- Medusa by Jessie Burton (Bloomsbury) - Supposedly a feminist retelling of the Greek myth from Medusa's perspective, this is fairly simplistic and reads as young adult fiction. Medusa meets Perseus on an island; they talk from either side of a rock, tell each other their stories and fall in love. They hold hands but never see each other, indicating that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Medusa wonders, “I thought of what it might mean to have a boy admire you, not for how you looked, but for who you were. For your thoughts and your deeds, your fears and your dreams. Was such a miracle to be my inheritance?” It’s what every young adult wants to hear, but it is not achievable. She also claims, “When beauty’s assigned you as a girl, it somehow becomes the essence of your being. It takes over everything else you might be. When you’re a boy, it never dominates who you can be.” This is true, in a world of binaries, and the pair assert agency over their own ‘myth’. Both Medusa and Perseus have been manipulated by the Fates and gods, questioning how much control does one have over one’s destiny? Medusa claims her name is Mirena, which means both duality and strength (and is also the name of the Queen of the Amazons and a contraceptive device). The novella is an introduction to telling one's own story, creating an identity, and learning that an individual can be more than one thing. Medusa revels in the new-found knowledge, “I was growing accustomed to this new sensation of uncomfortable compromises, of living in the grey areas of life, rather than the starker strips of black and white I’d believed in as a child.” It's an entertaining read of self-discovery more akin to the Percy Jackson novels than Natalie Haynes' works.
- Frogkisser! by Garth Nix (Allen & Unwin) - This is a fantasy/ fairytale mash-up in which young Princess Anya has to go on a quest to restore the kingdom and save her sister, Morven. There is a lot of hokum about collecting ingredients such as a pint of witches' tears and three-day-old hail stones to make a Reversal Lip Balm. With this balm she can kiss the frogs that have been transformed by her evil stepstepfather (her stepmother remarried after her father died) back into their original shape, including the hapless Prince Denholm, with whom Morven has fallen in love. She sets out accompanied by a loyal dog, Ardent, who is easily distracted by food, and falls in with an apprentice thief, Shrub, who has been transformed into an orange newt, and Bert, short for Roberta, leader of the Association of Responsible Robbers who steal from the rich and give to the poor. Bert tells Anya that their ethos is about "making sure that those who have too much do some sharing with those who have too little, and it isn't always just about valuable things like money or even basic things like food. It is also about sharing power and opportunities." Anya doesn't understand this as she is a princess and has always had unrecognised privilege. This is clearly a Life Lesson, and is handled in a rather clunky fashion. As Anya completes her quest, meeting several characters and learning self-awareness, there are nods to Narnia and the Discworld novels but without the complexity of the former or the satirical light touch of the latter. It's fine, but largely forgettable.
- Hagitude by Sharon Blackie (September Publishing) -From
the author of If Women Rose Rooted, which examined women’s connection to
the natural world, comes Hagitude, a reimagining of the second half of
life; menopause and how it affects women along with society’s expectations. As
with the previous book, Blackie uses the archetypes of Jungian philosophy, and mythical
tales to explain her theories. She
begins by explaining the negative portrayal of ageing in Western culture.
“Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still
trivialised and marginalised, and often actively ridiculed.” Unlike some of the
legends from cultures which revere and respect elders with their gifts of wisdom,
our tales of old women suggest they are something to be shunned, and the ageing
process must be avoided at all costs. Much of this fear of the old
woman can be ascribed to the ‘witch wound’ as many women fear not
conforming to the narrow expectations of society. Due to the witch
trials and their associations, many women were culturally oppressed and modified
their behaviours to escape unwanted and dangerous attention, and “to avoid
being overly visible. Young women are enamoured with sparkly witches and spooky glam, but that is not the connection to nature and the earth that appeals to menopausal women. Blackie makes an interesting case for menopause being like a crucible in which the fire burns through to the heart and essence of the human, just as she quotes Michaelangelo talking of his sculpture, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” By considering the body as a thing that carries us, rather than the totality of who we are, she raises some thoughtful propositions and encourages a refreshing outlook.
- So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Faber) - A very short work (a mere 47 pages) in which Cathal, at the end of his working day, reflects on his relationship with his ex-fiancée, Sabine, a French gallery worker. The economy and efficiency of language is remarkable as it paints pictures that lodge in the brain far more than wordier works of fiction. From the opening sentence - “On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the
weather that was forecast.” - with its hints of mundanity and brilliance, we know what to expect. Like Joyce, Proust or Woolf, the
commonplace is juxtaposed with the specific in a slightly unsettling way. The
construction of sentences and the use of verbs to shorten actions - “He took up the coffee, leaving before he
sugared it" - gives it a lyrical lilt and an immediacy I also noticed recently
in Paul Lynch’s work – it is an Irish thing? Keegan introduces feelings and emotions in the description of events. We learn that the narrator is mean and petty as he remembers an evening with Sabine in terms of value. “She took a long shower then and changed and
drank a full litre of Evian over a Chinese which he’d had to order, over the
phone. The restaurant charged four euros for delivery." He expects some reward for being
kind – “Did I not order your dinner tonight and pay for it? Did I not buy all
those cherries for your fancy tart? And haven’t I helped you here all day,
moving all your stuff?” It is powerful to make the narrator so unsympathetic halfway through the novella, noting that the story was originally published in French under the title Misogynie. This is a tense tale without hyperbole or dramatic effects, but it resonates in a disturbing way as it questions what men really want from women and whether we have made any significant progress in gender equality.
- Dark Queen Rising by Paul Doherty (Crème de la Crime) -Dark
Queen Rising is billed as a murder mystery with a meticulously
researched political and historical setting. In the later fifteenth century, while
the House of Lancaster is in disarray (King Henry VI is locked in the Tower of
London; his wife Margaret of Anjou and their son, Prince Edward are captured
and imprisoned), the House of York is rampant and the three brothers Edward
(later King Edward IV), George (Duke of Clarence), and Richard (Duke of
Gloucester, later King Richard III) are at war amongst themselves. The novel is
full of set pieces and action; double crossing and espionage; smuggling and
disguises; secret passages and hidden doorways. The immediate mystery is that people are found dead in room
locked and bolted from the inside with the key turned. This leads to the search for a document - the Titus Regulus - containing secret ciphers, that could change attitudes to the right of succession. The problem is that “No one really knows what the ‘Titulus Regius’ truly is, where it’s
hidden, or what form it takes.” It falls to Christopher Urswick, the personal clerk of Margaret of Beaufort (married to Edmund Tudor, half-brother to Henry VI of England – due to having the same mother, Katherine of Valois) to solve the mystery. Doherty writes in his notes that, “Some people even regard Urswick as the founder of the British Secret Service", and there is plenty of chaos and suspicion as people are constantly swapping loyalties, and death is everywhere.
