Accidents Happen by Louise Millar published by Pan

The Bad Mother by Isabelle Grey published by Quercus

Traitor’s Gate by Michael Ridpath published by Head of Zeus

Two of the perennial themes in crime fiction are the mother whose child disappears and the threatened woman who is told she’s imagining the danger she feels all round her. Some men write about these, but the authors are more often women. Celia Fremlin’s first (and Edgar-winning) novel, The Hours Before Dawn, was published in the UK in 1958 and is an early example of the threatened woman whose friends and family think she’s mad. Sophie Hannah has used the same idea to great effect ever since her first novel, Little Face (2006), and she now has many imitators. Like most crime fiction, this is designed to reassure, showing how the heroine has had right on her side all along and will see her doubters forced to grovel in apology. These novels clearly answer a continuing need in many women, who have been mocked or disbelieved by those who should have listened.

Now we have Louise Millar’s Accidents Happen. Millar’s Kate Parker suffers from such atrocious anxiety that her young son has to hide the titchy risks he takes in case knowledge of them sends her right over the edge. Already her in-laws think she’s suffering from a mental illness, and they encourage him to ride his bike to the local shops on his own and commit other small rebellions against her constraining rules. She knows all the statistics for accidents and crime, trotting them out at every opportunity. She has even had a steel cage constructed in her bedroom so that when her fears assume human form and attack, as she’s certain they will, she and her son can lock themselves in the cage. Kate is no pushover: she fights her delusions as hard as she can. When her scent and moisturiser seem to have been more depleted than they should be, for example, she persuades herself she’s imagining it and battles on.

When she finds a man who shows much more understanding of her difficulties than any of her family, it is clear that he will bring some new threat of his own, but she doesn’t see that in time, and all kinds of trouble ensue. For me the set-up was more convincing than the revelation of the reasons behind Kate’s torment, but the narrative is well constructed and the precise outcome is kept in doubt for long enough to ensure complete attention.

Isabelle Grey has taken the other familiar theme and, without following the rules and patterns of crime fiction, shows exactly why her scripts for so many crime dramas, including one of Jimmy McGovern’s Accused last year have been so successful. In The Bad Mother Grey describes an ordinary family living in an ordinary English seaside town. Tessa Parker runs a boutique bed-and-breakfast, is on reasonable terms with her estranged partner Sam and does her best with her teenage children, Mitch and Lauren. A stranger appears and threatens the carefully constructed security, although it is not immediately clear that this will prove to be any more than an emotional upheaval.

The adolescent Mitch is beautifully drawn in all his angry, yearning uncertainty as he acquires his first girlfriend and challenges her immensely rich and all-powerful father. When the boy disappears, there are many possible causes and outcomes, and Grey both stretches the tension and keeps her story realistic until the denouement. This is a moving novel, as a well as a convincing one, and it shows with great clarity how past crimes and well-meaning manipulation damage families for years afterwards.

Michael Ridpath, who has moved from crimes in the City to murder inIceland, now takes us back to Berlin just before the Second World War and one of the first plots against Hitler. As Ridpath explains in a note at the end, he has based his story on the real plot ‘transmitted to the British government….by Ewald von Kleist with the help of a young, well-connected British journalist name Ian Colvin’.

In the novel, the British government is still trying to appease Hitler and there are many influential British people who are not entirely convinced that he’s a bad thing. But Conrad de Lancey knows better. He comes from a British county family with many German relations and has just emerged from dreadful experiences in the Spanish Civil War. He is a fluent German speaker and a lover of the country as it was before Hitler’s rise. Conrad’s slightly naïve decency, and almost incredible courage, are challenged as he discovers quite how brutal the new regime inBerlinhas become.

On the way to his ultimate disillusion and subsequent triumph, he falls in love, then is forced to doubt his beloved as much as all his old friends and relations, showing precisely why life in a society ruled by a secret and corrupt force such as the Gestapo makes any normal kind of relationship impossible. When you cannot trust anyone not to betray you into the hands of torturers, you can never reveal your real self and therefore you can never know or be known. Such a society – whatever its politics – will always collapse in the end because it frustrates a fundamental psychological need.

