Swaddled in Stories

"As my aunt twisted in her seat in the shade searching for the right word, as Vincent licked his fingers and filled his mouth with jerk pork, and as Violet scowled and chided me to listen, they laid a past out in front of me. They wrapped me in a family history and swaddled me tight in its stories. And I was taking back that family to England. But it would not fit in a suitcase - I was smuggling it home." (p.325-6)

This little quote pretty much sums up 'Fruit of the Lemon' by Andrea Levy, which I have been reading for the TBR Pile Challenge 2013 (but also because of how much I loved Small Island). This book is similarly about a family who's roots are in Jamaica, but it focusses on Faith, the daughter of the family and her experience of growing up black in Britain. She is vaguely embarrassed by the notion that her parents 'came over on a banana boat' and seems more concerned with fitting in than understanding her family history. She gets her degree, starts work in a lowly job at the BBC and moves into a shared house with some friends, including, to the horror of her parents, two boys. They in turn try to pair her up with a nice young man who works with her dad, and her brother Carl's new girlfriend is aghast that she seems to have no sense of her true identity. Her parents are also making plans to return to Jamaica. She cannot understand their link to the island and is determined to separate herself from them and forge her own sense of belonging. Then she witnesses a violent incident and it brings home for her the realities of racial politics. 

The second half of the book takes Faith to visit her extended family in Jamaica and here she learns her family history and develops a real sense of connection to who they were and what they experienced. Various members of the family each in turn tell the the story of various other members and gradually the whole story is built up. 

What I loved about this part of the book was the family tree that appears at the beginning of each chapter, and that is gradually added to as we are introduced to new people and go further back in time. It was very helpful too as it allowed me to visualise the links between each generation and remember who was married to who, or grandmother to who, or sister to who; it did all get quite complicated. It was all so beautifully written, the whole atmosphere of the place and particularly the culture shock that Faith experiences when she arrives that is transformed over her visit into a genuine sense of belonging.

Here she is arriving:
"My aunt took both my hands in hers then moved my arms open and looked me up and down. 'You skinny,' she concluded with a laugh. I laughed too then leant forwards to hug her. She was angular and brittle like a bag of crisps and I didn't use my full force in the hug for fear of crushing her.
'I was scared you wouldn't be here,' I said with a smile. One of my aunt's eyebrows rose alarmingly on her forehead and her lips tightened into a thin line as she pierced Vincent with a stare. Vincent looked at his mother and then at me and laughed, 'Of course we here.' " (p.176)

Stories: 
Grace's story (Faith's grandmother) as told by Aunt Coral:
"Nathaniel and Grace had known each other since they were little children. They used to play together by the river when she met him on her way from school. It was Nathaniel who taught her to climb trees and it was Nathaniel's fault Grace got beaten for ripping the sleeve of her dress. 'I don't think your mummy knows this so don't go tellin' her...' Nathaniel asked grace to marry him and she said she would. But Grace's mother did not approve of the match. She said that Nathaniel's family were only cane cutters. That he was too rough, too poor, too dark, too ignorant, for her daughter. Her mother told Grace she must never see Nathaniel again. But they met in secret and nathaniel gave Grave a ring that he made form an old coin. It didn't fit her finger so she kept it in her pocket. 'I saw it once - big ugly thing.' " (p.229-30)

Cecelia story (Faith's great grandmother) told by cousin Vincent:
"Then one day Cecelia was standing on a chair and stretching up to pick tamarinds from a tree with her baby strapped to her back in an old curtain, she slipped and was caught by a man. The man was Benjamin Nelson Hilton. 'Your great-grandfather. But when my mummy tells that story there is no baby, no curtain - nothing is strapped to her back.' " (p.260)

Obadiah and Margaret (Wade's parents, Faith's paternal grandparents) told by Violet:
"Obadiah began to import ribbons. He bought then from an American man who sent Obadiah the finest-quality ribbons in Kingston. Silk ribbon - grosgrain and watered. Satin ribbon - plain, brocaded and striped. Obadiah then sold them to shops. After a while he added lace - torch on, Chantilly and fine silk chiffon - gentlemen's collars and cuffs, embroidery silks, sewing silks, cotton thread on spools and the occasional bolt of novelty gingham cloth.
He met Margaret Little, my grandmother, in one of the shops he supplied. She worked at the back of the shop as a seamstress. 'Although she say she was dressmaker. No one knew the difference but her. But she stick up her nose and say dressmaker not seamstress, if you please. All show.' " (p.281-2)

