I have read, and rather enjoyed, quite a large chunk of Sarah Hall’s oeuvre to date. When I saw a copy of her debut novel, Haweswater, in my favourite local charity shop for just 50 pence, I had to pick it up. I hadn’t read any reviews of Haweswater before I started to read, and I admit that I was rather intrigued by it. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award just after its publication in 2002.
Set in 1936, in the ‘old, northern county of Westmorland’, which has since been absorbed into Cumbria, Haweswater is described as a ‘first novel of love, obsession and the destruction of a community told with grace and artistry.’ In the dale, there arrives a man named Jack Liggett, a ‘spokesman for a vast industrial project to create a new reservoir.’ Based in Manchester, Jack soon begins ‘a troubled and intense’ affair with a local woman, Janet Lightburn. Janet is ‘a woman of force and strength of mind, [and] her natural orthodoxy deeply influences him.’
This is not just a novel about a relationship; rather, it focuses more on the valley itself, and the changes brought upon it. All of the villagers are forced to move away before the reservoir can be completed, with their houses, many of which have been lived in by their families for generations, forecast to be completely underwater.
In the novel’s prologue, Hall sets up the changed landscape: ‘This was a monumental flood, water of epic proportions. It turned through the wooden spokes relentlessly, and as it did so it became like a music that is accidental, deeply beautiful and made only once. Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers… And even as the man hated this water, he could not help but find it beautiful. It stood for more than itself and it sang of its presence.’
From the first, I was struck by the way Hall has with words; her descriptions are quite unusual, but perfectly capture things. She is particularly skilled at doing so with the emotions of her characters: ‘Then there is the matter of his heart. Inside his old heart a new one was growing and pushing to get out, and inside that one another one, and another, all pushing to get out. So many hearts. And that was how grief worked inside the man. Filling his chest cavity he stooped over with the weight. So much of his life was gone. More than his home and his fields, more than the valley…’.
Haweswater is not the most action-packed novel; however, I personally love reading about small, rural communities. I found Hall’s perspective on this particular village, in the face of a huge amount of change, very interesting indeed. In my opinion, Haweswater is not her best novel, but I did really enjoy the reading experience.
Set during the summer of 1952, Zoe Somerville’s The Night of the Flood focuses on protagonist Verity Frost, who is on the cusp of going to University. Verity, ‘stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast’, is utterly beloved by Arthur, her childhood friend, whom she has a strange new desire’ to escape from. Arthur, whom she has known since ‘he was a skinny eight-year-old evacuee, brought home by her mother’, also longs to escape from his similar existence, ‘but only with Verity by his side’. The Night of the Flood centres around something of a love triangle, when ‘charismatic American pilot’ Jack is stationed at an airbase in the local area.
I found Somerville’s scenes to be well evoked, and effective in capturing this particular period in time: ‘Pollen caught in her nose, making her sneeze. It had been a day like this then too, the day her mother died. The same sudden heat and sunlight. The same grass-green and dazzling white sprung up on all sides. The same tang of manure from the fields. Everything erupting, spilling over with life. It had been the wrong kind of day to die.’ Somerville focuses on the landscapes of Norfolk, her home county, very well, and infuses so many of the scenes with its landscapes. For me, this was a real strength of the novel; for instance, the way in which Somerville evokes the flood: ‘Breathing heavily, they looked at the water, ruining the winter-sown crops. She could smell it too – the smarting salt of the sea. Saltwater… glistening in the moonlight, beautiful and destructive.’
The character dynamics are interesting here. During their first meeting, Somerville writes that Arthur finds Jack has ‘a litheness and swagger that spoke of complex confidence’, and feels ‘a shiver of something close to dislike’. I also liked how Somerville explored Verity’s inner world: ‘I have all these separate boxes inside me, she thought. And in all of them are bits of me but I don’t know in which one is the important bit. I don’t know how to choose the right box.’ I did find there was a lot of depth to Verity, but perhaps the same cannot be said about the other protagonists here.
I found The Night of the Flood very readable, and found the omniscient perspective worked well. However, I perhaps would not have remembered a great deal about the minutiae of the story had I not made extensive notes for this review. In terms of the historical novel genre, I would not say the novel is entirely gripping at any point. The historical setting also became a little unmoored at times; it felt as though the characters could have been transported to a different decade without too much trouble on the author’s part.
