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Many novels have been written with a desire to educate. Not many are very good. Didactic purpose can overwhelm the heart of fiction, which is storytelling. Still Alice is different. Written by an author with a doctorate in neuroscience and published in 2007, Still Alice is the story of a university professor who has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Genova tells Alice’s story from the inside. In the preface to the 2009 edition of Still Alice, Genova writes: ‘ My query letter seeking representation for Still Alice was rejected or ignored by 100 literary agents. The few who asked to read the manuscript felt that Alzheimer’s was too heavy, scary and dark, and that readers would shy away from the subject. It was too big of a risk, and they passed on it. I pressed on and self-published Still Alice, selling copies from the trunk of my car for almost a year.’ When Still Alice was eventually picked up by Simon and Schuster it spent 59 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. It has been translated into 37 languages. It has been made into an award winning movie and there’s been a stage production. I always have felt the world of agents and publishers has a low opinion of the fortitude of the reading public. We, the readers, are willing to feel and willing to learn. Just give us a good story at the same time. The impetus for Genova’s book came from realizing how little is written from the point of view of the person with the disease. There are medical discussions galore. There are support groups and advice for carers. But there is so little for the Alzheimer sufferer herself. Genova brings this fact directly into Alice’s story, having her set up a support group for other Alzheimer sufferers in her area: a place where they can talk, and not be talked around, above or about. Near the beginning of the novel Dr. Alice Howland is introduced to an audience as, “the eminent William James Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.” The abundance of capital letters points up her status as an important person. A few pages earlier she was seen as a dynamic wife of another Harvard professor, and mother of three grown children. She is busy, in control and a little domineering, especially in her relationship with her youngest daughter. Alice knows best. About forty minutes into the lecture she is giving she gets stuck. “She simply couldn’t find the word. She had a loose sense for what she wanted to say, but the word eluded her.” It’s the first indication that something is wrong. But so what? We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I know I have, and in front of a class. That technical language can disappear into the back of one’s brain so easily. But a few days later she gets lost during her routine run near her home. “She wanted to continue walking but stood frozen instead. She didn’t know where she was …She knew she was in Harvard Square, but she didn’t know which way was home... ‘ Please stop this,’ she whispered. She opened her eyes. Just as suddenly as it had left her, the landscape snapped suddenly back into place.” There is a page of words in the spaces where I’ve put the ellipses in that quote. Genova’s writing is detailed and evocative. You feel Alice’s mounting panic along with her. Genova has chosen a highly intelligent woman as her protagonist and a particularly aggressive form of Alzheimer’s as her villain. She needs Alice’s smart analytical brain to tell her own story. She needs the fast progressing disease to keep up the pace. But the empathy that flows from the author is not only for the loss of a good brain, it is for everyone who suffers from this disease that robs people of their very essence. One of the most memorable passages of the book is a family gathering when Alice and her husband tell their children about Alice’s illness. It’s too long to quote here but suffice it to say that everyone immediately starts talking about themselves, as if Alice isn’t there. They don’t ignore her completely, that’s what’s so clever about this writing, but it’s enough to give the feeling that that’s what’s coming. Dark, heavy and scary? Scary, yes. I’m sure everyone reading this knows of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. Everyone fears it for themselves and the people they love and care for. Dark? Well what is dark? It’s serious. It doesn’t paint everything rosy. Dark is good. Heavy, no. this book is as light as air. It’s light with love and truth.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Froken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne) is published in the US as Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla is a young woman from Greenland living in Copenhagen. She’s an expert on snow and ice, not only because her mother was a hunter in north Greenland, an area that is harsh and sparsely inhabited even by Greenlandic standards, but because she has studied snow and ice, written a dozen published scientific papers on them and been on expeditions to the arctic, where any group would take her along as navigator ‘even if they had to carry her on their backs’. Smilla owes much of her forceful and resilient character to her mother. In traditional Greenlandic society there were women who hunted like men: ‘because of the numerousness of women, by dint of death and need, and because of the natural acceptance in Greenland that each of the sexes contains the potential to become its opposite. As a rule, however, women have then had to dress like men, and they would have had to renounce any sort of family life. The collective could tolerate a change in sex, but not a constant transition to and fro. It was different with my mother. She laughed and gave birth to her children and gossiped about her friends and cleaned skins like a woman. But she shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.’ That is Smilla speaking: academic, wordy, cynical, funny and possessed of enormous insight. Smilla’s father is Danish, a wealthy retired anaesthetist who ‘resembles a docker and discretely cultivates this look by letting his beard grow out now and then.’ He left Smilla’s mother, and Greenland, when she was three years old. He took Smilla into his care when her mother died in a hunting accident. Smilla went to boarding schools through the period of cultural assimilation, when Greenlanders were called North Danes and speaking Danish was the sign of being civilized. She ran away from school repeatedly but she somehow got the education. So when is this book set? In the 1990s. Which is a little disconcerting, because although it’s a modern story there’s so much that has changed. Nobody then carried a miniature computer in their pocket. There was no Google. Research was going to a library. The Danish colonial repentance that led to infrastructure, healthcare and education for the Inuit of Greenland was encased in contempt for their cultural autonomy and their rights as human beings. Their story mimics the painful stories of the native peoples of Canada, Australia and the USA. Smilla is a product of that time. The alcoholic mother who lives in a nearby apartment is another. One day Smilla finds this mother’s child sitting on the stairs. ‘Then I see that it’s a child, … “Beat it, you little shit.” I say. Isaiah looks up. “Peerit,” he says. Beat it yourself. …the boy on the stairs looks right at me with a gaze that cuts straight through to what he and I have in common.’ One day Isaiah falls to his death from the roof of a building next door. Smilla doesn’t believe it was entirely accidental, his footprints in the snow look like he was running from something, and Smilla is tenacious. What follows is a crime story, an action-movie of a book. But it avoids the things that make action movies so tedious; the outrunning of explosions, the dodging of hails of bullets and the drawn out fights where people spring back up after getting the hell beaten out of them. Smilla knows about violence alright, she is expert at it, but it’s violence informed by that cutting intelligence of hers. ‘The misconception that violence always favours the physically strong has spread to a large segment of the population. It’s not correct. The results of a fight are a matter of speed in the first few metres.’ There are moments in this book when you’ll wonder just why something has been included, elements of two sex scenes come to mind, and moments that verge on the farcical, complete with people popping in and out of doors, but the overall mixture of lurking evil, social commentary and philosophical musing lifts it above and beyond the average murder mystery. And you will learn a lot about snow and ice.

What about this title, Drive your plow Over the Bones of the Dead? It’s strange, it’s sinister and at the same time it’s an everyday scene, a farmer ploughing a field. It's taken directly from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It’s one of the proverbs of hell, but don’t worry too much about that. Blake’s conception of hell, in fact Blake’s conception of most things, is far removed from the world as most people find it. But it is worth devoting a little more time to Blake, because Tokarczuk does. She starts each chapter with a Blake quote. He is easy to quote, if difficult to read in bulk, because he often wrote in aphorisms. One of the characters in the book is deeply immersed in translating Blake into Polish and two qualities of Blake’s suffuse this book. One is rage. Blake raged against a lot of things, social injustice, people who tried to pick holes in his spiritual conception of the world, cruelty to animals, dark satanic mills, you name it and Blake had a fiery opinion on the matter. The other is Blake’s belief that every person’s imagination is sacred to themselves and not to be denied by others. So are you prepared for the weird, the opaque and the hyper-individualistic? Janina Duszejko (but don’t you dare call her Janina; she has a deep feeling that she is not a Janina) lives in a forested area of Poland, near the Czech border. Most people only inhabit the remote houses, above the valley and on the plateau, in the summer. Mrs. Duszejko stays all year round. She calls the other two neighbours who stay Oddball and Big Foot. Oddball calls on her in the middle of the night, to tell her that Big Foot is dead: ‘The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him. “Don’t you have a torch?” he asked. Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning, in the daylight. It’s a feature of torches that they’re only visible in the daytime.’ And there you have it, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the world she lives in and a deft movement from a modern porch light into an intimidating and archaic world ( M for Murk is not a typo) and from there into the mind of someone intensely witty but somewhat off course. But remember, everybody’s imagination is sacred to themselves and in this book there are coterie of odd characters with large imaginations who are realized with love and respect. There are also a large number of more everyday characters who are raged against in true Blakean fashion. Here is Mrs. Duszejko’s reaction to the parish priest, who is about to give a sermon on the patron saint of hunters: ‘It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.’ Blake, rage and odd characters aside, this book is at heart a complex noir mystery. The first death is an accident but later people start getting killed in bizarre ways reminiscent of The Name of the Rose. On one side of the story there is Mrs. Duszejko, with her passionate feelings about animals and her belief that astrology can predict the time and nature of a death, on the other is an increasingly backward-looking, church-oriented and male-dominated Polish society. Mrs. Duszejko has a theory that the animals are uniting and taking their revenge on the hunters. She pesters the police with her ideas. More murders happen. She speaks out against hunting during the priest’s sermon. She loses her job teaching English at the local school. There are more murders, and motives and clues and reveals and twists, and eventually an ending you might not expect.

