“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

 “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry:

It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, freshly retired from the Garda spends his days sitting in a wicker chair in a small flat annexed to a Victorian castle, smoking cigarillos and contemplating the Irish Sea, the bobbing fishing boats and a small island busy with cormorants. His life has lost force and momentum and, although he is not unhappy he is certainly lonely. He longs for a visit of his daughter and certainly welcomes the surprise visit of two former colleagues from Dublin who come for advise and help on a case they re-opened.

Tom has a great love in him, for his dead wife, June, for most of humanity, for nature, the butterflies hibernating in his bedroom and even for his furniture, he respects the “intimacy of inanimate things“.

Tom is a sympathetic person but not a reliable witness, his thoughts are full of grief, he survived more than one blow and disaster in his life and not everything he experiences or remembers, the reader slowly finds out, can really have taken place. His inner world is a mix of sorrow and sadness but also a great sense of humour. 

Tom, we slowly learn, clearly is the victim of the corroding effect, trauma can have on memory and thought. Trauma inflicted on him and his wife and a lot of other people in those dark times when the holy church had a fierce reign, power and authority in Ireland. The subject of the book is quite clearly the condemning retribution of priests and nuns who abused the power they had over the most innocent and fragile members of society which had been put into their care, the children. 

We accompany Tom Kettle on his way in life, how he was passed from one orphan institution to another, was abused by priests, how he served in the army and was forced to kill in Malaya, how he experienced more trauma in Dublin, now a cop, during the trouble, the time of the bombings, how he finally met his wife June who experienced similar abuse in her childhood, how they married and had, for a while, a very happy family life with two lovely protected children. Then disaster sets in and Tom is uprooted but does not loose his strong sense of justice and morality. 

The book is a powerful play on hazy unstable memories and the upholding of personal narrative as life slowly descends into oblivion.

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“Here We Are” by Graham Swift - review

 “Here We Are“ by Graham Swift:

Another brilliant story by Graham Swift, a tale straight out of life with just the right amount of magic and wonder. Not only is there magic on stage like the inexplicable appearing or vanishing of things and persons, there is the vanishing act of life itself, its mostly unwelcome but inevitable decline into old age and death, its highlights like love, friendship, devotion, mercy and forgiveness, but also its cruel disappointments and betrayals which are all too humanly comprehensible but nevertheless formative and life defining. 

All brilliantly and with great insight told by Swift who again, as in his last novel from 2016, Mothering Sunday, has achieved a remarkable piece of magical writing, a quiet novella full of palpable regret that eventually finds consolation. It is a short book but it contains a whole life. Or rather, the lives of three people whom fate chose to throw together.

It is the postwar summer of 1959, England and a new variety show is all the talk among the tourists and crowds on Brighton pier. It is here the fate of a love triangle is about to unfold. There is Ronnie Deane, later known as The Great Pablo, who, in World War II at the age of eight, is torn from his poor, fatherless and often miserable home in Blitz-tormented London and evacuated to a save home in the country. Here he is received by a childless couple with open arms and love. Ronnie soon accepts and even loves his new parents. Through his new foster father he learns the trade of a stage magician and excels in it.

Then there is Evie White, who became his assistant on stage and his fiancée. From early childhood on she was brought to every imaginable and available casting by her mother to perform as a dancer, singer or chorus-girl and when she finally met Ronnie she fell in love with him and the two were engaged to be married soon. 

But then Ronnie’s biological mother died and he had to leave for London and during his 2-day-absence Evie’s love for Ronnie sadly and inexplicably transformed into love for actor Jack Robbins, Ronnie’s best friend and compere of the show they all were part of. 

As Ronnie came back from London he immediately saw in Evie’s eyes what had happened and the next day he simply vanished, never to be seen again, never to be heard of.

50 years later, Evie, now 75 years old, on her husband Jack’s death anniversary, remembers and looks back on her life. Looking back together with Evie on more than half a century the reader is forced to re-evaluate the picture he formed of her, Jack and Ronnie.

This is a gentle and forgiving novella, a masterpiece in compressed story-telling, that transforms a commonplace love story into a complex narrative full of profound emotion that stays with the reader for a long time. 

As an epigraph Graham Swift used "It's life's illusions I recall" from Joni Mitchell‘s song “Both Sides Now”: The ending line is well remembered: “I really don't know life, at all."

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“Victory City” by Salman Rushdie - review

 “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie:

This is the enchanting tale, cleverly styled as the translation of an ancient epic, of Pampa Kampana who, as a nine-year-old girl in the India of the 15th Century, helplessly watches as her mother leaves her behind and walks into the flames. As a result of a war who killed all the men, the women all decided to end their lives. Young orphan Pampa Kampana then is miraculously inhabited by a goddess and decides that she “would laugh at death and turn her face toward light.”