The protagonist of Jean Kyoung-Frazier’s Pizza Girl is a highly compelling 18-year-old pizza delivery girl, who is experiencing her first pregnancy. She is a troubled character, who becomes infatuated with one of her customers, stay-at-home mother, Jenny, when she and her family relocate to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Indeed, the novel opens: ‘Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.’
I really appreciated the attention to small, memorable details throughout, as well as the emphasis placed on our half-Korean, half-American narrator’s sense of self and belonging. The narrator’s introspection is realistic, with a real awareness of her conflicting thoughts regarding her pregnancy: ‘I didn’t know if I was noticeably showing yet and I was doing my best not to find out… It made my palms itch to think about the day when I wouldn’t be able to fit into any of my clothes.’
This is more than a book about an unusual friendship. Kyoung-Frazier does a masterful job of mining the emotions of her characters, creating a novel which feels fresh and unusual in equal measure. The twists were surprising, and I found the reading experience incredibly satisfying; I did not know where the story would end up, and there was an unpredictability to it which I admired.
The White Rock by Anna Hope ***
I adored Anna Hope’s first novel, Expectation, and was thoroughly looking forward to delving into her second, The White Rock. The novel takes five separate time periods as its focus, all of which are clustered around the same rock in rural Mexico. In the present-day story, a writer is travelling with her young daughter and husband, whom she is separating from, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We then go backwards in time to meet ‘The Singer 1969’, ‘The Girl 1907’, and ‘The Lieutenant 1775’, before moving forward chronologically, and visiting each of these characters again.
In the present story, entitled ‘The Writer 2020’, Hope’s writing is most evocative and thoughtful: ‘The writer had the same reaction, when reading this paper and watching this video [about the climate crisis], as she’d had when her husband told her about his multiple infidelities, a shallow breath that was almost a pant, almost comical. The sweat that broke on the palms of her hands. The sense of looking at herself from a slight distance, noticing this breath, these hands, this body, registering this feeling, which in both instances felt like a shock and an affirmation of something she had known for a very long time.’
I loved the approach taken in the novel, but only the present-day story really caught my interest. Hope is a talented writer, but I did not feel myself pulled in enough to the other narratives, all of which felt a little detached. The author touches on some very important topics, such as climate change and drug abuse, but overall, I feel that she was just trying to do too much in The White Rock. For me, this novel lacked the emotion and minutiae which was so present in Expectation, and whilst it is a good read, I still felt rather disappointed by it.
The Mad Women’s Ball by Victoria Mas is a prize-winning international bestseller, translated into English by Frank Wynne. Before spotting a copy in my local library, the book and its subsequent film adaptation, had completely passed me by. However, it sounded too interesting to pass up, and back home with me it went.
Set in the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris in 1885, The Mad Women’s Ball is a fictional account of real historical happenings. During this time, ‘all of Paris is in thrall to Doctor Charcot and his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad or hysterical. But the truth is more complicated – these women are often inconvenient, unwanted wives or strong-willed daughters.’ A huge event, ‘The Mad Women’s Ball’, is held annually in the middle of Lent; it is the ‘highlight of the social season’ for the moneyed classes, but for the women themselves ‘it is a rare moment of hope’.
One of Mas’ protagonists is Geneviève, a senior nurse at the institution. Another is the daughter of a wealthy family, Eugénie. The ‘fates’ of these women ‘will collide on the night of the Mad Woman’s Ball.’ Charcot, of course, also features heavily, if not physically then ever-present in the minds of the women. Mas exposes his barbaric practices, where he would experiment on chosen women in front of a large audience: ‘Charcot has little difficulty commanding the attention of his rapt audience… He has the penetrating yet inscrutable gaze of a doctor who, for years, has been studying women at their most vulnerable, women who have been rejected by their families and by society… He knows that all Paris knows his name. Authority has been conferred on him…’. I have read about the real-life Charcot before, but I believe that this is the first time I have encountered him in fiction; he is just as unpleasant and sure of himself here as I had imagined.
