”The Lie" by Helen Dunmore - review

 “The Lie“ by Helen Dunmore:

Two years after hostilities of First World War have ended Daniel, a young soldier, returns to his place of birth on the Cornish Coast, alone, without money, home or relatives. 

He is a shell-shocked survivor and his first-person account recounts the horrors of the trenches in France where he lost his closest friend since boyhood, Frederick, who perished alongside him in a shell-hole on the western front. 

In search for shelter he offers help and assistance to an elderly blind woman who soon after dies of pneumonia and, in fulfilling her wish, buries her in her own garden. 

He struggles to make a living in the aftermath of war, he works on the land, but is drawn deeper and deeper into the traumas of his past and the memories of his dearest friend and first love, now dead. Daniel has survived the war but the horror and passion of the past stay with him and seem more real than the quiet landscape that surrounds him. 

He also comes to the aid of Frederick's grieving sister Felicia, now a war-widow living alone with her infant daughter in the cold, grand house where Daniel once played with her and Frederick and had free access to a big library and the whole fascinating world of books. 

He has not told her the full truth of how her brother met his death and he hasn’t told the truth about the absence of the old woman and slowly the village people grow suspicious. 

I thought it a well written book, an often very touching narration, full of descriptive prose. Yet, I was left with no redemption, only a sad hopelessness and a feeling of great injustice.

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”The Colony" by Audrey Magee - review

 “The Colony” by Audrey Magee:

This is a brilliant, beautifully touching novel, a thoughtful play on the private and the political, of the impact of nature on life and art and the restrictions of tradition, of the war between classes, cultures and genders.

Two foreigners, one an English painter, the other a French linguist, separately travel to a remote Irish island. The one, following a romanticized notion much in the sense of Gauguin on Tahiti, wants to capture the island’s and the islanders’ beauty. The other also wants to capture beauty or rather, by way of recording the islanders' tales, preserve the beauty of a dying language. Each one claims the island as his discovery/ playground/ property. It comes as no surprise that they don’t like each other.

The novel begins with a chucklingly funny description of how the English painter, driven by cliche, stubbornly wanting it the old way, crosses the channel to the island on a self-made boat, a currach, oared by two Irishmen and gets violently seasick. This comical episode shines with all the wit and dry humour of the islanders and is a good introduction to their often stoical, sometimes fatalistic attitude.

As the two visitors are paying guests the household which hosts them, grudgingly tolerates both of them. In contrast to the often childishly complaining visitors the islanders possess a simple dignity, although their lives aren’t easy. Over the summer each of the women and men on the island, but also the visitors, are forced to question their values and desires. At the end of the summer the visitors leave and for some everything has changed.

The Colony itself is a community of the few remaining islanders on this piece of rock in the sea, three miles long and half-a-mile wide. They struggle, as they always did, in an ever repeating pattern from day to day, trying to make a living from their meager surroundings. There are mostly old men left in this community and widowed women who lost their spouses to the sea. The characters are drawn convincingly and as individuals in their own right and never drift off into cliches. There are many internal monologues which deepen the understanding of the main character's individuality.

Irish is the main idiom used, English understood by most but not all. The only young male left, James, aged 16, speaks English and doesn’t want to be called Séamus, does not want to become a fisherman and, through a slowly growing trust and friendship with the English painter, discovers and develops his natural aptitude and love for painting and art. James is encouraged to return with the painter to London, to become an artist in his own right, only to be brutally disappointed in the end and left behind because he, the apprentice, became better than the master. 

The titular colony serves as metaphor for broader conflicts. The many conflicts are overlapping, intersecting, merging or nestled within another: The conflict between the islanders and the visitors, the visitors themselves, between the islanders themselves, between the generations, between genders and between nations and languages.

Although the time set is when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their most violent and atrocities commonplace, the novel has a feeling of timelessness. 

Slowly themes of national identity, of colonialism and imperialism, emerge, the old rivalry between the English and the French, the English oppressing the Irish, the French oppressing Algeria. Purity in language, purity in culture is put into question. What is deemed to be cherished and preserved, what should be fought for and with what means, what should be accepted as doomed? The novel portrays Irish lives cornered by the dead weight of tradition. 

The deeply touching heart of the novel, though is the development of young James, trying to find his voice, purpose and destination, his hopes first raised and then left bitterly betrayed and disappointed. 

Interspersed with the narrative are short, coldly detached, fact-cool reportages of terrorist killings which lend the novel a threatening, dark uneasy undertow and prevent the reader of losing himself too much in a fairytale of a remote island. 

