More books I have read

'Tokyo Ueno Station' by Yu Miri

On life: “There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Tokyo Ueno Station is anchored in Ueno Park in Tokyo. The narrator appears to be dead, lingering in the park where he previously lived in an encampment of homeless people. It is strongly implied, though not actually made explicit, that he ended his own life in front of a train.

The narrator, Kazu, was the eldest of eight children from Fukushima prefecture. He got no education beyond elementary school as he had to go to work to help provide for his younger siblings. He came to Tokyo in 1963, aged 30, to work on the construction of the stadium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, leaving his wife and two small children back in their home village, and subsequently spent long periods away from his family, only going home twice a year. Kazu’s son Kōichi dies aged 21 in his flat in Tokyo, of unspecified causes. Aged 60, Kazu retires from work and returns home, but his wife dies a few years later. In due course Kazu’s granddaughter moves in with him to take care of him but one day, aged 67, he leaves her a note and returns to Tokyo, where he starts living in Ueno Park, one of several hundred homeless people there.

The novel paints a vivid and sympathetic picture of homelessness. The homeless community in Ueno Park suffer repeated short-notice evictions – e.g. when the Emperor is due to drive past to visit one of the museums nearby – and have to dismantle their huts and leave the park, before returning to the park once the ban is lifted and having to reassemble everything. Evictions from Ueno Park evidently became more common when the Tokyo city government was bidding for the 2020 Olympics.

Why does Kazu leave home and go back to Tokyo? The notion of him feeling a burden to his granddaughter didn’t seem quite sufficient to make someone voluntarily choose homelessness. It’s probably more that he only knows hard work, living in basic quarters, and he has never been used to living a settled life in an ordinary home. “I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to.”

Tokyo Ueno Station was published in 2019. The novel includes a longish Author’s Afterword that  provides some interesting context. Yu Miri is one of Japan’s “resident Koreans”, born and raised in Japan but with South Korean citizenship. This ethnic Korean community intermittently experiences hostility from the Japanese and she writes of a feeling of having outsider status in Japan, something that she says has given her empathy with those such as Kazu who, for other reasons, exist on the margins of Japanese society. She writes of the phenomenon of poor young men like Kazu leaving their villages to seek employment as labourers, doing back-breaking work only to end up, when they are too old for labouring work, homeless in Tokyo and wandering the streets.

One reviewer quoted sums up Tokyo Ueno Station as "a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair", which seems a reasonable description. It's very good though.

Footnote: Kazu’s family are practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism, something I had not heard of. There’s a remarkably tedious seven pages or so (in an otherwise non-tedious novel) devoted to the traditions of the sect and the names of temples and their founders.

'DallerGut Dream Department Store' by Miye Lee

The customers of the DallerGut Dream Department Store are asleep. Once people are asleep, they can go to the store to choose a dream, for which they “pay” in emotions afterwards. These emotions seem to be stored in the form of colourful bottled liquids, which are occasionally then drunk. No, I didn’t really get that bit either.

Penny’s hometown manufactures sleep products. Penny is a new employee at the DDDS – working there is coveted, so she is very pleased to have landed the job. Each floor of the department store sells a different type of dream. Given the choice of which floor of the store she wants to work on, Penny chooses the front desk, where she assists the experienced Weather. Behind the front desk is an Eyelid Scale, which predicts the visiting hours of regular customers. Once the eyelids stay closed, the store knows the customer will arrive soon.

There are a number of “dreammakers” who create the dreams sold in the store. Dreams from the ‘Big Five’ dreammakers are highly sought-after and expensive. Dreams are advertised before their release. Customers open the dreams to dream them. Dream payments are made with the customer’s post-dream emotion. The Dream Pay Systems software connects the customers’ dream payments to the safe.

I suppose it’s all meant as feel-good escapism. I don’t mind a bit of that, but I did think this was fairly mediocre. Discussing this book at Book Group, Claire admitted that she’d chosen it because she liked the colourful cover. Ali commented that the book read as though it had been written by AI, which was a tad harsh but I did see what she meant. Ruth kept drawing unfavourable comparisons with Roald Dahl, which I found a little odd but I think she had seen some loose similarities with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I hadn’t particularly, but I suppose maybe the sparkly multicoloured fantastical element. I don't get the sense that DDDS was written as a children’s book though.

I found the rendering into English of some of the dreammakers’ names irritatingly childish (Wawa Sleepland; Yasnoozz Otra; Babynap Rockabye) but maybe there are some cultural differences here – presumably the translator must have tried to create English equivalents in the same spirit as the Korean originals.

DallerGut Dream Department Store was first published in 2020, and in English in 2023, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee.

'Jennings and Darbishire' by Anthony Buckeridge

Mum’s friend Clemency recently offloaded a couple of tatty copies of books in the ‘Jennings’ series, and Mum passed on one each to Dave and me. This is a 1956 edition, with presumably the original cover, but mainly still intact.

The ‘Jennings’ series relates the doings of Jennings, his best friend Darbishire and their classmates in Form Three at Linbury Court Preparatory School, somewhere on the Sussex coast. Dave had a number of books in the series when we were kids, most of which I think I read as well as I always found them funny, and still do. Most of the ones Dave had were from the 1970s Collins reprint, with front cover photographs. The Wikipedia entry on the ‘Jennings’ series states that there were 24 novels in total.

The events of Jennings and Darbishire kick off on Jennings’ birthday, when he receives two presents that trigger the action of the rest of the book: a camera from his father and an Ideal Junior Printing Outfit from his Aunt Angela. Armed with these two things, Jennings decides to start a regular publication, the Form Three Times. Their attempts to generate material for the publication lead to various unfortunate events, or ‘bishes’ as the boys would say. A typical story arc: a misunderstanding with some French fishermen they are hoping to photograph leads to them having to smuggle raw fish back into school, which Jennings attempts to fry for breakfast in the school dark room, setting fire to a developing dish in the process. Caught by Mr Wilkins, Jennings attempts to hide the parcel of fish by stuffing it up the chimney in Mr Wilkins’ study, leading to convoluted attempts to get it out again before the master decides to light a fire.

Jennings and Darbishire was first published in 1954 and was - according to the Wikipedia entry - the fourth novel in the series.

Some more books I have read recently

‘Black Sun’ by Rebecca Roanhorse

A fantasy novel, set in a region known as the Meridian. There are three strands of story, all leading up to the Tovan day of ‘convergence’, a coinciding of the winter solstice with a solar eclipse.

Strand 1: in the Obregi Mountains

The story opens on a scene between a twelve-year-old boy, Serapio, and his mother Saaya. After making him drink some poison to serve as a painkiller, Serapio’s mother carves an image of a crow on him, sews his eyes shut and then jumps to her death. So far, so normal. We later revisit Serapio a few times, as he grows up in more-or-less isolation with crows as his constant companions, aside from a series of “tutors” he is sent, who teach him various skills (before he kills them). To compensate for being blind, Serapio has a supply of a drug (“star pollen”) which enables him to throw his mind into a nearby crow and see things via the crow's eyes (“farseeing”). We learn that Serapio’s mother and some loony associates have used Serapio as a vessel for the crow god, to exact vengeance for the Tovan Watchers’ (we’ll get to them) past wrongs. Serapio’s destiny is to be the “Odo Sedoh”, the Crow God reborn.

Strand 2: in the city of Cuecola, and afterwards on the Crescent Sea

We meet Xiala, a sea captain who is in jail after a night of heavy drinking. Xiala is Teek, but has been driven out of her Teek homeland. Xiala is tasked by a Lord Balam with ferrying a human cargo across the Crescent Sea to Tova in time for Convergence. The human cargo turns out to be Serapio, who needs to be transported to Tova for a confrontation with the Sun Priest (see below) on the Day of Convergence. The Teek, seemingly an all-female race, have some sort of special affinity with the sea: Xiala can control the sea with her Song, and swimming below a certain depth to try to rescue a member of her crew triggers her to briefly change into a mermaid, to the consternation of the crew, who lock her up and plot to kill her. Thankfully Serapio’s on hand and gets his crows to gorily slaughter them all. Continuing the remainder of their journey together, Xiala and Serapio become fond of one another.