The other women held in the Salpêtrière ‘range in age from thirteen to sixty-five; they are dark-haired, blonde or redheads, slender or stout; they are dressed, and wear their hair, in the same way they would in town. They move with modest grace.’ Mas empathises, and humanises, these characters, many of whom are being held entirely against their will. She describes: ‘It is only by looking more closely that the signs of their distress become evident: the taut, twisted hand, an arm held tightly against the chest, the eyelids that open and close like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings… One woman yawns continually; another is racked by uncontrollable tics; their expressions are weary, vacant or steeped in profound melancholy.’
One thing which Mas does well, and which has also been rendered marvellously in this translation, is capturing movement and activity. One scene, which follows morning preparations on a single ward, unfolds as follows: ‘Between the rows of iron bedsteads, the women stretch, pin their hair up into chignons, button their ebony gowns over their translucent nightshifts, then trudge wearily towards the refectory under the watchful eye of the nurses. Timorous rays of sunshine steal through the misted windows.’ Mas creates such a sense of place.
The Mad Women’s Ball has been rendered with care and empathy, and there is a real immediacy to the prose. I found this short work rather powerful, and its separate threads were pulled together with skill. Wynne’s translation is excellent, and this is a book which I would highly recommend, particularly if you want to learn what life was like for the women packed away to such asylums during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the effects which this imprisonment could have upon them.
As I said in my last post, The Literary Sisters is ten years old! I am going to be embarking on the very difficult task of choosing a favourite novel which I have read every year between 2013 and 2023. If you would like to share your favourites from any, or all, of these years, I would absolutely love to hear them.
2013
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘As a protagonist, June is an interesting choice. Many original personality traits can be found within her, and rather than being the make-up and fashion loving stereotype of a teenage girl, her hobbies and interests feel rather unique – for example, the way in which she likes to pretend she lives within the Medieval period, and her dreams of being a falconer when she finishes school. She and her sister are complete opposites, and June is somewhat lonely in consequence: ‘Greta got prettier and I got… weirder’, she tells us. June is a vivid and wholly realistic character in consequence. The novel is told in retrospect, and June is around one year older than she was when Finn’s death occurred. This present day narrative is woven with memories from June’s past.’
2014
The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘I was so captivated by The Ladies’ Paradise from the outset. First published in France as Au Bonheur des Dames in 1883, the novel tells the story of the rise of department stores in Victorian-era Paris. In the insightful Oxford World’s Classics introduction, it is said that Zola was given the inspiration to write such a novel after witnessing the rise of Le Bon Marche, one of the city’s most famous department stores.’
2015
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘I was beguiled from the novel’s very beginning. The opening chapter sets the tone of the whole wonderfully: ‘Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs. North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company. She answered an advertisement in the personal column of The Times‘. A young Frenchwoman, Louise Lanier, determined to spend the summer in England, is its author. Of her newest venture, Mrs North says the following: ‘”At my age, I don’t expect fun… But I hope it will be interesting. I’m too old to go in search of change, so I’ll try to bring change into the house. It’s too quiet as it is.””
2016
Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘Here I Am is a deep familial jigsaw, which has been incredibly well pieced together. The dialogue is wonderfully constructed, and there is a very dark humour to it in places, which adds a great balance to the whole. Above all, the novel feels very believable; the characters are lifelike, and their problems and interactions are very realistic indeed.’
2017
Thalia by Frances Faviell
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘One of the other strengths within the novel – and there are many – is the sense of place which Faviell details. France springs to life immediately, and the minutiae which she displays, both in terms of the general region of Brittany, and within the home, are vivid. One feels present in Rachel and Thalia’s colliding worlds through Faviell’s stunning use of colour and scent. Rachel herself is startlingly three-dimensional; I would go as far as to say that she is one of the most realistic narrators whom I have ever come across.’
2018
A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘Ausubel is such an exciting writer, with a fresh and dynamic voice and imagination. Every single one of her stories here, which are separated into four sections – ‘Birth’, Gestation’, ‘Conception’, and ‘Love’ – feel energised, and electrically charged. Her prose throughout is beautiful, and has such a strength to it. As a conceptual work, A Guide to Being Born shocks and astonishes. Every single tale here is a miniature masterpiece; all are vivid, unusual, and memorable, and for the most part, they throw up a lot of surprises. A Guide to Being Born is such a polished collection, which feels nothing less than sumptuous to read.’