All three of these novels deal with fears that are part of the human condition, and the journeys their main characters have to take through danger into restored security provide just the kind of reassurance for which we all yearn.

Published by Short Books 25 April 2013

480pp, paperback, £12.99

Reviewed by Paul Sidey

 
Before reading this novel, I knew nothing of the work of this Catalan writer. Subsequently, I have discovered that he is a translator, with a very varied CV – from medieval poetry to the Asterix comic books. He writes on cultural and sporting matters for the Barcelona edition of El Pais. This is his first novel.

According to Catalan Literature Online, ‘Punti represents a plausible and reasonable way of understanding the professional harvest of Catalan literature at the threshold of the twenty-first century. The literature intentionally distances itself from both the transcendentalist vacuum inspired by Romanticism and from the well-known political instrumentalization of Catalan resistance-style writing.’

Sometimes translation, as with the extract quoted above, can do a real disservice to a writer. This is not an accusation, however, that should be levelled at Julie Work who has produced the English language version of Lost Luggage. But it is hard to tell if the novel is ‘incomparable literature’, as the review from El Pais claims.

There is no doubt that Punti has come up with a good storyline. Four young men, Christof, Christophe, Christopher and Christofol discover they are related. They all have different mothers in different countries, and the same mysterious father, Gabriel Delacruz, who has disappeared. He was, it appears, a truck driver, whose business took him from Frankfurt, Paris, London and Barcelona.

After Delacruz is declared officially to be a missing person, the half-brothers try and piece together the missing pieces of the jigsaw about the man who abandoned them all twenty years ago.

From a nun with a wooden leg in a House of Charity to cards discovered in the lining of one of Delacruz’s jackets, there is picaresque potential in this low-key ‘detective’ story, but Lost Luggage remains intriguing rather than dramatic.

Perhaps this is to do with the ‘transcendentalist vacuum’, as discussed by Catalan Literature Online… It is, of course, not fair to be facetious about an author because of a pretentious analysis of his work by someone else. The language of Delacruz’s original may have a dynamic that an English reader cannot appreciate, but, in terms of pure, simple narrative, Lost Luggage ends up in a siding off the main track.

Published by Inside the Dog Press 2 May 2013

368pp, hardback, £14.99

Jasper Gibson’s debut is a comic novel set in South America about which Michael Palin has commented: ‘It’s a viscerally funny book which is quite painful to read.’ In a piece specially written for bookoxygen, Gibson shares the background on his experiences in Venezuela, the setting for Harry Christmas’s escape from the British Rot.

*

Contrary to popular belief, the best thing to do with a problem is to run away from it. I didn’t know anything about Venezuela, but I picked Caracas out of a list of cities for no other reason than I liked the sound of the word Ca-ra-cas… Crackers. A good craic. Maracas and clappers and crackheads and rappers. What problem was I running away from? Life. I had ruined a relationship with an incredible woman through my drinking and delusions. She was half-Irish, half-Sicilian. The end was explosive. I had also found myself working for the Devil.

The Devil, perhaps unsurprisingly, worked in television. He had floppy hair and soft shoes and called everyone ‘guys’, even if there was only one other person there.

‘Guys,’ he said to me, ‘we’ve been here before haven’t we? I mean haven’t we? What is it now?’ I was working on a clip show called Extreme Portsmouth and it was amongst this footage of drunks bull-charging police vehicles that I came across my moral core, which I had temporarily misplaced.

‘The problem,’ I replied, ‘is that in this clip someone is evidently committing suicide and I’m not comfortable writing jokes about that.’

‘Rubbish,’ said the Devil, making a lunge for my moral core. ‘That’s not a person jumping off the roof. It’s a dummy. Anyway you can’t see it land. How do you know what happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter if you can’t actually see the impact. It’s 40 storeys.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘And if that’s a dummy, where’s the other person?’

‘What other person?’

‘The person that threw the dummy off.’

‘What?’

‘That dummy is jumping off a tower block on its own.’ I stood up and left my desk and the building and my job and my country.

