SQUAWK OF THE YEAR

Wherein we squawk about our favorite books from 2016.

Bill Kirton:

A lot of my 2016 reading was escapist – stories by the best sellers who’ve earned their reputations as reliable providers of thrills, suspense, twists and satisfaction and who don’t need reviews from me to confirm their excellence. On the other hand, there were others who had nothing like the exposure of these big boys and girls and yet who produced highly individual, accomplished novels which deserve a wider readership. Black Sheep Boy is one of them.

I bought it on the recommendation of a friend, otherwise I don’t think it would have registered on my radar. As the title suggests, it’s a series of episodes in a life, but a life far removed from that of a comfortable old guy living in Scotland. The first person narrator is a young boy who lives in the Louisiana bayou and, as well as sharing his personal pains and pleasures with us, he evokes this highly individual context and its customs. Throughout, the fact that he is, as the blurb warns us, ‘small, weak, effeminate’, frequently creates conditions, oppositions and alliances which set him at odds with that same culture with its fixed notions of how men and women should be.

So the exoticism of the content is already fascinating to a reader far removed from its everyday manifestations, but the main power of the book is the voice in which it’s related and the way he shares with us the discoveries his experiences bring to him. The rhythms and music of the prose, the delicacy of the images he conjures up, and the beautiful mix of ‘normal’ English and the gentle patois of the bayou are captivating. Interest never wavers, from the simplest stories he recounts to the questions of identity he asks of others and himself as he grows into and struggles to understand and withstand the dilemmas and threats posed by his sexuality and his gender. Themes of mysticism, justice, impotence and survival weave through it all, taking different guises in the various relationships he forms and experiences he enjoys and/or endures.

And, in the end, so closely do we empathise with his thoughts and feelings that the specificity of his sexual and gender-related issues broadens into reflections on identity and purpose which relate to the whole process of how we become who we are and continue to evolve through more of its iterations. It’s beautiful, thought-provoking, essentially human and an excellent read.

Pat Black:

I thoroughly enjoyed Frances Larson's Severed, a grisly but compelling history of decapitation. I also loved Peter Hill's memoirs of his time working on Scottish lighthouses, Stargazing.

But the blue rosette goes to a book I haven't reviewed - I, Partridge, by Alan Partridge. The audiobook is narrated in-character by Steve Coogan and was probably the funniest book I've ever come across. As if I needed to look any more of a lunatic on the morning commute. Eat my goal! 

Marc Nash:

I had a year of big thick post-modern works and lots of non-English fiction in translation.

Most of the Po-Mo was pretty disappointing with the honourable exception of Sergio de la Pava's "A NakedSingularity", but it was the non-English fiction that blew me away this year. Valeria Luiselli's "The Story Of My Teeth" was good fun, both of Yuri Herrera's 100 page novels were very evocative and lyrical in their brevity. Both of those authors are Mexican. But the winner was Korean author Kan Hang's "The Vegetarian" which despite a completely redundant third section, parts one and two were so stunning and beautiful and haunting that the limp part 3 simply didn't matter. Highly recommended. 

Worst read of the year Gillian Slovo's "Ten Days" purportedly about the London riots of 2011 in which just a single rioter makes an appearance and he's rescuing a child from a burning building. utterly misses the point. 

Melissa Conway:

After a lifetime spent reading whenever a spare moment presents, I’m lately in this weird bubble of book avoidance, with the excuse that I simply can’t spare the time. I didn’t read much in 2016, but even if I had, my year’s best pick would have stood out from the rest. Rebecca Lochlann’s The Sixth Labyrinth is the first book in the second Child of the Erinyes trilogy, a love triangle driven by divine destiny to be reincarnated through the ages. Great writing, highest recommendation.

J.S. Colley:

My have-read list for 2016 is woefully short. I will mention HillbillyElegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance.  The author’s family moved from addiction-ridden Appalachia to Ohio, where he was able to overcome his inherited geography and make it to Yale Law School. Although it didn’t fully live up to my expectations, it came close.

I’m currently reading Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes, published by the newly-formed Aardvark Bureau, about South Africa’s only “ethical pest removal specialist.” So far, I’m enjoying it. Perhaps I’ll write a review when I’m finished.

I wish you all happy reading in the new year!

THE DARKEST OF SUNS WILL RISE

by Brian Sfinas

174 pages, Heartless Press

Review by Bill Kirton

This is a teasing, tantalizing book. Part of that may be because I’m not familiar with the conventions of the genre, but I know enough about it to sense that in this instance, the writer may actually be testing and stretching those conventions. The sci-fi essentials are there – space travel, extra-terrestrial entities, a close dependence of humans on machines and a  society which has clearly evolved from some of the processes and preoccupations that prevail today. But there’s also a deliberate confusion, passages which challenge accepted social and moral behaviours, a reluctance to ascribe qualities such as heroism and treachery to exclusive sources. Motives and reciprocations overlap, acts of simple human jealousy sit among and are mixed with threats of potentially cataclysmic conflicts which may only be resolved by the premeditated creation of black holes. As Mr Spock might say, ‘It’s sci-fi, Jim, but not as we know it’. In fact, the impression I’ve retained from my reading of it is that it is so layered with events whose significance operates simultaneously at many separate levels that it might need several readings to understand all the author’s intended themes.

It’s certainly unconventional in its form and narrative techniques.  Others have compared The Darkest  Of Suns will Rise with the epistolary novel, but examples of that genre seldom offered as many distinct viewpoints as this author exploits to convey the different layers and elements of his story. His principals share their interior and exterior monologues with us and are, in turn, probed and ‘explained’ by the advanced alien civilisation which has access to their rational and irrational thought processes. Between their diary entries and written interpersonal communications are extracts from databases of the type into which Wikipedia will evolve, written reports of serving officers, records of thought processes infiltrated and interpreted by the alien consciousness, items of correspondence. In other words, there are many voices, many opinions, many narrators. And this, too, must be a deliberate choice of the author. We’re told so often that a writer must show and not tell and, in my opinion bizarrely, there’s a reluctance to grant authors omniscience. The creation is theirs, everything in it is a product of their own thinking so of course they’re omniscient. The trick, the skill, is to parcel up that omniscience in such a way that it doesn’t intrude. The technique adopted here is to assign different aspects of the narrative – the internal fears and feelings of characters, the precise nature of the prevailing social conditions and structures, the policies driving the various factions, the actual events which occur and provoke reactions and plot developments – to appropriate sources: diaries, reports, conversations, internal monologues. Yes, it means the point of view changes repeatedly, but the change is signaled in a clear, bold headline immediately before the relevant passage so there should be no confusion in the reader’s mind about where the information’s coming from. The overall impression is of a carefully designed mosaic representing the preoccupations, sensations and perceptions of the story’s principals.