2019
Spring by Ali Smith (Seasonal Quartet, Book 3)
‘A very short review: ”Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing.’
2020
Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘Bird Cottage is a fictionalised account of the life of Gwendolen Howard, known as Len. Dissatisfied with her life in London, she decided to retire to the English countryside at the age of forty . In 1938, she purchased a secluded cottage in Sussex, from which she would be able to observe birds. From her new home, she found the peace, and the avian subjects, which she needed to author two bestselling bird books. With these, she managed to captivate a large audience ‘with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds who lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed.’’
2021
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
From my review, which you can read in full here: ‘I so enjoy Barbara Comyns’ work; it is wonderfully strange, and sometimes a little horrifying, but it is always compelling, and surprising. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which was first published in 1954, fits all of this criteria. The novel is set in a small Warwickshire village and, set over a short span of time, the story encompasses many strange things. After the river floods excessively in early summer, the villagers begin to change, exhibiting odd and frightening behaviours; these range from a ‘mad miller’ who drowns himself, to the village barber, who cuts his own throat in full view. These nasty and unforeseen ends are attributed to a peculiar illness, which spreads like wildfire through the village.’
2022
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer
‘This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease.
Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.
Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day.
Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect.’
Let me know your top fiction picks of the last decade!
When Mary Beard calls a book ‘wonderful’, I know I have to read it. Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees is one such novel. It was also recommended to be by my mother, who read it for her book club. The Island of Missing Trees was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022, and various reviews call it ‘[a] lovely heartbreaker of a novel’ (Margaret Atwood), ‘an astounding work of breathtaking beauty’ (Lemn Sissay), and ‘Shafak is that rare alchemist who can mix grains of tragedy and delight without diminishing the savour of either’ (Washington Post). Safe to say, my interest in this novel was piqued.
Having never read any of Shafak’s work previously, I had no idea that she was such a prolific author, with twelve previous novels to her name. I had a cursory glance at some of her titles and their general blurbs, and if pushed, I think I would have chosen to begin with The Island of Missing Trees anyway.
The Island of Missing Trees begins in 1974, and is set on ‘opposite sides of a divided Cyprus’. In the capital Nicosia, two teenagers, Greek Christian Kostas and Turkish Muslim Defne, meet at a tavern named The Happy Fig ‘in the city they both call home’. This tavern is the only place they are able to meet in secret, ‘hidden beneath the leaves of a fig tree growing through the roof’. When war consequently breaks out, both teenagers vanish.
On the first page of the novel, Shafak comments upon the division of Cyprus: ‘A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.’ She goes on: ‘For the island was riven into two pieces – the north and the south. A different language, a different script, a different memory prevailed in each, and when they prayed, the islanders, it was seldom to the same god.’
A story set in the late 2010s runs parallel to this. In London, Kostas and Defne’s 16-year-old daughter, Ada Kazantzakis, has never been to Cyprus. She wishes to make sense of her ‘family’s silence, but the only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a fig tree growing in the back garden of their home’. Defne passed away the previous year, and her father, easily distracted, is obsessed with trees, spending a lot of time away from home. I did not find Ada a believable character by any means; her moods are mercurial, and being as suspicious as she was judgemental, she was very difficult to like.
I was quite looking forward to The Island of Missing Trees, but I must admit that Shafak lost me when she started to, quite bafflingly, narrate much of the book from the fig tree’s perspective. Whilst I appreciated the imagination here, and it allowed Shafak to include more Cypriot history, in my opinion, this peculiar element of the novel was overworked. It also drew attention away from the more interesting historical story. I also found it odd that the fig tree chapters were told from the first person perspective, but those involving the human characters used the third, which kept me as a reader at arm’s length.
Usually, I love the approach of two intertwined stories in a novel, but again, I found the tale from the 1970s far more interesting than the focus on Ada. I found the structure here made the reading experience quite repetitive, with phrasings and metaphors copied almost word for word in different sections. The tone was occasionally a little too preachy for my liking, too, particularly as the fig tree is keen on doling out advice.
