This site will share with you hundreds of book and film reviews written since 2009. Also a chance to discuss these reviews together with some of my creative writing to be added.
The well-known painting, “The Goldfinch” was the work of the little-known Carl Fabritius, whose life was cut short in the devastation of the Dutch city of Delft in 1654 by the explosion of a gunpowder store – the “Thunderclap” in the title of art critic Laura Cumming’s “memoir of art and life and sudden death”.
Having been fascinated by her study of the painter Velasquez, “The Vanishing Man”, and found her attempt to piece together the facts of her mother’s childhood quite atmospheric and poignant, perhaps my expectations were too high for an original take in this case. It soon became apparent that, even with the most forensic research and deepest speculation which characterise the author’s past work, the facts are too thin to justify a full-length book devoted to Fabritius. So it is filled out not only with observations on Dutch art, but recollections of the author’s own father, a talented Scottish artist who fed her appreciation of Dutch art. She flits between these themes in chapters which read more like articles from The Observer on which she has worked for years – chapters which can be read in any order.
Regretting the lack of an index, and deciding it was Fabritius who really interested me, I combed the book for information about him, actually starting from the later chapters where the largest photos of his few known paintings are displayed with the most accompanying information and observations. So, the focus is on not only “The Goldfinch”, but a couple of self portraits of the artist himself, an intriguing view of a sleeping sentry with his dog, and the even more riveting “A View of Delft”. A small oil painting, only about eight inches by fourteen, this appears to be a product of the painter’s interest in perspective, so that the picture was designed to be attached to a curved surface and viewed through a peephole to give a more three dimensional effect in the days before photography or film.
Although, to be honest, I found the book overly repetitive, disjointed and rambling, the author has enabled me to appreciate Fabritius more fully, and to regret that such talent should have been curtailed so abruptly, at the age of only thirty-two (1622-54). How much more might he have painted, and would it have made his legacy more celebrated?
After graduating, French speaker Nathalie’s first contract is to design the costumes for a celebrated trio of athletes, dedicated to beating the women’s world record in the perilous feat of four consecutive triple leaps without landing in-between on the “Russian bar”, which you need to look up online if not familiar with it. This means an end-of-season journey to the Vladivostok Circus, located on the far eastern shore of Russia, where the team of two Russian “bases”, Anton and Nico, who support each end of the bar, and the young Ukrainian acrobat Anna, with their Canadian manager Leon, plan to prepare for their tour de force in the Siberian capital Ulan Ude – the author has a fascination for remote places.
Nathalie appears quite self-sufficient, and knows what to expect to some extent, having spent time in Vladivostok as a child, because of her father’ work. However, she has to win the trust of the group. Including Anton, who speaks little English, and to understand how they work, in order to conceive costumes which will enhance their performance without creating any physical or technical problems for them. There is an added stress in that Anna is a newcomer to the team, replacing the previous star Igor, who was crippled in a seven metre fall when he failed to land on the bar. Anna still has to prove herself, while Anton in particular may have been traumatised by the accident, plus he is possibly getting too old to continue the only way of life he knows.
Novels are often based on some specialism which the reader is unlikely to know much about: piano tuning, transplant surgery or trompe-l’œil painting to make a surface look like rare veined marble – in this case all aspects of circus performances on the Russian bar. This is revealed through detailed descriptions of the characters’ daily life, with a focus on the banal, while significant events tend to be implied, referred to in passing or covered in a single sentence – like Anna’s achievement of becoming the first woman to succeed in the four triples jumps with descending to the bar.
I discovered Elisa Shua Dusapin through her first novel, “Winter at Sokcho”, a quirky but brilliant portrayal of a young woman, who feels like an outsider, trapped in a dead-end seaside resort near the grim border with North Korea, never having known her father who was French engineer passing through, so attracted in turn to a French graphic designer who happens to visit Sokcho.
With my expectations perhaps raised too high, I found Vladivostock Circus a pale imitation of this. It lacks the striking, often beautiful prose of the earlier novel. There is still the strong sense of place, but although descriptions of the circus, closed down for the season, the port city and the long rail journeys all ring true, they are too often unbearably mundane, as for the most part are the characters’ activities and exchanges.
