Books

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa – “Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”

The opening chapters give a somewhat romanticised view of life in the ancient village of Ein Hod, said to be granted to Palestinian ancestors by Saladin, with flute playing in the olive groves after a day’s harvesting, yet perhaps this serves to heighten the brutal shock of “El Nakba”, the catastrophic expulsion of the Arabs from the land they had occupied for centuries, by soldiers in support of Israeli settlers.

Based on both respected written sources and her own experience of the refugee camp in which she was born, and of taking the chance as a teenager to study in the US, ending up living with her daughter in Pennsylvania, author Susan Abulwhawa has written a searing tale of Amal, a spirited Palestinian girl whose family members suffer terribly in various ways as they are forced out of Ein Hod to a UN-financed adobe box in the camp at Jenin. An infant brother is kidnapped by an Israeli soldier to comfort his young wife who has been left infertile after ill-treatment at the hands of the Nazis – in such ways the author shows sympathy with the sufferings of the Jews and an understanding of how it has so tragically fed their own determination to create a state of their own, whatever the cost.

Amal’s mother, a once lively Bedouin girl, is traumatised by events, only able to deal with her emotions by internalising them, thus seeming cold and distant to her daughter, who in turn treats her own child in the same way, through a fear of loving what one is doomed to lose. Amal’s cultivated, innately gentle father is radicalised to take up arms in the attempt to regain his property and freedom. Her brother Youssef is consumed by the desire for revenge, and so on.

Although leavened with humour and the strong sense of community, the bleakness of real events, and the unrelenting destruction of innocent families, seem at times too much to take, but anger and outrage kept me reading, together with the sense that to give up implies a lack of respect for those suffering a grave injustice which is still ongoing.

Another aspect is the style of writing, about which I have mixed feelings. I appreciate that there has been an attempt to emulate the flowery, convoluted style of Arab writing, but for a British reader it can become exhausting in its overblown repetition. Since I assume English is the author’s second language, I am not sure to what extent the often unusual use of words is deliberate. Certainly, at times it creates a vivid, poetic quality to convey fear, violence, internal reflections on one’s state. I particularly liked the sensitive translations of Arab poetry. By contrast, the author’s style is frequently jarring, and in moments of intimacy may appear cloying and cringe-making.

The most authentic and engaging sections of the novel are those set in Palestine. In the safety and opportunity of the United States, Amal succeeds in her studies and work, but always seems like a transient observer, detached from her surroundings and characters who seem somewhat two-dimensional. There are some interesting if arguable insights, such as her sister-in-law’s belief that Americans do not love like Palestinians because “they live in the safe, shallow parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell…the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of own own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.” These sound like the author’s own personal reflections.

Bearing in mind that it seems even UN reports have counted some massacres of civilians as justifiable actions by Israel against militants, and in view of an apparent general lack of awareness of the details of the Palestine-Israeli problem, this unflinching and moving novel is an effective way of spreading the word about a major injustice.

To quote from Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet”:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself….
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you
cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

“Le cordonnier de la rue triste” by Robert Sabatier – looking on the bright side

At first, I was put off by the twee sentimentality and the continual interjections of the coy narrator, who suggested that he might be one of the inhabitants of “la rue triste”. Yet although this short novel is not a page turner, it sucks the reader into the evocative atmosphere of a 1940s Parisian street where life goes on despite the Occupation. The last novel of the prolific French author Robert Sabatier, written in his eighties, this seems to draw on his own memories of growing up in Paris, orphaned young, apprenticed to the printing trade, drawn to literature and poetry, largely self-taught and ending up a writer.

Perhaps there is something of himself in the central character Marc, an unusually handsome boy who becomes a skilful cobbler, but loses the use of his legs as a result of an accident when pursuing his passion for running. This tragic event is somehow lightened not only by Marc’s spirit, but also the help given by an assortment of local characters: Jack-of-all- trades Paulo, resembling a comic strip character but with a talent for inventions, not least a workable wheel chair for Marc; Madame Gustave, the kindly manageress of a local bistro who keeps Marc supplied with food, or Rosa la Rose, the tart with a heart.