I first read this book in 1995, almost twenty-five years after its publication date of 1971, making it a generation later. Re-reading it in 2023 made it another generation, a long enough survival for a work of literature to become a classic. And there are elements of reading a classic, such as grammatical constructions that have gone out of fashion and words contemporary authors would choose not to use. It is also longer, slower and more erudite than much contemporary historical fiction, which is not in itself a bad thing.   Lyman Ward, an academic historian, is disabled by a painful bone disease and has retired to his grandparents’ house in Grass Valley, California where he is writing a biography of his grandmother. She was a writer and illustrator who married a mining engineer. In between scenes from Lyman’s life writing and telling his grandmother’s story, Stegner tells the story of the marriage of Susan and Oliver Ward. At least, telling his grandmother’s story is what Lyman declares he is doing, and that indeed is the plot and the characters, but what I read in the book that first time round was the story of the American West - not cowboys and Indians, bordellos and saloons, gunfights and posses, but mining and irrigation, the extraction of minerals from the ground, the conversion of wilderness into agricultural land and the hard work, labor, injustices, failures and lawlessness that went along with all that.   Susan Ward is a complex character and one obscured by the distance of time and its accompanying difference of culture. Lyman admires his grandmother, but acknowledges her failings - her snobbishness and her critical attitude regarding her husband. He acknowledges Oliver’s failings too - his silence and his propensity to be cheated at almost every turn. Interestingly he doesn’t seem to regard Oliver’s drinking as a failing, although Susan certainly does.   Lyman uses letters to tell some of the Wards’ story but most of it is told in scenes, scenes he tells us he is making up. History, and biography, are different from fiction because they don’t make things up, although they can, and do, speculate. History and biography contain unbridgeable gaps; things that can be never be known. Angle of Repose is a book in which a historian writes fiction. It is also a book where a historian eventually pieces together some history he wishes he didn’t know. And perhaps he doesn’t. He may have speculated one speculation too far.   This time through I took more notice of Lyman Ward’s own story - the pitiless attitude toward his own disability and the stark way he describes it, his old-fashioned and privileged attitudes, his contempt for the young people of the sixties, and his broken heart and deep resentment of the wife who left him when he became sick. In many ways he’s not a likeable person, but he is an intense portrait of one in an unenviable situation.

A novella, hardly more than a short story, this little book is pure, condensed Alan Bennett from the title onwards. Bennett is best known as a writer for stage, radio and screen including The Madness of King George, The Lady in the Van and The History Boys, all of which are a  must-see, preferably on the stage. His two BBC television series, Talking Heads 1988 and Talking Heads 1998 (a series of monologues with almost zero action) were an outstanding success and were reissued with new actors by the BBC in 2020. Bennett’s skills are the gently comedic observation of character, the dramatic twist, a mastery of dialogue and a deep love of playing with the English language. All these qualities are present in The Uncommon Reader. And did I mention that it’s fun? A common reader is a collection of extracts from texts that is prescribed to a group in the early stages of a course of study. It could also be an ordinary person who reads. The Uncommon Reader of this title is as noble is as it is as possible be, because she is the Queen. Definitely not a commoner. There’s much more to be said about the title that I’m not going to say. Be prepared for layers of meaning. Oh, and fun. ‘It was the dog’s fault…they careered along the terrace…and alongside the house…where she could hear them yapping at something in one of the yards.’ Note the language: ‘terrace’ and ‘yards’ (plural not singular like your back yard or my back yard) suitable terms to describe the environs of a palace but mixed with the common word ‘house’, the word you or I would use for the building we live in. ‘She had never seen the library parked there before, nor presumably had the dogs, hence the din, so having failed in her attempt to calm them down she went up the little steps of the van in order to apologise….“Though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book.” ’ So begins the Queen’s engagement with reading. Through his most uncommon character’s thoughts Bennett raises the same questions about reading that you see all over the internet. Who reads anymore? Why not? Whose fault is it that young people don’t read? Except in this opening scene a young person, a kitchen boy called Norman, is sitting reading in the corner of the travelling library, and an old person, the most senior in the land hesitates. ‘She’d never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something left to other people…Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides reading wasn’t doing. She was a doer.’ The Queen takes Norman on as her special  advisor and plunges into a maelstrom of books that takes over her every free minute, leads to her asking visiting notables what they are reading and upsets her staff, and the prime minister, no end. ‘ “I would have thought,” said the prime minister, “that your majesty was above literature.” “Above literature?” said the Queen. You might as well say one was above humanity.” ’ Which is one of the many comments about the nature of literature that Bennett inserts to create the subtext of this little book. ‘It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. “I think of literature,” she wrote, “as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach.” ’ Bennett, and the Queen, range far and wide over English literature, even venturing into French. (If you want to see just how many works are referenced look up the Wikipaedia article on The Uncommon Reader.)  As she gains confidence the Queen starts to wish some of the authors were still around, ‘so that she could take them to task’. ‘ “Am I alone,’ she wrote, “in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?”…“I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish?” ’ But as she reads more and more she finds even Henry James can be enjoyable. A novel, after all, need not be written ‘as the crow flies’. Much of Bennett’s charm is due to his authorial voice being rooted in his Yorkshire beginnings. Here he is, towards the end of the book, writing about an event at Buckingham Palace, speaking like he’s talking to his mum, only tidied up a bit. ‘ The prospect of a proper tea had fetched the privy councillors out in greater numbers than had been expected; dinner would have been a chore whereas tea was a treat.’ If you want an amusing read that is not a piece of fluff, something to curl up with and make you smile on a rainy winter afternoon, The Uncommon Reader is for you.