‘Can I have another Bloody Mary please?’ It was 14 June 2008 and Venezuela was coming into view. Just before I got on the plane a friend told me a series of horror stories about Caracas. Taxi drivers would kidnap me from the airport. I would be robbed. I would be killed. He was almost entirely wrong. I was the victim of an attempted mugging once as I wandered into a dodgy part of town – easily done, as that’s most of it – while looking for a guest house. I had a backpack on. I felt like a packhorse surrounded by wolves. They threatened me. I whinnied and fled. As I turned the corner I looked back to see the three of them still standing there, startled, as if I wasn’t playing the game properly.

My friend insisted I seek out the protection of Rex, an Englishman married to a Venezuelan. Rex turned out to be far more dangerous than Caracas. Have you ever seen a man open a bottle of wine and drink the whole thing while driving? ‘So what do you think of Chavez?’ I asked him as he mounted the pavement, drove past some cars he didn’t approve of, and then re-entered the traffic. ‘There’s only one honest position as far as Chavez is concerned. To the chavistas I am anti-Chavez. To the anti-Chavez people I am chavista!’ Which sums up the common view of Venezuela: polarity. For and against Chavez, extremes of rich and poor, beauty versus deprivation. But that is Caracas. There is another Venezuela.

Follow the northern coast east until you get to the Paria peninsula and there, on its very tip, is the Caribbean village I made my home: Macuro. When Columbus arrived there, the only place where he set foot on the mainland, he thought he had found the literal garden of Eden. I too was faced with a biblical vision: a dirty, bearded man who looked like he had been struck by lightning. I turned on the taps. It was time to shave, to clean up my act, and this village took me in.

I found work in a cacao plantation, and board with Senora Luisa who ran the sweet shop. She said she wanted payment in English lessons. We made almost no progress.

The peculiarities of this village are a widespread stutter, streets paved with grass and the warmest, most raucous people I have ever met. Fishermen, and cacao farmers, they are also singers, engineers, boxers, poets, revolutionaries, entrepreneurs, smugglers, cock-fighters and evangelical Christians. There is a great deal of spitting when you talk and an inability to dance salsa is only a slightly less heinous sin than an unwillingness to try. The village greeting is ‘Epalay!’, cried out as if you hadn’t seen the person in years with open palms and an expression of surprise. As there are only six streets everyone greets each other like this continuously, perhaps only minutes passing since their last meeting, perhaps their twentieth that day. ‘Epalay!’ – it’s like a huge family of amnesiacs.

As soon as I arrived, I started writing A Bright Moon For Fools.  My central character, Harry Christmas – part Jim Royle, part Oliver Reed – arrives there in a state of spiritual crisis. The characters, rivalries, love affairs, fights, gossip and miracles that electrify this village all provided inspiration for the trouble Harry causes as he attempts a shaky path to redemption. So, far from the horror stories, the Venezuela I found was a welcoming place, though certainly with its wild moments. From the Andes to the Amazon, the country is covered in communities like Macuro. Yes, you have to keep your eyes open – like everywhere else – but from what this traveller has seen, it’s considerably less frightening thanPortsmouth.

Translated by Frank Wynne

Published by Serpent’s Tail 28 March 2013

288pp, paperback, £8.99

Reviewed by John Petherbridge

You’re dining in a Parisian hotel restaurant described as one of the finest in the world when a boy, bored to death with his parents, gets down off his seat and stands in the way of the waiters, one of whom almost trips over him.  The waiter asks the boy to return to his seat.  The boy refuses.  The waiter, a young black man, tries to shepherd the boy back to his table.  On seeing this, the boy’s father gets up and punches the waiter in the face. There is a stunned silence but none of the diners does anything. Would you?

The principal characters of Fabrice Humbert’s novel, Sila’s Fortune, newly translated from the French by Frank Wynne, are all present in such a restaurant and the assault becomes a pivotal moment in their lives.  Moving freely between his characters’ back stories and their subsequent lives, Fabrice Humbert brilliantly weaves their various narratives into a panoramic tapestry of the crazy financial world of the years leading up to the 2008 crash.

The waiter’s attacker is Mark Ruffle who, having failed to make it as an American football star, is determined to outdo his property tycoon father in terms of wealth.  He uses the ruthlessness and brutality he demonstrated in the restaurant to amass a fortune selling sub-prime mortgages to the poor who have little chance of ever repaying them. However Mark’s violence and his aggressive money-making alienates his wife Shoshana who later tries to make amends for her husband’s behaviour by befriending Sila, the  waiter he punched.