There is a beauty in the writing, the dialogues bring to life the fascinating characters, their points of difference, their attitudes and views on life. The prose is luminous and lyrical, a pleasure to read. How, for example an artist might think and feel in colours, forms and shades is rendered in eloquent and poetic prose. How everything seen is instantly perceived as a potential painting, with a title attached. Sometimes the text morphs into vertical columns of one-word lines, almost modern poetry, snatches of colors, emotions, light, sounds, smells. But even when the details of the trapping, killing and gutting of a rabbit are meticulously sketched it always is done so in a slightly distanced, detached voice. And there is always humour. 

There is a slow tension, ever moving to rise to a climax, but then climax never comes, all falls back in the end to how it was before. For some, though the world is altered. 

A truly remarkable, sincerely beautiful novel. It left me touched and, at the end, heart-broken for James. 

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”Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Eugen O'Neill - a slightly disturbing read

 “Long Day's Journey into Night” by Eugene O’Neill:

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work and is considered one of the all-time great classics of the 20th Century. It was first published in 1956 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

It is a family drama, an unrelenting tragedy in which each of its members – the father, the mother and the two sons – turn against each other and against themselves, driven by self-pity and self-hatred.

It takes place in the Connecticut home of the Tyrones and covers one day from around 8:30 in the morning to midnight. 

Every member of the family is addicted to something, the father and the sons to alcohol, the mother to morphine. 

In a spiraling conflict everyone constantly conceals their addiction, blames everyone else for their fate, resents all others, accuses and denies and occasionally shows half-hearted attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation. Within the strict confinements of their home they bounce between reality and illusion. Any statement by any party made might be contradicted or rendered meaningless a second later. 

A slightly disturbing read, albeit interesting. I am not tempted to go see a stage performance, though. 

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”The Light of Day" by Graham Swift - review

 “The Light of Day” by Graham Swift:

This is my second book by Graham Swift, well, actually the third, if you count 100 pages into his Ever After, which I laid aside for this one, The Light of Day.

As in Mothering Sunday, which I thought was a stunning little masterpiece, the events revolve around one single event which dramatically altered the lives of everyone.

We meet George Webb, a former policeman and now private detective who is on his way to visit a former client in prison, the woman for whom and in consequence for everyone, life turned bitterly and dramatically in a very unprecedented way. Two years before George Webb had an assignment to follow her strayed husband and his mistress, a routine job which catastrophically went awry and left everyone, including the detective, transformed for ever.

This could be at first glance a simple detective story but it is not. There is a building of suspense but it is towards an end we already know about. Much more it is about looking back on lives led, on decisions once made and on the possibilities of missed chances and how a life might have turned in a different direction.

In exploring his past George Webb finds himself on a path to self-discovery and love. This is maybe the true message of the book and a token of hope, that regardless of how late in life and regardless of how many wrong decisions we made and stray paths we walked, there lies still hope.

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"Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift - review

 “Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift:

A naked man getting slowly dressed. 

A naked woman coming down the stairs. 

From the very first line, which opens like a fairy tale (once upon a time…), I was captured by the masterly evocation and beautiful phrasing, the musicality of the language and the almost painterly use of emotive prose.

It is the year 1924 and Jane, an orphaned maid who works for the Nivens, an upper-class family, finds herself in the estate of the neighbouring estate of the Sheringhams, also old-money aristocracy. Because it is Mothering Sunday the house is conveniently empty. She is in the bedroom together with the young heir, Paul Sheringham, who has been her lover for years and is going to be married in an arranged marriage to another woman in two weeks time and they both know that this just had been, probably, their last time of intimacy.

Little is said, much is revealed. Not much happens but still a lot does happen. 

Mothering Sunday, in adding layer upon layer of revelations and memories over time, builds in complexity. It is more than just a story about crossing barriers like class or education.

It is a book full of sensual, contemplative, long lasting images which carry so much more than what they actually show. Little still lifes, rendered in minute contemplation and an adoration of the transcendence of their everyday banality. 

Sounds, outside, in the air, inside the house. 

Smells, of fruit, of grass, of body. 

Touch, tactile sensations like trickling fluid out of body cavities or bare feet striking cool tiles, of a breeze against skin, of the afterglow of sex.

Objects, who become laden and imbued with meaning and a life of their own, objects who seem to retreat and shrink back with an insistent stillness. Flowers, blooms, frozen like butterflies. 