For me, the strengths here were the way in which Shafak wove mythology and horticulture, topics about which she is clearly very knowledgeable, through the novel. However, despite an interesting premise, I found The Island of Missing Trees really quite underwhelming. The novel is readable, but nothing about it took my breath away, as it seems has been the case for a great number of other readers. For me, the story would have had more of a punch had it been more condensed and less drawn out, and also if there had been less strands of story which do not always mesh seamlessly with one another. At this point in time, I’m not sure whether Shafak is an author I could enjoy, so I may try one or two of her other titles in future.
I chose Rose Tremain’s The Colour for the penultimate stop on my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. Set in New Zealand, The Colour is the first of Tremain’s novels which I have read; before this, I had only encountered one of her short story collections. The Daily Telegraph calls her ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and this sentiment seems to be echoed by many reviewers.
The central characters in The Colour are married couple Joseph and Harriet Blackstone. They choose to migrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in 1864, along with Joseph’s mother, Lilian, ‘in search of new beginnings and prosperity’. Soon after they construct their house, Joseph finds small pieces of gold in the local creek, and is ‘seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth’. He then sets off alone, with the destination of New Zealand’s Southern Alps on his mind; there are a series of newly-discovered goldfields there, and he joins an enormous migration of men in order to try and make his fortune. The blurb declares the novel ‘by turns both moving and terrifying’, and describes it as being ‘about a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and explore the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.’
Tremain gives a marked consideration to colour in her novel from its very beginning. She writes: ‘It was their first winter. The earth under their boots was grey. The yellow tussock-grass was salty with hail. In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding-sheet of snow.’ I was struck by Tremain’s writing immediately. She has such a gift for seamlessly blending her vivid descriptions with her characters, and the actions which they take. There is a timelessness to Tremain’s prose, despite the effective rooting of her novel in a very particular period and setting. She uses her chosen framework in order to explore many different themes relating to expatriation, nature, and human nature, particularly with regard to the ways in which changing conditions alter the relationships between husband and wife, and son and mother.
It feels as though the author is intimately acquainted with her characters, and their every wish and whim. When describing Joseph in the novel’s early stages, for instance, Tremain writes: ‘He turned away from his mother and looked admiringly at this new wife of his, kneeling by the reluctant fire. And he felt his heart suddenly fill to the very core with gratitude and affection… Joseph wanted to cross the room and put his arms around Harriet and gather her hair into a knot in his hand. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and tell her the one thing that he would never be able to admit to her – that she had saved his life.’ Harriet, too, feels fully formed, particularly given her slightly unusual and non-conformist character: ‘But she was a woman who longed for the unfamiliar and the strange… She wanted to see her own hand in everything. No matter if it took a long time. No matter if her skin was burned in the summer heat. No matter if she had to learn each new task like a child. She had been a governess for twelve years. Now, she had travelled an ocean and stood in a new place, but she wanted to go still further, into a wilderness.’
The Colour feels ultimately realistic from its beginning. It is filled with fraught discussions, and the darkness and loneliness which such a new life can bring with it. The cultural information is rich, and, particularly along with Tremain’s descriptions, paints a wonderful and tangible picture. I did find the ending slightly problematic, but it was still very enjoyable nevertheless, and I certainly struggled to put it down. Immersive and beautifully executed, The Colour is a believable and very human novel, which I highly recommend. I cannot wait to read more books by Tremain.
Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait was perhaps my most highly anticipated releases of 2022. O’Farrell is an author whose books I request from my local library, or purchase outright, before reading even a sentence of the blurb. The Marriage Portrait is another work of historical fiction, following Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020.
The Marriage Portrait is set during the winter of 1561, when 16-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici, the new Duchess of Ferrara, is ‘taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso.’ Lucrezia is the ‘troublesome’ fifth child and third daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Tuscany; she is thrown into the limelight after her older sister passes away on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Moderna, and Regio. Lucrezia is made to marry him herself. She realises that here, in secluded Fortezza, he intends to murder her. Up until this point, she has lived her life ‘locked away inside Florence’s grandest palazzo, guarded by her father’s soldiers and her mother’s ladies in waiting.’ At the countryside villa, however, there is nobody to protect her.