Every now and again, events begin to take a dramatic turn, but tend to subside like small waves on a beach. What makes this book worth reading is the poetic style, with occasional insights, such as how attempts to reconstruct the past often lack something “impalpable”, like “un reflet dans un miroir déformant”, whereas the strongest witness comes from the first-hand experience of writers like “Erich Maria Remarque”, author of “All quiet on the Western Front”. More than sixty years later, with an old man’s perspective, Marc observes with irony the individuals walking along “la rue triste” like automatons, a mobile phone to one ear, as preoccupied as if their lives depended on the call”. The gift of a TV from a grateful customer introduces him to the ludicrous world of shows in which the audience laugh at the presenter’s inane comments, and applaud not only the rights answers to simple questions but even seem to applaud themselves, like so many “performing seals”.

The novel is like an adult fairy tale, just about saved from mawkishness by some sharp dialogues and ironic humour. It also reminds me of the highly regarded “Stoner”, in its ability to capture the thoughts of “ordinary” people, and what it means to be alive.

Scrublands by Chris Hammer: angel of death

In this debut novel, Chris Hammer makes good use of both his first-hand knowledge of journalistic procedures, and his travels through the Murray-Darling Basin of Eastern Australia to research the impact of the 2008-9 drought.

Like Jane Harper’s “The Dry”, with which it is often compared, although with a distinctly different plot, this is another novel on the crimes triggered by the unrelenting heat and hardship caused by lack of predictable rain in rural Australia.

Traumatised by an ordeal suffered in Gaza, with questions over his ability to hold down his post, once successful foreign correspondent Martin Scarsden is given the supposedly straightforward task of covering how the run-down, drought-ridden town of Riversend is coping a year after its charismatic priest has inexplicably gunned down five local residents, before being shot dead himself by the local copper. Despite his grim motel room at “The Black Dog”, Martin finds himself reluctant to leave, caught up in the desire to find out exactly what motivated the priest Byron Swift to commit such an ungodly crime, but his quest is complicated by the apparent tendency of virtually all the local inhabitants to lie and have something to hide. Using the present tense throughout to heighten the tension, Chris Hammer keeps the suspense going by gradually revealing information, but keeps us guessing until the end as to the precise reason for the atrocity. Also, with the local population so divided against Swift, some of those with most reason to hate him being most surprisingly keen to describe him as a kind of saint, the priest’s true character remains an enigma almost to the end.

Initially slow-paced, but punctuated with dramatic events like the “hook” of the shooting outside the church in the prologue, the plot twists start to come so thick and fast that I began to feel bombarded. Martin’s frequent repeated summaries of events, either in his own mind or to update another character, prove very useful, making me wonder whether some editor advised this. If the book is made into a film, as I think is planned, some of this clarification may be lost.

Although the style at times seems formulaic and clichéd and some characters stereotyped, together with the, for female readers at least, common male fantasy of a romance with an impossibly beautiful much younger woman, the novel is saved partly by the vivid, closely observed descriptions of the landscape. “The sun slams down like a hammer on the anvil of the car park”; “where the river should be…there is a mosaic of cracked clay, baked and going to dust….There is nothing to hear; the heat has sucked the life from the world: no cicadas, no cockatoos, not even crows, just the bridge creaking and complaining as it expands and contracts in thrall to the sun”. Perhaps a surfeit of alliteration, but vivid and evocative writing. Crossing the barren stretch which separates Riversend from the greener civilisation of Bellington, with the temperature over 40 degrees, Martin hallucinates that his car is stationary, with world moving beneath him at the speed of 110 kilometres.

The author is also strong on the moral dilemmas and contradiction of being a journalist. Martin gets a buzz from being the first to submit a scoop, but his hubris over a run of good luck is shattered by the realisation that he has inadvertently published errors which may harm a third party, but cannot expect any support from bosses concerned only to save their own skins. Martin inhabits a “dog eat dog” world of wheedling, lying and moral blackmail to extract information, with the use of subterfuge to prevent others from getting hold of a story before there has been time to file it. He begins to see his past self in others, from the time when he was able to observe and therefore report brutal events so dispassionately, whereas post-Gaza he finds himself discarding details likely to cause pain to others, even though, at the risk of breaking a relationship, he can’t resist the drive to expose the truth as a whole – “It’s what I do”.

