Category: Fiction

Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig: Book Review

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I like novels that have an underlying  theme or themes that gradually impinge upon my mind as I read; themes that become clear often only after I’ve finished reading. There is no doubt about the theme of  Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig. Although it begins with a murder its main focus is a passionate denunciation of the treatment of illegal immigrants, thinly disguised as a novel. The characters are mouthpieces for the condemnation of social injustice.

It is page after page of unrelenting misery. Poverty and prejudice, squalor and suffering, prostitution, racism, illegal immigrants, and life in desperate circumstances. There is no relief from the images of brutality, fear, hatred, misery, and helplessness and evil, danger, deceit and terror abound.

In the midst of all this is Polly, a single mum and a lawyer working on behalf of illegal immigrants, employing them as au-pairs, cleaners and taxi-drivers. Whatever she does she feel guilty, exhausted, oppressed and in a mess. It rubbed off on me as I read this book, long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

It begins with the murder of a young woman, whose body is dumped in a pond on Hampstead Heath, then meanders through a whole host of characters (some one-dimensional) before the relationships (in some cases it seems forced) between them become clear. The main characters, apart from Polly, are all immigrants living in London, Job an illegal taxi driver from Zimbabwe, Ian, an idealistic supply teacher, from South Africa, Katie from New York  working for a political magazine, and Anna, a teenager from the Ukraine, trafficked into sexual slavery.

It is heart-rending, but totally depressing reading. I could only read it in short bursts. It’s depiction of life in London today is harsh, and criticises the British who aren’t willing to do the work carried out by immigrants and complain that life in Britain is no longer the same with jobs are being taken from them. It asserts that it is only the immigrants who do work such as nursing and taxi-driving, teaching and cleaning. Reading this book should deter anyone from wanting to live here, particularly in London. Everything comes in for criticism from the NHS to the state school system. There are not only illegal immigrants but also asylum seekers, trafficked under-age prostitutes, suicidal Moslems, mindless journalists and the idle rich.

I can see that this is a worthy book, a serious book and yet I found I just couldn’t warm to it. I’m waiting with interest to see if it makes the Orange Prize shortlist, to be announced on 20 April.

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Not much reading here today as D and I are off out with the family this afternoon.

This morning I’ll be reading more from Griff Rhys Jones’s memoir Semi-Detached, which is coming on nicely. I’m now up to the part where Griff is in his final year at school. I loved his description of cricket that I read yesterday.

I hate and abhor cricket. I loathe cricket. I abominate cricket. There is only one thing more boring than the abysmal English habit of watching a game of cricket and that is an afternoon playing the wretched game. It is sport for the indolently paralysed. Only three people out of twenty two are engaged in any proper activity. The rest simply sit and wait their turn.

The excruciating tedium of ‘fielding’ – standing about, like a man in a queue with nothing to read, in case a sequence of repetitive events, ponderously unfolding in front of you, should suddenly require your direct intervention … (page 179)

Football is a game. Tiddly-winks is a game. A sack race involves energy and fun. Cricket is like a cucumber sandwich: indulged in for reasons of tradition, despite being totally eclipsed by every other alternative on offer. (page 181)

I can well imagine that fielding would be much more pleasurable if one could read at the same time. One of my fond memories of childhood is going with my parents to watch cricket, but then I did used to lie in the grass making daisy chains.

I’d like to finish reading Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig this evening, if I have time before I fall asleep. I have very mixed ideas about it right now, varying from liking it to wishing I’d never bothered to pick it up. It’s a tough read – from a subject point of view, that is. This is by no means a ‘comfy’ read, more of a rollercoaster to batter and bruise. But I must finish it before writing about it properly.

Coming up next week I’m looking forward to reading one of these books:

At the moment it’s King Arthur’s Bones that is calling out to me. It’s five interlinked mysteries from Michael Jecks, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson and Philip Gooden.

The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson:Book Review

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

 The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson is his third novel, published this month.  I didn’t know of him and hadn’t read anything by him before, but when I saw this book on offer through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers’ Programme I thought it looked interesting.  His earlier novels are The Underground Man, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997 and Five Boys, published in 2001.

The Widow’s Tale is a sad tale – she is certainly not a Merry Widow, but then again she is not the Widow of Windsor (Queen Victoria) even though she does leave her house in London and live in seclusion in Norfolk.

Like Rebecca she doesn’t have a name and written in the first person singular the narrative is all from her perspective and rather rambling as befits a woman in her sixties on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was a bit put off at the beginning when she comes out with the phrase, so often used by my mother-in-law: “By the time you get to my age …”. But there the similarity ended.

Her husband has died, she’s taken it badly, and goes to live in a rented cottage on the bleak Norfolk coast, shunning other people. She drinks to forget herself, sits in pubs alone, doing the crossword and reading a book to pass the time. She drives out to places she once knew, goes for solitary walks,  gets stuck in the saltmarshes, and is definitely quirky and obsessional.

But there is something in her past life that is haunting her, an episode that John, her husband didn’t know anything about and that has coloured her life ever since. I think it it was this rather than losing  John that caused her such distress. I was wondering how this book would end and in a way it is inevitable and I thought it rather disappointing.

I don’t often think this about a book – it was OK. The writing is fluent and it’s a quick read. It’s episodic rather than linear as she recollects events and thoughts from the past and I would have said it’s really good but for the fact that I couldn’t really believe the narrator is a woman. But it has made me want to read more by Mick Jackson and I see from his website that as well as his three novels he’s also written two book of short stories, Ten Sorry Tales and Bears of England, both of which look interesting.