Light on objects, light in rooms, light through windows, tree leaves, across lawns. 

Mothering Sunday is sensual, it moves the heart, it is a beautiful and precious gem. In just about 130 pages Graham Swift has rendered a little masterpiece. In its brevity it explores themes and mental landscapes which longer books sometimes cannot cover.

It is an ode to life, to youth, to ageing. It explores identity and the need of the search for a narrative, it tells of the value of experience and the power and doubt of storytelling. 

It is a powerful, philosophical and beautiful contemplation of the lives we lead and of the parallel lives we might have lead. As it moves from 1924 through the century it becomes also the story of a self-discovery. 

It is a thorough contemplation of life, of what the real stuff in life is, what counts, what is tale, fiction or reality. It is about books and literature, about words and meanings, about chances and missed chances, about finding your place in the world and finding a language with which to speak in it. It is a remarkably wise, life confirming and uplifting book. It gave me much pleasure.

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”Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin - a review

 “Giovanni‘s Room“ by James Baldwin:

‘‘I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life”. 

So begins the tragedy in Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956. In a mastery of language in writing and an often confessional voice it recounts the tormented love affair between the American narrator, David, and Giovanni, an Italian bartender in Paris.

From the very beginning we learn that David has abandoned Giovanni, we know that David’s ex-fiancée Hella has left him and returned to the United States, we know that Giovanni has been sentenced to die under the guillotine and David is waiting for the morning to arrive when he knows Giovanni will meet his fate. 

I have read this book many many years ago, when I had been young and it might be due to my circumstances then that I read it differently from how I read it now. 

Back then the book was all about the right to love, regardless whom, in equality. And it was about all the shame and torture that accompanies following this conviction. Humans, in their love, are fluid beings and to be liberated means to love with the same level of freedom. This should be clear by now, in 1956 this truth had not been quite so evident. 

Now, though I think the book is not so much about a queer relationship, it is much more about what happens if one is so afraid of love that one finally cannot love anybody. I’ve read it now less as an affirmation of queerness than an exploration of how much suffering it causes to deny who and what you are and the way we damage everything, ourselves, our friends, our relationships, when we try to fit norms that don’t define us. The central subject of the book is still shame and the intricacies of sexuality and morality. And it is about the loss of dignity and the fear to be unable to meet the expectations of society.

There is an almost Jamesian quality in the prose, sparse and concise at one time and at other times beautifully poetic and philosophical, creating microclimates of emotions.

And as in The Ambassadors by Henry James, a young American in search of himself and his role and purpose in life moves to Europe, to Paris. Here he awaits the return of his departed girlfriend who moved to Spain in order to "find herself".

Unexpectedly he finds himself deeply immersed in a love affair with an attractive Italian barman and moves to live with him into his room. The room itself, a place of respite, situated on the outskirts of Paris, dark, confined and messy, becomes the metaphor for the clandestine and shame-ridden nature of their affair. It is both protective isolation and prison. 

As every traveler knows, the profoundest experience of understanding what home means is living abroad for the first time. One discovers, after leaving it behind, what home meant and what one has lost. As in The Ambassadors here, too Americans are placed under close scrutiny and in comparison to different cultures, especially the famous/ infamous American trait of happiness, this peculiar innocence they seem to possess, this belief that one can choose, without great sacrifice, cost or consequences, to be good and move through the world without causing harm. 

One of the book’s most famous lines about Americans come from Hella, the fiancée of David: “Americans should never come to Europe,” she says. “It means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.” 

Giovanni to David proves to be the only person with whom he has ever felt a true, erotic and spiritual love. And yet, when his fiancée returns, David abandons Giovanni, even as he knows he wants to be with a man. He perceives this kind of love as a threat to his masculinity and just to keep himself grounded in normality he struggles through heterosexual relationships with women, leaving a trail of unhappiness for everyone. Feeling betrayed by his lack of honesty and the revelation that David can never love her with genuine feelings Hella finally leaves him. Giovanni, left behind devastated, commits a crime and is sentenced to death.

David is a character who will always protect himself even for the cost of love and happiness. He will attempt to risk a little but never too much. David is weak and cruel and filled with shame and remorse. Giovanni wants to live life to its fullest, no matter the cost to himself or anyone else. 

This book laments a lost and wasted love. To have read this book again after so many years has given me great joy. It truly is a remarkable and beautiful work of literature which seems to have gained with time and aged quite well.

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