Elena, a university literature teacher and an expert on Balzac, the first great chronicler of capitalism, realizes that the non-intervention of her husband Lev Kravchenko is a sign that his accumulation of vast wealth, following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, has made him indifferent to the fate of others. She eventually separates from him and sues him for half his considerable fortune.

Matthieu and Simon are in the restaurant celebrating Simon landing a job, at three times his present salary, with a London-based investment bank. Simon is a meek mathematician living in the shadow of his brasher flatmate, Matthieu, who works in PR. As they walk home Matthieu surmises that they might be better off having  the assailant’s same obsession with power and property – ‘the absolute need to assert yourself.  To mark your territory. To be less human and more animal.’  Simon doesn’t agree but his mathematical skills are used by his new employer in accordance with Matthieu’s observations.

Sila, the waiter, is an illegal immigrant from a war-torn, presumably African, coastal town which is gradually being choked by sand. When Sila inadvertently insults a military leader he has to flee from the city. He stows away on a freighter but is discovered.  The captain tells him he will be thrown overboard, the usual fate of stowaways. Sila is saved by the intervention of the ship’s cook who needs someone to help him. Another fortuitous meeting takes him from being an exploited illegal immigrant, working as an under-paid washer-up, to being a well-paid waiter in a top Parisian restaurant with the right to stay inFrance.

Some months after the assault Sila moves toMiami in the United States where his Parisian employer has another restaurant.  And that’s where his good fortune runs out. 

Fabrice  Humbert writes with great authority. His detailed accounts of Lev Kravaschenko’s and Mark Ruffle’s acquisition of their fortunes in the very different circumstances of post-Soviet Union Russia and the Miami poor are both totally convincing. Similarly his account of Simon working for a London bank as a quantitative analyst (quant) during the boom years of the 90s and early twenty-first century rings true.

The author never allows the prodigious amount of research which must have gone into the writing of the book to overwhelm his characters.  Lev, Elena, Mark, Shoshana, Matthieu, Simon, Sila and other minor characters all come across as credible people rather than the stereotypical products of research.

Sila’s Fortune is an epic, complex, extremely readable novel of an era in which the accumulation of great wealth became divorced from the provision of human needs.

Published by Picador 9 May 2013

320pp, hardback, £16.99

Reviewed by Caroline Sanderson

The term ‘Hampstead Novel’ used to generate something of a literary hoohah. Searching for a definition online, I found it described as ‘a slow, self-consciously intellectual, dinner party novel’, and ‘a middle-class morality novel – probably involving adultery and shallow-masquerading-as-deep’. And somewhat topically– in the words of Margaret Drabble, a supposed proponent of the form– ‘an invention of the “Thatcherite press” ’. Ouch.

In the less sensational words of that thoughtful London writer Amanda Craig, however, the Hampstead Novel is actually ‘about people who live pretty much as we do, to whom things happen’. That description could certainly apply to Kate Clanchy’s entertaining debut novel, Meeting the English.

Set entirely in London NW3 during the long, hot and globally eventful summer of 1989, Meeting the English centres on the family of Phillip Prys, a playwright and novelist of some renown who has recently had a stroke which has rendered him paralyzed and unable to communicate. Attempting to cope with this cataclysmic domestic event are Shirin, his shining, much younger Iranian artist wife, his formidable ex-wife Myfanwy, and his two troubled children – Jake who has been sent down from Oxford for unacceptable conduct and possession of illegal drugs, and Juliet who is more preoccupied with her weight than her impending GCSEs. Then an unlikely saviour arrives in the shape of Struan Robertson, an academically brilliant seventeen-year-old orphan from a dour Scottish mining town.  Seeking gainful gap year employment he answers an advertisement in The London Review of Books: ‘Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair.’

And the rest is Clanchy’s novel, which examines what happens when Struan – who has never in his life ‘been south’ – meets the English. And not just any English, but the eccentric Prys ménage of NW3 which appears as exotic and incomprehensible to him as a chattering class of tropical birds. And yet, miraculously, the ingénue but caring orphan boy from Cuik turns out to be rather good at sorting out everyone, as well as pushing bathchairs.