It may of course be the essential point that a good deal of tedium and dull routine lies behind great achievement – also that the moments of truest connection and deepest insight may occur in the course of nondescript, ordinary life.
This is the kind of low-key novel with a minimal plot, leaving much unclear, which has a “marmite” effect on readers who view it very differently. The chief interest for me lay in comparing the French text with the English translation, which is good, but dares to deviate a good deal from the original wording so that it give some scenes a different flavour.
Overall, there is too little substance to sustain a couple of hundred pages. Perhaps a shorter novella would have made a more powerful impact, with a wider appeal.
Set in the 1820s, this is a gripping, striking and memorable piece of historical fiction. It begins in the Australian outback of New South Wales, where a small band of troopers have the grim task of executing, under the rough justice of the colony, one Daniel Carney, the sole survivor of a gang of rebels, bushrangers as they are called, whom they have managed to track down. Adair, the Irish officer in charge, assumes the role of keeping an eye on Carney during the night, ostensibly to find out more about the gang. Even if you are not immediately hooked by the clear prose which creates a vivid sense of place at the remote Curlow Creek, and of the interactions between the characters, do not be deterred by the moments of violence in the first chapter.
Through a series of lengthy flashbacks, the storyline shifts back to Adair’s very different past. Orphaned as a very young child, he had the mixed blessing of being brought up in a wealthy, if eccentric household, where he formed, in a complex triangle, a close attachment to both Virgilia, an older girl who lives at a nearby country estate and to Fergus, born soon after to the lady of the manor who has taken Adair in. Whereas Adair is cautious and responsible, knowing he has to make his own way in the world, Fergus, the family heir, has a Heathcliff-style charisma and wildness. When this eventually takes him to Australia, where he takes up the cause of the underdogs, Virgilia tasks Adair with following Fergus there to find out what has happened to him. So it is that Adair’s long conversations with Daniel Carney in the last hours of his life are primarily to establish whether “Dolan”, the dead leader of the gang, was actually Fergus, and if so, what were his final motives and actions.
This is the framework of what turns out to be a well-constructed plot with moments of high tension, which is nevertheless secondary to the novel’s underlying purpose. It weaves together insights into the colonial experience from both sides in rural Ireland and Australia – different, yet with certain parallels, and also into human nature in general, and how we are shaped by a complex mixture of fate, chance and inheritance – so that in the course of being bound to suffer or impose “an insufficient law”, a man may come to terms with, or “find” himself.
This novel by Australian author David Malouf has a very poetic quality, which is not surprising since his books of verse began to be published before his fiction. His gift for expressing ideas with great clarity, precision, depth and range is very impressive. He deserves to be more widely known, and this book merits being read more than once.
It is an achievement to concoct the diary of a man from fifteen-year-old schoolboy in the early 1920s to death six decades later aged 85. It must have involved a good deal of research to select the series of C20 events to form the backdrop, and the book is possibly more appealing to readers of retirement age who can recall or have heard a lot about them in the past.
Logan Mountstuart has a comfortable childhood since his father is manager of a meat company, producing corned beef in Uruguay. On his return to England, a master at his minor public school who has taken a fancy to him steers Logan into an Oxford College from which he emerges with a third class degree, which matters not since his ambition is to become a writer. He has modest success in getting published quite quickly, but feels trapped after making the mistake of marrying an earl’s shallow daughter, on the rebound from rejection by a more intriguing woman. And so he embarks on a chequered life, where in the attempt to make the journal more interesting, his imaginary acquaintances mix with a succession of the rich and famous, movers and shakers, the likes of Hemingway, Picasso, Ian Fleming, even the Duke of Windsor and Wallace Simpson. All of these seem taken with Logan, at least initially. Then there is the US painter Nat Tate, whom some critics have been fooled into thinking actually existed.