This succeeds well as a page-turning yarn but needs to be more concise, with the conclusion a little less neatly sewn up, shorn of corny romance, and devoting more care to the development of Bryon Swift’s puzzling character to be on a par with, say, a Graham Greene classic.

Crashed – How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

A decade on, there is a case for a reassessment of the financial crash of 2008 which first became evident in the US, together with its aftermath on a global scale. Apart from the risk of producing a work that is simultaneously both overly superficial by reason of being so wide-ranging, and too confusing when it comes to referring to complex investment procedures, there is the question of whether a book is directed narrowly as academics or intended to enlighten reasonably well-informed general readers. There are many examples of books which manage to straddle both stools, page turners backed up with impressive bibliographies. I have the impression that this is what “Crashed” is meant to be, but for me it does not succeed in this.

One problem here is that the book requires such a good grasp of economics, financial speculation and politics that anyone possessing it would be unlikely to need to read it in the first place. Adam Tooze makes a promising start, explaining mortgage-backed securities (dodgy if based on loans issued to buyers who may not be able to repay them) or the “repo” system” – a risky form of speculation involving paying for a purchase of securities by reselling them. However, in describing how the crisis developed not only in the States but also the UK and the Eurozone, the author gets on a roll of journalese and no longer troubles to explain obscure acronyms and jargon of the trade. If one is only grasping the gist of the argument, of which one was already aware, is there any point in continuing?

There are also too many distracting digressions such as at the outset in Chapter 1, where the author goes on about the “The Hamilton Project” commenced on Obama’s watch, without clearly stating what it was.

The book contains a number of interesting insights on, for instance, the role of China in financing rampant speculation with its bloated trade surplus, or on the economic and political role of Germany , but I found that digging these out of the verbiage was hard work.

I recommend finding more systematic and focused studies of this fascinating subject, before perhaps returning to this book, which is perhaps better dipped into for reference , or read with the selection of specific chapters of interest, forearmed, of course, with a proper understanding of the working of government bonds, exchange and interest rates and so on.

“Educated” by Tara Westover – the price of “a change of self”

Educated: The international bestselling memoir

The youngest of seven children, Tara Westover was brought up after a bizarre fashion in rural Idaho by a father whose dominant and possibly bi-polar personality fed an extreme form of Mormonism. Using his children as cheap labour, Gene Westover (most family names used are pseudonyms) ran a scrapyard with scant regard for health and safety. He regarded the succession of gruesome injuries which ensued as God-given opportunities to prove the efficacy of the herbal remedies his submissive wife spent much of her time concocting. Hospitals were dangerous places run by “gentiles” to be avoided at all costs, antibiotics and analgesics likely to cause permanent harm. He was obsessed with storing up food and fuel for the long awaited Days of Abomination, the period of chaos which would precede the Second Coming of Christ, which he was convinced would be triggered by Y2K, the expected January 1st 2000 millennium computer failure. His other great obsession was to avoid corrupting state education, insisting that his children be home-schooled, but in such an unorganised way that they were left with no qualifications and woefully ignorant.

As soon as they were old enough, his offspring left home, either to drive trucks and do manual work, which generally meant they drifted back eventually, or as the only means of obtaining an education. Perhaps because she was a girl for whom “book-learning” was considered a particular waste of time since her “destiny” was to become a good wife and mother, Tara found it particularly hard to break free and get into college. Yet through ability and determination combined with the luck of catching the eye of a tutor at the Mormon college who could see her potential, she won a place on a study programme at Cambridge and gained a PhD by her late twenties.