Clanchy extracts much wry comedy from the situation. She is particularly good on appearance and the clothes of the period, from Struan’s C&A shirt and unfashionable pleated trousers which give him a ‘strange sexless fold around the crotch’, to Juliet’s knitted pink dress and pouffed 80s hair clipped up in combs. And Clanchy evokes the hot and heady ether of 1989 beautifully too, from the background buzz of events in South Africa, Iran and Eastern Europe, to the Lloyd Cole & the Commotions lyrics, and afternoons spent sucking ice cubes and watching Flamingo Road reruns.

I so enjoyed this novel. I know this has a lot to do with the strangely co-incidental fact that in 1989 I too was freshly arrived in London from the provinces; working in a shop in Hampstead and grappling with the outlandish whims of its rarefied, intellectual residents. But by dint of its ‘stranger in a strange land comedy’ and keen observation of family dynamics, Meeting the English is more than a period piece. And it’s more than a Hampstead Novel. Whatever that is.

The Ides of April by Lindsey Davis published by Hodder & Stoughton

The Dying Hours by Mark Billingham published by Little Brown

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith published by Sphere

The View on the Way Down by Rebecca Wait published by Picador

A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller published by Headline

Lindsey Davis’s many fans will have been made anxious by the news that she is embarking on a new series with a new sleuth.  They need not worry.  Marcus Didius Falco’s adopted daughter, Flavia Albia, is a wonderful creation, rendered with a surprising tenderness.  Rescued as a child from danger and destitution in the barbarian country of Britain, Flavia Albia is now grown up and investigating a series of perplexing deaths in Rome, secretly rescuing wild foxes from a horrible fate, and fighting the hardest of all women’s battles:  how to remain independent and yet commit yourself to love.  Just as closely researched and yet light-hearted as the Falco novels, The Ides of April is more touching.

Mark Billingham is another writer with legions of fans, who will not be disappointed with his latest novel, The Dying Hours.  Tom Thorne has been demoted and is back working in uniform, angry and unhappily bad at relationships but still skilled in detection.  Again, we are offered a series of puzzling deaths, this time all looking like suicide.  Billingham provides more gruesome details than Davis, and fewer laughs, but his affection for the emotionally incompetent Thorne is warming.

There is also plenty of affection in The Cuckoo’s Calling, a first novel by an ex-special-forces soldier, writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith.  His hero, Cormoran Strike, shares his military background and is struggling with a prosthetic lower leg, a private-investigation business on its uppers, and a disastrous, just-ended relationship with a rich beautiful woman.  The only lucky aspects of his life are a potential new client with lots of money and a murdered sister and his own new temp, Robin Ellacott. 

Robin is everyone’s idea of the perfect assistant:  seeing everything and commenting on nothing;  economical; efficient; honest; generous; and funny.  Cormoran Strike is great too, described early in the novel as ‘massive; his height, his general hairiness, coupled with a gently expanding belly, suggested a grizzly bear.  One of his eyes was puffy and bruised, the skin just below the eyebrow cut…’

The plot could have come from an Agatha Christie novel and yet The Cuckoo’s Calling is absolutely of today, colourfully written and great fun.

The View on the Way Down offers no fun at all, or investigation, but it deals with the aftermath of a crime on an ordinary family in a way that is heartbreakingly bleak.  Dad finds solace turning wood in his shed.  Mum cleans and bakes manically.  Pre-teen Emma is fat and bullied at school, and looking for consolation from religion.  All three are locked in their own solitude as they try to make sense of the loss of Emma’s two elder brothers, who were once inseparably devoted.  This first novel by Rebecca Wait is a beautifully written exploration of loss and blame.

Julia Keller’s A Killing in the Hills came out in hardback last summer, but I missed it then.  Now published in paperback, it reveals the difficulties of life in a small town inWest Virginia.  Bell Elkins escaped a dreadful childhood there, went to law school and was set for a bright future far away from the privations she had once known, but conscience drove her back.  Now divorced with a rebellious teenage daughter, she is a prosecuting attorney, fighting the casual but destructive drug culture she sees all around.  Her war puts her and her daughter at risk, as well as opening all kinds of old wounds and ramming home to her (and to us) the awful depths of rural poverty inAmerica.  There are hints of an apple-pie kind of ending but Keller manages to write movingly, while at the same time avoids all sentimentality.

bookoxygen

*

The room was messy and silent. Karen found that by concentrating on isolated bits of mess, by abstracting them, she could inure herself to the whole; elevate, even, those domestic components – the sticky jam-jar with its excretions of mulberry; the fallen slice of wholemeal bread; the soldierly ants carrying off slivers of crust like captives on litters – to individual, epigrammic tableaux. This was, she thought, a metaphor for life. It was five in the morning and she needed a metaphor to lean on.

The cockatoo began suddenly to bleat. What made it shriek like that, in its swirl of pre-morning dusk? She, Karen, had once thought that a cockatiel, a bowl of oranges, and the scent of fresh coffee – these things in combination – were what might bring bliss. This is what she had aspired to. They had been recommended specifically by a line in a Wallace Stevens poem. She had fallen for it, as for a cigarette ad. No particular brand brought glamour; cancer, they only brought cancer. (Parrots were bad for your lungs; the pesticides in orange peel were carcinogenic; coffee made you manic.)

The day before she had been to see an agent. She had chosen something flattering but dark, black, in fact, to wear, so as not to seem frivolous. She had warned herself to be brief – the tart scent of enigma outlives the cloying musk of chatty agreeableness – but she had succumbed, seated opposite the woman who might be her springboard, to a half-hour’s mirthless monologue. The agent, harried looking, a smoker, had glanced at her wristwatch a fifth, sixth time, and yanked the typescript from Karen’s arms like an orphanage director an unpromising foundling.

‘Short stories are the hardest to place,’ Eunice muttered.

Short stories were not, to belabor the metaphor, the blue-eyed, corkscrew-curled darlings of the baby industry. They were dark, hopeless.

‘But –‘ Eurnice sighed. She flicked through the pages. ‘No dashes, anyway –‘  It took Karen a few minutes to comprehend. Then she was outside, on her way home.

It was her only outing in weeks.

He – Tom – (into her next story she would fling, rebelliously, as many dashes as possible) – neglected to say, ‘So, how did it go?’ and Karen therefore sulked for the rest of the day. She turned to the solace of drudgery and, dragging out the vacuum, hoovered in places generally left undisturbed. She tried to block out the image of someone, perhaps a treble-chinned someone, with a paunch like a mudslide tucked into perma-press – or a rigidly thin, long Venetian nosed someone, with little sense of humor and a cold coming on – glassily regarding her neatly-typed pages. She shivered and winced as though they were leafing, with their tongue-moistened fingers, through layers of her own, excessively thin skin. She imagined her reader disliking a turn of phrase, or frowning annoyedly over an image, muttering, ‘Jesus,’ and slapping the thing down; reaching for the bologna sandwich.

They were picking up the carpet of her life, and she was under it, cringing. She worked the hoover without mercy, savagely mowing stripes into the close-cropped wool.

In the afternoon, she sat down at her desk, paused, then sharpened twelve pencils. She sat there while the sun burnt harshly, then merely gave light, then withdrew in its brief rosy paroxysm. Long after she should have clicked on the lamps – she did not – she sat there. Tom addressed her, pleasantly, something about eggs, and she, unpleasantly, did not reply. She got into her nightgown, lay down on the living room sofa, and thought of Gregor Samsa. ‘I will not move,’ she said to herself. ‘Why should I? I will think to myself with a multitude of dashes and I will not budge an inch.’

The whole of the next day, she lay there.

On the third day, Tom reminded her – he had that business trip? Was she alright? Did she, by any chance, know whether his shirts were -

She clenched her eyes shut. She made fists with her hands and brought them to her chin. The sun blazed again. Would she come to the phone? She would not. She slept.

In a gathering dusk – was it still the third day? She woke up briefly. He was going, he said. Would she be alright? ‘I have to leave now’ – he looked at his wristwatch in illustration. She closed her eyes. He left.