Inheriting Our Names An Imagined True Memoir of Spain’s Pact of Forgetting By C. Vargas McPherson The Cross with no Name Inheriting Our Names tells of the author’s search for her mother’s, and her grandmother’s, history and begins with the author sitting at the feet of the statue of the Virgin in the Basilica de la Macarena in Seville, fingering her grandmother’s rosary beads and attempting to say the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. 'I am trying to learn how to use the Seven Sorrows as a map, some kind of chart where I can pinpoint the few facts I know and follow the paths towards some understanding, some meaning from this family legacy of unspoken grief… I am seeking all my grandmother buried, all my mother rejected, all that Spain has silenced since its brutal civil war.' McPherson goes on to tell the history of Sevilla at the time of the civil war and the fascist dictatorship and to reconstruct the story of her mother and her grandparents. Her grandmother has a special relationship with the Virgin of the Macarena. 'But as soon as she sees the Virgin she knows. La Macarena is looking right at her. Her eyes are steady, penetrating, as though seeing something important in Aurora. And she winks. There is no mistake.' A holy statue that winks? And that’s the least of it. Aurora starts daydreaming about helping to carry the heavy statue in a procession. ‘ …what she would give to be able to carry La Macarena. “ You carry me in your heart. That is where it counts.” It’s a voice Aurora hasn’t heard in months. The Virgin is laughing as she climbs off the altar and over the velvet ropes. “Besides, I’m too heavy! These robes!...Aurora takes La Macarena’s arm so She doesn’t trip over the stanchions…”Be careful.” ' The Virgin becomes part of Aurora’s life. Like a good neighbor, she lends a hand and dispenses advice, sometimes unwanted. Aurora’s piety becomes concrete. Something you can relate to. In 1936, four years after the establishment of the second Spanish republic, Aurora and Manuel are a young married couple with two children. An election has just returned a coalition of left-wing parties to power. It is a time of hope for the working poor, but not one of improvement. Churches are being burned and members of the former ruling classes and priests are being murdered by factions that want to provoke both the end of the religious establishment and of private ownership of resources. Capital flight has plunged the country into economic turmoil. Times are hard and they are about to get harder. In July 1936 the Francoist general Quiepo de Llano exercises a swift and efficient coup, taking Seville for the self-styled Nationalists before Franco even lands his troops in Spain. In a brief show of resistance by workers flooding into the streets a fellow employee at the iron foundry dies in Manuel’s arms. Artillery and troops are sent into the Macarena district. Quiepo de Llano makes nightly radio broadcasts. “Your strikes are futile. You are futile without leaders. Return to work. If you do not, you will be shot. God’s army is merciful, but Spain will be bled if necessary.” Over the following months suspected ‘reds’ are dragged from their beds and shot against the wall of the cemetery before being tipped into a common grave.  Quiepo de Llano exults, “If your man is missing for a day or two, don’t worry. Rest assured, he’s been shot like the dog he is.” The tale goes on, through personal tragedy, hunger and fear, and all the while La Macarena is on hand for Aurora. But she is not there for Dolores, McPherson’s mother. When the story moves into Dolores’s tale the reason for the sense of disconnection that has affected McPherson and prompted her journey to Seville is fully revealed. Manuel has a story too, a powerful one. Guilt-ridden because he has a job at the iron foundry that makes ammunition for Franco, because he survived when friends didn’t and because he designed and built the iron railings put up to seal off the chapels in the cathedral from the poor who might steal the gold, Manuel steals scraps of iron from his workplace. He eventually collects enough to make a cross, which he erects in the cemetery where his friends and neighbors were slaughtered. It became known as The Cross with no Name. Manuel told no-one about his cross, until, on his deathbed, he told his eldest son, Manolo. For years Manolo also told no-one. Such are the silenced stories of Seville's Civil War. To get a book recommendation in your inbox every month subscribe to my Your Next Book Newsletter

Moon Tiger A romance lies at the centre of Moon Tiger; a romance that plays out in a few days in the bizarre limbo that is colonial Cairo at the height of the desert war. Like all respectable European capitals Cairo had a zoo. “The hippos share a small lake with flamingos and assorted duck; a keeper stands alongside with a bucketful of potatoes - five piastres buys a couple of potatoes which you then hurl into the pink maw of the hippo. The adult hippos wallow with their mouths permanently agape while two young ones, who have not yet got the idea, cruise fretfully up and down, occasionally struck by inaccurate potatoes. ‘Like an exotic form of hoop-la,’ says Tom. ‘Do you want a go?’ ‘Do you realise that potatoes are a luxury in this place?’ says Claudia. ‘ I can’t remember when I last ate a potato myself. We use yams. Mashed yam, roast yam, boiled yam….’ “Oh dear,’ says Tom. ‘Is indignation going to spoil your day? At least the hippos are happy, presumably.’ But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day…” And now you will be drawn into this story.  I say ‘now’ since you may not have been before. Beautiful, famous, independent Claudia, who is recalling her life as she ekes out her last days in hospital, has so far been self-absorbed, intolerant, neglectful, arrogant and frequently cruel Claudia. She is not the sort of person you’d want to know. But when she reveals what Tom has been in her life she becomes poignant, passionate, eloquent, resilient and astute. It’s a scene that the narrator, the old Claudia, has been plunged back into. She’s seeing it with the crystalline clarity of morphine fueled vision. To achieve this effect of immediacy in distance Lively uses the present tense with a distant third person point of view. It’s risky. It can annoy a reader with its feel of a lack of sophistication. But you probably didn’t notice, because smart, acerbic Claudia is right there, being witty about yams and the English diet. Then Lively switches you right back into a first-person-type insight, but what’s on the page is still in the third person. Old and dying, Claudia is remembering this scene. She could think, ‘I knew nothing could spoil my day’, but that’s not what Lively does. She writes, “But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day”. All the way through this book Lively plays with tense, point of view and dialogue in a way which is thoroughly experimental but because it serves both the character and the plot you’ll probably be surprised when, and if, you notice it happening. And while reading the passage you probably imagined it was your sensibilities that conjoured up  the discomfort over the zoo-thing, and that your modern education detected the odour of colonialism. Look again and you’ll see it is Penelope Lively’s skill that put that there.