This memoir often seems disjointed, even incoherent and inconsistent when dealing with the more dramatic events. The author admits to the problem of remembering exactly what happened when, say, a brother’s clothing caught fire in the scrapyard, or of dealing with differing recollections of the same incident. This may be what led to her interest in “historiography”, of the varied ways in which historians interpret the past. However, there’s no denying that I was left with the impression that much of the drama had gained in the telling. Apart from the frequent ability to avoid death or paralysis after falling from a great height or gaining third degree burns, there are a litany of inconsistencies.

Admittedly, his psychosis may serve as an excuse, but if Tara’s father forcibly pulled Tara’s sleeves down for the sake of modesty when she was working in the yard on a hot day, why did he let her put on make up to go out repeatedly with a local boy after work? I could understand “Dad’s” somewhat ungodly pride in her singing abilities, but would he have let her mother dye her hair red for her lead part in “Annie”? Would Tara’s parents have paid for her to have orthodontic treatment when they had not done so for her brother Shawn, and had such a horror of medical treatment? When she eventually reached King’s College Cambridge, lacking in confidence and nervous of drawing attention to herself, would she really have either sought or been permitted to stride up the sloping tiles to walk along the ridge during a tour of the roof?

Despite these reservations, this is an intriguing insight into how abuse of power and emotional blackmail may distort family relationships, leading to self-delusion and doublethink which the the changes in perception brought about by education cannot eradicate without a lengthy struggle. Breaking free comes at the price of a painful and guilt-ridden rift with close family members and poignant exile from familiar haunts, in this case the backdrop of the wild solitude of  “Buck’s Peak”.

“The disappearance of Adèle Bedeau” by Raymond Brunet – brilliant “translation” by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The sudden disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, the surly waitress at the real-life Restaurant de la Cloche in the “unremarkable” town of Saint-Louis on the French-Swiss border triggers the chain of events in what proves to be a psychological drama involving the two main protagonists in opposite camps, yet oddly similar in some ways.

The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau by [Burnet, Graeme Macrae]

Manfred Baumann, an outsider by reason of his Swiss father’s surname and his own awkward personality, manages a bank in the town. Bound by routine, obsessively tidy, unable to form social relationships despite living in Saint-Louis for years and doomed to rub people up the wrong way without meaning to do so, Manfred would also make a good detective in his close observation of his surroundings, his eye for detail and speculation on people’s behaviour – as often as not misconstruing their motives (perhaps not so useful for a sleuth!). What past events make him so secretive and prone to persist in a needless lie, which may in fact make him the subject of suspicion? Why are his emotions so repressed, and do they have a tendency to burst out in acts of violence?

The detective deployed to investigate Adèle’s disappearance is Gorski, a man of unusual persistence, who works on the basis of evidence, scorning the reliance on “hunches” of work colleagues, also haunted by his failure to solve the murder of a girl some twenty years earlier, for which a man he believes to be innocent was found guilty, later dying in prison. Found wanting by his snobbish middle-class wife, Gorski might have felt more at home if he had followed his father’s wishes and taken over the family pawn shop.

It would seem better known in France where it was apparently made into a film by Chabrol, Brunet’s novel has been brought to English readers in a superb translation (in that in never seems like one) by Graeme Macrae Burnet who made his name with the unusual murder story “His Bloody Project”, and could well have written this novel himself. I was fascinated by his “afterword” which reveals the intriguing similarities between the original author Raymond Brunet and his creation Manfred Baumann. An only child like him, attached to his mother but losing his father at an early age, Brunet too was “chronically shy”, never known to have a girlfriend nor to be gay, regarded as “aloof and superior” at work, and was a frequent patron of the Restaurant de la Cloche, until the discovery of his negative portrayal of the place together with its regular customers made it uncomfortable for him to go there. In fact, Brunet identified so closely with Baumann that he was devastated by Chabrol’s portrayal of him as “somewhat comic and pathetic”.

In short, an unexpectedly good read.

“Le Blé en Herbe” by Colette – growing pains

        

Almost a century after this was written, it seems like the charming, bitter-sweet tale of Phil and Vinca, two adolescents who have been close friends and playmates since infancy. On their summer holiday in the shared house rented by their parents every summer on the Normandy coast,  there is ample opportunity for the inevitable unsettling change in their relationship mixed with the general tensions and confusion of moving from childhood to becoming an adult. The appearance on the scene of the sensual, predatory thirty-something Mme Dalleray serves to bring matters to a head.