However, all the name-dropping quickly becomes tiresome, and I suspect the book may appeal more to men, since it is written very much from a male perspective. William Boyd has explained that Logan was inspired by the journals dating from the 1920s of writer and critic Cyril Connolly, whom he describes as “selfish, promiscuous, talented, hard up, lazy, an epicurean and a particular kind of English intellectual (his tastes were refined but narrow), and I found something about his flawed personality deeply beguiling”. As a female reader, I do not.
Particularly in early life, Logan is not a very likeable character. He can’t resist sleeping with his best friend’s fiancée, he drinks far too much, and lusts after countless women, most of whom conveniently seem to find him attractive. Yet he has odd flashes of integrity, as when he refuses to plant incriminating evidence on a man whom the Duke of Windsor wants “out of the way”, and so years later still bears a grudge against him – Wallace hissing the word “traitor” at a chance meeting.
Logan is at his best in times of adversity. When unjustly imprisoned in Switzerland, which at least ensures he survives World War ll, he distracts himself with a small farm of insects found in his room – woodlice, a cockroach and ants which he “herds together in a small packet” but they keep escaping, which gives him “a vicarious sense of freedom”. Sometimes he is so impoverished that he has to live on tins of dog food, for which he develops a taste, but always lands on his feet. His home may be sold because he is believed dead, but in another stage of life someone will bequeath him a house, admittedly in a rundown state.
He may have to flee the US since he is suspected of underage sex with a girl he didn’t realise was only sixteen, but ends up with a cushy teaching post in Nigeria, where he has a chance to show his decency in trying to free a servant who has been pressganged into an army during the Biafran war. Boyd’s own childhood experience of living in Nigeria may have contributed to this section’s authentic ring.
There is wry, even black humour, in the scenes when, especially in old age, he decides it is not too late to take up a cause like joining a Socialist Patients’ Collective, after experiencing the shortcomings of the NHS, or finding out who is defacing a plaque to a hero of the Resistance in the French village where he has taken up residence – this altruism invariably backfires.
The disadvantages of the diary format is that the entries are often quite short and fragmented. There are too many banal sections, involving lists and humdrum events: how many made to measure summer suits Logan bought, just how much he boozed one night, how he furnished his flat. This may be realistic in terms of what a diary is like, but is pretty tedious. While skimming through the duller patches, it is easy to overlook the names and professions of people in passing, so that when they turn up again three hundred pages later one cannot be bothered to check who they are.
What often feels inevitably unstructured, because it is representing the course of life, and also unbearably long – I felt better disposed to it as my Kindle recorded 80 per cent read – is actually full of many imaginative incidents which could have been developed more fully, and some expressive pieces of writing which one would not normally find in a diary. In other words, would a series of short stories on particular events in the stages of Logan’s life had been more satisfying? Still, this book was longlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize, has been adapted for a television series, and has sold well, so who am I to carp?
Why does the elderly narrator Joe spend his days playing only Beethoven on the “free” pianos to be found in Paris railway stations? Who is the woman he keeps hoping to encounter, and is she part of some idealised dream?
For much of this novel I imagined that Joe is a gifted pianist who has been traumatised by two events during his adolescence: witnessing the explosion on landing of the plane carrying his parents and “insupportable sister”, and his subsequent despatch to the aptly named “Les Confins”, a grim boarding school for orphans run by the Catholic church in a remote spot on the French border with Spain. This is run by L’Abbé, a sadist who singles Joe out for psychological torture, after his Oliver Twist-style error of introducing himself by “asking for more”, that is a single bedroom instead of a dorm and salad for starters. Sensing that Joe is desperate to play the piano in his study, L’Abbé sets him to work using his digital dexterity to type endless letters for him, under strict instructions never to raise the piano lid. When he suspects Joe of a lie to avoid incriminating another boy, L’Abbé cunningly manipulates Grenouille, his brutal caretaker, in the knowledge that he will subject Joe to physical violence in revenge.