I know I’m focusing on the formal aspects of the book, but that’s because I found them intriguing. I’m also reluctant to summarise the plot because I don’t want to risk any spoilers and I think in any case that just ‘telling the story’ would do the novel an injustice. There aren’t any goodies and baddies in the conventional sense. The aliens, The Prognosticate, have infiltrated humanity and helped it to what, on the surface at least, seems to be a utopian peace. Illness has been banished, our despoliation of the earth has been reversed and there are logical futuristic developments of familiar everyday processes. The internet has become internets, nanotechnology has solved most of the problems which prevail today, religions have been superseded. But, perhaps as a result of all this, life seems dull, too easy, featureless. One of the elements which may disturb some readers is one character’s need for pain, an extreme masochism which makes excruciating demands. Objectively, in this monotonously perfect existence, it is perhaps a signal of the forces that have been suppressed but not extinguished. And, indeed, there are those who don’t accept the pacifying intrusions of the aliens. They are the Orphanage, led by a Mother, and they have not rejected the old Gods, so conflict is still a factor in this utopia – at private and public levels.

And, in the end, perhaps that is the book’s main message. The couple at its centre enjoy a relationship of domination and submission, the themes of subjugation and control are constantly restated. Maybe we’re not made for peaceful, unthreatened existence. We need to fight, to feel, to be challenged. But that ‘perhaps’ and that ‘maybe’ are important. The book’s teasing complexities may have other significations, different interpretations. What does seem clear is that the author has not taken an easy route here, but he has created a totally absorbing, well-constructed, poetic examination of the interplay of very mysterious forces.

SQUAWK OF THE YEAR

Wherein we squawk about our favorite books from 2015

J.S. Colley:

The books I enjoyed this year are, in no particular order:

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper, a story about an 83-year-old woman who sets out to hike 3,232 kilometers across rural Saskatchewan, Canada to the sea. She leaves a note for her husband, Otto, that reads, “I will try to remember to come back,” and a box of recipe cards so he won’t go hungry. Russell is their neighbor who has loved Etta from afar for years, and James is a coyote who befriends Etta on her long journey. It’s a poignant novel covering a myriad of themes, ranging from aging, illness, death, friendship, love and loss.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt: A Novel by Tracy Farr. After losing her mother and her father, Lena Gaunt is introduced to the Theremin, a musical instrument that is played without physical contact. (This is a real instrument—who knew?) Sounds are produced by the oscillations of the musician’s arms and hands. But that’s not the only odd thing about this novel. The protagonist is a bisexual, octogenarian junkie. While I thought a few of the plot points were forced—something that has annoyed me with a few works of modern literature—it was, overall, an excellent read.

It’s fascinating what will spark a novelist’s imagination. Tracy Farr read about the Theremin and, from there, created this whole world—this fictional life—of Lena Gaunt. Imagination truly is a gift, for both the reader as well as the writer.

The Moon Casts a Spell: A Novella (The Child of the Erinyes) by Rebecca Lochlann. I wanted to give a shout-out to this companion novella to Lochlann’s larger volumes in The Child of the Erinyes series, which follows the lives of three people through various incarnations. In this installment, fate brings them together on the “windswept isle of Barra, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.” The atmospheric setting casts a spell over the reader. Will the trio ever discover their link to the ancient past? This novella will help Lochlann’s fans endure the wait until the next full-length novel in her new series is published.

Bill Kirton:

Lisa Hinsley was a very gifted, sensitive young author. I first came across her through her book, My Demon, which I enjoyed very much. Through a friendship on Facebook, I also came to know her as a warm, compassionate person who had lots of time for other people and was perennially positive. This was true of her even as she fought cancer for three and a half years, telling us of her tribulations but with never a sign of the self-pity or ‘Why me?’ which comes so naturally with the condition. When she went into hospital for the last time, she was the focus of an online party which she herself described as, literally, 'a party till you drop’. It was a joyous event which went on for many weeks, filled, on Lisa’s insistence, with laughter and happy, uplifting contributions. If any partygoer let any of the underlying sadness show, it was Lisa who raised their spirits through her astonishing bravery and example. She died on December 9^th this year, just 2 days before her birthday, but left an example of how to live for everyone who knew her, even if only online.

So, while it’s always difficult for me to say which of the books I enjoyed is ‘better’ than the others, this year the choice is easy. It’s Stolen, by Lisa. Not because of its deathless prose, its insights and revelations or any particularly literary qualities (although it has plenty), but because it was written by one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. I don’t believe in an afterlife but I really wish there were one - just for Lisa.

Pat Black:

For new books, I enjoyed Sarah Lotz's The Three. Part ghost story, part conspiracy thriller, written in a unique style. Extremely unsettling. 

But my choice is Roger Deakin's Waterlog. Classic nature writing, one of the best books I've read in years. 

Marc Nash:

Michel Faber - The Book Of Strange New Things

A story that dissects a husband and wife's love so expertly.

A book that tears back the veil of communication and how double-edged it is and how easy to misinterpret meaning.

A science fiction world that wears its inventiveness very lightly, yet somehow manages to authentically conjure up a truly alien sensibility.

A novel about religious faith which I would normally run a million miles from rather than read and enjoy.

Superlative.

THE QUICKENING

by Mari Biella

200 pages, Amazon Digital Services

Review by Bill Kirton

Susan Hill is quoted as the most accomplished of our contemporary writers of ghost stories. She’s certainly an excellent writer but, for me, her work isn’t remotely scary or disturbing. The Woman in Black is touted as a masterpiece of the genre and yet I found it predictable and devoid of the chills everyone seems to ascribe to it. This no doubt says more about me than about Ms Hill, and her fans will probably not even have bothered reading this far in my review. And, even if they have, they’ll consider me unqualified to comment on anything in the genre.

But it’s the fact that others have compared Mari Biella’s The Quickening with Ms Hill’s works that provokes my remarks because to me there seems to be a significant difference between the approach of the two writers and the impact of their stories. Ms Biella makes no assumptions about the reader’s susceptibilities. All aspects of her story, the rational and the immanent, are given equal weight. Her characters and their relationships are beautifully, carefully drawn and delineated. She knows them so well and follows their shifts of mood and their changing perceptions with the lightest and yet surest of touches. Her writing is measured, thoughtful. She chooses the words she puts into her first person narrator’s mouth with care and skilfully reproduces the tone and rhythms of the late Victorian era in which the events take place. Most of all, her book’s uniqueness stems from the fact that she manages to close the gap between the rational and the supernatural which sceptics like myself find so difficult to negotiate.

The vast, impossible distance between the quick and the dead is, if not overcome, at least brought into question. The rational-minded Lawrence Fairweather despairs at his wife’s persistent refusal to accept the loss of their younger daughter. His wish is to move on from the tragedy but the child’s continued ‘presence’ for his wife and their other daughter closes all avenues. It sits at the centre of the narrative, determining its pathways, insinuating itself into everything, challenging him.

His account of the events begins in apprehension. Its slow burn intensifies as the story builds and, as he relates details of changes in his wife, we become aware of subtle psychological changes in himself. Simultaneously, in the broader context, the opposing forces of the real and the imagined begin, barely perceptibly, to overlap as seemingly irreconcilable elements gradually merge and fuse.

The result is a shiver which is qualitatively distinct from that produced by more conventional hauntings. Here, the external trappings of the story – its historical period, geographical location, oppressive mood and surroundings – follow those conventions, but the hauntings are internal, of the mind. They occupy the same space as reason. And, even to a sceptic like myself, they seem to be equally valid.