The Marriage Portrait, which is based on real historical events, has been described as a ‘vivid evocation of the beauty and brutality of Renaissance Italy, and of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.’ In the historical note which prefaces the novel, O’Farrell comments: ‘The official cause of her death was given as “putrid fever”, but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband.’
In the opening paragraph, O’Farrell immediately caught my attention: ‘Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place at the opposite end but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, should she wish; he is unfolding his napkin and straightening a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.’ O’Farrell goes on: ‘The certainty that he means her to die is like a presence beside her, as if a dark-feathered bird of prey has alighted on the arm of her chair.’
O’Farrell then transports us back in time, to a chapter entitled ‘The unfortunate circumstance of Lucrezia’s conception’, in 1544. She captures, sweepingly, her father’s palazzo: ‘It occupied a corner of the largest piazza in Florence, its back to the river, sides soaring above the citizens like great cragged cliffs.’ We then meet the 7-year-old Lucrezia in a following chapter, and begin to get a real feel for her character and intelligence: ‘Words pressed themselves into her memory, like a shoe sole into soft mud, which would dry and solidify, the shoe print preserved for ever. Sometimes she felt filled up, overstuffed with words, faces, names, voices, dialogues, her head throbbing with pain, and she would be set off-balance by the weight of what she carried, stumbling into tables and walls.’
As anyone familiar with O’Farrell’s writing would expect, The Marriage Portrait is sensual, rich, and evocative. The marvellous detail which it is suffused with is an everpresent quality of the author’s work. I found The Marriage Portrait entirely absorbing, captivated from start to finish. I loved the approach which O’Farrell took, flitting back and forth in time, and capturing beautifully imagined scenes, and vivid scenery. The novel is rendered quite exquisitely, and demonstrates what a master O’Farrell is at her craft.
I picked up a lovely hardback edition of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine in a charming little secondhand bookshop at the National Trust’s Cliveden Estate in Buckinghamshire. After reading Otsuka’s most recent novel, The Swimmers, I was keen to read the rest of her small oeuvre. I picked up this, her debut, with delight, and began it just days later.
First published in 2002, When the Emperor Was Divine begins in 1942 in Berkeley, California. At the outset of this slim novel, a Japanese-American woman learns from posters plastered all over the city that she and her family have been ‘reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens’, and face expulsion to the Utah desert. The novel opens: ‘The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue.’
Otsuka uses five different perspectives to tell her story, and has based the happenings on real events. All of these narrative voices are part of the same family, and include the daughter’s experience of the long train ride to the camp, to the family’s return to their Californian home. The first chapter follows the unnamed mother, as she spends all of her time packing up their lives: ‘Tomorrow she and the children would be leaving. She did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone or who would be living in their house while they were away. She knew only that tomorrow they had to go.’ At this point in time, Otsuka notes: ‘It was late April. It was the fourth week of the fifth month of the war and the women, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules.’
Her husband has already been taken away, arrested some months previously, and taken to Texas: ‘Every few days he was allowed to write her a letter. Usually he told her about the weather.’ We learn a great deal about the father before he takes centre stage in the narrative: ‘He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions.’ His presence loops in and out of the narrative, and is often the central thought of his son, particularly.
I have studied the Second World War extensively over the years, but my knowledge about the expulsion of Japanese-American citizens living in the USA is relatively poor. I went into When the Emperor Was Divine in the hope that it would both educate me, and immerse me within a compelling story. I can confirm that it absolutely did both of these things.
Otsuka’s writing is incredibly precise, and she captures so much in just one or two sentences. I really appreciated the amount of detail included, and the sharply observed scenes. Otsuka is highly skilled with regard to managing the time period, and assessing its impact on the central family: ‘Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio. Sometimes, in the darkness, he heard noises drifting from other rooms. The heavy thud of footsteps. The shuffling of cards.’ Later, she writes: ‘Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.’
As displayed above, there is an incredible poignancy here. Another example is taken from the third chapter, which begins: ‘In the beginning the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch. Above them blue skies. The hot midday sun. No trees. No shade. Birds.’