The story is perhaps unusual for a female author in adopting for the most part the viewpoint of Phil. Insofar as I  can judge, it provides a convincing portrayal of a sixteen-year-old boy – obsessed with the female body, worrying about his future studies, frustrated by the unimaginably long time he must endure before he can reach twenty-five and be considered fully a man. We know less about Vinca’s inner thoughts. Mostly still a tomboy, she can switch rapidly to wearing a pretty dress and flirting demurely with a male visitor who admires her. Capable of strong emotional outbursts, she seems generally more self-controlled, and mature in her reasoning but also more passive than Phil, playing mother to her little sister,  prepared to stay at home and help her own ailing mother until she gets married. In this attitude, she is the natural product of the 1920s when the book was written.

Apart from the fact that it is quite well-constructed, what sets this story apart is the vivid evocation  of the shoreline and changing weather along the Normandy coast. Colette’s style is quite poetical, so difficult to translate well, but the meaning is striking and clear. The same goes for the minute description of complex chains of thought and  shifts in emotions. There are also moments of humour mixed with irony, as when Phil brings Mme Dalleray  the gift of a bunch of thistles, of a blue the colour of Vinca’s eyes. I was amused by the way Phil and Vinca viewed their parents as aimiable, unreal “shadows” (les Ombres),  to be pitied for never having been in love, and in Phil’s case finding it hard even to focus on what his father was saying.

Perhaps because the scenario is dated, the examination of Vinca-and-Phil’s love sometimes becomes overblown and cloying, verging on Mills and Boon. There is an element of chauvinism as in Phil’s sense of his right to sexual adventures,  while expecting Vinca to be “pure”, together with a kind of reverse sexism in the idea that women, whilst appearing to be dominated, may in fact manipulate men, or take the lead in the case of an older woman initiating a boy.

When first published as a novel in 1923, and later distributed as a film in 1950s America, where it was temporarily banned, this  was widely considered shocking, “immoral and obscene” because it broke taboos in dealing not only with the awakening of physical attraction between adolescents,  but also with sexual acts, although in such oblique and lyrical language that it is unlikely to cause modern readers any offence.  There is the further twist that the plot was “inspired” by Colette’s own affair with her sixteen-year-old step-son, which reduces one’s respect for her as both a person and an author, although it may contribute to the book’s ring of authenticity.

“A Certain Idea of France” – a biography of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson- Using his wits to survive “like Tintin”.

This engrossing biography should delay the inevitable forgetting of what made De Gaulle so famous, with a clear socio-political summary of the past century to set the France of today in context. I enjoyed the frequent use of vivid quotations to show the reactions of De Gaulle’s contemporaries to this eccentric, complex man whose flaws both undermined and contributed to his often controversial achievements.

Deeply influenced by his conservative, nationalistic, intellectual Catholic upbringing, it is unsurprising that De Gaulle found the rapid French surrender at the outset of World War Two and subsequent collaboration intolerably dishonourable. His broadcasts to France from exile in London via the BBC, notably the famous call to arms in June 1940, had the same kind of morale-boosting impact as Churchill’s speeches. By the time De Gaulle was able to walk down the Champs-Elysées of a liberated Paris, an estimated “two million souls” gathered to greet him, yet few had any idea what he looked like in that pre-television age.

To gain recognition as the leader of the Free French and ensure that France should have some role both in the liberation and the subsequent negotiations required vast self-belief amounting to arrogance, combined with unrelenting persistence. Speaking of himself as “De Gaulle”, even “France”, a kind of latter-day male Joan of Arc, he threw chairs during tantrums with world leaders, machinated to get rid of rivals, tried Churchill’s patience to the limit, and aroused the implacable hostility of the American President Roosevelt. Forever “biting the hand that fed him”, he showed scant gratitude to the Allies or the Resistance groups on whom he was at times utterly dependent.