This is an excellent work, a pleasure to read. Ms Biella makes the ghostly accessible, possible, legitimate.

STOLEN

by Lisa Hinsley

268 pages, Kindle

Review by Bill Kirton

To create suspense, tension and all the other desirable elements of a thriller or mystery, some writers need to multiply their characters, crowd their pages with action and/or violence. In Stolen, Lisa Hinsley gives us just two central characters, one of whom is absent for long stretches, and a supporting cast of secondary characters (who are neither secondary, in terms of their importance to the main character, nor supporting, in the psychological sense).

This central character is Emily who, profoundly depressed by a double tragedy, decides to get away from it all, leaves home, with no warning to her parents, and travels to Scotland. I’m conscious of the need to avoid spoilers but the book’s blurb tells how she meets a seemingly kindly, sympathetic older man who treats her well and, in the end, reveals that he has a croft on a small island in Shetland where she can find the peace and solitude she needs to still the turmoil in her mind.

And the rest of the book takes place there, with the man coming and going to bring her supplies but mainly with Emily at first loving the solitude and a way of life stripped of all the conveniences and distractions of today’s world. When she realises, however, that the man is effectively holding her prisoner there, the dynamic changes and most of the book chronicles, in her own voice, her struggle to survive and find a way back to the mainland.

It’s a very subtle study of character as the scales are at first lifted from her eyes but she manages to persuade herself that there may be other interpretations for the man’s behaviour. Eventually, she’s forced to recognise the truth and her plans become darker.

The man’s character, too, is conveyed in the deftest of strokes.  While the reader is suspicious of him almost from the start, his words and actions, as perceived and conveyed by Emily, allow for other interpretations. He’s at times vicious, spiteful, uncompromisingly cruel to her, but he also seems to show concern, affection and even tenderness. It’s a very clever analysis of how we all want to mould reality to fit our own desires.

Amongst all this analysis, it’s important to recognise that Emily is a very sympathetic character. We see her weaknesses, her errors of judgement, but I wanted her to succeed, I wanted Ian, the man, to get his come-uppance. I admired her strength, was in awe of some of the things she coped with and, despite the usual need occasionally to suspend disbelief, I bought into her world. For her, it’s a journey to self-awareness; for the reader, sharing her days on the island, the fascination is in wondering how it will all end. And, at least in technical terms, the ending is a challenge. We know what happened, and we know the consequences of it all but to achieve it, Hinsley chooses a bold narrative shift that some may question. But the over-riding impression Stolen leaves is of having lived a powerful experience and been given many insights into the intimate thoughts of a real woman.

AMERICANA

by Helen Burke

Review by Bill Kirton

I’ve written before about the apparent artlessness of Helen Burke’s poetry. The need for that qualifier ‘apparent’ is especially evident with regard to this particular collection. She eventually made it to the USA, a country her father (whose happy spirit lurks in so many of her poems), longed to have visited, and she seemed to see things there through the eyes of a child on a first visit to Disneyland. That’s not meant to belittle the place or the poetry in any way – on the contrary, the joy, the surprise, the delight she experiences on encountering some of the people, seeing some of the sights, being part of the throb and bustle of Chicago and New York is fresh, uplifting, life-affirming.

Her advice to the wannabe visitor is ‘Pack nothing except the hopes and dreams you stand up in’. She’s in awe of some huge cakes in a shop that ‘loll about the counter like disgruntled teenagers’ and could ‘double as a country’. When a waitress takes a photograph of her and says she isn’t smiling enough, it’s because the size of the hot dog she’s been served has ‘overwhelmed’ her.  ‘It should,’ she says, ‘be on a leash’.

Like her priceless evocations of specific characters – the doorman outside the hotel where John Lennon was shot, Joleen the room cleaner, the man on Wickenden Street, the customers in his record shop, and many others – her reactions to places and events capture the essence of archetypal America – at least, as viewed through British eyes. The iconic Empire State Building is the setting for a very funny incident involving an elevator, a policeman (or woman) and a cider doughnut. And through her expressions of surprise, joy, wonder at these experiences, through the wide-eyed pleasure of the child creeps the wisdom of the poet, the intuition that there are forces at work which elude easy typification. America keeps surprising her, she loves using its terminology, its vernacular, but she’s aware that these are surfaces under which there are depths.

Nowhere is this more apparent than In Emily Dickinson’s Garden. Burke is a long-time admirer of the American poet. Visiting her house and garden brings a childlike delight, but one which is expressed in terms of a far from childlike aesthetic. She imagines that Emily is the white butterfly which lands on her arm, or a ‘cheeky raccoon’, and she and Emily:

‘sit awhile amidst the honeycomb of air,

Quiet as bees and impossible as mermaids. Our sea spun hands

And the honey of our song is all around.’

That’s not what I call artlessness.

THE SECOND COMING

by John Niven

384 pages, Windmill

Review by Bill Kirton

If you don’t like people swearing in books, don’t read this because the guilty parties are not only the people but Jesus, the saints and even God. But it’s the sort of swearing that peppers everyday speech, the harmless (though still offensive to many) vernacular of relaxed bar-room banter. The fact that life in Heaven is enhanced by some of the best cannabis around may also make pious souls tremble but all this gives a fluidity, pace and legitimacy to the many exchanges and adds to the spice of a beautifully judged, very funny satire on several aspects of the present state of society (and human development for that matter).

Basically, during the Renaissance, God thought His creation was progressing quite nicely and that it was OK to take a break and go fishing. Some 400 years later (a ‘break’ is a relative term for temporality in Heaven), he comes back to reports of centuries of religious conflicts, slavery, economic and social disasters, global warming and irrefutable evidence that Earth has become a complete cock-up. His staff in the main office know he’s going to go apeshit and they’re not looking forward to the fallout.

His single original ‘commandment’ – ‘Be nice’ – has been fragmented, multiplied, divided and spawned countless religious sects (which are enumerated hilariously and at astonishing length), none of which shows any respect for or understanding of His will. He phones Muhammad, who’s also having trouble with the Taliban and others. ‘They read something,’ says the prophet, ‘they have their own ideas… Next thing you know, is all very bad’, to which God’s response is that He’s only been back half a day and he's already ‘heartily sick of textual interpretation’.

In the end, the only answer seems to be to send His son back down again to have a second shot at getting people to see how things could and should be. And, from that premise, the author develops many delicious conceits revolving around aspects of our current popular culture, artistic preferences and the enormous distance between faith and the way people abuse it.

Jesus, reluctantly, is relocated to modern day America where his laid-back, hipster message of ‘Be nice’ is clearly at odds with all the prescriptive teachings of the various churches and his attitude to money scandalises all but the few friends who gather round him. The targets of the ensuing satire are principally the celebrity culture, the falseness and unreality of the way we now seem to live and an approach to religiosity which is diametrically opposed to everything a loving divinity would wish for His flock.