She plants seeds in the ashes of the inferno and by magic a city, complete with inhabitants, imposing palaces and grandiose temples commences to sprout from the ashes. Pampa whispers life, complete with their individual histories into the people’s minds and when the creation ends, there stand “Victory City” and the Bisnaga Empire.

Pampa herself is, due to the goddesses powers, ageless and fated to outlive those around her for two hundred and fifty years. As time goes on, ever and ever more relentless, war and old age afflict her brothers and children and their children and then their children, but she sadly, cruelly is forced to live on. She watches political and religious powers rise and fall, intrigues being spun, succeed and then fail again, and in the end she herself gets caught up in the turmoils and becomes victim of her own creation. 

Victory City is many things: a myth, an Indian historical epic, a polemic parable, a meditation on the self-ruinous nature of power and right-wing religious fanaticism, the tale of the creator who in the end is consumed by his creation. But above all it is a story about the immortality of stories, the way a tale told will always outlive deeds. What remains are not empires, who one day must crumble to pieces, but the words that will tell of them. 

This is a delightful, fast-paced, enticing, humorous, beautiful saga of love, heartbreak, conceit, adventure and magic and a tremendously well crafted act of story-telling.

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“Lessons” by Ian McEwan - short review

 “Lessons” by Ian McEwan:

McEwan has always been a moralist, most of his novels engage in moral arguments and combine harsh reality with excursions into the strangest chambers of the mind. And so, too does this novel, another profound demonstration of his remarkable skill.

In fact it proved to be one of his best I have read so far and among his most engrossing. It certainly is one of his longest but that, too proved to be a great delight. It is almost old-fashioned in its talkative, discursive humane way, full of insight and intelligence. And it is, with the inclusion of autobiographical details, his most personal. The language, as so often with McEwan is beautiful. He delights in close observation and the resulting rumination on the observed. Not to forget the subtle, rather agreeable humor, very British. 

The book is an exploration of a lifetime and an era, a stretch of 70 years from the postwar decade to the present day and McEwan divinely constructs and lets us follow the life of a failed writer/ poet/ concert pianist, who is an ordinary man with once grand aspirations and a complicated past. We are drawn into this life, watch it unfold, connect and take part. The book thrives on the interplay between global events, the Cold War, Chernobyl, Brexit, COVID-19, and the private turmoils in the live of Roland Baines. 

Roland is born three years after the Second World War, watches the Iron Curtain go up and the Berlin Wall come down. He watches his country being maneuvered, not always successfully, through difficult times by the hands of Labour and the Tories, watches the fall of Margaret Thatcher and the rise of Blair, sees AIDS recede, there is 9/11 and then there is Brexit. There is the emergence of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown. Against this backdrop of political happenings his own personal tragedies and triumphs play out over the course of almost eight decades. The novel moves back and forward in time, reflecting Roland’s memories of his experience.

Lessons begins with the memory of a remarkably harrowing piano lesson. At the age of 11 Roland had a disastrous encounter with Miriam Cornell, his piano-teacher, a woman of 22 years, who in an act of shocking intentional grope, pinches the boy’s thigh, strokes his crotch with a lingering finger, puts her hand under the elastic of his underpants and strikes his knee with the edge of a ruler. She pretends this abuse is a lesson and later on, when the boy is 14, draws him into a torrid sexual two-year affair, intoxicating and destructive, that leaves him marked, confused and the reader repulsed. Psychologically and sexually this will haunt the boy all his life.

Except that it doesn’t. Not really.

At this point the book could have easily become a moral tale, based on a single moral question. But McEwan has the skill to show us that no single incident is ever the whole story. For Roland, this means no single person defines who he is and shows him, through retrospective, the great gift of time: forgetting and overcoming. 

Long after the disastrous affair with his teacher Roland meets and marries another woman, Alissa, soon to be a world-famous novelist who achieves publication only at the cost of abandoning her baby boy and husband. Roland commits himself to the loving labour of raising his son alone. Here is another blow dealt by a woman and Roland still goes on. 

“In settled expansive mood Roland occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, minuscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence.” 

As Roland is attempting to make sense of his life as lessons, stories of cause and effect, long-ago catastrophes slowly transform into soft tremors and the woman who was bound to leave the biggest impact on his psyche becomes, in the end, one who is hardly remembered.

Roland, in the end, knows what he always wanted and needed, which are very simple needs: Kids around the table, a cat in the garden, a garden, good wine and friends to spend an evening with. He wants a hearth to warm him. And luckily he is given one, even though tragedy has its play with him more than once, too. This is life, after all. 

Roland is an everyday unheroic hero, one who has been given a life which he must now lead, regardless of the difficulties, to its end. His acceptance and determination keep him going. And in the end it dawns on him that these lessons given to him were really gifts. 

This is a wide-angle, epic and engrossing family history, a book about life, about who we are, about how we live. It raises many moral questions and covers many topics and my pleasure in reading this novel was immense. Lessons is a wise book and beautifully, compassionately crafted great fiction.

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