The whole book has a real sense of history, both as a big thing that encompasses everyone and as a personal tale of the events of individual lives. And Faith is drawn in to the story of her family, and sees and experiences the island that forms the backdrop to the stories. It is a complex interweaving of events that brings her to understand where she comes from and where she belongs. All the story tellers are open and honest, seeing the flaws of their family characters but loving them anyway, not judging, just telling it like it was. Very engaging and real characters, the book takes you into a family and almost makes you feel like you belong too.

Dark Materials (at last)

I have been waiting to write this review for what seems like years. I was pointed to these books by a friend, back before the third book was published in 2000, and we read them aloud as a family (I say 'we' and for a change this did include my ex in the experience, I remember having to hand over the book when I was crying too much at the end to carry on reading). The books have been an ongoing passion for Creature, read and re-read to the point of memorisation, listening to the tapes on long journeys and then several years ago we went to Oxford and spent four hours queueing in the rain for an open casting for the part of Lyra when the films were planned. I sat in horror as we watched the closing scene of The Golden Compass as I realised to what extent they were going to butcher the story, so lets not go there (though to give due credit most of the actors were well chosen for the parts and the characters, if not the plot, were excellently executed). Over the last couple of weeks I have been listening to the tapes again while painting in my bedroom so have come back to a review I started a couple of years ago and decided to finish it.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy consists of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The first, Northern Lights, tells the tale of Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon, who live in a world like this one but different, their life at Jordan College and how political changes come to their world and take them away from everything they know. She is an ignorant wild child with a mysterious background who by simple childish curiosity finds herself caught up in monumental changes. Learning to use the alethiometer, which communicates with Dust, she travels with the gyptians to the far north, the land of the northern lights, and armoured bears and witches. And her father Lord Asriel, who blasts an opening into another world and leads Lyra into the second book. The Subtle Knife introduces Will, who lives in 'our world', but who's search for his missing father leads him quite by chance to find a window through which he enters another, where he encounters Lyra. Although they think they have their own tasks to pursue they find themselves inexplicably bound together. Will unintentionally finds himself in possession of the Subtle Knife, which cuts openings between worlds, and with the help of the witches they set off in search of his father. In the third book the story diverges on many paths: in one Lyra has been taken by Mrs Coulter and hidden in a far distant mountain cave, to protect her from the evil intentions of the church; in another we follow Will as he travels in search of her; in a third there is Mary Mallone, a research scientist from Will's world who learned from Lyra how to communicate with dark matter, and who travels to the world of the Mulefa and who has a vital role to play in the unfolding events; and finally we have the republic established by Lord Asriel in yet another world, from where a great army is gathering to fight the might of the established church. Oh yes, and then there's Mrs Coulter and her golden monkey, beautiful and wicked, a threatening presence throughout the story, until she redeems herself at the end.

Now that is a really brief summary of the story, go to Wiki if you want more details, and a full rundown of the cast of characters, because there is so much more to it than a fantasy story about two children. It is an exploration of philosophical, metaphysical and religious ideas. It is a challenge to the whole idea of religion, and the effect that it has had on humanity. And yet at the same time it creates the idea that religion is real, we meet 'God' and the angels and go to the land of the dead. He embraces the idea that there is more to life than we can know or understand, but seems to conclude with the idea that it is our responsibilities towards our fellow human beings that should be the defining feature of what makes life good and worthwhile. 