In this take on a well-worn theme, the harshness of the regime at Les Confins is so repetitious as to seem tedious – one becomes inured to it, rather like most of the boys. This is not relieved much by the moments of black humour, or Joe’s identification with and conversations with Michael Collins, the astronaut who circled the dark side of the moon while his colleagues undertook the first moon walk in 1969, and other surreal incidents. Take the occasion when “the Vigie”, the gang to which Joe is admitted, sneak up on the roof to experience the violent wind which blows through the valley “once every three years”. Wedging his feet under a low parapet, Joe spreads his arms wide like wings, to experience the sensation of flying, and freedom. With echoes of “Le Grand Meaulnes”, Joe eventually falls in love with Rose, the spoilt daughter of a rich benefactor of “Les Confins”, to whom Joe is forced to give piano lessons. It can be quite hard to keep up with the author as he flits between scenes.
Many of the incidents are implausible, the characters stereotyped and exaggerated. Yet by the end, the author succeeds in suggesting that L’Abbé himself was once an abused orphan who genuinely believes that it is necessary to punish his pupils to bring them to his version of belief in God, while Grenouille is probably suffering from an old soldier’s PTSD. One has to suspend disbelief over the fact that the fifteen-year-old Joe, son of a comfortably off family, would have been packed off to Les Confins when he was so close to being old enough to go out and earn a living. So much of the book is devoted to his two years spent at the school, that there is too little space to cover the half century he spent with the freedom to come into his inheritance and work as a music teacher, which would have “restored the balance” in real life.
However, Jean-Baptiste Andrea is less interested in realism, except perhaps to move us over the plight of orphans who suffer long-term damage through abuse. Instead, he is more focused on using his quirky style to go off at a tangent on flights of fancy, and observations on life. So this is a novel likely to divide opinion sharply. He is a talented writer, so although I did not care for this particular plot, I shall probably attempt another of his novels, hopefully on a different theme. Best read in French if possible, I suspect……
It is 1943, and despite occupation by the Italian army, allied to Nazi Germany, the remote French commune of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, close to the border, seems to be a haven for Jews. Although she has been obliged to adopt the French name Hélène, Esther’s family is not typically Jewish because her father, a former teacher, is a self-styled communist and “pagan” who risks his life guiding refugees along the “Old Salt Road” passes across the Alps into northern Italy. When in due course Esther is obliged to flee in turn with her mother, she falls under the influence of a rabbi, so that, once the war is over , it makes sense for the pair to follow a relative’s advice to emigrate to Jerusalem “to forget” the troubled past. This proves impossible, since the establishment of Israel means displacement of the Palestinians and more strife.
Esther’s brief, chance meeting in Palestine with Nejma, an Arab girl of a similar age, is the device used to link the two characters, even if only tenuously. Le Clézio portrays them as “wandering stars”, innocent victims of circumstance uprooted from their homes who happen to be on opposite sides of the conflict. Yet their positions are not equal, for Esther has the means and choice to travel further and create a new life in Canada, although she will always be haunted by memories. Nejma’s story occupies less than a quarter of the novel, making it seem like a digression in the account of Esther’s life, but it is more moving, since she suffers more in her attempts to survive at the most basic level in or outside the grim camps set up by the United Nations. Her future, which is left unclear, appears bleak.
Despite being very observant, even as a highly educated woman in later life, Esther does not seem to reflect much on how the injustice borne by her people has led to a chain reaction of suffering for others. It is Nejma who has the insight to see the significance of a dying Arab’s question, “Le soleil ne brille-t-il pas pour tous?” (“Doesn’t the sun shine for everyone?”) This is the closest the author comes to “taking sides”.
Perhaps because I read this in December 2023, during the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza triggered by the brutal incursions by Hamas into Israel on October 7th, I was expecting Le Clézio, as a Nobel Prize winner, to give more consideration to the moral issues raised by the conflicts which form the background to this novel. It appears that he prefers to leave it to us to reflect on these, via his focus on individual lives, which tend to follow a random course, subject to fragmented, disjointed perceptions, as in reality.
