Tag: Netgalley

Two Tribes (2020): Chris Beckett

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★★★

It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Behold: a speculative Brexit novel! Despite being weary of the whole Brexit conversation, I was curious to see how this particular author might project its results into the future. Chris Beckett is a smart and perceptive sci-fi writer, and I’ve read several of his other books, although, so far, I’ve only posted on Dark Eden. He’s interested in human society, the way it develops, and the way that small events can knock history onto different paths: in short, an ideal person to tackle the far-reaching potential effects of Brexit. The two tribes of his title refer, on a superficial level, to the Leave and Remain Brexit factions; but they also reflect the British world of two centuries later. Here we meet Zoe, a London-based historian who is researching the foundations of her society, using a cache of 2016 diaries alongside the rich digital records of the period. I’d come to the book assuming that we’d be spending much of our time with Zoe in the future, so I’ve got to admit I was a little disappointed to discover that it’s predominantly set in 2016: a Romeo-and-Juliet story framed by the Brexit divide.

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The Snake Pit (1946): Mary Jane Ward

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★★★★

Virginia Cunningham finds herself sitting in a garden, while a strange man asks her about voices. She doesn’t quite understand how she came to be here. Has she gone out for a walk? Why, then, isn’t she dressed more smartly? Where is her husband Robert? Presently, another stranger called Grace urges Virginia to follow her, gently rebuking her for always forgetting how things work. Gradually, Virginia begins to understand that she is in a psychiatric hospital; but how long has she been here? Why can’t she remember anything before today? And what must she do in order to be released from this place, with its arbitrary and bewildering rules? Mary Jane Ward’s novel, of which this is a 75th anniversary edition, was inspired by her own experiences of institutionalisation, and played a major role in starting conversations about the treatment of mental illness in the USA. Poignant, compassionate, and often surprisingly amusing, it offers a frank picture of a world in which patients and staff often seem equally incomprehensible and irrational.

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Land of the Living (2018): Georgina Harding

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★★★★½

With hand on heart, I can say that this is one of the most achingly beautiful, and also most heart-breaking, novels that I’ve read. Our protagonist is Charlie Ashe, a farmer turned British soldier in Burma (now Myanmar) in World War II. In one of two intertwining storylines, we see him wandering in the Burmese jungle after losing his patrol, dazed by its vastness and beauty, even as he reels from the slaughter he’s witnessed. Alongside this story, we skip ahead a year or two and see Charlie again, after his return home to England. He has married his sweetheart and started a new life with her on a Norfolk farm, and yet he still finds himself struggling to come to terms with the trauma of his wartime experiences. The Charlie who has come back from Burma is not the same man who went off to fight, but can he, and his wife Claire, manage to find peace in the aftermath of tragedy? These two strands are woven beautifully together, but the real star in this book is Harding’s writing – eloquent and elegant – which gracefully probes questions of trauma, loss and memory, inviting us to think about survivor’s guilt, the strain of bearing witness, and how those left at home can never truly comprehend.

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Spacecraft (2021): Timothy Morton

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★½

As a fan of sci-fi, I had high hopes for Spacecraft, a new entry in the Bloomsbury Objects series. I felt that there was a huge amount of potential here: so much to unpack, not only in the way that classic spacecraft have made their way from the speculative fringe into mainstream culture, but also more broadly about the historical antecedents of science fiction. Spacecraft have grown out of other human desires and stories: after all, they’re the ultimate accomplishment of one of mankind’s most ancient desires: to fly. And we can trace a genealogy from the generation ships of science fiction back into antiquity, to Noah’s Ark. I was excited to learn about early ideas of what a spacecraft might be. What about the flying machine with rockets which launches Cyrano de Bergerac to the Moon in his 17th-century satirical novel The Other World? How do these fictional spacecraft compare to the real deal: the Space Shuttle or rockets? Does a spacecraft have to be manned? What about Arthur C. Clarke’s enigmatic Rama? Brimming with questions, I settled down and prepared to be transported to other worlds.

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Will (2016): Jeroen Olyslaegers

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★★★★

For Proust, the key to memory was a madeleine: for the elderly Wilfried Wils, it’s a snowfall, which carpets the streets around his home in Antwerp. Walking through the city, he remembers how it was in wartime, and decides that it’s time to set down his story, addressing it to an estranged great-grandson. He hopes that this unknown reader will listen and, if not forgive him, then at least understand. The problem, Will knows, is that people like their protagonists to be heroes: the kind of men and women who place principles above their own safety, and protect those less fortunate than themselves. But that isn’t the story that Will has to tell. His is a tale of survival, of self-interest and self-preservation in a world where all certainties have been ripped away; and it isn’t just the tale of one man, but of a whole city. Olyslaegers’s disturbing novel is based around real events in wartime Antwerp, and inspired by the experiences of the author’s own family: his grandfather, who was a Nazi collaborator, and his aunt, the mistress of an SS officer. If it’s unsettling, that’s largely because it forces us to think very hard about how we ourselves would survive under occupation. Would we choose to be heroes, as we’d like to believe? Or would we, too, follow prevailing winds in this ‘life on the razor’s edge‘?