I think that what marks out good fantasy writing (if this can strictly be called fantasy, I am not so sure) is that the world that is created and the ideas within it are complete, logical and coherent. It is what is so good about the Discworld, and what is weak about the Harry Potter books. Things that happen have to be credible within the confines of the imaginary creation. This is something that Philip Pullman achieves spectacularly and on an impressive scale. Sometimes he waffles a bit and occasionally the story moves too slowly, but you can forgive him those things. He never talks down to his readers and does not shy away from being demanding or intellectual. Having said that two things remain unanswered questions for me: firstly the idea of daemons, and the nature of their physical presence. They seem to be real solid creatures, but how do they come into being, are they born with the person and yet on death they vanish into nothingness. And secondly I was left very disquieted by his idea of death, of the idea of a consciousness left trapped in the world of the dead. And his solution was the one thing that, when I thought about it further, was unsatisfying: if there are an infinite number of universes and thus an infinite number of dead souls, and only one exit, you could still wait an infinite time in the land of the dead. Or does the soul not have a sense of time passing. I am not sure, but it still sounds unbearable. It is essentially what makes me an atheist, that the concept of eternity is non sensical to a human being, and non existence is preferable to an eternity of anything, even paradise. This is what I like about the books, that they cause you to think about such big questions. But also it's not just to be clever; it is such a great story and appeals to the child in you that wants there to be more to life, for there to be adventure and discoveries, for there to be a purpose to life and a heroic task to undertake, for there to be magic.

I could quote all sorts of things, we must have a hundred favourite moments from the story but I will give you this as a taster, from The Subtle Knife, Will finding the window:

"The cat stepped forward, and vanished.
Will blinked. Then he stood still, close to the trunk of the nearest tree, as a truck came round the circle and swept it's lights over him. When it had gone passed he crossed the road, keeping his eyes on the spot where the cat had been investigating. It wasn't easy, because there was nothing to fix on, but when he came to the place and cast about to look closely, he saw it.
At least, he saw it from some angles. It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two metres from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a metre across. If you were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible from behind. You could only see it from the side nearest the road, and you couldn't see it easily even from there, because all you could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front of it on this side: a patch of grass lit by a street light.
But Will knew without the slightest doubt that the patch of grass on the other side was in a different world.
He couldn't have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly that he knew fire burned and kindness was good. He was looking at something profoundly alien.
And for that reason alone, it enticed him to stoop and look further. What he saw made his head swim and his heart thump harder, but he didn't hesitate: he pushed his shopping bag through, and then scrambled through himself, through the hole in the fabric of this world and into another." (p14-15)

You can pop back to Midsummers Day 2009 when we took a visit to Will and Lyra's bench in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford, which is another of my most visited posts. I am guessing that, even though it is 12 years since the final book was published, there were a few people gathering the other day to sit on the bench, just as we did.

The Accidental

I picked up 'The Accidental' by Ali Smith at a charity shop a few weeks ago. As you can clearly see in the photo the cover claims not only did it win the Whitbread and was Booker shortlisted but it also won the Orange Prize in 2006. I was sure it was not on my list, and on inspection I find that it was merely shortlisted, and hope that this cover will now becomes a collectors item having been published in haste and over eager anticipation of the announcement.

What a weird book. An inside view of what is really probably quite a normal family, with normal kind of hangups, who's lives are disrupted and altered, not necessarily for the better, by the arrival of the wild, bohemian Amber on the doorstep of their holiday cottage. I was left feeling, as I frequently am when people do stupid things, "why did no-one ask who she was and what she was doing there?" The parents, Eve and Michael, are being terribly polite and offer her dinner, and she just moves right in. 12 year old Astrid is delighted just to have a distraction from the tedium and Amber does the job of a slightly distracted older sister, alternately paying focussed attention and ignoring her. Magnus, a teenager with real troubles, is on the edge of the bath about to hang himself when he finds himself quite literally swept off his feet and then seduced by Amber. Michael is distantly infatuated and utterly rebuffed, in spite of being a serial seducer of his female students. Eve, a writer suffering from a crisis of confidence, seems strangely desperate for approval from her, constantly trying to impress and also failing. There is that slightly surreal atmosphere that you get on holiday, that this is not 'real life' for them, they are almost in suspended animation, out of their familiar environment, isolated, with only each other for company. Amber becomes their focus because it is too difficult to talk properly to each other. So the story hops from person to person, seeing each perspective, except Amber, who remains an enigma, making her all the more intriguing. She is like the catalyst that highlights all the flaws in their relationships, as if she is deliberately setting them up against each other. They all have their secrets and she is the one stirring it all up. She seems to find them all extremely tedious and is like some kind of superior being who deigns to bestow her gracious favours upon them and they should be duly grateful. In many ways she is not really a character, but a tool used by the author to upset everyone, to point out how vulnerable our lives are to the vagaries of chance.