From the outset, the lyrical, often repetitive prose creates a hypnotic effect as he describes in great detail the landscapes, sea voyages, small daily events in a village or refugee camp. The reader has to pay close attention, to glean scraps of information to build up a picture of what is going on. One needs a certain amount of general knowledge about, for instance, the Shoah or Holocaust, the belief in “Eretz Israel” leading to the foundation of the modern state in 1948, the Nakba (forced movement and dispossession of the Palestinians) and subsequent conflicts there to appreciate the novel more fully.
However, one can simply read this as a lyrical, impressionistic account of how war makes people rootless and vulnerable but hopefully coming to terms with their situation and gaining greater self-knowledge and control over their lives.
In mid C17 Holland, Catrin, a young widow, sells the possessions inherited from her husband Govert, to fund her decision to leave her remote village on the edge of the Dutch polders. This is not only to escape the gossip of neighbours, suspicious about the cause of Govert’s sudden death, but also to see more of the world. Her natural skill as an artist, so far limited to painting flowers on the family’s wooden furniture, soon enables her to gain employment with a potter in Delft.
This is the cue for the fascinating history of the Dutch “Golden Age”, initially based on the import of fine white porcelain from China by the East India Company until distant civil wars disrupted the trade. These events encouraged the development of a domestic product, Delft faience with its striking blue images, which replaced the copied or imagined Chinese scenes with the sailing ships, windmills and rural scenes of Holland. All this forms the background to one of the “thrillers” for which the Dutch author is apparently best known.
Meetings with artists already or soon to be famous are shoehorned in: Catlin encounters Rembrandt who notes her true appreciation of art, and Vermeer, who runs an inn with his wife, becomes a friend. Catlin even come across Carel Fabritius the painter of “The Goldfinch”, shortly before he is a victim of the explosion of the gunpowder store which destroyed a quarter of Delft in 1654. Catlin has to endure not only this, but also the plague which devastated cities like Delft the following year, but we know she will survive, being the narrator of this tale of an action-packed eighteen-month period.
Despite being a potentially “good yarn”, this novel seems likely to disappoint readers looking for depth of character, and a certain degree of plausibility in a plot, which swings too often between sentimentality and violent melodrama. It is impossible to judge how much this novel has “lost” in translation from the Dutch, but the frequent clichés and tin-eared use of modern turns of phrase in the dialogues are continually jarring.
“You’re young, beautiful and you obviously have talent”. “I hope it was the last one that swung it for me”.
Catlin lives in a society in which a woman cannot pursue an apprenticeship to become a master potter, nor sign contracts herself when running a business. People believe that the plague is a punishment from God, which can be kept a bay with certain potions. Yet some of the exchanges would not sound out of place in a modern soap opera.
Despite the obvious flaws, at least Simone van der Vlugt’s historical research seems to be essentially accurate. By coincidence, the art historian Laura Cumming has produced in 2023 “Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death “ a study of Dutch art featuring Carel Fabritius, which could be of interest who have found this aspect the most rewarding part of “Midnight Blue”.
It’s the 1870s in “Les Pouilles”, the arid, sun-scorched heel of Italy’s boot. A weary donkey carries former bandit Luciano Mascalzone, prematurely aged by years in jail, back to his home town of Montepuccio, where he plans to fulfil his dream of “possessing by force” the beautiful Filomena Biscotti, a final crime for which the local men will surely kill him. The opening scenes, with their vivid sense of place and of a simple, sentimental, inward-looking community, quick to deliver rough justice, calls to mind a spaghetti western.
The succeeding chapters which trace Mascalzone’s descendants, the “Scorta” line, through four generations, starting with his bastard son Rocco, resemble a darker version of Daudet’s “Lettres de mon moulin”. They present a series of incidents which reveal the gradual change of a community over a century, focusing on the relations within a family in which each generation feels tied to a land it seems impossible to leave, but where making a living means a struggle to survive. Whether this takes the form of Rocco’s acts of violence and theft by which he enriches himself, or the sheer hard work rebuilding a business selling cigarettes like his grandson Elia, it gives a sense of pride. Those with less drive may be satisfied to labour growing olives, or fishing. Life evolves gradually, but not always for the better: the fishermen’s tradition of supplementing their income with smuggling switches from cigarettes to Albanians or refugees from further afield; the streets of Montepuccio may be lit with electricity, but they are thronged with tourists, and bright young people, including Elia’s daughter Anna, leave to study in the cities of the north.
