This is my review of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon.

When a middle-aged woman disappears from a suburban road, gossips fear the worst, but her neighbours are embroiled in a rising tide of panic and recrimination as they fear that a guilty secret from the past is about to be exposed. Prompted by the vicar’s sententious platitude that “if God exists in a community, no one will be lost”, bossy ten-year-old Grace and her compliant but underestimated friend Tilly pose as helpful brownies to gain access to neighbours’ homes in order to check whether or not God is there. Quite how this is going to help the situation is never made quite clear.

The story is set in the long, hot summer of 1976 which a number of writers have used as a backdrop to weird goings-on. Despite some novel if overwritten images –– “the sky was ironed into an acid blue, and even the clouds had fallen from the edges, leaving a faultless page of summer above our heads”, “the avenue…bewildered by the heat” – I grew weary of descriptions of the unrelenting drought, but this may have been the author’s intention. The focus on “contemporary accuracy” with references to Harold Wilson and his pipe, “Are you being served?”, “The Good Life”, Patsy Cline singing “Crazy”, “The Drifters” and “Angel Delight” often seems contrived.

At first, the chapters written from Alice’s viewpoint seem the strongest, until the contrast begins to jar between her childishness and some implausibly insightful comments: observing a Mrs Morton she reflects “Early widowhood had forced her to weave a life from other people’s remnants, and she had baked and minded and knitted herself into a glow of indispensability.” In order to drip-feed the reader with the details of what is really afoot in “The Avenue”, Joanna Cannon has to resort to a number of different viewpoints, all in the third person and often involving flashbacks. This often makes the storyline seem fragmented, with the highly stereotyped adults soon becoming tedious caricatures. Trite comments apart, there is a good deal of humour in the book, but the hypocrisy and prejudice of the adults is laid on with many trowels.

As the story labours its way to a surprisingly abrupt and anticlimatic ending, I was probably wrong to be irritated by a number of small errors: the “six week” school summer holiday runs from early July through to September, starting on July 5th, at least a fortnight earlier than I remember to be the case. Dahlias bloom in July alongside freesias – perhaps a quirkish effect of the heat. The persecuted Walter Bishop has several cedar trees in his front garden, something I have never seen outside a stately home. My main problem was being unable to form a clear sense of place – a mental picture of the estate, somewhere a bus ride from Nottingham. At various points, we are told about terraces and a corner shop, but houses in the Avenue have garages and sound detached. Lace-curtained windows of kitchens and “living rooms” both seem to overlook the road plus the houses seem to have “sitting rooms” as well. Here, an alcoholic single mother lives close to a property manager. The neighbours mostly seem to have known each other from childhood but are they working or middle class? You need to know this about a community in the UK. And, although some appear to have jobs, how is it that they all seem able to converge on a dramatic scene at the drop of a hat?

It’s the fantasy land of a children’s story in what purports to be an adult novel. The “genres” are all mixed up but in the end it proves to be a lightweight, by turns sad, funny, sentimental, unsubtle psychological novel. A poignant situation and any sense of real suspense are both blunted by a storyline which descends into tongue-in-cheek parody – to give it the benefit of the doubt – particularly when the neighbours gather in their deckchairs to watch over the creosote image of Jesus which has appeared on a drainpipe.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Green Road: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 by Anne Enright.

With her by turns staccato and poetic prose, wry wit and Pinteresque dialogues of unfinished sentences which reflect how people both fail to communicate but also do not always need to use words when they have lived together for years and shared common experiences, Ann Enright has an original angle on the well-worn theme of Irish family life.

In this case, the four Madigan children have grown up in a small west coast town close to the beautiful green road “famed in song and story” which runs across the Burren above the beach at Fanore and the Flaggy Shore – all of which can be found on Google images if the lilting names catch one’s interest enough.

The first part, “Leaving” is like a series of short stories, each from the perspective of a different sibling over a span of twenty-five years, with a final focus on Rosaleen, complex, difficult and probably too inconsistent and self-absorbed to be a “good mother”, and arousing a mixture of frustrated love and irritable resentment in her children. Ann Enright seems most authentic when writing about Ireland, which is where Rosaleen and her two daughters have allowed themselves to be “trapped”, all feeling a sense of unfulfilment to which they respond in different ways. “Impossible to please”, “Rosaleen was tired of waiting. She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened.”

Ann Enright’s experimental, risk-taking approach does not always work for me, but many observations and passages strike home: as Rosaleen walks along the Green Road in the dark, “a delicacy of stars above her”……….“The sea was huge for her. The light gentle and great. The fields indifferent , as she walked up the last of the hill. Bust she got a slightly sarcastic feel off the ditches, there was no other word for it – sprinkles of derision – like the countryside was laughing at her.”

Rosaleen’s two sons are more pro-active in their quest for an elusive goal, with Dan going “everywhere”, and Emmet “everywhere else” abroad. I was gripped by the strong sense of place and build-up of tension in the drama of aid-worker Emmet’s over-sensitive girlfriend Alice breaking a taboo in Mali by taking a stray dog into their home. Dan’s spell as a lapsed priest flirting with the gay art scene in New York struck me as too contrived, perhaps partly because of the arch tone of the unnamed first person narrator, a device not used elsewhere in the book, partly because it seemed overloaded with caricatures of over-sexed, drugged up young men caught up in an early ‘90s panic over Aids, all based on a woman’s second-hand research of the explicit details of being a male gay.