Strand 3: in the holy city of Tova

In Tova’s celestial tower dwells the Priesthood of Watchers. Tova is a strictly hierarchical society, divided between the four Sky Made clans (the nobs) and the Dry Earth folks (the peasants). Within the Watchers, there are four priestly societies. The current Sun Priest – i.e. head – is Naranpa. The previous Sun Priest named Naranpa as his successor, but her humble Dry Earth origins mean that she was a controversial choice; to add to that, Naranpa has made some reforms that are unpopular with traditionalists. The Sky Made clans hold civil power in Tova and the priesthood is facing a challenge to stay on top. Additionally, Naranpa is fighting a direct challenge to her authority by Abah, one of the other priests. There are also ongoing rumblings of discontent in the district of Odo, the home of clan Carrion Crow. Clan Carrion Crow were subjected a while back to a brutal killing rampage – the “Night of Knives” – ordered by a former Sun Priest, to deal with emerging heresy and worship of the Carrion Crow’s old god. A cult – the Odohaa – has grown up centred around the prospect of the Crow God returning.

It took me a few chapters to engage with this – probably standard with fantasy novels where the reader not only has the cast of characters but also whole slews of made-up city and country names to deal with, plus whatever else the author throws in. However, once into it I did enjoy it. The ending left more loose ends than I’d been expecting and had the distinct air of being set up for a sequel – at which point I discovered that Black Sun is, in fact, the first of a trilogy. I may be sucked in to reading the next one, which apparently is called Fevered Star.

Even allowing for its being the first in a trilogy, there were some frustrating things left unresolved at the end, a few too many for fairness given that some readers would be intending to read Black Sun as a one-off. Examples: we never discover who murdered the Carrion Crow “matron” Yatliza or who made the first assassination attempt on Naranpa’s life, beyond its being implied that it was not, in fact, anyone from the Carrion Crow clan. Also, even though Serapio was supposed to have died in the course of exacting his revenge, he seems not to have done. As Serapio is a bit of a disaster area, albeit through not much fault of his own, it struck me it would be better if he had done.

Black Sun was published in 2020. The Wikipedia entry on Rebecca Roanhorse currently has a lot of detail around the reception of her first novel Trail of Lightning, as well as information on Roanhorse's background.

The quote on the front cover from a Ken Liu ‘Roanhorse is the epic voice of our continent and time” fits in well with the tradition of fulsomely OTT cover quotes.

‘Cover Her Face’ by P D James

PD James' first detective novel, introducing the recurring character of Adam Dalgleish.

The story is set in and around an English country house, Martingale, in the village of Chadfleet. Martingale is the home of the Maxie family: Simon, a bedridden invalid (it’s not really clear what’s wrong with him); his wife Eleanor; their grown-up children Stephen, a “rising young surgeon” at a London hospital and Deborah, widowed (I don’t think it’s made clear what she does for a living, if anything). Additionally, there are family friends and weekend guests Catherine Bowers (a nurse; holding a candle for Stephen Maxie) and Felix Hearne (war hero, now part of a publishing company, fighting inner demons, keen on Deborah). Also in the household are Martha Bultitaft, cook and general housekeeper-type, and Sally Jupp, newly-arrived house-parlourmaid, an unmarried mother until recently resident at St Mary’s Refuge for Girls.

The annual fête is held at Martingale and the following morning Sally Jupp is discovered dead in her bed, apparently by strangulation, though it quickly becomes evident that some sort of sedative had additionally been slipped into her nightly cocoa. Her bedroom door was bolted from the inside and it seems as though the killer must have escaped out of the window (fictional killers, and fictional people in general, being implausibly adept at climbing out of upper-storey windows and nimbly making their way to the ground with the help of drainpipes and ivy, as opposed to the undignified slipping, cursing and breaking of ankles that would seem more likely in reality). Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish duly turns up, plus a lower-rank colleague, to investigate the crime. (As in The Private Patient, the other of James’ novels I’ve read thus far, it’s never made clear why The Yard has been called in over the local constabulary; there’s at least a hint of a suggestion in the PP that it was because the victim was reasonably well known, but there’s nothing in the murder of Sally Jupp that would equate.)

The person who eventually turns out to have done it was probably the one we as the reader had learned least about as they blended into the background rather. I suppose they had certainly been provoked though going to the lengths of killing seems a bit far-fetched – though it is held to have been a sudden and unpremeditated attack. I felt that there were other characters who would have been more plausible killers. The sedative turns out to have been unconnected with the murder; turns out Martha had been slipping it into Sally’s nightly cocoa so that Sally would persistently oversleep and thereby get herself into trouble.

The bit at the end, where an off-duty Dalgleish decides to take a diversion through Chadfleet on a drive home to London, in doing so encountering Deborah Riscoe and offering her a lift home to Martingale, seems a bit odd. AD’s feelings for Deborah? “he knew with sudden and heart-lifting certainty that they would meet again”. Did they? I guess I’d have to read more of the AD series to know whether this is followed up.

It’s a pretty good story and proved a good holiday read. It’s not too bad in terms of tying up the various potential red herrings and loose ends. One possible inconsistency that bugged me was that I was sure there had been a suggestion at one point that the way the strangulation had been carried out indicated that the murderer knew what they were doing, something that seems implausible given the identity of the killer - but I gave up trying to find the page I'd seen this on.

Cover Her Face was first published in 1962. My copy was the Sphere Books Ltd 1970s re-issue. The unpleasant cover art has no connection with the story; Sally dies through strangulation and the telephone plays no significant part in the story. The first edition cover, shown on the Wikipedia page, is clearly meant as an image of Sally Jupp and makes more sense in terms of connection with the story.

‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang

Korean novel that won the International Booker Prize (or the Man Booker International Prize, as it was then) in 2016. Even though I complacently consider myself reasonably bright, knowing in advance that a novel has won a major literary prize doesn’t necessarily fill me with optimism as to its likely readability, but I was encouraged by this one being blessedly short, at less than 200 pages.

The Vegetarian is centred on a woman, Yeong-hye, whose sudden decision to become vegetarian (vegan, in fact, though I don’t think the term is used) is the catalyst for the rest of the events in the novel. The story is divided into three parts: the first is told from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s husband, “Mr Cheong”, the second from that of her unnamed brother-in-law and the third from that of her long-suffering older sister In-hye. The story narrates Yeong-hye’s descent into ever more severe mental illness.

In Part 1, The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s husband wakes up one morning to find his wife throwing all the meat in the house into rubbish bags. She will give no explanation other than saying “I had a dream”. Short, italicized passages from Yeong-hye’s perspective relate the dreams she is having, disturbing dreams filled with blood and violence. She develops the idea that there is a lump in her stomach, caused by all the meat she’s eaten: “Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there.” At a strained family lunch, Yeong-hye is given a general berating by her whole family, and her father attempts to force-feed her, resulting in her slitting her wrist in front of the family. She is admitted to a psychiatric facility, where she spends several months.

In Part 2, Mongolian Mark, it’s two years later. We learn that Yeong-hye's husband, Mr Cheong, has divorced her, deciding that his wife will never be normal again. In-hye’s husband, an occasional artist, has come to fancy Yeong-hye more than his wife, and this grows into an obsession with her after learning from his wife that Yeong-hye may still have a birthmark – a “Mongolian mark” – somewhere in the region of her buttocks. This develops in his mind into an image of an entwined couple with their bodies covered in painted flowers, and he becomes fixated on recreating this image in video art. Unknown to his wife, he asks Yeong-hye if he can paint her naked body and film himself doing it. This spirals a bit and leads to him painting himself and filming himself having sex with her. Unfortunately, In-hye discovers the tape and has them both committed to a mental hospital.

Part 3, Flaming Trees, is set a year later than Part 2. Yeong-hye is now resident in a psychiatric facility, somewhere in the mountains. She would seem to have been diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. Only In-hye visits her. All of In-hye’s family seem to have abandoned Yeong-hye following the “scandal” (presumably meaning the sex tape with her brother-in-law and its aftermath) and her sister alone cares for her. In-hye’s husband has left her. It becomes apparent that In-hye, like Yeong-hye, is suppressing a lot of anger (and emotion more generally). In-hye (no doubt, because she was the eldest daughter and didn’t have the option of falling apart) instead chose the path of working hard to appear the perfect working woman, wife and mother. Is In-hye’s extremely mild rebellion of “abandoning” her son in their apartment for a few hours while she wanders into the forest, supposed to signal that she could go the same way as her sister, if it weren’t for her self-control?

Verdict? Interesting, and also: huh? In-hye is the most sympathetic character in the novel, by some margin. Of the two men, I did have a certain amount of sympathy for Yeong-hye’s husband; not so much for her brother-in-law although he seems intended to appear the more sympathetic character of the two. Reading the book, I was expecting part of it, probably the last part, to be told from the perspective of Yeong-hye herself – but this does not happen. This makes it harder for the reader to gain greater understanding of where Yeong-hye is coming from, and harder to sympathise with her.

So what on earth is wrong with Yeong-hye, and what’s all the tree stuff? In the few glimpses of Yeong-hye’s thoughts in the earlier part of the book, she seems to be thinking that she might harm someone, and there are some suggestions that YH is suppressing violent urges; “on occasion, her eyes would seem to reflect a kind of violence … which she would appear to be struggling to suppress”. There is a suggestion that Yeong-hye showed signs in childhood of being disturbed (“In-hye remembered moments from their childhood when Yeong-hye’s face had worn the same expression as it did now… moments when [her eyes] would narrow and turn completely dark”). In the novel's later stages, Yeong-hye has become dangerously anorexic and appears to have become convinced that she is a tree and can therefore get the nourishment she needs by exposing her naked body to the light. But then, close to the end of the novel, In-hye also seems to have a tree thing (“In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. None of the trees would accept her.”) And the ending? Frankly, who knows.

The Vegetarian was published in 2007, and was translated into English by Deborah Smith.

A book I read

‘Riders’ by Jilly Cooper

This March’s Book Group read. Claire, a JC fan, had flirted with putting Cooper’s 2023 novel Tackle! on our reading list, but then thought better of it, I think because she thought the rest of us wouldn’t like it. However, I quite fancied reading a JC as although I read a number of blockbusters in my teens, notably Lace and several of Jackie Collins’ novels, I had never read any Cooper. Most likely I was put off by the horsey theme suggested by Riders’ famous “bum in jodhpurs” cover art. However, I picked it for our book list as being a Cooper novel I knew of, and it’s also the first in the "Rutshire Chronicles” series of which Tackle! is the eleventh and latest (the term "Rutshire" is not mentioned in Riders so must have been something Cooper thought up for subsequent novels).

Characters

The main characters:

• Rupert Campbell-Black, successful show-jumper, Adonis and vile posho. Lives at Penscombe, a country house and estate in Gloucestershire;
• Jake Lovell, half-Romany ex-children’s home boy. When we meet him, he is working at a riding school, being great with the horses and rude to the children and their mothers. Jake’s gypsy father walked out on the family when Jake was eight. Jake first met Rupert Campbell-Black at prep school, which Jake was attending thanks to his mother being the school cook;
• Helen Campbell-Black, née Macaulay, at the start of the novel a 20-something American who’s just come over to the UK and is working for a London publisher. For most of the novel, Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, after she idiotically marries him despite knowing perfectly well by a few dates in that they have nothing in common;
• Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s schoolfriend and live-in chum. Nice but weak;
• Victoria “Tory” Lovell, née Maxwell, at the start of the book a pudgy 18-year-old reluctantly being dragged around the deb circuit by her mother, and later Jake’s loyal and long-suffering wife;
• Fenella “Fen” Maxwell, Tory’s younger sister and, by the end of the novel, champion showjumper at only 19. Behaves in a bit of a bratty way, but then she is still only a teenager by the end of the novel;
• Colonel Malise Gordon, distinguished Chef d’Equipe of the UK equestrian team

Blurb re story

I’m not going to attempt a synopsis of the story as it’s an endless rollercoaster of events, with Jake on top one minute, Rupert the next. It’s structured around a series of horse trials/events/whatever it is they’re called. The horsey stuff was actually reasonably engaging and I did find myself getting quite into the various horses and their personalities.

Much of the stuff in the novel that would nowadays be considered on the problematic side, I was able to reasonably gloss over as being to be expected from a novel of this age and type. It’s all loaded with sexist and boorish behaviour, infidelity and general reckless irresponsibility: the latter including shedloads of drink driving, and several times I found myself chiding characters for drinking so much on empty stomachs (e.g. reading page 141, I found myself shouting at Helen HAVE A SANDWICH). But I think getting too aerated about all that is a bit pointless. What was more difficult to gloss over is Rupert’s cruelty – to his horses, his son, his wife and tbh most of the people he comes across: not content with having bullied Jake in school, he won’t let up when he encounters him again in adult life, calling him “Hopalong”, “Gyppo” and mocking his mother’s suicide.

I was pleased that Jake has slightly rescued his life by the end of the book, though that only happens in the last few pages. I was aghast at his idiocy in starting an affair with Helen Campbell-Black – however pathetic Helen appeared, he should have steered well clear for his own sake. Jake’s genius with horses, plus his excessive nerves before competitions, presumably suggest that he’s better suited to being a trainer than competing as a rider. And I was pleased that he does, against the odds, secure the sponsorship that Rupert wanted, so one over on Rupert. Unfortunately, though, it’s left open whether Rupert’s spite and (completely unjustified) desire for vengeance might mean he continues to try and thwart Jake at every opportunity. We’ll never know.

Rupert Campbell-Black

Skimming back covers and snips of reviews of Cooper’s books over the years, I had got the impression that Rupert Campbell-Black was a recurring character and some sort of hero, albeit a roguish one. Ruth has read another one of Cooper’s "Rutshire" novels – Appassionata, I think – and confirms that RCB is in it, albeit in a more minor role. Reading Riders, I was shocked at how horrible Rupert is. Heroes in romance and other popular novels are definitely of a type: handsome, taciturn, occasionally domineering – but RCB goes beyond that into sheer unpleasantness. He thrashes his horses, punts his toddler son across the room, beats Helen up when she confesses to an affair and constantly baits and demeans others, including his wife (“You must be the only person who’s excited my dear wife in years. I certainly don’t.”). (Rupert, of course, has been sleeping around for years, which he blames on Helen’s frigidity; when Helen is faced with photographs of Rupert cavorting with his groom in one of their fields, he turns it on her, with “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”)

In general, cruelty to animals and hitting women and children would completely debar a man from hero status. But I got the strong impression that despite Rupert’s flaws, Cooper was representing him as a hero. There were several points where I suspected Cooper was depicting a character she herself fancied: at one point a horse is “driven on [around the course] by Rupert’s erotic pelvic thrusts”. Wearing a new designer suit, "such was Rupert's masculinity, and the enhanced blueness of his eyes, and the lean, broad-shouldered length of his body" - Christ, calm down, woman. When he attempts sex with his wife when she is upset after their baby's hospitalisation, he was, apparently, trying to comfort her "in the only way he knew". Diddums. The distinctly non-consensual group sex scene that Rupert ropes Helen into with Billy and Billy's wife Janey (Rupert locks Helen in with them and orders her not to be “a fucking spoilsport”) is distasteful beyond the general macho behaviour that permeates the book.

Towards the end of the novel, Rupert jumps a clear round at the Los Angeles Olympics despite having one arm in a sling and is feted even by the usually-disapproving Malise Gordon, who makes a sick-making speech telling Rupert that “without doubt you produced the finest and bravest display of riding I’ve ever seen”. Rupert isn’t brave, he’s an utter pig and sufficiently unpleasant to put me off reading any of Cooper’s subsequent novels, which I might have done otherwise.¹

Riders was published in 1985. The story begins in 1970 and works its way up to the mid-eighties.

 

¹  I've never been attracted to complete bastards, however ropey their arsing childhoods might have been - see Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey, and back in the eighties I remember having a dispute with my sister as to the merits of Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. I maintained that he had zero merits; Hannah felt I think that he had some sort of tortured soul quality caused by childhood neglect that excused him. Yeah, sod that.

Some books read in 2025

‘When I Fell From The Sky’ by Juliane Koepcke

I remember reading a version of Juliane Koepcke’s story as a child and it was one of those stories that stuck with me (though Koepcke observes at several points in this 2011 memoir that many of the accounts written in the 1970s about her experience took a lot of liberties with the truth).

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane, then 17, was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother and left her stranded in a remote part of the Peruvian rainforest, where she spent 11 days before being picked up by forest workers and taken to safety. (Her survival of the crash seems incredible, though evidently some people have contrived to survive plane crashes.) Koepcke notes that the forest canopy probably served to break her fall, and there is a suggestion that because she remained strapped into her seat, part of a bank of three that had originally contained her mother and another passenger, this had a slowing effect similar to a parachute; she also observes that she landed underneath the seat, which may have given her some protection from the elements until she recovered consciousness. Her subsequent survival in the jungle is attributable partly to her familiarity with it but also to her own determination, given that she was injured, presumably suffering from some degree of shock and must have realized that her mother was probably dead. “I think of my mother during each of my nights, in which I barely sleep.” “I have to keep going. Keep going. Here I will perish.” At one point she comes across three corpses, still in their seats but driven head-first into the ground with only the lower portions of their bodies visible; Juliane is only able to tell that the female corpse is not her mother because she knew her mother never painted her toenails.

