Inside the Wave

I have been reading 'Inside The Wave' by Helen Dunmore for a few weeks, kept on the bedside table. I have loved her novels and was saddened to read of her death from cancer last year. I had not come across her poetry before, and look forward to reading more of her collections. 

This one, written during her illness, is warm and friendly, reflecting occasionally on her imminent death but more often simply nostalgic. I loved 'Leave the door open' because it reminded me of my own childhood, it is so full of atmospheric details:

"Leave the door open! We cheep and command
From the shared double bed or from the cot
With the bars that make tigers out of the dark.
We want the fume and coil of your cigarettes,
The smoke that has embraced us from birth,

The click of your footsteps in the wooden landing,
The wedge of light that parts us from the dark" (p.22)

And 'The Duration' telling of an old couple visiting the same beach, but without their son who has grown and left:

"Here is the place where he built his dam
Year after year. See, the stream still comes down
Just as it did, and spreads itself on the sand" (p.41)

She has such a lovely eye for tiny detail, and taking the most unassuming of subjects. In 'Ten Books' she describes examining old books of her father's before they are consigned to the tip:

"MacNeice, freckled with brown
From many damps in many different houses.
On the inner page, under my father's autograph
An early flourish of blue crayon
Where I scribbled a figure so primitive
There are not even legs for it to walk upon." (p.61)

But it is death that she returns to at intervals and they were the ones that struck me, poignant but utterly without self-pity, truly someone come to terms with their mortality. In 'September Rain', the penultimate poem:

"I lie and listen
And the life in me stirs like a tide
That knows when it must be gone.

I am on the deep deep water 
Lightly held by one ankle
Out of my depth, waiting." (p.65)

And comparing herself to a flower, in 'My life's stem was cut':

"Wait while the sun moves
And the bees finish their dancing,
I know I am dying
But why not keep flowering
As long as I can
From my cut stem?" (p.23)

The one I felt captured the mood is called 'The shaft', it seems to encapsulate her persistence in seeing the beauty of life:

I don't need to go to the sun -
It lies on my pillow.

Without movement or speech
Day deepens its sweetness.

Sea shanties from the water,
A brush of traffic,

But it's quiet here.
Why would have thought that pain

And weakness had such gifts
Hidden in their rough hearts?" (p.21)

A collection to come back and back to, to copy out and pin up, tiny exquisite moments of appreciation of life.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither (not an A to Z post)

'Spill Simmer Falter Wither' by Sara Baume (who's website has pictures of dead animals, so I think I can see where some of the images in the book have come from) is a most unsettling book. It is sad, without any redeeming moments. The blurb on the back describes it as showing 'the restorative power of friendship' but I did not get that *at all*. It concerns the life of Ray, who describes himself as 'old' but is only 57, who has lived his entire life in his father's house (which he never refers to as his home), utterly without companionship, who adopts an equally damaged dog. 

"I'm a boulder of a man. Shabbily dressed and sketchily bearded. Steamrolled features and iron-filing stubble. When I stand still, I stoop, weighted down by my own lump of fear. When I move, my clodhopper feet and mismeasured legs make me pitch and clump. My calloused kneecaps pop in and out of my shredded jeans and my hands flail gracelessly, stupidly. I've always struggled with my hands. I've never known exactly what to do with them when they're not being flailed." (p.11)

She captures something so utterly pitiful that you are bound to read on with horrified fascination, wondering how a person could feel this way and carry on. 

"Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that's in me. It's in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It's in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I've given you for granted. My sadness isn't a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop." (p.51)

"When I was about as tall as the letter slot and riding in the back of my father's car, we were passing through town one day, driving along the main street, and I remember seeing a woman through the window, standing in her doorway. After a moment she turned and went back inside, closing the door behind her, and then of course I couldn't see her any more. I know it sounds like nothing much, but it was the first time I realised that other people's lives go on. All the time, out of sight and without me. It was the first time I realised that everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless." (p.98)

He avoids contact with the people in the village, having the same meaningless exchange with the man in the shop, always wary and self-conscious of his own difference:

"They've long since marked me down as strange, a strange man, I am a strange man. And it's because of my strangeness that they make a special point of knowing where I live. And they wait, and have been waiting all the time I've been in this house in this village, all my life, for strange things to happen for which they can finger me, for which they can have me and my threatening strangeness removed." (p.117)

The dog attacks another dog, it's what he's been bred and trained to do, and when the dog warden comes to take him away the man panics, and they run away. 