“Part Two”, “Coming Home” is more of a novella focused on a fraught Christmas reunion. Although, plotwise, not much happens, in terms of sudden sharp insights, comical or poignant situations and brilliant sentences one would love to have written, it is absorbing and demands to be read again.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

 

This is my review of Oscar et la Dame rose by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

After an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant, ten-year-old Oscar puts the adults in his world to shame by the courage with which he faces the prospect of death. He is scornful of his distraught parents and sharp enough to perceive that his surgeon sees him primarily as an embarrassing and frustrating reminder of his own professional failure. The only “grown up” to offer Oscar some comfort is the eccentric hospital visitor “Mamie Rose”. Her suspect reminiscences of life as a successful wrestler, and the advice that Oscar should try writing letters to God, suggest that she may not be any more honest than the other adults, but combined with her idea of a game by which Oscar could imagine that each day represents a decade of the life (which he will not in reality experience), these ploys both entertain Oscar, and help him to grasp some vital points about living which it can take most of us years to understand, if at all.

Apart from Mamie Rose’s frankly tedious anecdotes, I found it implausible that Oscar would be so insightful about, for instance the “mid-life crisis”, and his romance with another patient, “Betty Blue”, is a bit mawkish at times. The most poignant moment for me occurs when, as a “very old man”, Oscar is struck by the beauty of nature, and realises that each day is to be appreciated as unique.

A philosopher by training, Schmitt uses quirky humour and an original approach to make just about tolerable a parable of how we could make more sense of life, and deal better with death. The focus on a young person’s death makes the situation all the more moving, but has relevance for us all.

Although I disliked this story at first, I was won over by the final pages, and was left with the sense that Schmitt has succeeded in provoking thoughts which stay in one’s mind. I believe this is studied in French schools and judging by reviews, it appeals to young people and is likely to spark discussion.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Ladies’ Paradise (The Ladies’ Delight) – Unabridged by Émile Zola.

I gave this 5 stars in the original French, but found this English version useful only to check a few points, like the names of fabrics!

Since I associate Zola with grim, unrelenting tales of exploited coal miners, the theme of a Paris department store dedicated to delighting women seemed at first uncharacteristically tame and frothy. In fact, behind its plate glass and eye-catching displays, “Au Bonheur des Dames” proves to be as dominating and exploitative as any industrial factory, its shop assistants, clerks, packers and delivery men mere cogs in the machinery, as controlled as any industrial worker, on the mass production line of retailing.

Beneath his charm and apparent empathy with women and their love of fashion, inspired entrepreneur Octave Mouret is in fact a cynical manipulator: he is not only a casual seducer, but views his female customers as an inexhaustible captive market to be dazzled by his marketing ploys and all too readily induced to fritter away their husbands’ money on the material goods he displays with such alluring skill. His sponsor Baron Hartmann warns him that one day women will “get their revenge” but Mouret is knocked off course where he least expects it by the sweet, unsophisticated but stoical country girl Denise Baudu, who is quick to grasp that the department store is a part of inexorable progress, but steadfastly sticks to her personal principles.

In vivid if wordy descriptions, Zola describes how the magnificent store looms over the surrounding gloomy alleys, further cutting them out from the sun. These are the haunts of the resentful traditional shopkeepers who persist in their stubborn and ultimately fruitless struggle to survive, when they cannot realistically hope to compete with Mouret’s drastic discounts and huge variety of goods. The scale and brightness of his store, with the light pouring in through glazed roofs, and the Lowry-style bustle on the metal staircases and galleries, as far as the eye can see, creates the idea of a self-contained community, which Zola sometimes calls a “phalanstery” after the C19 ideas of Charles Fourier for a utopian community.

Yet, although the workers are housed and fed in a paternalistic way, the shop is far from utopian: staff are not allowed to have visitors in their rooms, women have to leave when they become pregnant, and in the summer months of slack demand, assistants are dismissed for the slightest imagined misdemeanour. Not surprisingly, they often resort to scams to swindle the store, and the smallest rumour or incident is exaggerated and spread on the gossip grapevine. Although the customers look down on the assistants who must be ladylike without being accepted as ladies, they often behave badly, not merely overspending on luxuries and abusing the “returns” policy, but even resorting to shop-lifting.

Just as the store seems very topical in these times of zero hours contracts, class divides and the ravages of competition, Zola’s characters are real in their flaws and complexity. There are also some moments of comedy amongst the exhausting materialism of the store contrasting with the suffering of the impoverished small shopkeepers.

The novel is best read in French, although the exhaustive lists of specialised fabrics and some of the dated procedures forced me to resort to English translations. These vary a good deal in quality, so it is advisable to check them out before purchase. Some come with interesting introductions, to be read afterwards to avoid spoilers. This kindle translation is far too literal – hence very stilted and wooden in places. Also, not easy to read in conjunction with French kindle version!!

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars