New Favorite Novel Just Read by Penelope

I have just happily read my way through Linda Grant's latest novel : We Had It So Good- just published by Virago. This book is as satisfying as her last book was not satisfying, - The Clothes on Our Backs, but this is another novel, that perhaps is closer to our hearts.

Basically the novel focuses on the life of an American who sails to England (on the same boat as Bill Clinton, also with a Rhodes scholarship)- arrives in Oxford in the hippies sixties and marries one of the hippie chicks he meets, Andrea. Andrea's best friend Grace is the everlasting sixties girl - who remains true to the confrontative counter-culture ideals and we see the other main characters lives develop as they get good jobs, buy large houses in London, have children that go to private schools and as they give in to all the conventions that recent history let them have. The book is excellent because the author carries her cast of characters well, and does what Virginia Woolf admired so much in George Eliot, and perhaps in Katherine Mansfield, she opens doors on her invented characters that allow us to arrange our own thoughts about what parallels we see in our own lives, at the same time enjoying what she, the author Linda Grant, has written. The book is as the Guardian reviewer says a great novel about the lives of the Baby Boomer generation, but it is also a novel that manages to hang together on all fronts. Beginning, middle, end and some sort of resolution of our uneasy spirits in these times - when internet, and the turmoil of the world, and the inevitable aging we have to go through - and we could do with some illustration of this in novel form with a proper beginning, middle and ending, and Linda Grant has managed it here. The novel ends with a bird perched on the mink hat of our main character. This is a successful and satisfying novel. I enjoyed my crying fit in the last six chapters.

Booker Prize Winner 2010 announced !

The Finkler Question named the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winner -

The Long Song by Andrea Levy reviewed by Renée Levine

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

This amazing novel brings you, perhaps reluctantly but immediately to Jamaica 1831, directly into the life on a large sugar cane plantation and the life of both slaves and white rulers. The time is just before the British Empire frees all its slaves, we witness a brutal revolt and we get to experience the freedom given by the Parliament when they passed the abolition of slavery act and its attendant results for both slave and massa.

The book is packaged with a preface and an afterword supposedly written by Thomas Kinsman, a former black London printer who returns to Jamaica in 1898 where he was born before being shipped off as a rejected infant by his mother. This educated and well dressed gentleman interprets the tale from time to time giving advice to his mother, the author of the book. She writes the story but is full of concern about its style since the story is complex. Thus she switches from first person to third person in order to keep us, the reader, engaged and not turned off by unnecessary detail, often boring in historic accounts. On the other hand, she must bring detail to the tale so that you, again you the reader, can absorb the horrors of that life lived by slaves.

July is old when she tells the tale but the story begins with her birth, actually it begins with the violent rape of her mother Kitty, a slave raped by the white overseer of Plantation Amity. However, July is not always present in the telling: when the tale is told in the third person it is in the past, when it is told in the first person, it is in the present. The old woman is more sophisticated than was the girl and the house slave who speaks in Jamaican patois.

All levels of plantation life are given to us: the social gulf among the house and the field slaves, the casual brutality of white over black, the jealousy of status in the black world among gradations of color and of course the Church and its hypocrisy, the man of god who obeys his marital vows but can enjoy sex with the nigger under the same vows.

The story is not easy to enter. I flailed about for a goodly while trying to “get it” between the relationships, the languages and the switches of time. When the tale was done, I loved the work that had gone into it and felt it was more than worth while. Brilliant construct, an exciting read. Andrea Levy, grew up black, born in black London of Jamaican (but mixed with jewish and irish some time ago) parents. Her father was a veteran of the war who decided to immigrate to Britain after the war. This is her first novel set in Jamaica and it has perfect pitch. (not deliberate ) One feels that she is intimate as only one who has suffered and lived this tale can be with such a setting and such a history.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I have just finished this wonderful wonderful book, and I really hope it wins the Booker - I am looking forward to Renée Levine's review, but I recommend everyone reads this tale. It is really very good, insightful, enjoyable, and one of the best books I have ever read! Finally I can be a honest bookseller when I recommend this one. Loved it, go out and buy it from your favorite independent bookshop today.