On  the fourth day, someone came to the door. ‘Karen?’ he called. She lay there, thinking not to reply, but he would not go away. It was Arkady, the piano teacher. Sorry as she felt for herself, she felt sorrier for him. She went to the door and unlocked it. He did not seem in the least appalled by her appearance. She always looked like this, perhaps? Wait, she said. She went to the bathroom and washed her face. She put on cologne and pants and a shirt.

‘You have practiced?’ Arkady said.

‘No, I’m afraid I have not. I have had a breakdown.’

Where?’ he said.

He looked around for something damaged.

‘Here. Me.’ She put her hands on either side of her face. ‘I have had a breakdown. Me.’ She tapped at her temple. ‘Inside.’

‘Oh.’

‘I tell you what. You just play. Okay?’

It was, lately, more and more like this, with all of his pupils. They were unprepared, they were broken down, and, flinging their compassion for themselves over him as well, like a moth-eaten blanket or a butterfly net, they did not release him, but bagged him and bid him play.

‘That sad one – you know –‘

That sad one. He  launched into Chopin.

‘Prelude in E Minor,’ he said. ‘Opus 28. No. 4.’                                 .

‘No one is going to publish my stories.’

Arkady noddded.

‘Just as well. It’s all a pile of crap.’

She swung out at a stack of folders and stray pages fluttered to the floor.

Arkady nodded again.

‘Probably,’ he said.

He liked the word. It had a Russian sound.

‘Probably,’ he said again.

‘I think,’ Karen said, when he had finished playing, ‘I should stop having lessons.’

Arkady nodded.

There were twigs and bits of bark on the back of his jacket.

‘Have you been lying in a field?’ Karen asked.

‘No – I have been to a cemetery.’

‘Oh.’

He volunteered nothing more, simply sat on with his back to her, bowed, and she, although giddy from her new agoraphobia, was sufficiently collected to not pry.

He had his sorrows.

It came to her suddenly that he had his sorrows, which he had taken to a cemetery, and were therefore doubtless greater than hers, which were simply to do with words – and dashes.

Published by Tinder Press 28 March 2013

284pp, hardback, £14.99

Reviewed by Lesley Bown

Somewhere in America, yet another strange religious sect has collapsed in on itself.  Amaranth, the First Wife, escapes in the husband’s car with her two daughters, Sorrow and Amity.  They drive for four days and find themselves in Oklahoma, in a scene straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. Here, in the dusty middle of nowhere, a farmer struggles to get his crops to grow, turning to drink for solace in the evening, locking his crazed elderly father in the bedroom, helped only by a teenage boy claiming to be half Mexican but answering to the name of Dust.

In other words, Amaranth has driven from the frying pan into the fire.  After a dysfunctional childhood and fifteen years in the wilderness of the sect, which totally cut itself off from the outside world, she has no way of knowing that she has somehow landed up in another mythical distorted world.  Amity and Sorrow, who can’t read and have never seen a television or a computer, can’t help her.

The names give a clue that the book is an allegory, and as the story of the collapse unfold, the reader learns that it all started when Amaranth’s closest friend, Hope, left the sect.  With Hope gone there is, literally, no hope.  Even more significantly though, Hope leaves because her eldest son has reached puberty and can no longer be contained within the sect, where it becomes apparent that there can only be one sexually active male, the ageing husband of the wives, all fifty of them.  This is a story about what happens during that dangerous period when children start the transition into adulthood, when male children challenge the dominant male and females have difficult choices to make.

Amaranth, Amity and Sorrow are fully realized and interesting characters, but the men are less convincing.  Distant, unknowable and sometimes terrifying, they never really come to life.  They are objects of sexual desire, wielders of power, and scarily unreliable sources of knowledge.

Received wisdom suggests that unhappy, immature, dysfunctional people are drawn to the comfort of a sect, which becomes a substitute for family, but Peggy Riley pursues the more unusual question of whether such people can create anything other than alternative forms of dysfunction.  Before she joined the sect Amaranth drank, and after leaving it she rides a rollercoaster of uncontrolled emotions, sexual desire and maternal instinct.  She is short on intelligence and self control, muddling through the crisis with dumb determination.