Striking descriptions of the landscape ring true, since based on Laurent Gaudés own experience of frequent visits there, where his wife’s family and neighbours must have provided the models for his characters. Since he has also made a name as a playwright, it is not surprising that this novel has a distinctly theatrical flavour. One can imagine many of the scenes as stage sets: at one extreme Rocco’s defiant, remarkably vigorous death-bed speech to his startled audience; at the other the family celebration with a huge banquet held on a fishing platform in a rocky cliff, which remains “engraved” ad the high point of the family’s memories.
The story is related in old age by Rocco’s daughter Carmela to Don Salvatore, the once fiery priest and outsider, nicknamed “le Calabrais”, who has softened his jaundiced view of the locals. Sensing the onset of senility, Carmela is anxious to ensure that, after her death, details of the family’s history should be passed on to Anna, including one closely-guarded secret which seems ironical more than shameful, but might indeed dent the reputation of “les Scorta”, if widely known.
Despite its insights into human nature and evocation of a distinctive community, the frequent sentimentality, exaggeration and sheer implausibility of some events may captivate the reader, but make it more like a series of fables or flights of fancy than seriously moving. On the other hand, it makes one reflect on a disappearing way of life which has perhaps been dismissed too readily for its superstition, prejudices and poverty, so undervalued for its strength of ties to family, land and traditional ways of living.
In the English translation, the title is “The House of Scorta”.
This systematic, thoroughly researched biography of George Orwell’s first wife Eileen Blair has been overshadowed by Anna Funder’s more recent, subjective and at times dramatised account, “Wifedom”. The latter’s damming portrayal of Orwell, as an appallingly selfish man whose clumsy advances would nowadays trigger the wrath of the #MeToo Movement, induced me to turn to Sylvia Topp’s work for a second opinion.
It is true that Orwell pursued his interests with a single-minded obsession, whether it was to rush off to Spain to fight Franco’s fascist forces, or to lead an arduous life of self-sufficiency in a rundown cottage in an isolated village, rearing goats and selling eggs to make ends meet. He also seems to have made frequent passes at women, apparently regarding fidelity in marriage as unimportant, yet still deviously concealing an attempted fling with one of his wife’s so-called best friends. The fact that a fascination with young Arab girls prompted him to ask Eileen for permission to visit a Moroccan brothel is particularly disturbing. He seems callous in his lack of concern over her ill health, but perhaps because he was frequently so unwell himself, he underestimated the risks of her final operation, leaving her to die alone while he went abroad. The empathy which prompted him to comfort a traumatised stranger he came across during the London blitz did not seem to extend to his wife.
Yet Sylvia Topp makes it repeatedly clear that Eileen willingly chose to devote her life to supporting Orwell for the decade of their marriage. This was despite being sufficiently ambitious to be very disappointed not to get a First at Oxford, and eventually finding an interest which could have given her a fulfilling, independent career – she was working on a Masters in the psychology of education when she met Orwell. She was conventional enough to think that, approaching thirty, “it was time” for her to get married. She also seemed to have a leaning towards achieving success vicariously through others, not only Orwell but also her high-flying brother Eric whose medical articles and books she typed and edited long before she took on the same role for Orwell.
By modern standards, Eileen was not a feminist. Yet since Oxford University only started awarding women degrees in 1920, four years before she began to study there, while women only gained the right to vote in 1918, and then had to wait a decade to have the voting age reduced from 30 to 21, she possibly felt that this was sufficient clear evidence of advances in achieving equality. She was clearly not a victim but prepared to speak out, and show initiative when she really wanted to do so. Admittedly, Orwell’s frequent bouts of illness as his TB developed cramped her style, but she seems to have been an innately kind person who could not have done otherwise than care for him.
