Friday Five: Books Read in January

The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham (Sphere) - Male authors seem to think that all women want babies and will do anything to have them. Apparently, baby fever drives us crazy, which must be comforting for them to think that it isn't their oppressive patriarchal behaviour which has this effect. Meghan has a baby and Agatha wants it, so she befriends her to steal it (not a plot spoiler because it's obvious from the cover design). Despite being from supposedly different cultural backgrounds and socio-economic circumstances, the two women are written interchangeably in the first person, and its fortunate that each alternate chapter is introduced by their name or there would be no distinction between the two. Apart from the fact that one has a baby and one doesn't. Because, lest we forget, it is motherhood, or lack thereof, that defines the status of women. One of the characters, let's call her Megatha, literally says, "I am not a real woman because I cannot have a baby." Tedious. 

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press) - Maggie O'Farrell has written a story about grief at the death of a child. That's a tricky subject and one she addresses well. She has made the child the son of William Shakespeare, although her refusal to name him as such and refer to him as the playwright in London or the Latin tutor or the son of a glove-maker seems perverse and artificial. There are wildly overblown sections of prose as she tries to talk about Shakespeare without talking about Shakespeare, including descriptions of the layout of the home of his birthplace, the attitude to ghostly figures, the very essence of iambic pentameter. The novel includes several quotes and themes from Shakespeare's plays and is written in the present tense, which becomes cloying as many things are revealed that are obvious with contemporary hindsight. In trying to diminish William Shakespeare and elevate Anne (called Agnes here) Hathaway, Maggie O'Farrell has done a disservice to both them and us in what feels like little more than fan fiction.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Penguin) - Richard Osman created the wildly popular Thursday Murder Club, and now he has published a standalone novel, We Solve Murders, which looks perfectly set to be the beginning of a new series. The main characters are Amy Wheeler, an assassin/ private security officer to billionaires and her father-in-law, Steve Wheeler, who used to be in the business but now likes spending time with his cat, Trouble, and his quiz team down the pub. It is a fast-paced thriller packed with guns and humour. Influencers are being murdered in a spat between money launderers, but no one really cares about influencers because they are so shallow, until we meet Bonnie Gregor, one with a family and a conscience. Amy is meant to be protecting famous author, Rosie D’Antonio who loves flirting – with danger and men – as they encounter lots of action in multiple locations. There is a cast of hundreds and it’s quite hard to keep track of who is whom. It doesn’t really matter though, as the action, locations and opportunity for cameo roles all combine to make this novel a dying-to-be-made-into-a-film script, with actors queuing up to play the characters. It’s a very decent book with a central character who talks to his dead wife while sitting on a small bench by a quiet pond and is trying to come to terms with his grief and her absence.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber) - There is so much weight in such a small book (114 pages) as Claire Keegan questions, what is decency and humanity? "Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?" Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant trying to do the best he can for his family in a small, rural Irish town where half the population is emigrating. The Catholic Church dominates the village, the schools and the workforce, and folk turn a blind eye to some of their more insidious practices, such as the Magdalen laundries. With a solid nod to Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Bill has his eyes forced opened just before Christmas, and he has to make a decision rather than merely going with the flow. The language is exquisite as it settles into natural rhythms and their inevitable outcomes, with a beautiful Irish tilt. "So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of the town or its reflection on the water." In this instance less is definitely more.

Fiday Five: Books Read in October

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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 29^th, 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.
5. 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.