But that summary sounds so dull, so pious, that it does the book a huge disservice because it’s hilarious. Its irreverence is reverent, its targets deserving of our scorn. Jesus and his friends are great characters, their road-trip style journey is adventurous, fascinating and full of surprises. ‘Disciples’ are gathered in a very modern way; Jesus’s notoriety grows thanks to his prowess on guitar and his beautiful voice; and his eventual death at the hands of his persecutors fits perfectly in the context of a society run by people whose values are those of TV talent shows and for whom the acquisition of fame and fortune is the supreme goal. In fact, Jesus's encouragement of people to follow his ‘Be nice’ ways ends with him being seen as a guy who ‘made it a point of honour to insult and defame just about everything America stood for’.

The author’s familiarity with religious factions but also with obscure pop groups is very impressive but he wields his knowledge with care and everything’s designed to complement the social mores he’s exploring. His attention to detail is extraordinary, to the extent that he can scatter smaller satirical throwaways en passant as he moves through the larger narrative ironies. It’s a wonderful deconstruction of who and what we’ve become.

And yet, as I need to keep on insisting, the overall impact of The Second Coming is a feelgood one. Look at how he ends it (and since we know what happened to Jesus the first time round, this isn’t a spoiler). Jesus is back in Heaven and God, with drink and cigar in hand, is looking out over his ‘emerald orchard where the souls of toddlers and tiny babies play’. He reflects on how lucky they are and asks ‘Why do babies on earth cry?’, which reminds him of a line from John Updike who, he thinks, is a ‘Nice guy. Decent, honest golfer too. The kind of fellow who won't take a gimme if he thinks there's a chance he'd miss it’. The line is ‘as souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from Heaven’, which prompts him the reflection: ‘Literature. Now that was some good shit. He was glad they'd come up with that.’

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU KID

by Helen Burke

64 pages, Valley Press

Review by Bill Kirton

Helen Burke’s poems are full of ambushes. You read along, sharing reminiscences, savouring the comfortable rhythms, admiring the visual and aural images and suddenly, unawares, you’re presented with an absurdity or a marriage of things which don’t belong together or a formulation so perfectly pitched that you want to stop, read it again and reassess it and the context in which it sits. And each time it’s a pleasure, reinforcing the impact of what preceded it or taking it to another level.

It’s no surprise to read that this collection brings together some of the poems most frequently requested by audiences around the world. They’re celebrations of love, of continuity; distillations of the effect of memory as it evokes distances in time and space and yet, simultaneously, cancels them. Some are autobiographical and yet they express feelings we can share, feelings with which we can identify and which stir echoes of moments through which we also have lived. In fact, the poet hopes, in her introduction, that ‘these poems can connect with you at a heart level’. In one of them she writes ‘we are the stories that we tell not with our mouths but with our hearts’ and the notes to another say ‘the stories we write with our hearts are what matter’.

She captures perfect moments, fragments of times spent with her father and mother made of the simplest elements:

‘And we walked home, like two happy dogs

and the sky was duck-egg blue and the grass

was full of four-leaved clovers’

Meanings shift constantly, life is change and yet its essence can be caught and concentrated into a memory. Like her Dad’s Lingo, it refuses to settle into non-negotiable meanings.

Burke’s imagination is riotous. In a poem like Hospital Lingo, the ‘procedures’ the patients have to undergo are distorted, become a parade of hilarious absurdities as she piles gag on gag with meticulous timing. Yes, even though these are lines lying on a page, their timings are as immaculate as any delivered by stand-ups. Read The Christmas Letter (the poem which won the Waterstones Poetry Prize) and see how, line after line, you’re ambushed by gags (aka truths).

‘All the kids have had nose jobs

and the cat’s booked in for a boob job,

but the gardener’s making do with reiki and several flu jabs.

My cocaine habit’s coming on nicely

and the twins have made a blue movie – so hip.

Daddie's married our nanny – again – and

he'll be off to the Philippines

(once his heart can face the trip).

The dog has got his own Rolex’

And so on, and so on. It never lets up.

As well as teeming with punchlines, the poem My Wild Mother presents us with a vibrant personality we’d love to know. And we do know her. The poet’s mum and dad live in her verse, they’re so real in her memory and thinking. It’s a great proof of the persistence of love and for her it’s a constant currency.

Her dog, Baxter, is a happy Sisyphus, exuberant about life despite the restraints which mark it.

There is no cure for being free of mind and will.

Baxter, my friend, my alter ego.

Baxter – I love you.

Go on being. Baxter.

The seeming artlessness, the wit, the humour belie the fact that Burke is dealing in profound, existential truths. The instant has multiplicity and multi-valence, life is a ‘shadow dance’. She conveys the passage of time, the distance between various ‘thens’ and ‘nows’ and yet manages to experience them simultaneously. She writes, in The Serving Girl, of:

‘Your presence in your own absence.

Nothing to be done but bear it.’

In short, Here's Looking at You Kid is packed full of experiences, conveyed in terms which help us unlock our own. It’s funny, loving, deep, witty, compassionate, fundamentally human. It’s a poetry of happy, energetic protest – not of the angry, proscriptive or restricted political kind but a celebration of living and the refusal to submit to conventions and restraints.

MYRA, BEYOND SADDLEWORTH

by Jean Rafferty
282 pages, Wild Wolf Publishing

Review by Bill Kirton

The words ‘Myra’ and ‘Saddleworth’ in the title will resonate with UK readers of all but the youngest generations but perhaps be neutral for those not familiar with what were known as ‘The Moors Murders’. The victims were children who were tortured and killed on Saddleworth Moor by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965 and the case’s notoriety still persists. Hindley died in 2002 but here the author creates a fiction which suggests the death is a deliberate misdirection and, in fact, she’s released into the community with a new identity.

Given the hatred that’s always been directed at Brady and Hindley, it’s perhaps not surprising that news of this novel created some negative reactions. People assumed it was part of an attempt to rehabilitate Hindley and portray her as a ‘normal’ human being and, even if they didn’t, they objected that it might cause further distress for the victims’ families. Such reactions show a form of blind censorship, i.e. objections aimed at a book that was never written. Here, in the foreword, the author makes it clear that the book is in no way sympathetic to Myra Hindley or Ian Brady and writes unequivocally that it’s ‘an honest attempt to find out what kind of person commits such atrocities’.

First, then, let’s make it clear that it’s a compelling read. Hindley, Brady and the cast of characters who surround them are vivid creations, thanks to the distinctive things they say and do. The narrative is in the present tense so everything is immediate, precarious, unpredictable. There’s no feeling that releasing her has resolved anything and, given her character, she could send the central story in any number of directions.

And yet that’s misleading, because she’s only part of the narrative. There are several stories here – at least four ‘love’ stories, two of them involving Hindley – as well as examples of betrayals, adultery, deceit, illicit sex, lies, evasions and religious hypocrisy – all variations on everyday cruelties. Hindley and Brady’s involvement in evil was indeed extreme, unthinkable, and yet they don’t have a monopoly of it here. Evil is omnipresent in nature and in people. It pervades the narrative and is made more sinister by the author’s skilful use of the vernacular when letting us hear the characters’ words and thoughts. That throws up many examples of casual, unthinking cruelty. One character ‘thinks Hindley should have hanged. Or better still, be chopped up into little pieces while alive and boiling oil poured over her’. Later, in a phone call to Beth, Pat asks ‘How could you do that to a child?’ Scum. Perverted, whereupon Beth touches the photo of her son ‘for luck’. And that’s the same son who joins the military and, egged on by his lover, abuses, humiliates and debases Iraqi prisoners. So there’s no shortage of evil impulses, and morality seems to be negotiable.