The Keeper of Stories is fast paced, full of eccentric characters and above all funny. It is an ideal read for those times when you simply want to enjoy a rollicking good story and there’s the added bonus of a very sharp little dog.   Janice is a cleaner in Cambridge – the university town in England, not the one in Massachusetts – and she has discovered that a good cleaner can pretty much dictate her days and hours, so why would she take on a job for the mother-in-law of one of her least favourite clients, especially when that mother-in-law makes it quite clear she doesn’t want a cleaner?   ‘The globule of spit hits the pavement less than an inch from her shoe. It is either a very good shot or Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s mother-in-law has missed. Janice stands looking at the small, elderly woman in the open doorway… Does she really need to be here? And what is this woman wearing? It seems to be some sort of kimono thrown over and pair of men’s cords (rolled up many times at the ankles), and on her head she has a red hat with artificial cherries on. The cherries appear to be covered in what Janice suspects is mould.’   Mrs YeahYeahYeah is the only client Janice doesn’t like. She doesn’t like Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s husband either. She calls him Mr NoNoNotNow. The only reason Janice hasn’t walked out in four years of working for them is because of the dog, who’s called Decius.   ‘“This is Decius, he’s a fox terrier.”             This was one of the first things Mrs YeahYeahYeah had said to her. Quickly followed by, “I hope you like dogs we’d like you to walk him.”’             Not, “We hope you like dogs.” Pause, “Would you possibly mind walking him?” (Polite British requests always involve interspersed ‘would you minds’.) ‘All Janice had been able to say was, “Decius?”             “Yes, he’s named after a Roman emperor.”             And that’s when she first noticed it. She looked at Decius. He looked at her and his expression said, as surely as if he had barked it out loud, “Don’t say a word. Not a fucking word.” She didn’t blame him, but after all this time it still amazes her how much he swears. For a fox terrier.’   There are other clients, all with their own stories. There is Geordie Bowman, an internationally renowned opera singer with humble roots. And there’s recently widowed Fiona and her son Adam. Fiona is creating a doll’s house. ‘Most of the rooms are complete, perfect in their miniature form. Bedrooms, a drawing room, a nursery, and Janice’s favourite, a beautifully fashioned county-style kitchen with pastry part-rolled on the table alongside a bowl of plums the size of pin heads.’   And there’s Carrie-Louise, a nearly-ninety year-old whose greatest entertainment is sparring with her old friend, Mavis, and proving she can make better elegant little cakes for tea than Mavis can. Carrie-Louise actually has Janice bake the cakes, for Janice is a woman of many talents. Janice can handle a soldering iron as easily as she can whip up batter for madeleines. She’s a woman who is severely underestimated by some of her clients. Mavis clearly thinks she’s the sort of woman who buys her cakes. She is also underestimated by her husband.   Janice travels to her jobs by bus and likes to listen to music on her headphones while inventing stories about her fellow passengers and the bus driver, whom she is sure must once have been a geography teacher. She hauls her vacuum cleaner and her bag of supplies onto the bus because her husband uses their car to get to work at a college in the centre of Cambridge, a place easily accessible by public transport. ‘“You don’t want to take the car in, Jan, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. Parking’s a nightmare in the city.” This is true, although it is also true that most of her employers have parking for visitors or drives. “Whatever you say, but I think you’ll find I’m right.” He had beamed good-naturedly at her.’ (Janice’s husband has a nice line in passive-aggressive dominance.)  ‘She returns to the hall, kicks off her shoes, flexes her toes and heads for the kitchen. She knows the first thing he will say when he wakes is, “What’s for dinner?” He doesn’t ask this in a nagging or demanding voice, but in a jolly tone that suggests they are all in it together. She is no longer fooled.’   So there’s the cast of characters, or most of them. What about the plot? It’s a double story: Janice’s, both her past one and her current one, and the story of Mrs. B (as Janice starts to call Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s mother-in-law). It’s a story with suitably villainous machinations, a suitably dark secret and a suitably sweet romance.