What made When the Emperor Was Divine even more compelling to me was a simple narrative device; all of the central characters remain unnamed throughout. As well as the story of just a few individuals, Otsuka encapsulates an experience which affected an entire community of people. There are moments of profound sadness scattered throughout this slim novel, and there is also exquisite beauty. When the Emperor Was Divine is an evocative blend of fiction and reality, well executed and skilfully written.
Jenni Fagan is an author whose work I have enjoyed so much up until now that I no longer read the blurbs of her novels; rather, I just sink into the unknown, feeling sure that I will like what I find. Of course, the title of her newest novella, Hex, does bring with it a lot of punchy imagery, and it is surely not difficult to guess some of the themes which might be found within its pages.
Hex is Fagan’s shortest book by far, coming in at just over one hundred pages. It was published as part of a Polygon series entitled ‘Darkland Tales’, which aims to bring together ‘dramatic retellings of stories’ from Scotland’s history. This is the second book in the series; the first and third have been written by Denise Mina and Alan Warner, respectively.
Set on the 4th of December 1591, Hex weaves together a present day protagonist with a woman accused of witchcraft in Edinburgh. Geillis Duncan, a teenager from Trenant, Scotland, has been locked into a prison cell far below the city’s High Street, and is facing the final night of her life. However, this is not just a work of historical fiction, or an imagined narrative of real historical events. Fagan introduces, in the form of the novella’s narrator, a modern-day character named Iris from the summer of 2021, who tells Geillis that she ‘comes from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe.’ Conducting a conversation across the centuries is a clever tool. Fagan reveals that in the vast swath of time which separates Geillis and Iris, not much has fundamentally changed. Fagan offers a simple yet very effective way in which to explore how and why women are still discriminated against almost 450 years later. Numerous parallels are drawn between the characters.
Iris essentially takes on the role of Geillis’ familiar, and directs much of her narrative is toward Geillis. The second chapter begins: ‘Your cell is several floors below the city. It is, far below footfall, or taverns, or flats; below beds, or kitchens, or hugs, or hope, or church, or prayer, or freedom, or laughter, or air; below shuttered windows, or dogs asleep in front of fires. It is so far below the seasons they might as well not exist.’ She goes on to comment: ‘Travelled time all my life’, and then: ‘Five hundred years between us, Geillis Duncan – it’s such a little leap really.’ Iris continues: ‘A woman’s voice is a hex. She must learn to exalt men always. If she doesn’t do that, then she is a threat. A demon whore, a witch – so says everyone and the law.’
When she first meets Geillis, Iris observes: ‘Head turned away, eyes toward me – the outline of your nose and forehead and chin is marked in moonlight; you look like a silver face on a ten-pence coin.’ Such sensual descriptions make Geillis almost tangible to the reader. Iris, otherworldly as she is, then begins to magick things up to help her new companion: a blanket, a meal.
We then transition from Iris’ perspective to Geillis’. As the time approaches dawn, Geillis tells Iris about how she came to be imprisoned, and offers a ‘visceral description of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition.’ When she is tortured in her own home, before being thrown into her dingy prison cell, Geillis describes the following: ‘They turned me over, Iris… everything inside my body felt like it was burning, like I was on fire, like I was already in hell and they were the demons surrounding me, and it is for their crimes I will die!’ When asked why she was persecuted, Geillis responds: ‘I helped women birth… I knew how to pick the right herbs to cure a headache, and I had a terrible want in me to go out at night and see the stars.’
I found Hex to be entirely absorbing. Fagan manages to pack such a lot in, from death and murder, to race and expectations. There is a real brutality to this story, as one might surely expect. I liked the juxtaposition of both narrators, with Geillis’ sometimes old-fashioned turns of phrase, and the very current events given to authenticate Iris’ point of view: ‘If only she didn’t wear stilettos. If only she didn’t walk through a park. If only she didn’t go out at night. If only those smart, brilliant sisters had realised police officers would later take selfies by their dead bodies.’
Something which I admire about Fagan is the way in which her stories are not straightforward. Even in a work as short as this one, she is such a creative author, managing to insert quite original elements, and making for a very memorable reading experience. Another, quite moving, touch is that Fagan chose to dedicate Hex to the real Geillis Duncan.
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