There’s a chapter called ‘the same species?’. It refers to foxes and dogs but its applications to people are self-evident. Indeed, the fox is a recurrent leitmotif and, with his vixen, evokes the pairing of Brady and Hindley. Regularly through the narrative, the fox appears, protecting and feeding his vixen, symbolising power, control. Or else we hear its ‘hoarse, unsettling cry’ which sounds ‘as if it's calling from another plane of existence’. And then there’s the organised bestiality of the foxhunt, which appals Hindley. Ironically, she ‘doesn’t approve of cruelty to animals but this is a British tradition’. It’s just one of the frequent examples of ‘the careless cruelty of those who consider themselves to be the norm’ and it provokes the chilling reaction from Hindley: ‘There’s no respect for life here, no care, no soul.’ The final irony of the hunt is that it’s Hindley who’s blooded.

The fox isn’t the only example of the thematic use of animals. One narrative thread is conveyed almost exclusively via emails or texting between two lovers, Hal and Pat, whose chosen names are wolf and lynx. Pat writes that, in bed, Hal is ‘ferocious, insatiable, a BEAST!!!!!’ Themes of animal cruelty and beauty are linked as the exchanges show that love and death are close companions. Pat says of Hindley, ‘I hope she rots quickly’ and her words are followed by the reply ‘I love your fierceness’ which leads swiftly to Pat’s desire to ‘make love  … till the sweat drips from our fur and we’re exhausted. I’ll lie along the length of you and lick the salt from your pelt and we’ll fall asleep together, satiated by love.’ It’s a world of the senses: of touch (of course) but also of sights, smells and perfumes and those ear-splitting shrieks in the darkness. It taps into the traditional romantic association of voluptuousness and death, sensuality and extinction.

Hindley, then, may be a monster but she’s living amongst people who themselves are far from innocent. Crimes are perpetrated to defend the status quo. Indeed, the text says ‘If only humans could be made innocent, but they know too much, want too much.’ And one of the characters, Jude, says of Brady and Hindley, ‘we are all like them. Which of us gets to go through life without hurting other people?’ We’re defined by our actions. Brady could rationalise his horrific acts (if rationalise is the correct word) as a statement of identity, but he has no control over how they are perceived. We all form opinions of one another which are instinctive and which we assume to be ‘true’, ‘valid’. And that highlights a seemingly simple, relatively innocent question that comes near the end of the book. To avoid spoilers, I’ll summarise it by saying that there were two people who came to be very close to Hindley in the course of the narrative and yet neither of them suspects her true identity. So the question is how did neither of them know? The text asks: ‘Shouldn’t they have nosed out the stench of her, the ugly, grave-crawling putridness inside her?’ Well, precisely. They didn’t. So how can there be such a distance between the inner monster and the perceived person? What value can we put on moral judgements? And why does the loathing engendered by the monstrous acts overwhelm with such ease any compassion we might have felt?

I’m aware that this is very long and yet there are many other aspects of Myra, Beyond Saddleworth I haven’t touched on. It’s a compulsive read, carefully and beautifully written, which, while seeking to discover the real Hindley and her motives, conjures up a broader context of a society in which civilisation is not much more than a tacitly agreed veneer.

 

DEATH ORDER

by Jan Needle
292 pages, Endeavor Press Ltd.

Review by Bill Kirton
This is an astonishing book. It’s a carefully crafted, beautifully written novel but, as I read, I had to keep reminding myself of that fact because even its speculations seem so authentic, so well supported by evidence. In its pages we find actual historical figures, personages of the highest international stature, names sewn into European and World history, but they’re not handled as icons (ugh! I hate that word), respected statesmen, or even as the monsters their reputations made of some of them. No, they’re people, important maybe, but all with their motives, idiosyncrasies, agendas, and all part of the fabric of the story of one of the most mysterious events of World War II, the strange flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in 1941. Or was it perhaps Alfred Horn?

The historical fact of the flight, its potential significance and its long aftermath make it ripe for conspiracy theorists. Hess was, after all, Hitler’s deputy and yet nothing seemed to come of the flight. He was shuffled away to prison, then transferred to Spandau in 1947 where he stayed, its only inmate from 1966 onwards, until his ‘suicide’ in 1987, when he was 93 years old. Everything about the Hess story poses question upon question and the refusal of the UK authorities to release the relevant documents serves only to multiply the suspicions that the truth has never been told. Jan Needle’s book is the closest I’ve come to seeing all the events in a context which makes sense of them. It also questions other ‘facts’ which have become part of the historical record and yet don’t bear close scrutiny. Some of the great myths and heroes of those awful days begin to look not only shabby but actually sinister.

But all this stress on the ‘real’ subject matter is in danger of making it sound like a dry, historical read. It’s not. Its sweep is indeed large, but its focus is tightly held by the groups of individuals whose decisions and actions are behind the whole adventure. Central to the narrative are two main figures. Bill Wiley is distrustful of his masters in the SIS. He’s a flawed individual, something of a womaniser with a sick wife and a young son whom he loves but whose very existence makes Bill vulnerable. It’s through that vulnerability that he comes to accept a part in an operation that will end in the ‘murder of a 93 year old man’.

Then there’s Edward Carrington, a clever linguist whose skills made him a target for the SIS during WWII. He was persuaded to join the organisation as a spy and it’s through his meetings, travels and actions that we gain access to the machinations of the political (and royal) classes at the time and the elaborate structures behind the Hess peace initiative.

Add to them the killers who actually strangled the old man, the politicians engaged in their own internal and external power struggles, and the gentle but brilliant evocation of the various periods during which the action takes place, and you have a complex, layered account of the macrocosm and microcosm of war and the politics behind it.

This is writing without stylistic flourishes and yet which has its own energy and relentlessness as it uncovers layer after layer of the intrigues which combine to activate the dramas. The author moves us smoothly between time frames, making the 1940s feel as dynamic and immediate as the present, and deliberately structuring his narratives to suggest the broader continuum of which the Hess incident is simply one manifestation. The reverberations of some of the past events continue to be felt and we need to deconstruct the foundations of some of the myths into which we’ve bought so trustingly. This is about some contemporary perceptions as well as about mid nineteenth century history. In one of the reviews I read, the writer wondered where fiction ended and fact began. Part of Jan Needle’s point is that so many of what we accept as ‘facts’ are fictions. The ‘truth’ of Death Order is very persuasive.

THE CAR BOMB

by T.V. LoCicero
222 pages, TLC Media

Review by Bill Kirton

No writer would want to be compared with the late and very much lamented Elmore Leonard; it would be the kiss of death because he’s incomparable. Having said that, there are many aspects of The Car Bomb which recall the great man’s style and preoccupations.

First of all, it’s set in Detroit – a Detroit not yet as low as it is today but well on the way down. LoCicero notes that ‘the corruption is rampant in this town’ and calls it a ‘hapless city’.

Next, the citizens he shows us have the same confusing moral compass that sets good guys and bad guys on the same level, each with characteristics which belong to the other end of the spectrum to that which they seem to occupy.