Perhaps he was simply applying the reading which had convinced him of a leader’s need to “cultivate mystery and keep his distance” with “a large dose of egoism, of pride, or hardness and ruse …Leadership is solitary exercise of the will”. Although he was a showman in his oratory, delivering carefully honed speeches from memory in several languages and, with his undeniable courage, loved to disappear into large adulatory crowds, private meetings with De Gaulle were often disappointing. There is a pattern in descriptions of him pontificating at length, looking through people rather than at them, sometimes unexpectedly proving later to have noted and even been influenced by remarks they had managed to make.

“Granting” Algerian independence has been cited as one of De Gaulle’s main achievements, but Julian Jackson points out that it was in fact “wrested from him” after France had come close to mainland civil war, and he showed a callous disregard for the suffering of pieds noirs and Harkis who “lost out” in the process.

It was a shock to realise that De Gaulle’s return to power as President in 1958 was undemocratic, a coup “legalised” because “France’s elites had lost confidence in the existing regime to resolve the Algerian crisis”. This gave him “full powers to govern by decree for six months with the suspension of parliament during that period”. His subsequent manipulation of the constitution under the new Fifth Republic to get himself elected directly by the public, thus cementing his personal power, was also questionable – he was recreating the role of a monarch within the republican system which had aimed to destroy it. His delight in “upsetting the applecart” was evident to the end, as in his rash speech, climaxing in the infamous slogan “Vive le Québec libre!”on a visit to Canada.

De Gaulle often seems like a throwback to a previous age, with his frugal personal lifestyle, rejection of the telephone even when holding high office. and his musing on the damaging effect on society of mass production. Yet he encouraged others to pursue the technology, including nuclear warheads, which would “make France great” and was fortunate, probably owing some of his popularity to, the fact that his “reign” coincided with the “Trente Glorieuses” – the three decades of post-war relative economic prosperity and cultural achievement in France.

Although forced to resign ultimately as an old man who had become out of touch, as indicated by the riots of 1968, De Gaulle often proved quite insightful: he foresaw the collapse of Soviet communism, the folly of the American involvement in the Vietnam War which could not be won, ironically even prophesied for the Common Market that “if England enters into the Community, it will collapse because England will divide us”.

Clearly intended to be a major academic work, this requires a significant investment of time. At more than 800 pages, including notes and bibliography, it is too thick and cumbersome to read comfortably in paper format. I found the Kindle version more convenient, with the downside of it being much harder to flick back quickly to check on a point. The sheer number of names of politicians or acronyms of organisations and parties often becomes too much to absorb. Yet it definitely extended my knowledge and understanding considerably – probably one of the best books I have made the effort to read.

“Transcription” by Kate Atkinson – No need for a bodyguard of lies when truth has vanished.

There are plenty of stories of naïve young women caught up in World War Two who prove plucky and shrewd when parachuted into occupied France to work in espionage or join the Resistance. This novel focuses on a more mundane form of spying, and at times almost seems like a parody of the genre.

Obliged by her widowed mother’s terminal illness and death to give up her school scholarship and prospect of trying for Oxford, Juliet Armstrong finds life taking an unexpected turn when she is recruited by MI5 in 1940, initially as a typist transcribing bugged conversations between Fifth Column Nazi sympathisers and “Gordon Toby”, the work colleague masquerading as a Gestapo agent.

Pehaps intentionally, the recorded conversations are monumentally boring and trivial – little threat to national security – but when Juliet is recruited to spy on one of the female members of an ultra-right wing club, matters take an unexpected sinister turn. As the plot switches continually between 1940 and 1950, when Juliet is working on childrens’ programmes at the BBC, the tale becomes less of a spy thriller, and more a case of paying the price for past actions.

At times the story is quite funny, even a page-turner creating the sense that the plot is going somewhere interesting and unpredictable. Therefore I tried to suppress my irritation (over the excessive use of asides in brackets!), together with a sense of unease over the underlying jokey, flippant attitude to war, which seems an aspect of Juliet’s personality. She is actually quite an unappealing character: instinctive lying without blinking, often for no apparent reason; getting a “buzz” from taking the occasional fool-hardy risk; proving ruthless and calculating under pressure; perhaps the ideal spy in her lack of emotion or commitment to anyone or anything. She is kind to dogs, or people who have suffered inadvertently through her actions, but does not seem deeply moved by anything.