The obsession is the English love affair with gardening. Wulf, who was born in India and raised in Germany, writes in her prologue, “ I was amazed, when I moved to London in the mid -nineties, to find a nation obsessed with gardening. The shelves of my local newsagent groaned beneath lavish displays of gardening magazines; everywhere I went I saw signs for garden centres, and my new friends all seemed to think that the best way to spend a weekend was to visit the grounds of a stately home (unless they had an allotment, in which case the thrill of digging and weeding could not be surpassed).” In 1734 Peter Collinson, a successful London cloth merchant who traded extensively with the colony of Pennsylvania, collected a shipment of two boxes of plants from the customs house at the Port of London. Inside his boxes were hundreds of seeds wrapped in paper and, marvellous to behold, some living plants that had survived the crossing of the Atlantic, which could take between five and twelve weeks. Two of the cuttings were of Kalmia Latiflora, the Mountain Laurel, which Collingwood had only ever seen as a botanical illustration. Collinson was a man of means with a passion for botany at a time when European travellers were bringing home stories of strange and wonderful trees, flowers and shrubs. In his day a garden was a parterre, a pattern of low, neatly trimmed hedges enclosing a display of flowers, often only one plant of one colour. Municipal gardens in southern Spain are still like that, deep red roses in a frame of green box, and the gardeners you can employ where I live in California  seem to be in the same tradition. They will take a hedge trimmer to the shrubs you have carefully pruned to leave the flowering wood and mould them into tidy balls and ovals. Not so in Britain, thanks to Collinson, and the person at the other end of that shipment. That person was John Bartram, a farmer living on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Like Collinson he had adored plants since childhood but unlike him had few books to refer to and even fewer he could read because he knew no Latin. Collinson, a fellow of the Royal Society, heard of Bartram though his connections with Benjamin Franklin and the subscription library Franklin had founded in Philadelphia. Collison acted as the library’s London agent choosing, buying and shipping books to America. His hope was that he’d find someone to ship him back plants in return and eventually he did: Bartram. To begin with Bartram supplied Collinson with plants and seeds from around his Pennsylvania farmhouse; kalmias, tulip polars and lady’s slipper orchids. Later he ventured further afield; a lot further afield. He travelled, alone on horseback, throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey and into the Carolinas and Virginia and on into uncharted territory. Meanwhile Collinson set up a subscription scheme for Bartram’s ‘boxes’. And that is why British gardens, large and small, are populated with so much more than the few species of trees that survived the last ice age. There are only five evergreens native to Great Britain: Box, Holly, Scots Pine, Juniper and Yew. The new generation of wealthy landowners were prepared to pay vast sums for the trees grown from Bartram’s seeds. Cedars, Bays, Spruces , Hemlocks and many new types of Pine all entered Britain from America and formed the backbone of the great gardens of the stately homes the British so love to visit. Add to that the great flowering trees of the Eastern and Southern United States, the Magnolias, Rhododendrons, and Dogwoods, and the deciduous trees with their astonishing autumn colours, the Maples, Aspens and Liquidambars, and it’s no wonder the great estate holders called filling their acres ‘painting with nature’. You have probably never heard of Peter Collinson and John Bartram before now but there are many characters in Wulf’s book who will be familiar. There are, for example, chapters on Linnaeus and the classification of plants. His ‘sexual’ system was considered scandalous by many British plant aficionados, not least because of the descriptions Linnaeus chose to employ: “ …the bridal bed…adorned with such precious bedcurtains, and perfumed with so many sweet scents” and other nomenclature so much more explicit that I hesitate to include it in this newsletter. The second part of The Brother Gardeners moves into the next generation of botanizers and has chapters on Joseph Banks, the botanical  expedition he tacked onto the mission of Cook’s first voyage of the Endeavor. As a young man he was one of the first Europeans to set eyes on Australia, because he didn’t just finance that expedition, he went on it. Then there was the ill-fated voyage of the Bounty, which Banks arranged to take breadfruit trees from Tahiti to be grown in the West Indies. Banks established Kew Gardens and later in life was president of the Royal Society. In my last garden I had a rose called Rosa Banksiae, Lady Banks. Whatever happened to it, it recovered from in a season, such as being cut down to its base so the deck could be repaired. I always wondered what the good Lady Banks made of having such a tenacious plant named after her.