"It's hard to learn anew how to make it through from dawn to dark without all of the props and pointers inside me father's house. Without plant-watering, yard-pottering, chair-rocking and channel-zapping. I expected it would be exciting; I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don't, it's terrifying." (p.135)

The driving, driving, driving is as meaningless and repetitive as his former existence. They are going nowhere, running away, but towards nothing, just round in circles. The few times he encounters other human beings, people who show any sign of friendliness, he backs away, and is afraid. He has become attached to the dog, but the dog is a nasty little thing and does not improve with companionship, does not appear to reciprocate his loyalty. 

Looking at the pictures on Sara's website, there is even the porpoise which appears in the book, you see a morbid fascination with death, which comes through in the man's thoughts:

"Hares and mice, wagtail and rooks, squirrels and mink. Every kind of creature every kind of killed. Eviscerated and decapitated, lobotomised and disembowelled. Sometimes the only remains are a puff of uprooted plumage, pale down dancing in the whoomph of air from passing vehicles, no sign of the bird from which it was bashed loose. The people inside the grim reaper cars don't care, they have places to go, they keep going. Now we circle the roundabout and circle again, and as we circle, I watch the traffic. I wonder where everyone is going. And I wonder if any of the road-kill creatures actually wanted to die, and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn't bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn't stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no one to talk to." (p.148)

There is a tiny moment when they find themselves at a farmer's market and he is offered a sample of tapenade on tiny bread. He takes some and is overwhelmed, as if really tasting something for the first time. He says he feels like an ordinary person, doing an ordinary thing, and when the girl smiles he feels it is real. I wanted it to mean something, for him to see a way to connect with others, but it is too late and he is too far away. Later:

"I'm still holding the jar-shaped paper bag in my hand. I place it down beside me. But as I place it down I start to wonder if maybe I didn't seem to regular in the market after all, inconspicuous, unsuspicious. Maybe the girl at the tapenade stall was conniving against us all along. Maybe what we've been given is a poisoned dose, a jar reserved for those who seem strange, those who walk the streets unarmed with tiny screens. Now I knock the bag onto the floor mat with a sweep of my fist, now I lean over and push it beneath the passenger seat." (p.219)

I am not sure what to conclude. It is a beautifully written book, very intense, but I found myself sucked in to the man's character, there is no relief from him because it follows his thoughts. You seek an explanation for how and why he ended up like this, but it is not really forthcoming, and his acceptance of his existence is almost the most soul-crushing part of the tale. I would probably avoid it if you are having worries about the meaning of life.

That was then and this is now

Much as I admire Ali Smith sometimes I feel that some writers regularly dominate the shortlists for book prizes and they squeeze out other potential new writing talent; it would be nice if the judges could spread the attention around a little more. Having said that she is a writer who is doing interesting writing, and, from this article in the Guardian, sounds like a really interesting person. I picked this book, 'How to be both', for the Weirdathon challenge because of the way she has played with the narrative structure: the book is in two parts, and in half of the books the story of George is first, and in half the story of Francesco. Depending on your copy your reading of the story will be different, and thus your perception of the narrative. I borrowed the book from the library and that copy had Francesco's story first. I could not figure out what was going on, I thought it was going to be all avant-garde and impenetrable, and took it back to the library. This copy came to me via Simon Savage in a freebie package from Penguin Books, and it has George's story first, and it completely gripped me, I read it in about two days. This is not going to be a long waffly review, because when I really love a book I often don't stop to write down any quotes, it's as if the writing just floats though your head and transfers the story to your brain by osmosis. You end up with an intuitive sense of what she is writing rather than a series of hard and fast events and images. 

SPOILERS
George's mother has died and in struggling to make sense of it she begins to revisit memories of their trip to Italy to see the frescos of Francesco del Cossa. She becomes something of an observer: of the painting by Francesco in the National Gallery, of her mother's former 'friend', of a young girl in a pornographic video, and of the slowly mouldering ceiling of her bedroom. It's as if she wants to take a step back from the world, not be part of it. Her bond with her younger brother, and a new friendship with H become the only things keeping her sane. Mirrored by the gender ambiguity of George's name is the spirit presence of Francesco, a real 15th century Italian artist who Ali Smith recasts as a woman, able to overcome the prejudices of her era and fulfil her artistic potential with the collusion of her father. She watches over George's shoulder, thereby also becoming an observer, of an existence that should be almost incomprehensible to her, and yet in which she manages to find parallels with her own life. So George's story floats back and forth between the motherless present and the mothered recent past, while Francesco's floats between her ghost watching George and the tale of her growing up and becoming an artist and the adventures that led her to work on the frescos that George and her mother travel to Italy to see. 

