It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with a travel book: Maiden Voyages: Women and the Golden Age of Transatlantic Travel by Siân Evans, a social history of the experiences of women on transatlantic travel in the interwar years.

Before convenient air travel, transatlantic travel was the province of the great ocean liners and never more so than in the glory days of the interwar years. It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women. Some travelled for leisure, some for work; others to find a new life, marriage, to reinvent themselves or find new opportunities. Their stories have remained largely untold – until now. This book is a fascinating portrait of these women, and their lives on board magnificent ocean liners as they sailed between the old and the new worlds.

My first link is A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, about his travels in Europe walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/34. Many passages are so vividly described that I could easily visualise them, such as the picture of the author who was then nearly nineteen years old, striding through the German countryside reciting Shakespeare in a loud voice and accompanied with gestures, sword thrusts, a staggering gait and with his arms upflung, looking as though he was drunk, or a lunatic.

In a way his journey was a gilded experience as he had introductions to people in different places – people who gave him a bed for the night, or longer stays. There were also people who didn’t know him who welcomed him into their homes as a guest – as the title says it was a time of gifts.

My second link is ‘time‘ in the title – Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. It’s set in Dalkey, a small coastal town south of Dublin, where Tom Kettle, a recently retired policeman is living in a tiny flat annexed to a Victorian castle. Two of his former colleagues disturbed his peaceful afternoon, asking for his help on a cold case he had worked on. This appears to be a detective story, but the main focus is Tom, himself as the narrative reveals in streams of consciousness. It soon becomes clear that his memories are unreliable and for a while I was confused, not knowing what was going on, whether Tom was remembering, or imagining what had happened in his life. 

My third link is also by Sebastian Barry – The Secret Scripture about an old woman in a mental hospital in Ireland, secretly writing her life story. I’d not long finished The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates and was surprised to find that I was reading yet another tragic tale about a gravedigger’s daughter.

My fourth link is The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates The main character is Rebecca Schwart, born in New York Harbour, the daughter of Jacob and Anna, escaping from Nazi Germany in 1936. They live a life of abject poverty whilst Jacob can only find work as a caretaker of Milburn Cemetery, a non-demoninational cemetery at the edge of the town. It’s a grim, dark world, a violent and pessimistic world, gothic and grotesque.

My fifth link is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, one of my favourite books of all time. I love the first line – Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It has never failed to delight me and that dream sets the tone for the book. I’ve read it many times and each time I fall under its spell. Identity is a recurrent theme, just who was Rebecca, what was she really like and what lead to her death. I still want to know the narrator’s name and her awe of Rebecca still exasperates me. Daphne du Maurier described the book to her publisher as ‘a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower … Psychological and rather macabre.’

My final link is to another book whose first line stands out in my mind. It’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was George Orwell’s last novel, written in 1948 and presents his vision of a dystopian society, a totalitarian state complete with mass surveillance, where individuality is brutally suppressed. This is possibly the least enjoyable book I’ve read, horrific in content, lacking in convincing characterisation, and has a poor plot. It is depressing and dreary in the extreme, but I can see why it can be considered a brilliant book in its depiction of a dystopian society. It is seriously thought provoking!

I never thought my chain would finish with Nineteen-Eighty-Four! It consists of two non- fiction travel books and four novels and for once there are no crime fiction books.

Next month (May 4, 2024), we’ll start with a novel longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize – The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.