Her recall of how she managed in the days after the crash, and the strategy she adopted, make for fascinating reading. On regaining consciousness, Juliane was unable to locate any of her fellow passengers and although she could hear search planes overhead, realized that the tree cover was too dense for them to ever see her in the area she was in, so decided to move off. She remembered advice her father gave her: “If you get lost in the jungle and you find flowing water, then stay near it, follow its course. It will bring you to other people.” She locates a tiny rivulet nearby, which becomes a stream, and eventually a river, the Río Shebonya. Finding it difficult to proceed on foot – she had lost a shoe in the crash, and was worried about stepping on a stingray – she resorted to swimming in the river. The water contained caimans – a type of alligator – but she knew that these creatures did not generally attack people. Koepcke acknowledges her debt to her parents in teaching her what creatures to look out for and avoid and which could be ignored. Before reaching the river, she had heard and recognised the calls of hoatzins, which she knew nest exclusively near open stretches of water, which had reassured her that she was on the right track.

After the crash, Juliane spent four weeks recovering in a mission station in Yarinacocha, home of the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Her father, perhaps understandably, appears to have been distracted, going daily to the temporary morgue that had been set up, waiting for his wife’s body, but I did think that his daughter ought to have been better protected and shielded from journalists and visitors: in addition to their hanging around the mission station, she seems to have been relentlessly mobbed by them after returning to Lima. She must have felt like public property, at a time when she needed to get back to as much normality as was possible. On a lighter note, Koepcke relates the vast numbers of letters she received, including, inevitably, some from weirdos, including a bizarre letter urging Juliane to learn Esperanto and to write a book in that language about her experience.

Koepcke is German but was born and brought up in Peru, and lived there her whole life until her father sent her “back” (she’d never lived there) to Germany after the crash to complete her schooling. For the three years prior to the crash, Juliane had been living with her zoologist parents at ‘Panguana’, the biological research station they had established in order to analyse the ecosystem of a small area of the Peruvian rainforest. She relates incredible journeys with her parents from Lima over the Andes and into the rainforest to the research station, the whole thing about a week’s journey. Koepcke’s affection for the rainforest permeates the book: “It is no green hell. It is a part of me.” Koepcke followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a zoologist, doing her doctoral thesis on rainforest bats.

Koepcke frames her memoir from the viewpoint of a present day trip to Peru with her husband to wrestle with the Peruvian authorities to have Panguana declared a nature reserve and in doing so hopefully saving it from encroaching civilization and deforestation. The book’s cover shows a still from Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, which featured Koepcke returning to the crash site in the company of Herzog and the film crew (it's available to watch on YouTube here).

On a side note: the safety record of LANSA, the Peruvian domestic airline that the Koepckes were flying with on the fateful flight, would read as comical if so many deaths hadn’t been involved. At the time of the 1971 crash, LANSA had already lost two planes in crashes, with a total of around 150 fatalities. The airline was notorious in Peru and Juliane recalls a Spanish saying that roughly translated as “LANSA lands on its belly”. Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had urged his wife not to fly with LANSA but all other flights for that day were booked up. The plane itself was a type that had been taken out of service in the US some years earlier, and of a design that had trouble withstanding turbulence; to top all that off, it had been assembled from spare parts of other aircraft. It was LANSA’s last airworthy plane and the airline’s operating licence was revoked shortly after the 1971 crash. Shame it took that long.

When I Fell From The Sky was published in 2011, and in English in 2012, translated by Ross Benjamin.

‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell

It’s Victorian times. Dorothea Truelove is 25, wealthy and does charitable work that includes visiting women prisoners at New Oakgate Prison, the Oakgate Charitable Women’s Society having deemed it “beneficial for lady visitors to call upon the inmates and improve them with edifying conversation”. Ruth Butterham is 16 and has just been banged up in said prison for – allegedly – poisoning her mistress with arsenic. The novel alternates between Ruth’s telling of her own story to Dorothea, and Dorothea’s perspective on things.

Ruth’s story is relentlessly grim from start to finish. After her father, a struggling artist, commits suicide, her mother, a seamstress, is left impoverished and is reduced to having Ruth, a talented needlewoman, apprenticed to a dressmaker in order to pay off her debts. Unfortunately, the dressmaker is the vile Mrs Metyard, who has four other girls, all foundlings, already apprenticed to her and living a wretched existence. Mrs M enjoys occasionally dressing up as her late husband and administering brutal thrashings. Early on, Ruth had become convinced that she can cause damage to people with her needle and by the time Dorothea meets her in prison, is convinced that she has caused the deaths of more than one person. It started after she embroidered a silver angel on a blanket for her baby sister and, when her sister died from the “strangling angel” (diphtheria), was convinced that she had caused the baby’s death. While at Metyards, she sews a corset for the bridal trousseau of Rosalind Oldacre, a former schoolmate who had tormented Ruth, and Rosalind subsequently dies – actually from arsenic poisoning from green dye in her clothes, but the death further confirms to Ruth her own terrible powers.

Dorothea’s mother is dead and she has a tense relationship with her father, who wants her well married. Dorothea is an enthusiastic amateur phrenologist and keeps a human skull in a drawer in her desk, hidden from her father, who disapproves of her interest in phrenology. Dorothea seems to be of the view that phrenology has the power to detect evil propensities through head mapping and that the shape of the skull may actually change if certain organs of the mind are developed; she measures Ruth’s head regularly while Ruth is in prison, and is forced to conclude that Ruth is irredeemeable because she has observed no change in the shape of her head, though she also observes that Ruth’s “moral organs” are more developed than she expected, and is confused by this.

Late in the novel, the theme of poisoning spills over into Dorothea’s life, when a concerned family friend informs her that Dorothea’s father poisoned her mother, and that he believes Dorothea to be in danger from the same fate. At Dorothea’s last visit to the condemned Ruth, Ruth embroiders an ‘R’ onto Dorothea’s handkerchief and bids her deliver it to her late mistress’s husband. I have to say I was a bit confused by the ending: has Ruth somehow killed Dorothea’s father? How has the handkerchief ended up back at the Trueloves’ home? Maybe I missed something here.

The Corset was published in 2018 and was Purcell's fourth novel.

‘Trust Me, I'm a Junior Doctor’ by Max Pemberton

“Medical school has been rather like a long holiday, punctuated by the odd sick person.”

Engaging memoir based on Max Pemberton’s Telegraph columns, recounting his first year of working as a doctor in the NHS. It kicks off as he and his medical school peers start their first jobs as junior doctors, aka “house officers”.

By Pemberton's account, new house officers are dropped in at the deep end, immediately expected by nurses to know how to do everything without being shown and kicked around by the more senior doctors. It does sound a complete baptism of fire. The junior doctors feel tyrannized by their pagers; addressing his, Max says: “Bleep, I know you’re going to, and you know I won’t know what to do.” He relates being alone on night shift, sprinting from one ward to another, having to put in endless cannulas.

Pemberton’s first, six month, stint as a junior doctor was on a surgical ward, after which he decided surgery was not for him. Apparently the system is: six months on general surgery, six on general medicine. The eventual completion of his 12-month stint meant registration with the General Medical Council, and becoming “a slightly more senior junior doctor”.

He has a bit of a rant about various things. He has a dig at hospital managers and targets. Good nurses leaving because they are overwhelmed by excessive demands and excessive paperwork. He relates how, during his first year, he had doubts, despite all his training, about whether medicine was for him. Towards the end of the book, he bemoans how medical school did not prepare him for life on the wards: although he knew the details of how paracetamol worked on the body, he had not been taught how to prescribe it. He also relates plenty of amusing incidents, including how the man turning up at A&E with a hairbrush inserted into his rectum provided enough amusement to make six years at medical school seem worth it.

“Max Pemberton” (it’s a pseudonym) is an NHS psychiatrist who also writes a column for the Daily Mail.

Some books I've read (relatively) recently

A few books I’ve finished over the past few months. All these were books we read in Book Group.