What I loved about this book is how everything is tied together, how the themes of art, creativity, friendship and loss are reflected across both halves of the book. There is a detailed description of the photo on the front cover of the book and Francisco analyses the image, as if it were created by a master painter. George goes repeatedly to see the painting by Francesco, sitting examining it in minute detail, and surveying the behaviour of other gallery visitors, counting how many stop and look, and timing how long their attention is held there. It made me want to visit the art gallery and spend more time just looking. Dunk bought me a 1000 piece puzzle of Jackson Pollock's Convergence for my birthday; the process of putting it together is forcing us to examine the picture in detail, to consider the way the paint has been applied, to examine the layers and the interaction of the colours, to think about the process of creation. When it is finished we will probably either love it or hate it, but it has made me think more about how you appreciate a piece of art.

Here is George imagining the decline of her bedroom ceiling:

"Anyway, George's room, given time, enough bad weather and the right inattention, will open to the sky, to all this rain, the amount of which people on TV keep calling biblical. The TV news has been about all the flooded places up and down the country every night now since way before Christmas (though there has been no flooding here, her father says, because of the medieval drainage system is still as good as it always was in this city). Her room will be stained with the grey grease and dregs of the dirt the rain has absorbed and carries, the dirt the air absorbs every day just from the fact of life on earth. Everything in this room will rot.
She will have the pleasure of watching it happen. The floorboards will curl up at their ends, bend, split open at the nailed places and pull loose from their glue.
She will lie in bed with all the covers thrown off and the stars will be directly above her, nothing between her and their long-ago burnt-out eyes." (p.12-13)

And here the child Francesco, after the death of her mother:

"I put my head through the slit in the sleeve as if it were the neck opening: I dragged the dress through the house, me in it.
I wore nothing but her clothes from then on: I dragged them in the housedust for weeks, my father too weary to say no, until the day he picked me up in his arms (I was wearing the white one, big, filthy now, ripped a bit where I'd tripped on the stones one day and when it'd caught on the doorframe another, today I was all sweat and heat in it, my face a colour I could feel) so that the trail of the heavy material left the floor and hung behind us both over his forearm like a great empty fishtail as he carried me through to her room.
I thought he would beat me, but no: he sat me down still in her overgown on the shut trunk of clothes: he himself sat down on the floor in front of me.
I'm going to ask you kindly to stop wearing these clothes, he said.
No, I said.
(I said it from behind the stiff shield of the front of the dress.)
I can't bear it, he said. It is like your mother has become a dwarf and as if her dwarf self is always twinkling away in all the corners of the house and the yard, always in the corner of my eye.
I shrugged.
(But cause the shoulders were so high over my own deep in the dress, no one but me knew I'd shrugged.)" (p.214-15)

A wonderful book, a worthy winner of everything it has won. 

Sprezzatura

"And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura." (from the poem 'A Scattering', p.38)
(meaning a studied carelessness, especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature) Is that not the most wonderful sounding word... and a quality that I love when reading. 

I ordered A Scattering by Christopher Reid the other day, second hand from Amazon, but am counting it as being from the TBR pile since it has been on the unwritten list in my head since it won the Costa Prize several years ago. It was reading Joyce Carol Oates's book 'A Widow's Story' that sparked the memory of this poetry collection because it is also a book that reflects on mourning the loss of a spouse. Partly I admit I was curious to read if men and women experience grief differently; the thing that struck me hardest is that we don't. This piece comes from the final section called 'Lucinda's Way':

"Genius of growth and overgrowth, you planned this small
London back plot
to be where a gardener, a lone Eve, could lose herself utterly.
When I came out to call you in to supper,
or to the pestering telephone,
often you seemed to have vanished until I spotted you
bent over or squatting in the midst of some urgent green handiwork.
Lost to sight for a different reason, you're still to be found there
if I look carefully." (p.60)

and it struck me how similar it was to a thought Joyce expressed when trying to tackle the overgrown and neglected garden that had been her husband's domain, that she could imagine he was working somewhere there, companionably with her, if only she were to turn round and look. And again, they both take solace in the occasional forgetting, a feeling that the person is still there that provides some small comfort: from 'Late'
"Of course I'd forgotten that she'd died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress,
I felt the mattress and bed boards
welcome her weight
as she rolled and settled towards me,
but, before I caught her,
it was already too late
and she'd wisped clean away." (p420

The difference in their stories is that Joyce was taken unawares, with no chance to prepare or say goodbye, where Reid suffers along with his wife through her illness and progress towards inevitable death. 