What I found most vivid about the writing is her description of Magnus and the breakdown he is going through. He has been involved in an incident that resulted in a girl at school committing suicide. He has admitted it to no-one and the events go round and round his head, things replaying in a loop, it is as if he is looking in on himself from the outside. He is grasping the terrifying unforeseen consequences of his actions, consumed with horror at himself and unassuageable guilt. You get this sense of how fast his brain is working, and how his own thoughts are tormenting him, he repeats the phrase 'First they. They then. Then they. Then she' over and over mixed up with the other thoughts, knowing what he has done but hardly being able to say it to himself:

"He talks all about things. He talks as if they matter. He talks about calculus, about how plants grow or how insects reproduce or about what the inside of a frog's eye is like. He talks about films, computers, binaries. he talks about how holograms are produced. He himself is a hologram. He has been created by laser, lenses, optical holders, a special vibration-isolated optical table. He is the creation of coherent light. He is squeaking about it now. He says coherent light is well cool. He is quality. He contains all the necessary information about his shape, size, brightness. He is sickeningly excited about himself. He is quite dodgy really. He only seems to be dimensional. He is a three-dimensional reproduction of something not really there. He was never really there. Look at him. He's lucky. First of all, he doesn't exist. That's lucky. Second, he's so small. He could slip away under a door. He could slip away in a crack through a wood floor. Third, he's back then, before. The real Magnus is this, now, massive, unavoidable. The real Magnus is too much. He is all bulk, big as a beached whale, big as a floundering clumsy giant. He looks down at his past self squeaking, shining, clambering about on his own giant foot as if the foot is a mountain, an exciting experiment or adventure. Hologram boy has no idea what the foot belongs to. Hologram boy could never imagine such monstrous proportions. First they. They then. Then they. Then she." (p.37-8)

There were some slightly surreal passages, almost random words, I think they might have been Michael's attempts at poetry but that is just a guess, but on the whole a fascinating book. The family are all so real and believable, and sympathetic (well maybe less so Eve, I am having trouble with middle aged women in books recently, they tend to irritate me ... can't imagine why:-) Amber is not real, but I don't think she is meant to be. Amber's impact makes them all look at themselves differently, and make different decisions, or understand that their decisions are not so vital as they once thought. I just loved the symbolism of the moment that they return home from the cottage to find that Amber (we are left to assume it was her) has emptied their house, utterly, except for the telephone answering machine with three significant messages on it. It's as if she were telling them that they really were in such a mess it would be better to start again from scratch. And they do.

Eve Green

Eve Green by Susan Fletcher.

This book was in the pile from the charity shop and I picked it out because I was struggling with 'On Beauty' and wanted something a bit more light weight. It is the lovely intriguing story of Evangeline, who loses her mother very abruptly and very young and goes to live with her grandparents in rural Wales. It is told by her pregnant adult self reflecting on the immediate aftermath of her mother's death and then the disappearance of a local girl, and her childhood obsession with finding out about her mother's teenage years and the mysterious K, who may have been her father.

The abduction of Rosie raises tension in the community but this remains mostly on the periphery of Evie's concerns. She befriends a local man Billy who, having been injured by a horse as a teenager, has been living on the edge of village society, and through him learns much of her mother's history. Mainly the story is about her relationship with her grandparents, and also Daniel, the young farm worker who becomes a reliable constant in her life.

The book is also about Wales, and farming, and attachment to the land and to a particular place. Her crusade to discover her own heritage is like an urgent need to establish a sense of belonging. She talks very little about how she felt at the loss of her mother, much more about how she formed new bonds. Then as a teenager Evie tries going away to University but finds that she cannot bear to be away from the farm, or from Daniel, and she seems to accept that they will inevitably be the ongoing centre of her life.

Beautifully written and very atmospheric, though I'm not sure it would tempt many people to the wet and windswept hillsides of Wales, but you have a wonderful picture of a warm, close knit community, that is broken but then seems to be able to heal itself, and you just long to belong.