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi

Subtitled ‘What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death’. An end of life memoir by American neurosurgeon Kalanithi, who died of lung cancer in 2015 at the age of 37.

Kalanithi’s parents were immigrants from India, who settled initially in New York City before moving to Arizona. Helped by an academically ambitious mother, he got into Stanford where he completed degrees in English literature and human biology. His decision to apply for medical school came while completing a subsequent masters in English literature. While waiting for the medical school application cycle to go through, he applied for and took a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Cambridge. After this, he started studies at Yale School of Medicine. The man was clearly a born student though I did find myself wondering quite how many years in total he’d spent in college.

Kalanithi’s cancer developed while he was still in residency – which I loosely understand as meaning you’ve left medical school but are still in training. He was in his final of six years as a neurosurgical resident and anticipating graduating at the end of the year. He was thirty-six at this point and married to Lucy, also a doctor. Kalanithi himself suspects that he has cancer “and not the good kind” before it is officially diagnosed. From the CT scans, he is able to spot himself what it is, and that it has already spread.

The second half of the book is Kalanithi’s reflections post-diagnosis, including on the switch to experiencing medicine from a patient perspective. He notes the passing from subject to object, and the becoming a person to whom things happened. There are some reflections on religion and a turning back towards Christianity, probably understandable from a man facing a premature death. I liked that he doesn’t claim to have had epiphanies through having cancer:

Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany – a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters – and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.

Towards the end of the book, his reflections on tense are interesting: what tense is he living in now? Should he say “I am a neurosurgeon”, or, knowing that he will never return to duties, “I was a neurosurgeon”? What should he say when friends say that they will see him at some future event? The book ends with some words directed at his baby daughter Cady, who we learn from his wife’s epilogue was eight months old when he dies. Paul’s manuscript, written during the last year of his life, was unfinished, derailed by his rapid decline and death. The epilogue provides context and a concluding chapter to Paul’s story. (The foreword, written by a fellow doctor and author, is turgid – I think if I’d read that first, as I never do, it might just have put me off reading the book.)

This obituary in Stanford Medicine includes a video recording of Kalanithi talking about his diagnosis.

'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell

I read (and enjoyed) this on Mum’s recommendation. It’s a fictionalised account of the childhoods and married life of William Shakespeare (henceforth WS) and his wife, called here Agnes. It’s set in Stratford in the late 16th century and framed (loosely) around the couple’s son, Hamnet, and on his parents' grief following his death.

Hamnet is eleven and has two sisters and lives with his parents on Henley Street, Stratford, next door to his grandparents’ house, where his grandfather John runs a glove-making business. The book opens with Hamnet trying to find medical help for his twin sister Judith, who has been taken ill. Judith has a fever and has developed ‘buboes’ – pale oval swellings under the skin. Hamnet’s mother has a reputation for being able to cure anything with her potions, but struggles to cure this one. In a twist, Judith recovers, but Hamnet falls ill with the plague and dies.

Hamnet’s mother Agnes tends a patch of land at the farm where she grew up. Local legend has it that Agnes’ mother emerged from the forest that bordered the farm, bewitching the farmer, who married her. Local people say that Agnes is a forest sprite and a sorceress. Hamnet’s father met Agnes when he was sent there to tutor the farmer’s sons in Latin. Agnes becomes pregnant, they marry and move in next door to WS' parents in Stratford. In due course, Agnes comes up with the idea of getting her husband to go away to London to find work, with a view to getting him away from his brute of a father; she would then follow him at a later date, with the children. WS’ father John is persuaded that it would be a good idea to expand the glove business to London; in the event, WS does make a great success of working in London, but as a writer leading a touring company of players, rather than in the glove business. WS spends more and more of his time in London, only returning home intermittently. O'Farrell explores Agnes' grief following Hamnet's death, and the shared understanding between the women - Agnes and her mother-in-law Mary have always had a fractious relationship, but both have lost a child, as very many women must have done then. In this fictionalised account, Agnes travels to London to seek her husband, and ends up at the opening performance of his new play, Hamlet.

In an Author’s Note, O’Farrell notes that only a limited amount is known about the Shakespeare family. The names of Shakespeare’s three children are known, and it is known that the boy, Hamnet, died young, but the cause of his death is not known. Having him die from bubonic plague in the novel is a fiction of O’Farrell’s, influenced, she says, by the apparent absence of any mention of the disease in any of Shakespeare’s literary output – her implication being, presumably, that this is odd given the time period in which they were written.

The suggestion in the novel is that WS named his play Hamlet after his deceased son. O’Farrell notes "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" and cites this 2004 article The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet in the New York Review of Books.

Hamnet was published in 2020 and was O'Farrell's eighth novel.

'The Guest' by Emma Cline

Ruth’s choice for our November Book Group book. We read Cline’s first novel The Girls in 2018 and I thought that was well written and atmospheric.

The story opens with a young woman, Alex, swimming in the sea off a beach somewhere “out east” from New York City – we don’t know where, exactly, but it’s somewhere where rich people have second homes. She is there with her older boyfriend, Simon, who invited her there for the summer to amuse herself while he’s working and then to go to parties with him in the evenings. Alex is 22, Simon in his fifties.

It quickly becomes clear that Alex has got herself into a bit of a mess back in NYC – she seems to routinely pilfer other people’s painkilling (and possibly other) medication, she has run up bills on various men’s credit cards, restaurants and nightspots have blacklisted her, her flatmates have thrown her out for non-payment of rent (and pilfering their meds). What she does for a living is not entirely clear but she appears to be some kind of escort, though work has tailed off and she’s had to reduce her rates. We never discover anything about her background or why she is in the position of doing this kind of work. She’s being persistently chased, via voicemail and text, by an ex, Dom, from whose apartment she has stolen drugs and cash.

One evening Alex and Simon attend a party at the home of an acquaintance of Simon’s, where Alex gets drunk and makes up to the hostess’ younger husband, whom she teases to throw her into the swimming pool, which he does. Simon takes exception to this sort of behaviour – and to the fact that Alex dented his car the previous day and didn’t tell him – and buys Alex a train ticket back to the city, suggesting that they talk “in a week or so”. Alex manages to convince herself that Simon doesn’t actually want rid of her but just wants a few days’ space, and decides not to return to the city but to find a way to stay in the area for a few days, planning to surprise Simon by returning to his house on the evening of his upcoming Labor Day party. By then, Alex imagines, Simon will have calmed down and be pleased to see her again. Alex proceeds to inveigle herself into various other houses in the area via making up to a series of complete strangers. In the book’s final scene Alex does, indeed, present herself at Simon’s party as she planned, fresh from the scene of a car crash driven by a troubled teenager she seduced.

Discussing this book, Ali mooted the idea that the ending and the final single-word sentence “Now.” might indicate Alex's death from injuries suffered in the car crash, but that would be too unsubtle a device for Cline, who commendably avoids melodrama, both here and in The Girls. It's enough that Alex has now burned all her bridges, even throwing away her mobile phone on her way to Simon’s, and is now faced with the dawning realization that she has hideously miscalculated.

What is this fascination Alex has with people’s swimming pools? I did wonder whether there was some symbolism being used in the form of the various pools, and of water generally. Early in the story Alex gets carried further out to sea than she intends while floating on her back and manages to rescue herself by swimming parallel to the shore until the current becomes less strong and she is able to return to land. Towards the end of the story, when things are unravelling, there is another incident when sea swimming, but this time Alex mis-times a wave and is thrown to the sand underwater, cutting herself. Early in the story the swimming pools Alex encounters are pristine, well cared for; as the story progresses, one pool is “a little gray”; “the dirty pool, the water probably half beer at this point”; the final pool she encounters is unheated and freezing, the water dirty, “biscuit-colored foam floated on the surface, visible grit settled on the pool’s bottom”. This Guardian review of The Guest does indeed have it that water is used as a leitmotif. So there.

The Guest was published in 2023 and was Cline's second novel.

More books I have read

'Briefly, a Delicious Life' by Nell Stevens

It’s 1838. The narrator is the ghost of a young girl, Blanca, who died in 1473 at 14 years old. Blanca died in childbirth, after becoming pregnant by a novice monk of a similar age. After she died, Blanca expected to meet the ghosts of other dead people, but she never has. She amuses herself by going inside the heads of the living and rummaging around in their pasts. (She has discovered that she can also see into their futures – but tries to stop herself doing this.) She has spent most of her time since death around the Charterhouse at Valldemossa, the monastery in the remote Mallorcan hillside village where she lived and died.