The first section recounts a holiday in Crete, remembering a precious time together. I loved several part of this section, particularly the contrast between himself as a bumbling tourist, and his wife as an intrepid explorer:
"Is there anything more absurd
than the Englishman abroad,
with his panama hat and his hay-fever
firing off left, right and centre,
and his scraps of misremembered Classical Greek
...
But is there anything more sublime
than the Englishman's wife,
who is willing to climb
the rockiest, thorniest slope
with abundant hope 
in her heart, and an illustrated
Flowers of Crete in her hand,
...
While he perspires
under that dapper
but ineffectual brim,
and sneezes loudly, and sneezes loudly again,
the Englishman admires
his intrepid wife
and , somewhere in his brain,
begins to compose
a snatch of holiday doggerel:
his humble, private hummable rap-rhapsody or hymn." (p14) 

And then thinking back to the walk from the beach, I found this so evocative of childhood seaside holidays, but it is the last line speaks volumes:

"All but overgrown,
the twist and tilt
of that path above the bay
permitted a wading,
occasionally snagged or stumbling,
single-file progress of two - 
in which, more often than not,
I followed you." (p.19)

The second section records, unstintingly, her illness and death; the bedside vigil, the attempts to pass the time, the frightening realities of it's effects. But where Joyce gave an incarnation to the fear of suicide and thus allowed it to stalk her, he rationalises the threat, an attempt to reduce it's power over them:

"No imp or devil
but a mere tumour
squatted on her brain.
Without personality
or ill humour,
malignant but not malign,
it set about doing - 
not evil,
simply the job
tumours have always done:
establishing faulty
connections, skewing
perceptions, closing down
faculties and functions
one by one.

Hobgobin, nor foul fiend;
nor even the jobs worth slob
with a slow sly scheme to rob
my darling of her mind
that I imagined;
just a tumour." (p27)

As he tracks her decline the words become more poignant, the fact that her true self, though often confused, remained there:

"Food and friends,
treats and surprises:
all that she deemed necessary
assumed the tragi-
comic form
of Chekhovian picnics
at our end of the ward,
which she directed, or conducted,
with frail, airy
emphases and flourishes
of her right arm - 
the one limb so far spared." (p.30)

The third part, 'Widower's Dozen' is 13 poems, looking at all the different ways she is constantly brought to mind, the things he missed about her and venting anger at the world. He laments the weight of his soul, asks the purpose of tears and in the market he comes to "sneak a taste" of the "feminine element/his life has lacked for too long." The one from this section I identified with most is 'About the House', because it speaks of the private intimacy of relationships, the little things that have passed between you, things that you own, everything you have shared, add up to what is lost:

"The fragments of rusted, possibly agricultural metal
that she found when digging and that became
Mother and Child, without the Child;

the elongated Wapping-mudlarked flint
that, from its tilt when stood on end, got called
Russian Peasant Woman Walking through a Snowstorm -

these and suchlike trouvailles-turned-knickknacks
keep their place about the house, though symbolically inert now,
their only function to be a bother to the cleaner with her duster.

Nevertheless, they will stay there until a decision has been announced
by the Senior Curator, Department of Private Jokes." (p.46)


The final part is more a eulogy for Lucinda, a celebration of the woman, someone who lived life with gusto, I would have liked her:

"Did anyone ever match your appetite
for plans and projects,
for doing two or three things at the same time?
You watched bad television, had me massage your neck, and sewed
lavishly beautiful patchwork quilts.
...
Two or three things at the same time.
Can't you now somehow contrive
to be both dead and alive?" (p.53-4)
...
"RADA accepted you. You attended classes. Made friends.
Splurged on adventurous recipes for dinner parties
but, totting up the pennies in the ruled back pages of a pocket diary,
survived the rest of the week
on cashew nuts and packet soup." (p.55)
...
"Controlled, melodious, your voice rises up
from you through your character
and reaches into the large listening darkness,
where I sit and hear again
the lines I helped you to learn." (p.56)
...
"You're wearing home-made
Turkish trousers,
one of your fearless
unfashion statements;
shirt loose as a tunic;
wild hair bunched
in an ikat bandanna,
for extra buccaneer effect." (p.59)
...
"When we sold the flat we had lived in for - amazingly - seventeen years,
you visited our few, small rooms in turn
and out loud said goodbye to the empty spaces." (p.61)
...
(and rather beautifully, and like Joyce, hopefully, finishing)
"While the innumerable air kisses
we exchanged in passing
remain suspended to this day,
each one an efficacious blessing." (p.62)

The Secret Scripture

While knitting I have been listening to 'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry, which, I read on the Wikipedia page, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2008. The library has a very limited selection of books available that are Mac compatible so it was, I confess, chosen a little at random, but what an engaging book it turned out to be. Now I commented in reviewing 'The Gathering' that I did not read many irish authors so I am pleased to find that I have not clung to my prejudice. I read some of the online reviews and loved the fact that the book comes from his direct family history, he describes the inspiration coming from a comment from his mother: "We were driving through Sligo, and my mother pointed out a hut and told me that was where my great uncle's first wife had lived before being put into a lunatic asylum by the family. She knew nothing more, except that she was beautiful."

