{"id":218,"date":"2012-03-21T08:51:34","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T08:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/demo.bookoxygen.com\/?p=218"},"modified":"2012-10-22T17:09:10","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T17:09:10","slug":"a-stones-throw-by-fiona-shaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=218","title":{"rendered":"A Stone’s Throw by Fiona Shaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Published by Serpent\u2019s Tail\u00a0 5 April 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

240pp, trade paperback, \u00a311.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Divided into five elemental sections, Shaw\u2019s fourth novel opens with \u2018Ice\u2019, seven pages so economically charged with emotional and visual clarity that the reader is instantly pitched into its glimmering world.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a near impossible act to follow and indeed as the story settles into \u2018Water\u2019, \u00a0then \u2018Earth\u2019 and the rest of the sequence, it inescapably falls into a less haunting, more recognizable rhythm. \u2018Ice\u2019s\u2019 dark fairytale of a terse father and trusting, then truant son trudging through snowy countryside is replaced with a woman\u2019s story more than a decade later, as Meg Bryan embarks on a sea voyage from England to Africa during World War II, to join the fianc\u00e9 only recently met and accepted, not for love but to escape a mother\u2019s neediness.<\/p>\n

Now the book joins forces with two currently vogueish content streams: the floating collection of survivor-in-a-lifeboat tales such as Charlotte Rogan\u2019s The Lifeboat<\/em> which are clustering to commemorate April\u2019s centenary of the Titanic<\/em> sinking; and another group, led by Sadie Jones, which uses twentieth-century, often post World War II or colonial periods to explore family alienation, parental attachment and class from a female perspective.<\/p>\n

Moving between Kenya and the UK in the 1940s and ’50s, Shaw\u2019s heroine is a figure of post-war constraint, bound by her era, her switch of class and her contained grief for a missing brother and an absent father. But Meg\u2019s modernity and inner landscape, redolent of a wisdom beyond her years and experience, can also defy plausibility.<\/p>\n

Disaster descends \u2013 or threatens to \u2013 repeatedly in A Stone\u2019s Throw<\/em>, shedding a dense contrasting shadow against the novel\u2019s devoted romanticism. Meg\u2019s love for that missing brother and for the soldier she meets briefly on board ship; and her son Will\u2019s passion for a school friend are the book\u2019s real engines, expressed in Shaw\u2019s discerning, shapely prose.<\/p>\n

Like Jones\u2019s The Outcast<\/em> or Rachel Heath\u2019s The Finest Type of English Womanhood<\/em>, this is a novel pitched at that reading-group-driven appetite for intelligent heartbreak in a shifting social milieu. Shaw\u2019s particular strength is in her quiet yet intense power of evocation which gives the book\u2019s opening its impact and lights up a handful of other key locations: an African garden; an English beach.<\/p>\n

Tasteful and well crafted, this is a story of sensitive souls and well modulated pain. Elemental, however, it is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n

Divided into five elemental sections, Shaw\u2019s fourth novel opens with \u2018Ice\u2019, seven pages so economically charged with emotional and visual clarity that the reader is instantly pitched into its glimmering world…<\/p>\n

[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2878,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/2878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}