The story opens when Blanca sees what appears to be two men kissing in the garden of the abandoned monastery. One of the men turns out to be a woman, though apparently called George. This is George Sand, a successful writer who has come to Mallorca from Paris with her two children and her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, seemingly with the intention of improving everyone’s health. Things don’t actually work out that way. The winter in the remote hillside region turns out to be brutal and the village more or less cut off. The locals are hostile to the family, partly because they assume Chopin’s coughing and general air of ill health indicates TB (it’s never clear whether it actually does or not), partly because George and her daughter wear trousers, partly because it gets around that George and Chopin are not in fact married. The woman employed to cook for them fleeces them at every opportunity, pinching portions of their food for herself and watering down their milk. The villagers are reluctant to sell to them and charge them way over the odds for food and transport. The family don’t exactly help themselves by seemingly making not much effort to participate in the life of the village, including not turning up to Sunday Mass. I felt a bit sorry for the driver who loses his carriage in a flood after George has intransigently insisted on being driven back to the village from Palma despite having been warned about the poor weather conditions. As a reader, you do wonder why on earth George and Chopin didn't draw a line under the venture sooner than they did, particularly after the village children set upon George's daughter Solange with rocks - in the event it's only when the villagers come to the monastery with flaming torches that it occurs to George that it's not really working out.

It’s a lovely story and Blanca’s ghost is a most appealing character. Blanca has reached the conclusion that her “in between” state – clearly dead, disembodied but not seeing the ghosts of other dead or apparently being admitted to any kind of afterlife – must be a bit of a glitch that’ll be rectified in due course. She imagines that heaven, when she’s eventually admitted, will involve “a lot of good seafood and gentle harp music of the kind I had never actually heard while alive”. When the family returns to Paris at the end of the novel, Blanca, who has developed an attraction to George, goes with them, seeming to have realized that not much is going to change vis à vis her afterlife and she might as well effect a change of scene for herself.

George Sand was the pen name of Aurore Dupin. Her Wikipedia entry currently notes that she “is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era”. Sand evidently grew up in the countryside but moved to Paris after the breakdown of her marriage, where she took up trouser-wearing and cigar-smoking in addition to novel-writing. Sand did spend a winter in Majorca with Chopin and her children, detailed in her book A Winter in Majorca. It looks from Google Maps as though her country home in central France is now a museum.

Briefly, a Delicious Life was published in 2022 and was Nell Stevens’ debut novel.

‘The New Long Life’ by Andrew J Scott and Lynda Gratton

Subtitled ‘A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World’. The focus is on the challenges posed by both technological advances and increased longevity. Longevity was evidently addressed in Scott and Gratton’s earlier book The 100-Year Life (which I haven’t read) and they claim to have found, in discussing the issues around it, that these also raised a lot of questions relating to technology.

The authors define “social ingenuity” as a new form of human ingenuity, required by advances in technology and in the expected human lifespan. Technological advances, they argue, initially cause disruption and require social ingenuity to get over. They state that this need for social ingenuity is their motivation for writing this book. We need to see the consequences of technological ingenuity, and the advances that have resulted in longer lifespan, as opportunities not risks. Scott and Gratton introduce a cast of personas – “everybodies” – which they use to illustrate the need for social ingenuity.

The authors suggest a need to move from a three-stage life (education-work-retirement) to a “multistage” life. They discuss the demographic transition that many countries have experienced whereby both mortality rates and fertility rates have fallen, leading to older people forming an increasing proportion of the population. If we’re to exploit the gains of longevity, the authors argue, we have to adjust our perspective on ageing and what we think of as old. They argue that there is a need for corporate practices to catch up with the multistage life, breaking the link between age and stage: i.e. the idea that you join a company after leaving university, get a series of promotions if you’re good enough; be winding down in your late 50s/early 60s. People will need more education as they live and work for longer and it will need to be spread out, rather than front-loaded. Education needs to be something people can access in their sixties as easily as in their twenties.

This was an interesting read. The personas were a neat idea though I wish they had been made more use of – having been introduced, they are then only mentioned briefly throughout the rest of the book. The idea of a midlife MOT, apparently suggested in a 2017 review of the UK state pension age, is interesting, as was the idea of the benefits of compounding as not only related to money: investing in your health etc. The suggestion in the chapter “The Government Agenda” of protecting the worker not the job, was interesting, the argument being that it’s not good for the economy to impose rigid rules on companies to project existing jobs from new technology, but that workers should be supported to get alternative jobs via re-education and training programmes. Also, if we need people to stay working for longer, then simply raising the retirement age isn’t enough in itself; it has to be done in conjunction with policies aimed at supporting older people to stay working. (I also liked the description of generational labels such as “millennial” as a “demographic version of astrology”.)

The authors claim that we’re currently – the book was published in 2020 – living through a period where the gap between technological and social ingenuity is widening, though I’d guess that worries about the effect of technological advances on people’s jobs has been around at least since the Industrial Revolution, the development of the power loom being a case in point. I seem to recall that learning about this sort of thing was one of the things that put me off taking History as an O-level subject, but I was young and foolish then and would of course find such things much more interesting now.

‘Lessons’ by Ian McEwan

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

Lessons covers most of the lifetime of Roland Baines, starting from his arrival in England from Tripoli with his parents in 1959, aged 11, to start at boarding school. The story is set against a backdrop of significant world events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Chernobyl disaster; the Eastern Bloc; the fall of the Berlin Wall; more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pivotal to the course of Roland’s life is a teenage involvement with his school piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. The “affair” with Cornell resulted in neglect of his schoolwork and a distancing from his peers, feeling himself way beyond them in terms of life experience. (“He believed he had entered a transcendent state that most of them would never know. Schoolwork he could sort out later. He believed he was in love.”) Roland fails all his O-levels; he is accepted into the school sixth form after a teacher advocates for him, but he again falls under the influence of Cornell, who tells him to leave school and move in with her; once he arrives at her house she locks his clothes in the shed and compels him to live in pyjamas, effectively confining him to her house. Their involvement ends when Cornell suggests they get married, which seems to trigger something in the sixteen-year-old Roland and he demurs, resulting in her throwing him out.

The experience with Cornell seems to have far-reaching consequences for Roland’s subsequent relationships. A string of initially promising relationships end when the women break up with him. His wife Alissa deserts him and their infant son, leaving a note saying that it was for the best. It’s only relatively late in his life that he finally marries his friend and long-time on/off girlfriend Daphne, though Daphne dies of cancer not long afterwards. It is implied that he is sexually over-demanding, though the exact nature of his issue is never made explicit; there’s a reference to “his problem, the old one. He couldn’t help himself. [Daphne] had said in a tight voice that he could and must.”

Roland writes poems, and seems to have had aspirations to be a serious poet, though he never achieves the literary success he would have liked – he has the occasional poem published, writes articles for in-flight magazines, writes verse for a friend’s greetings card business. (Ironically, his ex-wife Alissa does become a successful novelist, and her writing talent seems to enable him to forgive her.) In his middle years he makes his living playing the piano in a hotel bar. Roland agonises a lot, and is plagued by worry that he hasn’t achieved anything (“Nothing achieved”), though he is clearly a talented man, musically gifted (while at school, he was lauded as an extremely promising young pianist, though this early promise went the same way as the rest of his school career) and apparently a good enough tennis player to be able to coach the game. This is also dismissing his success as a father to his son Lawrence and stepfather to Daphne’s children and, towards the end of the novel, as a grandfather. Like his own father, Roland is a better father than he is a husband/boyfriend.

This was the first McEwan I’ve read, but I will probably read more. Mum and Dave have both read several of his novels. Mum isn’t a big fan of them, finding his protagonists frustrating; certainly I was sometimes frustrated at some of the decisions Roland makes, but I found him on the whole a sympathetic character. Themes that run through the book are decisions and their consequences, and the range of possibilities depending on choices made and not made; at one point, Roland ruminates over “single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array”. Later in his life he seems to make peace with his choices – as is, perhaps, the way of things.

Some more books I have read

'You Can Heal Your Life' by Louise L. Hay

A re-reading of one of the self-help books I found useful in my twenties, along with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and one or two others. Hay’s book is wackier than Susan Jeffers’ (the gist of FtFaDIA is essentially "stop dithering and get on with it”) but I still think it has some merits.