The central character, local TV anchor Frank DeFauw, a handsome, charismatic, family man with a regular mistress and a taste for other casual, extra-marital encounters, is said by his son Bobby, many of his friends and colleagues (and by Frank himself), to be ‘full of bullshit’. At one point, even as he’s thinking about his other son, Tommy, who was killed in a boating accident, he ‘glimpsed an attractive redhead pulling a ballpoint pen and a pad of yellow sticky notes from her purse’. And this is one of the (very few) ‘good’ guys. Another character’s opinion of him was that ‘he was not just smart, but clever and intuitive about people, dedicated, caring and, probably more than any white guy she had ever known, color blind’.

Opposite him, his school friend, Judge William O’Bryan, whose job it is to uphold the sanctity of the law and hand out judgements in court, is as corrupt as they come and totally lacking in compassion. When Frank asks him why a person he (Frank) thinks is innocent would kill his wife and kids, the reply is chilling. ‘Why do evil or f*cked up people do any of the things they do? Because they’re evil or f*cked up.’

Frank’s real enemy is another journalist, Wil Barnes, whose columns are almost invariably about Frank’s peccadilloes. And yet this ‘little prick’, which is how Frank usually refers to him, uses operational methods and techniques which mirror those of Frank. With these figures at the centre of the narrative, along with many others demonstrating equally ambivalent moral stances, notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seem irrelevant. The use of children here and there in the narrative suggests that there is nonetheless a notion of innocence, but it’s an innocence that gets compromised (at best) by events.

There are other narrative and stylistic factors which put this story firmly in the ‘Leonard school’. From the shocking hook of its opening chapter, the pace is unrelenting. It’s movie-ready, cutting fast from instant to instant, keeping everything in the ‘now’, never dwelling too long on any episode. The narrative takes us right into the middle of a pre-existing set of people and circumstances, all alive, vibrant, busy. We jump from setting to setting, seeing things which are happening simultaneously in different places to different people. It’s making use of the confused, fractured nature and texture of reality.

And then there’s the dialogue – sharp, witty, natural – all of it in the moment. Frequently, the end of a chapter is marked by a sharp one-liner. On one occasion, for example, Frank’s wife Marci says something nasty about Judge O’Bryan. Frank says ‘Jesus, I always thought you liked him’. She replies ‘I do. But none of us is perfect. You should hear what I really think of you’.

Cliff-hangers abound and they’re varied. As well as those involving specific threats or actions, there are the more subtle ones, as when Marci tells Frank that she intends to file for divorce. Frank walks out onto the deck and sees a seagull on the bow of the boat moored at their dock. He decided that ‘if the gull stayed in place for at least the next five seconds, everything would be okay. Starting his slow, even count, he got as far as three’.

This book satisfies the criteria for both crime (UK) and mystery (USA) novels, which aren’t always the same. It has interesting characters, clear settings, great dialogue, page-turning pace and teases at the reader’s own attitudes to morality. OK, it isn’t by Leonard, but it may well be a sort of homage to the master.

 

JOCK TAMSON'S BAIRNS

by Cally Philips
Guerilla Midgie Press

Review by Bill Kirton

When you read Jock Tamson's Bairns, be prepared to think; not in any heavy, academic, pretentious way, just gently, quietly, reasonably. Be prepared, too, to re-examine how you use words and how you look at (and judge) other people. That doesn’t mean it’s some worthy, ‘improving’ tome, couched in arcane philosophical or psychological terms. On the contrary, it’s a careful, uncomplicated invitation for us to take a wee step back from our assumptions, the everyday attitudes we carry, the loose way we use language. It challenges the way we create compartments, chop reality into manageable chunks, box them up and label them, even though some chunks shouldn’t be in the same box and most labels are at best inadequate and at worst wrong.

And the problem inherent in such an approach is exacerbated when what we’re dealing with is not abstract ‘chunks of reality’ but people. Cally Philips has worked a lot with people with ‘learning difficulties’. (The need to use quotation marks around apparently familiar, ‘normal’ terms is obvious from the early pages of the book.) The expression ‘learning difficulties’ has (thankfully) evolved from ‘mental retardation’ and worse because nowadays we try to be careful of the terms we use. There’s certainly been progress, but there’s still an underlying assumption that, because most of us ‘feel normal’, those who are different must be ‘abnormal’. But, as the author points out, the people who’ve decided what ‘normal’ means are – yes, you’ve guessed it – the ‘normal’ ones. ‘Normal’ isn’t a hard scientific fact; it’s a consensus.

So, we assess ‘disadvantaged’ individuals, judge them, stick labels on them so that we can accommodate them in a specially designated bit of our reality. They are ‘other’. And now we’ve dealt with them, so we can ignore them. But that doesn’t work for the author here. She doesn't keep quiet, doesn't look away, doesn't hide behind the labels and attitudes provided by others. She’s honest and says what she sees. And she chooses to use a very clearly fact-based fiction to show that the category ‘abnormal’ is as rich, varied and human as its ‘normal’ counterpart and that, however we refine the labels we stick on people, they’re still restrictive and misleading.

But everything I’ve said is outlined much more simply and accessibly in the introduction. Her style is friendly, conversational and honest and, when we move to what she describes as ‘fictional stories based on factual experience’, she continues to draw us into her revelations by creating characters and situations which, yes, underline the message but are also moving, funny and entertaining. In her own words, she’s ‘respect[ing] the real-life experience of the people whose lives [she’s] fictionalised’ in order to ‘teach insight for those of us who so badly need it’.

The first story is called Gary gets to be God and there’s a beautiful irony in the title.

Gary is blind, doesn't talk, can’t hear very well, so communication is limited. He also shuffles along on his bottom. He drools, squeaks when he's happy and screams when he’s unhappy. For us ‘normal’ people his behaviour is ‘challenging’, there are ‘incidents’, ‘reports’. It all fits a convenient pattern doesn’t it? Why can’t he be more like us? Why can’t he be ‘normal’? Cally Philips answers that with her own question, one which acknowledges that Gary’s ‘normality’ is different. ‘Can you imagine having to move around shuffling through the dark on your bum,’ she asks, ‘without the ability to tell someone what you want or know what's round the corner?’

But, in a group improvisation, with the theme of ‘where do you want to go?’, poor, powerless Gary gets to be God. It’s a beautifully orchestrated story with a poignant ending.

The other three stories work in similar ways. In Jonjo Can't Sit Still, Jonjo has Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (which we all glibly shorten to ADHD and assume that the label ‘explains’ things). The impact of this story comes from the fact that Jonjo tells it himself and so we get access to his normality, which turns out to be as legitimate as ours. Philips lets him ‘explain himself’ by using a combination of his own impulses and the language other people use about him. The writing is very clever as we see the logic, the ‘normality’ of how his mind works, of how he interprets/understands expressions. He loves to run and he’s ‘an accident waiting to happen’, so he runs, a car hits him and the accident has happened. Why did it happen? ‘There is no reason to an accident’ he says. His father uses the expression ‘you’ve hit the nail on the head’ so when he tells a doctor ‘I have low self-esteem’ and sees from her facial expression that he’s surprised her, he says ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to hit the nail on the head’.