The couple somehow found time for a very active social life, entertaining friends in their often uncomfortable homes, and there is a pattern in their guests’ comments on Eileen: energetic, lively and attractive. She had no shortage of admirers: while Orwell was fighting in Catalonia, she had an enjoyable social life in Barcelona, forming a close relationship with a man called George Kopp, who may have wanted to marry her. Yet when Orwell was shot, she helped to ensure he received the best possible treatment, and later saved him from arrest as a suspected communist, by contriving to give him advance warning.
With her belief in Orwell’s talent, Eileen seems to have enjoyed being closely involved in his creative writing. There is evidence that her feedback led to a marked improvement in his style, which colleagues noticed without identifying the reason. The couple were intellectually very compatible, able to discuss issues on equal terms, and Orwell valued her opinion and trusted her enough to tell his publishers to deal with her, and accept her decisions in his frequent absences. There is even a suggestion that aspects of “1984”, an certainly the title of the classic, were derived from a poem which she wrote before even meeting Orwell: “End of the Century, 1984”.
The couple were also bound by a rejection of materialism, concern for social justice, and perhaps a sense of there being some virtue in a life of struggle, although Sylvia Topp notes tartly how they frequently took advantage of the good will and home comforts of wealthier relatives. Ironically, by the time of Eileen’s tragically early death, Orwell’s writing was beginning to bring in a good income, although he too only lived for a further five years. They paid a high price for a shared addiction to strong black tobacco.
Despite a tendency to be overdetailed and to speculate too long over minor points, to the extent that in order to get “hooked” quickly, it might be advisable to skim-read the first three chapters, and later through Eileen’s final employment at the BBC, this biography proves in the main very absorbing and revealing, not only about Eileen and Orwell, but also the times in which they lived.
“The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully though the high boughs…..A big loose hound whose coat is littered with the shadows of the trees lets out a few rough, half-hearted barks…..The presence of a black and white cat moves on the window ledge.” This spare, poetical prose sometimes sounds incongruous, too mature in the thoughts of the young girl narrating this story, unusually observant as she is. But does this really matter? Recounted in the present tense to give a sense of immediacy, this is one of those simple tales which hang on the subtle way in which the facts are revealed.
In the rural Wexford of southeast Ireland during the early 1980s (as we glean from references to the IRA hunger strike in the Maze Prison), a girl – whose name we are never told – is fostered with a farming couple, the Kinsellas, to ease the burden on her heavily pregnant mother. Home life sounds chaotic, since her mother already has to care for at least four children, and do more than her fair share of running the farm, with a husband who clearly drinks away what money there is, leaving too little to pay for the hay to be cut, gambles away a red Shorthorn cow, and casually accepts handouts of potatoes, rhubarb and “the odd bob” sent to his wife. His callousness is revealed when he forgets to unload the girl’s luggage as he drives away, but never seems to make any move to remedy his error.
The Kinsellas could not be more different. Working hard in quiet cooperation, they are keeping at bay a suppressed grief which the girl only discovers after some weeks, from a neighbour’s gossip. Yet although the girl’s presence can only enhance their sense of loss, they still give her the care and attention which she has lacked, so that she blossoms and develops in the space of a few weeks. Suddenly, it becomes clear, as it would to a child with little sense of time passing over a long summer holiday, that the school year is about to start, her mother has given birth and she must return to her old life. The sense of belonging and the affection which have grown make the parting all the harder, on both sides. As is the case with Claire Keegan’s novellas, the ending is ambiguous, leaving the reader to reflect on what happens next. Yet it seems that the girl has gained some permanent benefit from the experience, as perhaps the Kinsellas have as well.
Much of the emotion in this book is implied, together with the way in which observations are used to reveal the characters’ lives and the rural setting, laced with the Irish turn of phrase in the dialogues. As John Kinsella observes, “You don’t have to say anything. Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s a man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing”.
This novella has been made into the film “The Quiet Girl” which has also been highly praised.
Antenna Reviews 