Horse is wonderful story telling And it’s more, and in some ways less. I feel there’s something paradoxical about Horse.   First the story. It’s a more-than-dual timeline, but mostly two time periods moving forward in parallel, historical and present day. Each chapter has a title, a place named and a date. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t read chapter headings you’re going to need to break that habit for this book, or you’ll be hopelessly lost. Even with the signposts I found myself flipping back to check on who was when, something I find much easier in a physical book than in an e-book. It’s something to do with spatial memory.   The historical part runs from 1850 to 1875, so from before the American Civil War until after. Jarret is enslaved, but his father is a free man and a horse trainer in Lexington, Kentucky. Jarret adores horses and one in particular, which he cares for from the moment it is born. This horse will eventually be known as Lexington, a racehorse famous in his day and later famous as a stud stallion. Lexington is temperamental and Jarret, who becomes his groom, is the only person who can calm him.   The present day part tells of Jess, an Australian transplant to Washington DC with a special talent for bones, the sort that are displayed in museums, and of Theo, a post-graduate student who is also a transplant. His heritage is more complicated, his father being American and his mother Nigerian. He, because his parents were diplomats, spent much of his childhood in an English public school.   So, no more about the plot because one of the joys of this book is working out what is going on and how the timelines fit together.   But there is more to say.   In her afterword to the book Geraldine Brooks writes, ‘As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would also need to be about race.’ This novel has that oft maligned element, a theme, and, like a skeleton being stripped of its flesh for display, the theme emerges as something essential yet disturbing.   Brooks’ characters think about their situation, be they enslaved, emancipated, mixed race or immigrant. She shows how their inner lives are circumscribed, and threatened, by the construct of race. And she shows how threats are realized in a society that has racism woven throughout its social fabric. The construct of race is constantly on everyone’s mind. The characters can’t seem to move a few yards without having to consider it. And the result is deeply shocking.   Courageously writing about race is how Horse is more than a great story about a horse, it’s also why it’s less. Sometimes the bones stick out.   For example, the character of Catherine, an English veterinarian, seems shallow despite carrying a significant element of the plot. Her dialogue often feels like dumps of information and her language unconvincing. She’s there but she’s not there. Yet she’s important, not only for the plot but because she is outside the racist the web that has ensnared both Jess and Theo.   When Theo says, “The slave-holding classes considered enslaved people subhuman. They referred to them as ‘the necessary mudsill’ on which one constructed the edifice of a higher kind of society.” Catherine’s response is, “What a distressing concept… although I’m not sure it’s an order of magnitude worse than the upper-class attitude to the lower classes. I mean, not everything has to be about race does it?” Theo retorts “Perhaps not, when you are White.” Catherine mutters and leaves off the conversation.   This is not how an Oxford-educated woman reacts to an argument. Such a woman can recognize a certain type of shock-tactic when she hears it. She would hear the assertion in that first sentence and agree with it before expanding the conversation. Or maybe she would react angrily to the personal attack. She does not live in America. She has not spent the last few years rethinking her status while being subjected to the steam roller effect of the notion of white privilege. She won’t see where this ‘You are White’ is coming from.   But, is this out of character reaction there so Catherine can say, “Not everything has to be about race”? Is it the author who is saying, ‘Think about all those scenes where it’s been about race? Were those always about race? Here I’ve given you three people and the conversation comes round to racism in America, but none of these three people were born and raised in America. This is not their culture or their heritage.’ So here’s the paradox. The jarring nature of Catherine’s out of character reaction sends the reader out of the novel and into their own thoughts. Just what are those thoughts? That’s down to you.   I won’t go in for any more textual analysis. The story of the horse, Lexington, and the people who connect with him is masterfully told and the way the construct of race pollutes every character is subtle and thought provoking. It was a hard task the author set herself. 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The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye begins, as do all fairy stories, by announcing that it’s a fairy story. ‘Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jeweled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.’ It's a fairy story but it is today. And for the next hundred pages it’s today - or 1994, when the book was published. Dr Gillian Perholt, the largely irrelevant, happy woman, is a narratologist. Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. (And, yes, I did have to look that up). Narratologists, as far as this story is concerned, spend most of their time flying to conferences to give talks to other narratologists. Gillian Perholt flies to Turkey, which we all know is a place where the air is full of spirits, some of whom get captured in objects such as lamps and bottles and are obliged to grant us three wishes if we release them. But one hundred pages in and, although the tone is still that of a fairy tale, the content is the story of Turkey; the rationalist Turkey of the 1990s, not the reactionary, reverted, Turkey of today. Although that Turkey is presaged. While looking for a supposedly magic pillar in the Haghia Sophia, Gillian and her Turkish  colleague, Orhan, meet a Pakistani family. ‘ “And she, does she speak English?” It was clear that Gillian had been taken for a quiet Muslim wife. She had been standing two paces behind Orhan as he cast about for the magic pillar. Orhan replied gravely. “She is English. She is a visiting professor. An eminent visiting professor.” Orhan, a child of Atatürk’s new world, was enjoying himself…the Pakistani gentleman was not happy.’ In the story called Dragon’s Breath a village is destroyed by a dragon. Then there should be a hero who slays the beast, shouldn’t there, not something sad and unnecessary about a fried pig? How is hopelessness converted into legend? The Story of the Eldest Princess… hang on, shouldn’t that be The Story of the Youngest Princess? It’s always the youngest one that gets it right, isn’t it?  And princesses are not supposed to befriend scorpions, toads and cockroaches (at least only sanitized, Disneyfied ones). Princesses are supposed to find their true love, ‘naked to the waist, with black curly hair, leaning on a long axe and singing: Come live with me and be my love And share my house and share my bed And you may sing from dawn to dark And churn the cream and bake the bread And lie at night in my strong arms Beneath a soft goosefeather spread.’ The Princess is about to fulfil the destiny the story demands, but a scratchy cockroach voice rasps out from her basket: ‘And you may scour and sweep and scrub With bleeding hands and arms like lead And I will beat your back and drive My knotty fists against your head And sing again to other girls To take your place, when you are dead.’ The cockroach knows. He has crept around the dark crevices of people’s houses. A S Byatt has such a mastery of the open tone and straightforward language of the fairy tale and so cleverly controls the way a fairy tale evokes the dark fears of the human psyche that it is hard to keep in mind that she has made all this up. Those verses are her own and this book is no re-telling of The Arabian Nights. She follows all the tropes, then she does something that hits you in the stomach. Intertwined, like roses and their thorns on a trellis, her fairy tales are both fables and commentaries on the preoccupations of modern times. And is there a djinn in a bottle? And where does a nightingale’s eye feature? I’m not going to tell you. You will have to read the book.