Philips helps us to share the world as he sees it. He’s sensitive to clichés, to what others say and think. And he loves to run. So the ‘normal’ people give him Ritalin to slow him down. Then comes his first accident and he’s on crutches for a while, which allows him to share another insight. ‘Crutches slowed me down a bit,’ he says, ‘but Ritalin slows me down on the inside too and crutches only slowed me down on the outside’.

I’m doing too much story-telling, but it’s simply to illustrate how the fictions are so carefully tailored to enhance the central message with regard to the tyranny of labels. The central figures of the other two stories, Heather and Angus, have different problems again and give more examples of how badly they’re served by our preconceptions and how the differences between us and them blind us to the similarities. We are, indeed, all Jock Tamson’s Bairns – not equal, no, not by a long way, but all the same, all individuals with our idiosyncrasies and gifts, flaws and beauties. In the last part of the book, we see the fictional ‘No Labels’ drama group improvising again, interacting. All its members have ‘difficulties’, but the improvisations impose no restrictions. They can be who they are and the results show that who they are is valid. In fact, the improvisations sound like much more positive ways to pass the time than watching TV or indulging in all the other herd activities that constitute normality for the majority of ‘normals’. These are lives being lived, individuals with their own precious selves, all different, all valuable.

Labels are supposed to identify; in fact, they obscure.

 

LONG STORIES SHORT

by Marc Nash
107 pages, Kindle Edition

Review by Bill Kirton

Let’s start with the necessary disclaimer. I received my review copy of this book free from the author, who’s a fellow squawker. That, however, hasn’t coloured my judgement of it in any way. If I like books, I say so and I try to say why. If I don’t, I tend to keep my silence about them (unless they perpetrate unforgivable crimes against the profession or the language). If Booksquawk were just an incestuous, mutually back-scratching site, it wouldn’t survive, and it certainly wouldn’t attract writers of the status of Brian Aldiss.

So, what did I think of Long Stories Short? Well, how long have you got, because I could probably spend ages on each of the 32 flash stories that make up the collection? They’re all different, some share themes or aspects of a topic, but each one is a meticulously well-worked example of the concentrated impact this form can have when it’s manipulated by a master. And, while the stories feature specific individuals and/or isolated incidents, there’s a universality to them. They’re about birth, love, life, death and some, such as Fallen Angels, have a breadth of vision that encompasses vast movements and makes the macrocosm accessible.

But before I get too po-faced about this, let’s note that, while there’s plenty here that’s savage, black and unforgiving, there’s also plenty of humour and, most of all, there’s a delight in word-play that’s explored and sustained far more skilfully than any I can remember from other contemporary writers. Whisper it, but many of these tales recalled for me the vision as well as the sardonic humour and linguistic dexterities of Samuel Beckett. I know, I know – heresy, blasphemy. But look at Closed Book, the story of an old writer looking through the Baby Book his parents had kept of his early years, and its affinities with Krapp’s Last Tape are pretty clear.

Then turn to Crush and see how subtly but precisely the writer uses heart-related terminology to convey the impact of glimpsing his ‘bypassed Miss’, ‘a one woman love infarction’, a ‘heart stopper’. But even before she appears, the mood is set in an opening paragraph where a ‘card sharper’ is almost crushed by a toppling ‘stout-hearted oak’ which nearly induces a ‘cardiac-attack’. Throughout the tale, the word-play is delicious. It ends thus: ‘As he re-emerged back into the arteries of the city, the smell of warming cockles from a stall rendered his sclerotic muscle into a ball of wrinkles.

Heartbroken.’

One final reference to a specific tale – Cry Baby Bunting.  As with so many others, there’s a (sinister) playfulness in the title because the setting is a street party celebrating a royal wedding during which a toddler has gone missing. The wedding is intended to secure the succession to the throne but the scene of crime officers fear the abduction may be one in a succession of such incidents; two successions, then, one of which must be preserved, the other broken. And, as with the heart terminology in Crush, so here the language is manipulated deliberately to bring apparently distinct subjects into strange, uneasy relationships. ‘No cantankerous drunk,’ writes the author, ‘would abdicate cradling his bottled entitlement’ just to help a mother trying to organise a search party and, while the others were ‘drunk’, she was the one who’d lost her baby, so she was ‘the incapable one’.

Such concentrated effects are everywhere in these stories. They’re not tales you read if all you want is easy escapism. There’s an immediacy about each one. Exposition is minimal, we’re right in the action, sharing it, often getting inside not just the personality, but the psyche of the characters. Often the focus is simply ‘he’ or ‘she’ and ‘his’ or ‘her’ sensations and perceptions crowd in without preamble. The people here may mostly be troubled beings, but the natural world in which they live is also one of disharmony. The author exploits his medium with expertise but simultaneously subverts it.

So these are self-contained episodes that nonetheless carry echoes which drift through to others. They’re not just satisfying on a story-telling, narrative level but as a challenge, a mysterious sharing of something ‘normal’ and simultaneously not normal It’s our world but adapted, warped, given a slight axial shift. Indeed, a sentence from Flatpunchline (another Beckettian  monologue) could be said to describe exactly what the writer is achieving here: ‘Instinctively they felt the planet wasn’t set up right and they needed to tilt it off its everyday axis’.

If you like words, this is for you. In the end, it’s the handling of language that makes the greatest impression, not because of any slick sleight of hand but because as the words pick up each other’s resonances, they blend or slice open meanings and give a new, different depth to the subject matter. Perversely, the language calls attention to itself, the narrator is always there, handling his precious words with care, despairing at the fact that they’re being devalued. In Middle Mass he parallels the corrosive towers of scrapped computers, ipads and the like with equivalent towers of words ‘typed straight on to the face of the void’, each new clutch eliminating and compressing those which preceded it.

Indeed, after Abecedary Incendiary has chronicled the progressive extinction of various species, its ending foresees the end of culture, even civilisation: ‘Now I too have become extinct, both in body and heritage, since not one of the meagre generations which succeed me possesses any ability to read and understand these words’.

Just one more example, the brilliant Baby Steps, in which the narrator describes his emergence from the womb and the first years of his development. The story encapsulates the author’s vision and approach. He recreates the various experiences – birth, breathing, being breast-fed, learning to speak – and the reality of it is visceral. In a way, some of the words he chooses are inappropriate, but only because the reader’s own perceptions have been conditioned by habit, made comfortable. And, even as he recreates this baby’s world, language is everything. He asks ‘Is it any coincidence that as verbs, both “milk” and “cream” have the meaning to cozen or swindle?’ and when his mother baby-talks to him, it’s ‘a mummy-bird regurgitation of a bolus of phonemes, dripped directly from her tongue on to my own. Babble talk. Pidgin droppings. Non-Language’.

He quickly learn to snaps words together like lego bricks (only he puts it far more elegantly than that), and there’s a beautifully ironic postscript: ‘He went on to win every youth public speaking competition in the land and captained the Oxford University debating team to victory in the Varsity match. Whereupon he entered politics, securing a Parliamentary seat, but had to resign after a scandal in which he was caught suckling at the breast of a suburban prostitute, while dressed in a baby-grow and bonnet’.