The writing reflects this plodding focus rather than her wildness.  There is a measured steady pace that allows the story to develop gradually while maintaining the reader’s interest – at least until the last few pages.  A running thread through the book is that Amaranth slowly eases herself back into mainstream society, with many mistakes and misunderstandings, but as the climax approaches her small successes are not enough to sustain her, and things start to veer wildly out of control.  The writing, however, does not reflect this change and the climax feels too long and slow, with a resolution that is messy and unsatisfying.

A novel raises questions in the minds of its readers, and may or may not suggest answers.  Amity & Sorrow is short on answers and long on atmosphere, whereas most allegories have the opposite tendency.  As the story unfolds the allegory is lost, disappearing as Amaranth makes her slow journey back to the real world.  We do not learn the fate of Hope, but, perhaps, there is still some.

Published by Windmill Books 4 April 2013

336pp, paperback,  £7.99

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hilliard Selka

The Panopticon, a compelling, unsentimental yet heart-warming first novel from poet Jenni Fagan, is a reminder that love and humour can be found in the most desperate situations. Also that it’s a mistake to make assumptions about a person’s integrity and inner life based on the externals of their daily existence.

Apart from her name, Anais Kendricks seems just the sort of girl of whom the literate classes despair, if they spare her any thought at all. Abandoned at birth, she’s lived her entire fifteen years in care, apart from one spell under the wing of a known prostitute, Theresa. She uses drugs as a matter of course and she expects handouts to buy clothes and cigarettes. Education and employment (apart from the option of going on the game) are closed worlds to her. She is weird – paranoid about a big ‘experiment’ and has delusions of shrinking. Her associates are drug dealers, petty crooks and self-mutilators. Her only apparent skill is blowing smoke rings.

Anais has no future, and even her present lies in the balance: she is accused of beating up a policewoman so badly that the victim lies in a coma. It will be all the worse for Anais if the ‘pig’ dies, and if evidence can be found that she did it (is the blood on her clothes the police officer’s?). Meanwhile she is sent in handcuffs to the Panopticon to await developments.

The Panopticon  – a curved building with an observation point at the centre to enable every part of the place to be watched – is a special sort of care home. Here Anais meets Tash, who reminds her of Frida Kahlo; Isla, her belly a mass of lacerations; and Shortie with the baseball cap. These three and some of the lads in the place become Anais’s family, and her developing relationships with them lead us into her tale.

We could dismiss Anais because of what she is, but it is impossible to resist her trenchant humour and fierce loyalty, her enterprise, her lip, her life-affirming imagination, her rapture at the night-time stars and her dreams of Paris. We are drawn into Anais’s world; we become her friend, albeit helpless. When she says she can’t remember what happened with the policewoman, but that she definitely didn’t do it, we believe her. When her good nature is turned against her and she is duped into going to a safe house to meet an old flame, with terrible consequences, we hate the bastard who manipulated her. It’s not all gloom – take the hilarious tragi-comic scene on an island in the middle of a loch, when Tash and Isla enact an impromptu marriage ceremony. The term ‘bittersweet’ could have been invented for this novel.

The Panopticon is set in the Midlothian region of Scotland and narrated in the first person. Fagan cleverly conveys Anais’s accent with just a smattering of local slang and a few oft-repeated elisions such as ‘I umnay’ for ‘I’m not’ and ‘they urnay’ for ‘they aren’t', effective without interrupting the flow of the narrative. But Anais is no peasant. She knows, for instance, about Frida Kahlo, Vera Wang, Reiki, Timothy Leary and Anais Nin after whom Theresa has apparently named her. It’s not clear how or where or when she gained all this information; she loves to read, but when was the habit formed and where has she ever lived where books were available to her? Did she (like Jenni Fagan in her own childhood) consume the contents of a library lorry? Will she too become a poet, or writer, or artist? Rather, will she end up a jailbird junkie? There is a terrible sense of foreboding throughout, which makes this latter seem more likely than the former.

The dénoument when it arrives is almost credible, marred only by a few missing details about how, in practical terms, such an outcome could have been achieved. But really, what do these matter if you want to believe? In order to believe, however, we also have to have faith in Anais’s ability to control her wilder nature, perhaps a harder challenge. To say more would be to give away the ending which would be a shame. Read for yourself…

Sparingly and cleverly written, with poetic passages, The Panopticon is a yarn that makes one hungry for more from the same author.