelings about it all bear no relation to Gail’s, however much I liked her.

Chris Whitaker – All the Colors of the Dark

Lord, this is intense. The writing is so dense and so evocative at the same time, the characters blaze off the page, the plot is labyrinthine and full of traps for the unwary reader who thinks they can see where things are going. Is that plot entirely plausible – well, no, but it works, nonetheless, and it holds the reader till the final page, after which that reader might need a bit of a lie down. Glorious.

Emile Zola – Au Bonheur des Dames

My first Zola for many years. He was where I began reading French novels for fun, alongside my A level texts, which were a lot less thrilling than Germinal or La Bête humaine (sorry, Maupassant, Balzac and Moliere). The setting here is a huge Parisian department store, whose growth is threatening the small businesses in the area, who can’t compete. A young orphan, with younger brothers in tow, arrives at the home of her uncle, hoping to find work in retail, and is entranced by Au Bonheur des Dames, despite her uncle’s hostility to it.

Non-Fiction

Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies

I know about the 70s, obviously. They were the years I became first a teenager and then an adult. In 1970 I was 13 and when the decade ended, I was a graduate, in employment, a married woman and a homeowner. And throughout these formative personal times I was always aware of the news, brought up to read the Guardian and watch the BBC’s bulletins every evening, habits I continued long after leaving home. But it’s refreshing to read a history of this period, which fills in the bits I’d forgotten or never knew and looks back with perspective and insight on what I can only remember in terms of how it was presented at the time, or how it impacted on my own life. Beckett writes engagingly and draws on interviews with those amongst the key players who were still living (it was written in 2009).

Anthony Beevor – Arnhem

I’ve read most of Beevor’s WW2 histories – he manages to make the military manoeuvres comprehensible to me and fleshes out the personalities and personal conflicts. This one commended itself to me as I’d just re-watched A Bridge Too Far and was fascinated by the unusual spectacle of an all-star WW2 film depicting what was unarguably a multi-faceted cock up of tragic proportions.  

Viola Davis – Finding Me

I hadn’t realised quite how tough a childhood Davis had. She writes about it in a very direct and emotionally open way (did she have a ghost writer? It didn’t feel like it). There’s a bit too much God-stuff for me, but one cannot come away from the book without a massive admiration for Davis the woman as well as Davis the actor.

Jim Down – Life Support: Diary of an ICU Doctor on the Frontline of the Covid Crisis

I read this around the fifth anniversary of lockdown and it is powerfully written, angry and heartbroken. As an intensive care doctor, Down really was on the frontline and it’s essential reading as the memories – at least for those of us who were far from the frontline – begin to fade.

John Elledge – A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on our Maps

Hugely entertaining and enlightening account of various national borders (past and present), how they came about, how they have changed, how they have been – and are – bloodily fought over.

Goran Rosenberg – A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

There is a whole literature of the Holocaust that comes from the children of survivors. I’m thinking particularly of Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge and Lost in Translation, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead, Anne Karpf’s The War After. This generation had to deal both with their parents’ inability to tell them about their experiences, and with the very evident trauma that their parents lived with every day, and which often distorted family relationships and everyday life. Rosenberg grew up in Sweden, knowing very little of his father’s road to Auschwitz, only of the road he took from it, and has reconstructed that first road, as far as possible, to try to understand the tragedy that was waiting at the end of the second. Powerful and very moving.

Rebecca Solnit – Recollections of my Non-Existence

A memoir of how this remarkable and vital writer found a voice, found a way to exist and be both visible and audible, and to have an impact. It’s tough, heartbreaking, to read of how the relentlessness of violence against women wears down and intimidates even those who have not been directly victims, but Solnit always offers hope, even if it’s hope in the dark.

John Steinbeck – Travels with Charley

Steinbeck’s tremendously engaging account of his road trip in 1960, accompanies by his dog, Charley. It’s a journey of almost 10,000 miles, starting and finishing in New York, and travelling through Maine, the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, and the Deep South. It’s a most intriguing glimpse of America and Americans, which becomes most disquieting, inevitably, when he reaches the deep South and encounters the hatred and fear that prevailed in those segregated towns – he’s frank about his discomfort and uncertainty about how to deal not only with the racism but how to talk to the black Americans he meets without putting both them and himself at risk of violence. It’s interesting to note, in contrast to his awareness of the evils of segregation, that native Americans are encountered only as a brief historical footnote and whilst this reflects the brutal reality Steinbeck doesn’t indicate that he has given the implications of this any particular thought. But it’s a great read, funny, perceptive and sharp.

Elijah Wald – Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

This is the primary source for A Complete Unknown. Whilst the film tinkers a bit, inevitably, with chronologies ‘for dramatic purposes’, it does justice to the protagonists. But the book takes a much deeper dive into the folk scene, as represented primarily by Pete Seeger, and explains why Dylan’s ‘betrayal’ was so explosive. Entertainingly written and fascinating.