This impression may be the unintended consequence of shortcomings in the writing. I agree with other reviewers who have found the characters wooden and underdeveloped, the few really dramatic incidents implausibly contrived, and the long-anticipated climax so disconnected from what has gone before that it seems as if pages have been left out in a printing error. It is presumably intended to be a clever and surprising twist, but it seems like lazy writing, even insulting, to foist it on the reader in this way.

Whereas most writers apologise for any factual mistakes in a novel, Kate Atkinson defiantly admits “I got a lot of it wrong on purpose” – permissible in the case of MI5’s refusal to “spill the beans” on the transcription process. The portrayal of BBC School Broadcasting in the early 1950s seems accurate as I recall, and it does not bother me if the rest is not. What I find harder to accept is an established writer taking the soft option of a plot with gaping holes.

“Quatre Murs” by Kéthévane Dvarichewy – They mess you up your family….

As is often the case, although very close as children, four siblings have drifted apart into adult life. All they seem to have in common is a tendency to be troubled, even neurotic, perhaps owing to past repressed events which are gradually revealed.

In the prologue, they are brought together physically by the final visit to the childhood home which their widowed mother has decided to sell. This inevitably triggers nostalgic memories, but tension is aroused by the mother’s wish to give some of their inheritance in advance to her two younger and less successful children, the twins Elias and Rena.
The “four walls” of the title seem like a metaphor for the four adult siblings who need to decide whether they want to rebuild their relationships to prevent their family group from crumbling, once it has lost the “anchor” of the family home. To do this, they have to understand their relationships in the first place, which is hard in view of all the unspoken resentments, real or imagined guilt of the past.

A reunion with their mother two years later at the Greek holiday home purchased by elder son Saul creates a situation in which the four can reflect on the past, perhaps make a few confessions and ultimately begin to rebond. The author uses the device of taking a different view point in each chapter: that of Saul, the “intellectual”, successful but troubled former journalist; then Hélène, the internationally known creator of perfumes who has perhaps erected a false screen of not wanting either children or a man in her life; Elias, who has not achieved his potential as a pianist and is separated from his wife, and Rena who has suffered a crippling accident, leaving her dependent on a crutch, perhaps another metaphor for emotional clinging to others.

Is perception of the past changed by the passage of time, or does each individual see it in his or her own way? Memories take root differently, with hate linking us as much as love. Do only children, like their parents, make a fantasy out of having a large family, thus creating a heavy burden for their own brood of children? People worry how their children will turn out, what they can do to avoid mistakes in their upbringing, all the while finding it hard to see themselves as parents. Such are the observations produced by the characters’ continual navel-gazing.

There are some strong dialogues (sometimes hard to keep track of who is speaking), leading me to wonder if this might have worked better as a film which could also have captured visually the ambience of the childhood house, or Saul’s Greek retreat. Critics have noted the subtlety and “non-dits”, unspoken words, of this novella, so perhaps I missed some of the revelations. For me, these proved too fragmented, the details sometimes hard to follow, except when delivered in a melodramatic outburst. One could argue that the real drama lies in the reader’s freedom to speculate over what may really lie behind all the obscure hints and allusions. For instance, do incestuous feelings lie at the root of a character’s malaise? Can it be hard for the siblings in general really to love anyone outside the charmed circle of their childhood bonds, now broken without being fully satisfied by anyone else?

The French author may have been inspired by her Georgian heritage to create a family with parents who were originally Greek immigrants, one of Jewish extraction, but it was unclear to me how being immigrants influenced the essential exploration of family ties, except that feeling a little rootless may have encouraged the mother to foster excessively tight bonds between her children.

A potentially promising novella left me rather bored and disappointed with its underdeveloped characters, thin plot, and somewhat tame conclusion.