You Can Heal Your Life was first published in 1984, and in the UK in 1988. It was an extension of an earlier self-published pamphlet called Heal Your Body. Hay’s philosophy is that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, and that our thoughts create our future. She takes this to rather an extreme IMO. But I still think there’s some value in this view if you don’t go overboard. Evidently, Hay was influenced by “New Thought”, as clearly were a number of other self-help authors that I read in the nineties (haven’t read many since then). Hay was a member of the Church of Religious Science – no idea what that is/was but it sounds suitably Californian.

The book is about the mental patterns that, Hay claims, cause disease (which she hyphenates as dis-ease). “We create every so-called “illness” in our body.” The most controversial thing, undoubtedly, is Hay’s claim that your own thoughts cause any disease you get, and that you equally can “think” yourself cured of any disease. More generally and usefully, Hay encourages readers to look at each of the problems in their lives and consider what kinds of thoughts they’re having that would create them.

A lot of it’s good. I do believe that we have choices about the thoughts we think, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to accept that our subconscious mind might be affected by what we habitually think. Ideas that I have found useful include the notion that it’s counter-productive to criticise yourself, and the idea that it’s true if you believe it to be true: this can work both ways, in retaining negative beliefs that we’ve internalized ("Usually, what we believe is only someone else's opinion we have incorporated into our belief systems") and in implanting new, positive beliefs. I have found that there’s some value in positive affirmations, however cheesy they may appear.

I have found the ‘How to Change’ and ‘Daily Work’ chapters useful to refer back to (albeit that I don’t think I’m going to be singing affirmations any time soon). There’s some good stuff in the What Do We Do Now? Chapter about being willing to change. All the chapters in Part 2 ‘A Session with Louise’ contain exercises to work through, mainly in the form of questions to ask yourself; I didn’t bother working through these on this occasion but I think I did the first time I read the book.

Ideas I’m not so sure about, to put it mildly: the idea that we ‘decide’ to incarnate on this planet at a particular point in time and space in order to learn particular lessons. A less fringe idea, but one I also wasn’t totally sure about, is Hay's claim that any problem her clients come to her with can be reduced to needing to work on loving the self. I can imagine that as a client I might struggle a bit to get on board with that – though that’s not to say that she’s wrong. She repeats this idea a lot: “As I have said before, no matter what the problem, the main issue to work on is LOVING THE SELF.” “From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this [a lack of self-love] has to be true”. It’s rather difficult to reduce all of life’s problems to this. I dunno. Maybe. She seems to be acknowledging in the second statement that her conclusion that every problem is due to a lack of self-love is a fallout of the way she looks at life.

One chapter of the book, headed 'The List', is a list of conditions with what Hay claims are probable mental causes, plus new thought patterns that can be adopted to cure these conditions. This list apparently first appeared in Heal Your Body. This, and the preceding chapter 'The Body', seems the most “out there” section of the book – most of You Can Heal Your Life is focused on positive thinking to improve your life generally, rather than specifically on curing diseases; as such I assume it was a broadening of the scope of Heal Your Body. Such controversy as surrounded Louise Hay seems to have resulted from her message being interpreted as saying that sick people have brought it on themselves – victim-blaming, if you will – which I agree is a possible, but somewhat over-literal, interpretation. I’d see her approach as more about enabling people to take and feel some control over their circumstances. (Also, judging by her short bio at the end of the book, might her strategy have served to help her cope with what must have been the powerlessness of her early life and the abuse she suffered?)

If you don’t take 'The List' too seriously, it’s quite amusing. Baldness as due to a tense scalp? It also seems quite a claim that female baldness has increased since women entered the business world. Influenza due to a belief in statistics? If you suffer with the unpleasant-sounding Mucus Colon, it could be due to "wallowing in the gummed mire of the past". And here’s a tip to bear in mind during an attack of rabies: affirm “I am surrounded and indwelled with peace”. Worth a try, I guess.

To finish on a quote from Louise:

The anus is as beautiful as the ear.

That quote's not relevant to anything, but it always makes me snigger childishly.

'84K' by Claire North

Dystopian novel. Helen’s choice for our April Book Group read. It’s set in England and uses lots of familiar place names, notably place names along the Grand Union Canal. But it’s not the England we know. Society has broken down a bit. Actually a lot. Human rights have been abolished. People can be sent to the ‘patty line’, which is not a good place.

The central character is a man called Theo Miller, who works at the Criminal Audit Office working out the cost of crimes. People who’ve committed crimes have to pay an indemnity. Something called the Company is in charge – well, the government is still notionally in charge, but it’s become inextricably bound up with the Company.

Theo Miller’s name is not really Theo Miller. I think his real name is mentioned once in the book, but I’ve forgotten what it was and have no hope of finding the page again. The real Theo Miller was a fellow student at Oxford, who was killed in a ridiculous shootout with one Phillip Arnslade, now the government minister for fiscal efficiency. Arnslade’s best friend Simon Fardell seems to be de facto CEO of the Company.

Theo encounters an old flame, Dani Cumali, who asks him to trace a Lucy Cumali, now possibly known as Lucy Rainbow Princess, through his job at the Ministry. Later, Dani tells him that Lucy is his daughter. Later again, Dani is murdered, apparently a hit job, ordered because of something that Dani discovered while working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Theo becomes focused on avenging Dani’s murder and finding Lucy. He travels to his hometown of Shawford, which has fallen into decay since its sponsor Budgetfood pulled out. A young woman who knew Dani meets him there and gives him a memory stick contain incriminating information. He is beaten up by various people (this is a recurring theme throughout the book).

Theo suspects Arnslade of ordering mass murder and ruining the country. He travels to Arnslade’s family home and rescues his mother Helen, who has been drugged and kept captive after Phillip discovered she was secretly filming him and Fardell talking about wrong stuff they were doing. They go on the run, and reach Newton Bridge, where they meet Bess, the “queen of the patties” and various other outlaws. They publish the contents of the memory stick online, and broadcast video of Helen reading out the names of the believed victims of state murder.

A recurring theme throughout the book is a woman, Neila, who lives on a narrowboat called Hector and travels the canals. She takes Theo onto her boat after discovering him lying injured by the canal. This incident is never later returned to and it’s impossible to know at what point in the action it happened. A significant annoyance with 84K was the difficulty of keeping track of the order things happened in. It jumps about a lot – which isn’t so much a problem if it’s jumping about between different characters’ perspectives, or from e.g. a character in the present day to the same character’s childhood, but this jumps about between events that are presumably not all that far apart in time and that all centre the Theo Miller character. By two-thirds of the way through the book I’d given up on trying to keep track. At the beginning I had expected the Neila and narrowboat thread to anchor the book and be a constant through all the other events, but it didn’t end up doing this. These selected notes from my reading give a flavour of my general confusion over the order of events.

• p.264 I have no idea whether this is before or after he’s met Neila. 
• p.303 So annoying. Which city is burning FFS? 
• p.305 What was Newton Bridge? 
• p.306 Who is this man? 
• p.309 She better not have dropped his gun in the water.

There are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing is depressingly awful (dystopia is admittedly not my favourite) and there isn’t much of a ray of hope even at the end. The ending was a big disappointment, for me at least, as I had hoped that it would end with Neila and Theo going off on the narrowboat together. And I was sick of Lucy by the end. It was impossible to care about whether Theo found her or not. Theo betrays Bess, Bea, Corn and everyone at Newton Bridge – people who helped him and took risks for him – just for a girl he’s never met. Not even a girl, but the idea of a girl, as he doesn’t even know whether she’s still alive.

The rear of the cover drips with adjectives: “extraordinary”, “breathtaking”, absorbing and timely”, “captivating”. Hmm. Go figure. Ruth and I shared one copy of the book and found ourselves pushing the book onto each other in faux-selfless fashion "No, it's YOUR turn to read 84K", etc...

I was relieved to finish it and felt in the mood for a pleasurable palate-cleanser. Which leads me on to:

'The Notorious Lord' and 'One Night of Scandal' by Nicola Cornick

These are the first and second books in Nicola Cornick’s 'Bluestocking Brides' trilogy. I read and reviewed the last one, The Rake’s Mistress, here, not having realized it was the last part of a trilogy when I bought it. All three books are set in the early nineteenth century amid the threat of French invasion. The first two are set in the fictional ‘Midwinter’ villages of coastal Suffolk; the third is set partly in London and then back in Midwinter.