Teaser Tuesdays – Hearts and Minds

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

I’ve just started to read Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig. I bought this book last year, attracted by the description on the back cover which describes it a contemporary novel which is entertaining and asking questions about the way we live. It’s about five people, all immigrants living in London, an illegal mini-cab driver from Zimbabwe, an idealistic supply teacher, from South Africa, a miserable dogsbody at a political magazine, from New York and a teenager trafficked into sexual slavery.

I remembered it when I saw that it’s on the Orange Prize for Fiction longlist and thought it was time I read it.

My teaser is from page 7.

Polly thinks gratefully of Iryna overhead. Bill has teased her about the way her life is dependent on cheap foreign labour, and she is conscious of the irony that, while her professional life often consists of helping refugees and illegal immigrants, her ability to do so depends upon exploiting them.

More teasers can be found here.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: Book Review

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

The Little Stranger is the only book I’ve read by Sarah Waters. I saw the TV version of Tipping the Velvet and wasn’t impressed. It didn’t make me want to read any of her books. But, so many other bloggers have praised them that I was interested enough to borrow The Little Stranger when I saw it in the library. That’s the influence book bloggers have.

It begins very well – an old dilapidated house, Hundreds Hall, just after the end of the Second World War, a family struggling to come to terms with post-war life and lack of money, and the hint of something supernatural lurking in the background. The Hall has a major part in this book. This is how it is seen through the eyes of the narrator Dr Faraday, who had known it thirty years earlier when his mother had been a nursery maid there.

I remembered a long approach to the house through neat rhododendron and laurel, but the park was now so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fight its way down the drive. When I broke free of the bushes at last and found myself on a sweep of lumpy gravel with the Hall directly ahead of me, I put on the brake, and gasped in dismay. The house was smaller than in memory, of course – not quite the mansion I’d been recalling – but I’d been expecting that. What horrified me were the signs of decay. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house’s uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like rat’s-tail hair. The steps leading up to the broad front door were cracked, with weeds growing lushly up through the seams. (page 5)

Reminiscent of Rebecca, I thought. It’s not just the house that is decaying, the family too is cracking up. Dr Faraday remembered it in it’s prime – now there are just Mrs Ayres, Caroline her daughter and Roderick, her son left, living on their own in the house with help from one servant, a maid – Betty, a fourteen year old girl. Roderick was injured in the war, and Caroline is a plain young woman over-tall for a woman with thickish ankles and legs, but a ‘clever’ girl. Their mother still has a good figure, with a heart-shaped face and handsome dark eyes. As the book progresses she declines rapidly, overcome by events and it is soon revealed that she has never got over the death of her first child, Susan who was ‘her one true love’.

It begins with Dr Faraday called out to see Betty who tells him there is something bad in the house that makes wicked things happen. What follows is a sequence of terrible events. Dr Faraday is a very tedious character, dismissing all thoughts that things that are moved from one place to another and much worse events are in any way supernatural, believing there is either a rational or pscyhological explanation for it all.  He is reinforced in his beliefs when he talks to another doctor, Dr Seeley who says:

The subliminal mind has many dark corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to devlop – to grow like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, malice, and frustration … (page 380)

I got very tired of Dr Faraday and his persistence. It is all very drawn-out, no doubt to increase suspense but I felt that all the tension and spookiness that had initially been built up just drained away in the middle of the book. It did pick up towards the end with several dramatic scenes, but I think it would have been better if the book had been shorter. However, I did enjoy it – the descriptions of the house and park are vivid and I liked the social commentary. The post-war period is well defined, indicating the attitude of the upper classes towards the working classes, the coming introduction of the National Health Service and the breaking up of landed estates to build Council estates – new houses for the workers .

So, just what is the ‘ravenous frustrated energy’ at the heart of the matter? All the characters are built up as suspects and it was only towards the end that I realised what (or who) was responsible.

The Little Stranger has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Will it win? Maybe not, there are some other very good books on the list, which I suspect may over shadow this one.

Once Upon A Time IV

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

On Sunday it’s the first day of spring and already there are signs here – the daffodils are now in bud and I’m hoping the trees will burst into leaf soon. Another sign of spring in the book blogging world is the Once Upon a Time Challenge run by Carl. This too begins on Sunday and runs until 20 June.

There are several options to choose from, so there is no pressure to make me shy away from this one – I can just read one book from the four categories of fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology or I could read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within any of these categories.

I had a quick look at my books and came up with these – all books I own and haven’t read yet, so I may read one or more of these in the next three months, or I might find something else in the library – who knows. 

  • Grimm’s Fairy Tales – I fancy re-reading these tales, which I haven’t read since I was a child.
  • The Death of King Arthur – this is a translation of the 13th century French version of the Camelot legend.
  • The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier – about a place between heaven and earth where everyone ends up after they die.
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – I’ve had this ages, started reading it twice and other books took precedence. It’s a mix of science fiction, thriller and historical pastiche.
  • Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage – the tale of a literary rat who develops the ability to read.
  • The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly – another book I’ve had for a while. Twelve-year old David takes refuge in myths and fairytales.
  • The Children of Hurin by J R R Tolkien – tales of Middle-earth  from times before The Lord of the Rings, set in the country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West.
  • The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart – a tale of Merlin and King Arthur and the third book in the Merlin trilogy. I read The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills years ago and don’t think I’ve ever read this one.