The main penitentiary gate opened on schedule, without any last minute hitch. Sandra Treming and four other old cons walked out into a rainy Monday morning.   The first scene in Through Thorns packs in a lot. Sandra Treming is notorious, serving a life sentence. She has what the authorities call ‘attitude’; no time off for good behaviour, but none added on for bad. She is terrified of the outside world and so ill-equipped for it that she doesn’t know how to use a seatbelt in a car.   Through Thorns is a fast paced story told in two timelines. One is how Sandra survives in the world outside prison in 2007, the other is how she came to be convicted 25 years earlier. The main thrust of the plot is laid out quickly. The twists and turns are in the details and the attraction is in the author’s compassionate attitude towards some of his characters, his skilful pillorying of others and his ability to create a community of people who are at the same time both absurd and believable.   Sandra in 1982 lives in the Alexander Berkman Collective. According to her own memories she ended up there because she was a runaway with nowhere to go and was befriended by two of the collective members. The collective is the sort of place where they have house meetings about buying groceries that end in members walking out because they are not ‘interested in participating in group struggle that doesn’t advance the revolution’. Whether this reminds you of Monty Python, One Day in the Death of Ivan Denisovich or house-shares you once were part of is all part of the cleverness of this writing. These people are naïve, laughable and dangerous. Or would be dangerous, if they ever reached a decision. When that disaffected member storms out the meeting no longer has a quorum which means, believe it or not, they can’t buy groceries. They so despise capitalist, bourgeois society that they won’t work, take money from parents or accept government payments. Their only sanctioned way of obtaining the necessities of life is through ‘liberating’ property. And that, plus some actual decisions, is where it all goes wrong.   Sandra in 2007 is an ex-prisoner in a hostile world. People who should help her, a steward of a half-way house, a parole officer, are cleverly skewered by the author. There are elements of farce here but also elements of devastating truth. Who hasn’t been humiliated by an official at some time in their life? And the more vulnerable you are the more likely you are to be humiliated.   “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you apprehended,” Case officer barked.   “Sorry?” Sandra played contrite to mask the indignation she felt.   “I contacted the halfway house. You weren’t there. In fact, they have no record of you checking in. So, where the hell have you been?”   “I’m staying at a hostel downtown.” She kept her voice neutral. Perhaps, if she didn’t push any buttons, she could weather this storm.   “You’re required to keep this office informed of your place of residence at all times. Why didn’t you tell us about this move?”   “I did, I­—”   “You’re lying. I took careful notes from our meeting. You didn’t say anything about where you were staying.”   Sandra pointed to the receptionist. “I wrote the address on the registration form she gave me.”   And she had. And when it’s proven that she did, do either he or the receptionist apologise for their lack of communication? You guessed it, no, it’s all Sandra’s responsibility; the responsibility of the vulnerable, homeless and jobless person that they are paid, out of the public purse, to help.­   There is a lot of social commentary in this book, and a lot of compassion for the less fortunate and capable. Because her room at the halfway house has gone, Sandra checks into the homeless shelter next door. There the locker she is assigned is broken and all her money is stolen in the night. Angela, refused permission to take her shopping carts full of junk into the shelter, takes Sandra somewhere to sleep that is safer. Safer means behind a bramble thicket under a freeway overpass.   Sandra has a habit of being decisive in the wrong ways. She left the apartment her former comrade found for her. She went to a hostel instead of the halfway house. She stayed in the homeless shelter when she knew her possessions weren’t safe. You could say making decisions that work out badly is a character trait. And that’s nothing compared to some of the decisions she made 25 years before. Yet she has a nature that is open to Angela and to others. Will she survive in this world outside prison with so much stacked against her? That’s a later part of the story, after the thorns, when things get a bit less Monty Python and a bit more modern fairy tale.