'The Notorious Lord'

Rachel Odell is 22 and has just moved to the Suffolk village of Midwinter Royal with her parents Sir Arthur and Lady Odell, a pair of renowned antiquarians. The Odells have taken a house there in order to spend the summer excavating an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Also in Suffolk for the summer is Cory, Lord Newlyn, another antiquarian and a protégé of the Odells. Cory is ostensibly there to assist the Odells with the dig, but he has another motive, which is to help his friends the Kestrel brothers uncover the identity of a French spy who is believed to be working on the Suffolk coast.

The men’s attempt to discover the identity of a spy believed to be passing intelligence to the French forms a thread that runs through all three books. Justin Kestrel, the Duke, has been commissioned by the Foreign Office to uncover the spy. Evidence suggests that the Midwinter spy may be a woman, whose sex has helped her evade capture thus far. Given this, Lady Sally Saltire’s reading group, of which Rachel is a member, falls under their suspicion. Someone fires a shot at Cory as he is walking home one night; Cory fires back and injures his attacker. He and Richard Kestrel put in an appearance at the ladies’ reading group the following day – but two of the ladies have their arms bandaged. Who can it be?

The story of  The Notorious Lord centres on Cory and Rachel and their growing attraction to each other. They are both likeable young people with no obvious irritating qualities – a romance novel where both parties are quite likeable and reasonable people is pretty unusual so I quite appreciated this one. Rachel eventually realizes that she does like Cory as more than simply a friend, but doesn’t see how she can marry him when they want such different lifestyles: Cory is an explorer who is always off travelling in search of finds; Rachel, after a lifetime spent travelling abroad with her parents, wants nothing more than a quiet settled family life at home in England. Rachel is quite an appealing young woman and her reservations about marriage to Cory seem reasonable enough. After the usual declaration-of-passion-followed-by-declaration-that-it-can-never-work, the story ends with them both deciding that they can probably each compromise a bit for the other.

In all three books in the trilogy there’s an illicit night of passion between the two protagonists prior to marriage. Cory and Rachel’s occurs as a result of their both being stranded alone at her parents' house in a torrential rainstorm – both have gone down to the excavation site, worried about the site being flooded and the Odells’ work lost – and Rachel falls into a flooded barrow and is rescued by Cory. They make their way back to the house, get out of their wet clothes, and the inevitable happens.

By the end of the book, things aren’t much further on vis a vis identifying the French spy, beyond its being established that it’s not Rachel. But then this is only part 1 of 3.

 

Postscript: Lady Odell’s pregnancy? We already know that Sir Arthur Odell is in his fifties. Lavinia Odell is presented as a middle-aged woman, but presumably she must be a number of years younger than her husband – though presumably in her 40s given that she has a 20-something daughter. The pregnancy is clearly a device to explain the nomadic Odells’ otherwise surprising decision to stay on at Midwinter Royal. But still.

Postpostscript: The titles of these books are a bit random, and I’m guessing probably just assigned by the publisher. Cory is an affable chap and there’s nothing to suggest he’s particularly notorious. In a similar vein, Rebecca Raleigh is at no point Lucas Kestrel's mistress. Which leads us on to the middle book:

'One Night of Scandal'

Book 2 of the trilogy. It kicks off in September 1803, only three months after the start of the action in The Notorious Lord.

ONoS focuses on Deborah Stratton, a young widow who lives in the Midwinter villages with an older female companion. Deborah is the younger daughter of a Lord Walton of Bath. Deborah’s sister Olivia and her husband Ross, Viscount Marney, live at the nearby Midwinter Marney Hall. Deborah eloped with a Neil Stratton when she was 19, spent an unhappy five weeks with him before he went off on military duty and promptly died of a fever. We learn that the marriage was in fact bigamous, though Deborah was (obviously) not aware of this. Deborah’s father is putting pressure on her to return home to Bath; Deborah isn’t keen on this idea and is keen to stay living in Suffolk near her sister and well out of her father’s clutches. She comes up with the idea of advertising for a “biddable” gentleman to act as her temporary fiancé during a visit to her home in Bath for her brother’s upcoming wedding, with the idea that this will quieten her father’s attempts to pair her off.

In the meantime, she keeps running into Richard Kestrel, the second of the Kestrel brothers of nearby Kestrel Court. Richard and Deborah had fallen out some time previously when he asked her to be his mistress. When Deborah puts a vaguely-worded ad in the Suffolk Chronicle for a gentleman’s “assistance”, Richard, predictably, responds to it, having guessed it was her and having, highly presumptuously, got the innkeeper to bin the other applications. Stuff happens, involving the two having spirited conversations and, intermittently, passionately kissing.

Richard and Deborah are less likeable than Cory and Rachel of The Notorious Lord. Richard is an arrogant and seemingly somewhat embittered man; Deborah is ditsy and irritatingly oblivious to (or careless of) the reputational trouble her behaviour could land her in. The 'night of scandal' of the title is a night that Richard and Deborah spend at a hunting lodge on the Kestrel estate. (And I realise romance novels tend to expect heroines to be “an untried innocent in the ways of love” but as DS has been married it’s not quite plausible that she is one such.)

Richard and Deborah’s bantering/bickering with each other is frankly tedious; their conversation on the beach where Richard tells her the detail around his naval discharge, and Deborah tells him about her marriage to Neil, was the first readable bit. The background conversations are more interesting: those between Deb and her companion Mrs Aintree, Deb and her sister Olivia, Richard and Ross, Richard and Justin, Ross and Olivia Marney. The Marneys are a more appealing couple than Richard and Deborah and the lotion mix up towards the end of the book, which results in them clearing the air and reconciling, is genuinely amusing.

Spy-related events in this book involve: Richard gives Deborah, as a gift, a book of seventeenth-century poetry. At Lady Sally’s reading group, where the same volume is being discussed, Deborah’s copy is accidentally switched for someone else’s. The switched copy is found to contain a sheet of paper with a coded message written on it. Richard initially angrily questions Deborah, but swiftly concludes that she is telling the truth when she says she has never seen it before (the cattier reader might be mildly surprised that Deborah is able to find the way out of her own house, never mind operate as an undercover agent). Examining the piece of paper later, the Kestrel brothers conclude that the spy is using a pictorial code. Later, at the Custom House auction in Woodbridge, Deborah accidentally bids for some engraved glasses, resulting in the long-suffering Ross Marney having to purchase them, to the annoyance of Sir John Norton, another local gentleman who was also bidding on them and seems particularly keen to acquire them. The glasses are engraved with the same symbols as were on the piece of paper in Deborah’s book. Shortly afterwards, Marney Hall is ransacked and the engraved glass vases are stolen. The book's absurd climax features the spies knocking Richard and Deborah over the head and tying them up, which gives Richard an opportunity to propose to Deborah.

Richard Kestrel’s history is quite interesting; he is a darker character than either Cory Newlyn or his younger brother Lucas, the heroes of the other two books in the trilogy. Richard’s father had him down for the priesthood; Richard didn’t like that idea and joined the Navy instead. He was injured and discharged from active naval service. During Richard’s invalided-out period his father had his naval commission cancelled and Richard fell into a dissolute life of drinking and women, until his elder brother Justin inherited the dukedom and threatened to cut Richard off unless he started leading a productive life. This led to Richard getting his naval commission back and taking up work for the Admiralty. This story thread led me to ponder more generally the limited work options open to younger brothers of the gentleman class: not having estates to manage, some light research suggests that the only career options open to them were to join either the armed forces or the priesthood, as by some sleight of hand these were not counted as regular employment. If you either didn’t fancy them or managed to mess them up, it’s not clear what you would have done – did you officially lose your status as a gentleman?

   

For a trilogy of romance novels these are remarkably engaging little books, probably because in addition to the standard romance stuff there’s the spy storyline that straddles all three, and quite a number of the characters appear in more than one of the trilogy. All three end with an Epilogue involving a conversation between the Duke of Kestrel and Lady Sally Saltire, old flames who have kept up a flirtatious friendship since the death of Sally’s husband. At the end of The Notorious Lord, Sally bets the Duke that Richard Kestrel and Deborah Stratton will be married within three months. This does happen, and at the close of One Night of Scandal Sally collects on her debt by asking Justin to attend a ball in honour of a watercolour calendar she is auctioning – which he was intending to do anyway. They enter another wager, that Justin’s other brother Lucas will be next to fall in love – which leads in to the action of The Rake’s Mistress. In the Epilogue to the final book, the two finally stop playing around and declare their feelings for each other.