Everything is in the mix here – beliefs, cultural systems, the despoliation of the planet – and with it all, the precariousness of language and the consequent threat to meaning itself. It’s brilliant, funny, and a collection to revisit again and again.

MEN CRY ALONE

by Philip Paris
302 pages, FeedaRead.com

Review by Bill Kirton

There are books you enjoy but which then fade and there are books which stay with you. They may stay for reasons of style, subject matter or because they touched a specific thread which was important to you. Whatever the reason, though, if a book does stay with you after you’ve finished it, the writer can congratulate him/herself on having succeeded, so congratulations to Philip Paris for achieving that sort of success with Men Cry Alone.

The theme of the novel – partnerships in which men are abused by women – suggests that, in this case, it’s the shock value of the content that makes its impact last. And it’s true that Paris’s careful, studied treatment of the theme, the thoroughness of his research and the sensitivity of his portrayal of the characters – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – are all very impressive. However, the real power of the book lies in the subtlety of his analysis of the psychology behind the events and his insinuation that extreme violence can be a feature of the most ‘ordinary’ relationships.

The inverted commas I’ve put around ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘ordinary’ are there to show that each of these terms needs to be questioned and, in this context, they don’t have the single moral value that’s normally ascribed to them.

The book opens with a gentle setting of context and an almost anecdotal approach to one of the main characters, all so skilfully managed that the shocking event towards which it’s moving is that much greater when it eventually does arrive. The reader doesn't know it's coming but then, neither did the character, and so Paris has made quite a strong point right at the outset. He’s set up a tension between the ordinariness of the everyday and the unthinkable possibility of extreme, unsuspected violence.

Three separate stories are told, each involving a couple in which the man is abused by the woman. Their respective situations and ages allow Paris to suggest the spectrum of such violence is broad: Alfred and Enid are in their 70s and have known and loved each other for 60 years; Tom and Gemma have a young daughter; and Gordon and Tania are childless. Structurally, having three distinct narrative threads is a shrewd choice. In each, there are sequences which end with cliff-hangers, whereupon the scene shifts to one of the other couples but rather than this frustrating readers by leaving them in suspense, they’re transported to a narrative point at which a previous cliff-hanger is about to be resolved.

For all three couples, we’re given unadorned, ordinary settings peopled by characters  unremarkable save for the fact that they are abuser and abused. There are no stylistic flourishes, no fancy literary or linguistic tricks, just a stripped chronicle of their days together and the mixture of furies and quiet desperation that characterise their lives.

The book is about more than abuse. It's about love, relationships, life. The little things we do unconsciously every day which may seem trivial but which constitute our strength and which, if broken or distorted, replace our previously reliable reality with chaos and impotence. As you read and become involved with these characters, the ordinariness of their lives strikes you, starts making you ask yourself questions about morality, psychology, motives, relationships and how all these things depend on the maintenance of really simple habits and routines.

Two of the abusers are unpleasant characters, but they’re not monsters, and in each of the relationships, the word ‘love’ is still a powerful part of the equation which holds them together. This contributes to the bewilderment felt by both characters and reader.  All in all, what’s being recorded is a tragic but baffling phenomenon. We’re seeing people manipulate the little things of life to plot against one another, use a child or the threat of suicide to control a partner. The real shock is that such familiar, trivial things in the most ordinary of circumstances can develop into something truly sinister.

This is an intelligent, considered, sympathetic book which gives you three gripping stories and constantly provokes you to reflect on the mysterious bonds which hold (or are supposed to hold) people together.

A LIFE TOO SHORT: THE TRAGEDY OF ROBERT ENKE

by Ronald Reng, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
400 pages, Random House UK

Review by Bill Kirton 

There are two things about this book that might make some people decide not to bother reading it. The first is that it’s about sport. The fact that it won a top British Sports Book Award in 2012 makes no difference; some people just don’t read sports books. The second thing makes it even less palatable: it’s not just about sport, it’s about football of the soccer variety and, as everyone knows, soccer players are spoiled, overpaid thugs with an inflated sense of their own worth. But this book transcends football, transcends sport. It’s the story of a likeable, gifted, seemingly grounded individual who suffered from depression and it leads us through the tangled maze of his mind as his illness dragged him inexorably down to the point at which, on November 10^th, 2009, he stepped in front of a train.

In the early years of the century, Robert Enke was one of the best goalkeepers in the world. As well as playing for clubs in the Austrian and German leagues, he also played in three other top European sides: Barcelona, Benfica and Fenerbahce. He played for his country at junior and senior level and was scheduled to be Germany’s number one in the 2010 World Cup. He was young, handsome, wealthy and in a secure, loving marriage. In other words, he was living what should have been a dream life but, as this account of it shows so powerfully, the dream was too often nightmarish. The writer notes tellingly that his suicide, at the age of 32, wasn’t really a result of a free choice. ‘The death of a depressive,’ he writes, ‘is never a free decision. The illness narrows perception to the extent that the sufferer no longer knows what it means to die. He thinks it just means getting rid of the illness.’

The irony is that the book takes the place of one which Enke and the author were supposed to be writing together. They’d been friends for years and Reng had access to his diaries and to many other sources which allowed him to record the impact Enke had on those around him and piece together the contradictions, the moods and even the thought processes of his subject. The material is handled with care, honesty and one could even say with love, and it gives us a moving account of the life of a complex, intelligent, caring individual who was haunted by a darkness which resisted attempts by psychiatrists, friends and a loving wife to offer ways to combat it.

Depression isn’t just sadness. Enke and his wife had a daughter who was born with a heart defect and died at the age of two. Naturally enough, the effect of such an event was disastrous for both of them and yet it was only one of the demons that spread their poison through his mind. It’s too easy to identify an event we can all sympathise with and make the seemingly logical link: event-sadness-suicide. But, as Reng reminds us, there are more deaths from depression-related suicide every day than there are from road accidents.

More complexities are added to this analysis of the condition by the nature of Enke’s job. In a soccer team, the goalkeeper is unique. He’s the only player allowed to handle the ball and also the only one whose mistakes are usually far more costly than any made by players in other positions. In a way, it’s a negative position. The object of the game is to score goals but the keeper is there to prevent them. As the last line of defence it’s also important for him to be (or at least seem to be) calm, in control, unlikely to panic. Any sign of stress or frailty sends a message to the rest of the team that he’s vulnerable. And goalkeepers aren’t allowed to be vulnerable. Some of the most fascinating and heart-rending passages of the book come near the end when his wife and friends are watching him play a game, knowing that he’s in a deep depression, seeing the truth of his body language and facial expressions while others interpret them differently. To the uninitiated, Robert Enke seems to be in ice-cool control of the situation.

The book begins and ends with the suicide. At the start it’s the helplessness, bewilderment and anxiety of those close to him that’s stressed; at the end, the pace is such that both the reader and those same people are dragged inexorably towards what they all know is to be a tragic outcome. The writing is skilful, Reng’s love and compassion are self-evident, but the force that overwhelms everything is that of the dark, incomprehensible monster that harried Enke to his death. This is not simply the story of an individual, it’s a frightening chronicle of how depression overwhelms all else, fragments and distorts values, undermines everything that makes life so precious.