The Betrayal reviewed by Renée Levine

The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

This is a hard book for me to review. It is clearly a serious work by a successful, experienced and talented writer. The Betrayal is the sequel to her enormously successful The Siege, the story of Anna and her family who survived, with all the horrors of the possible death either by starvation or by the immense cold that overran Leningrad during the threatening german invasion of 1941. The Betrayal takes place ten years later when the war has ended and peace has been restored only to be followed by the terror of the Stalin years, an era of paranoia in the face of Stalin’s death machine. The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic” is one of the sayings attributed to Stalin.
This volume continues the story of Anna who is still living in her parents’ apartment, she is working as a teacher, her husband Andrei is a talented pediatric physician in the local hospital. The couple bring up together Anna’s 16 year old brother after the death of her mother.
The plot driven story deals with a new patient just admitted to the hospital with a cancer in his leg. This ten year old boy the only son of Volkov, a senior secret police officer, becomes the tool for the plot. By means of his admission all the panic upon which rests the Stalin terrorist regime, is let loose. The amputation is not a success, the boy’s suffering becomes enormous, the panic on the part of the hospital crew becomes overwhelming. Whose fault was it? How will it be punished? Paranoia, whispering campaigns, petty grievances of jealousy and rank differences, all metastasize into giant lies and denunciations. Lives are at stake.
All the people are good: Anna is a good woman devoted to social causes, Andrei is a good doctor who loves his patients more than he cares about any rank, even the evil Volkov exhibits human qualities but of course we know all along that evil will win, punishment will come. The permanent mantra: don’t take risks pursues the telling of the tale. These are good people who live in terrible times. Only Stalin’s death brings release.
The story is riveting. We can’t stop reading and yet, and yet.
I found myself not admiring it when it was over. Something is missing. If you want a great novel in war time, read Pat Barker’s trilogy.

The Slap

I did not like this book. I do not like this book. It is cruel, depressing - and unreadable. I don't understand why it is on the Booker Longlist, it is not literature. It is sad. I can't review it and I won't be able to sell it in the bookshop. I can't write about it. I read Jane Smiley's review on the Guardian pages, I think she was able to read it - please read her review. I can't talk about it, it made me upset and sad.

Trespass reviewed by Renée Levine

Trespass by Rose Tremain

I am a fan of the author’s ever since I read The Road Home a couple of years ago so that the theme of this book did not surprise me. Such subject matter as dislocation, a sense of belonging, looking for sanctuary, needing a home, all these reappear in this novel set in the Cevennes this time, a dark mountainous region in south western France, taking place in our time. It was in this same part of France that Robert Louis Stevenson travelled with donkey and gun to protect himself and tourists nowadays return in vast numbers still with donkeys, but no longer with guns.
The book is structured in alternating chapters each section dealing with a brother and sister, one french and one english, both sets victims of abuse, both sets seeking redemption.
The action takes place essentially in a small village in France in which Armon Lunel, a decrepit, dirty and alcoholic man 64 years old lives in his beautiful but equally decaying and decrepit stone house (called Mas Lunel the name of the local old stone houses) left to him by his father, which he has not been able to maintain and wishes now to sell to a foreigner for the money that it might bring him given that especially the Brits, are buying property in France to escape the financial crisis in their home country.
On the same grounds, but in a tiny cottage, lives his sister Audrun who has not inherited more than the patch of ground on which she built the cottage but which she, in contrast to her older brother, has maintained and loved because she loves the land and its beauty and treasures her sense of home and belonging to this ancient earth.
The second set of siblings are Anthony, an antique dealer from London who also at 64, has discovered that his riches are vanishing and his life has lost much of its meaning. In search of a sense of belonging when his feels utterly alone, he travels to that same village in the Cevennes to visit his sister Veronica who has emigrated earlier to France to find her happiness as a landscape gardener and author with her lover, Kitty, a second rate painter.
The connecting link between these two pairs of siblings, is real estate. Anthony is looking for a beautiful house which will be the happy setting for the last part of his life; Aramon wishes, desperately, to sell his house and find rest for himself with 450,000 euro which will not require any work or effort on his part but will bring him independence for the rest of his days.
Anthony Verey’s arrival brings chaos into the domestic life of the two women because the bond between brother and sister is stronger than the love which joins Kitty and Veronica. “why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do?” Kitty asks. Every love, she claims, needs protected space and now her space has been usurped.
The other trespass occurs among the french siblings, the french ones this time. He owns the large house and she feels he has trespassed on her privacy over twenty years. Now he is looking for money to escape; she is looking for revenge. Her small cottage sits on disputed land.
The book evokes darkness: darkness of the woods, danger of curving roads for english drivers, crashing rocks and fierce currents of the streams, the magnificence of loneliness and the urgency of love.
Rose Tremain brings cultural collision to the surface, outsider against native, foreigner on foreign land, seekers of sanctuary versus a sense of belonging, victims of abuse are all around but above all perhaps is the theme of our times: outsiders who presume to think that one can be at home in a foreign country on land obtained with foreign currency simply because the foreigner has fallen on hard times in his own country but can still afford the misery available for cheap abroad where owners have fallen on hard times and buyers are by comparison, rich.
However, the author brings us to some sort of final redemption after opening up the ghastly damage done to the victims of this story.
People will argue wether this worked for them, the readers. Upon finishing the novel, I saw its perfect perfection of planned story, but the form so totally structured and never given a long leash, was too tight for me. I would have preferred a little more wiggle room for the reader, a little more space to invent or to imagine perhaps.
I’ll be curious to hear what people say besides what is totally true: this woman has written a beautifully crafted work.