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The Dangerous Kingdom of Love (2021): Neil Blackmore

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★★★½

In the English court of 1613, there are two paths to success: noble blood or a pretty face. Francis Bacon has neither, so he’s had to resort to bribing the King’s loathsome little favourite Robert Carr, in order to secure an appointment as Attorney General. This new job offers some protection from Bacon’s phalanx of noble enemies, who’d love nothing more than to see him fall from grace, but almost immediately he learns of a worrying development at court. Robert Carr is due to marry the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, one of Bacon’s nemeses, and Bacon knows perfectly well that his days are numbered unless he can come up with a way to break their stranglehold over the King. Ideally, he’d dislodge the brattish Carr by finding a beautiful, amusing and irresistible boy to offer up as a new potential favourite for the King. When Bacon’s path happens to cross that of the ravishing George Villiers, he seizes the opportunity, without stopping to think of the challenges that lie ahead: the task of playing Pygmalion and the difficulties that might arise when his creation gains power of his own. Giving centre stage to one of the period’s most fascinating characters, Neil Blackmore’s novel of sexual ambition in Jacobean England achieves the tricky feat of being both historically convincing and enormously fun.

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The Feast (1950): Margaret Kennedy

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★★★★

It’s the summer of 1947 and a small community has been shaken to its core (literally). Pendizack Manor Hotel has just been obliterated in a landslide, buried beneath the cliffs that once loomed over it. Reverend Bott, who has the unenviable task of writing a funeral sermon for the unrecovered victims, thinks back over what he has heard from the survivors. Through their stories, we revisit the week leading up to the disaster, day by day, watching as the various characters arrive and get to know one another. To some extent, this is the same kind of awkward cheek-by-jowl holiday community of strangers that we see in works such as The Fortnight in September (though that puts a much more positive spin on the experience). Romances blossom; old grudges linger; and plots are hatched, both malicious and benign. But this isn’t just the story of a Cornish summer holiday gone horribly wrong. Kennedy is, in fact, doing something much cleverer and more sophisticated – offering us the chance to solve a very unusual kind of mystery.

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Wendy, Darling (2021): A.C. Wise

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★★★★

I tend to avoid novels which retell or continue classic stories (why do so many people want to rewrite Pride and Prejudice?), but something about A.C. Wise’s Wendy, Darling caught my attention. Peter Pan is already a book that speaks to children and adults in different ways: reading it, as a grown-up, provokes a sense of discomfort that simmers beneath the sheer joy of its nostalgic anarchy. Wise has grasped that sense of ‘somehow wrong-ness’ and anchored it at the heart of her book, a fierce story of female autonomy, courage and memory. It begins, of course, on a dark night in London, in a nursery, where a small girl sleeps in a bed. A slight, lean shape appears at the nursery window: it’s Peter, come to carry Wendy back to Neverland. But Peter has left it too long. The child in the bed is not Wendy. It’s 1931 and Wendy, now a married woman, is in her room when she feels the warning sense of danger. She runs to the nursery, but she’s too late: Peter has spirited away her daughter, Jane. Outraged by the theft, Wendy can do only one thing: she must gather her courage and go to bring her daughter home.

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The Decagon House Murders (1987): Yukito Ayatsuji

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★★★★½

Only a few days ago, I wrote about finding it difficult to engage with Japanese fiction. Clearly I only had to wait for the right book, because Yukito Ayatsuji’s cult mystery novel has had me absolutely hooked. Seven students head off to spend a week on a remote island, intrigued by a tragic murder committed there six months before. They believe, as members of the K-University Mystery Club, that they might just have the deductive skills to solve the crime. As a local fishermen ferries them out, they discuss the problem with modern crime fiction. It doesn’t allow enough scope for deduction, one of them complains. ‘What mystery novels need,’ he argues, ‘are… a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer.’ Best of all is the ‘chalet in a snowstorm‘ model, where characters are cut off from the outside world. Little do they realise that, soon, they will be in that very same situation, trapped on an island with no means of escape. And then, one by one, they will begin to die. Someone on that island is a murderer. But who? Intricately plotted, this stonking novel challenges the reader to use her ‘little grey cells‘ to solve the mystery before the grand denouement. All the clues are there. But can you work out the solution? (Spoiler: I didn’t!)

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The Belting Inheritance (1965): Julian Symons

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★★★

Christopher Barrington has lived at Belting, the sprawling country house belonging to his maternal great-aunt, ever since the age of twelve, when he lost his parents in an air crash. The family is a strange one: the widowed old Lady Wainwright and her two sons, hapless Miles and uptight Stephen, along with Stephen’s wife Clarissa. Two other sons, Hugh and David, were lost in the Second World War and Lady Wainwright has never come to terms with her loss, especially that of David, her bright and charming favourite. In the summer of Christopher’s eighteenth year, we watch through his eyes as the old order at Belting comes under attack. As Lady Wainwright lies dying of cancer, a letter arrives, closely followed by a stranger, who claims that he is the long-lost David Wainwright. Inspired by the famous Tichborne case, this is a highly entertaining – albeit hugely convoluted – story.

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