The story has two voices; Dr Grene, who is a psychiatrist overseeing the closure of an asylum, and Roseanne, one of his elderly patients, in whose story he find himself caught up. Both parties are writing their own stories, Dr Grene in the form of a diary reflecting on his life, his work and his marriage, and Roseanne, in secret, writing the tale of her early life that bought her to where she finds herself, a lifetime of exclusion and isolation for unspecified crimes. They form a bond of real friendship as, in the process of making an assessment about her future, he spends time with her and begins to learn about her background and to wonder, and then investigate, why she was committed in the first place. What is so good about the book is that both voices are strong and distinct, with such different experiences and yet bound together by this place where they have spent so much of their lives.

Roseanne is over 100 and as such her story is also partly the story of the history and politics of Ireland, taking us from the civil war through to WWII. Her family were protestants and her father may have been the victim of a political murder. Politics and religion both play an important role in the events that shape her life. The local parish priest is the only other central character, who intervenes in Roseanne's life at vital moments, usually trying to set her on a proper catholic path, and eventually taking his revenge for her rejection of his well-meaning 'assistance', appearing to have acted as judge and jury in the process of her being incarcerated. Roseanne leads a drab childhood and then, after the death of her father, ends up having to support her mentally ill mother. She marries happily, to a catholic, but of course is viewed with intense suspicion by her husband's mother and the community, but at the same time seems haunted by the loss of her father to whom she was devoted. Then she is falsely accused of adultery, abandoned, ostracised and has her marriage annulled, and is forced to live in almost total isolation. It is when she has a child that she is eventually condemned by both society and the church and is placed in the asylum. If that's not enough to send anyone mad I'm not sure what is. What I got most from her story was her sense of powerlessness, a woman to whom life just happened, with no sense of being able to make choices. You sense her immense anger and unhappiness over all the events but this is swamped by her feelings of guilt, that she was made to feel responsible for what befell her. I felt angry on her behalf, as I often find myself when I read stories like this, about women being judged and condemned as immoral, and punished by having their lives stolen. As she writes her story she is of course looking back across over half a century, so the book is also about memory, and how we create memories of things as we might have wanted them to be, as well as remembering things. Dr Grene gives us an alternate version of the events as described in a deposition by the priest, which may or may not be more literally accurate, but are still skewed by his own prejudices. Dr Grene is equally sympathetic, because he also feels as if his life has been swallowed up by the asylum. I liked him because he had obviously been rather introverted and self-interested and it is his growing relationship with Roseanne that begins to make sense of other parts of his life and quite literally makes him a better person.

Alongside these two strong characters you have the intense atmosphere of poverty, and of small town Ireland, narrow minded, inward-looking and intolerant. It was almost like reading a book in 'black and white', the sense that life did not have much colour, it was drab and an unremitting grind. But that doesn't mean it was horrible to read, it was so beautifully written. Good atmosphere is so important to place you right in the story, to take the events in their context, it draws you in and stops you feeling like an outsider, with an outsider's viewpoint. A sign of a well told tale is that you care about the protagonists, and I did. I loved the twist at the end which bought the story full circle. Though in some ways I wanted a neat happy ending it was satisfying because you felt that Roseanne had made her peace by writing her story down, and feeling that she had someone she wanted to tell it to.

Life, death and all that

'Somewhere towards the end' by Diana Athill, is the most recent of Athill's memoirs, written when she was 89. I am going to include this in my Women Unbound Reading Challenge because it seems a very appropriate book. She is quite a remarkable woman who has lived a life that challenged many of the assumptions about the way women should live. As a young woman she was abandoned by the man she was supposed to marry, and instead went on to have a long and successful career in publishing and to carry on a series of unconventional affairs, ending up living for 40 years in a comfortable arrangement with a former lover.

While there is a certain amount of reflection in this book it is much more about the adjustments, demands and compensations of old age. She is already well known for her candour regarding her sexual life, though very discreet she did conduct several affairs with married men during her life. This book reflects at length on the decline of her sexual life and adjusting to this new idea of herself. There is a sense of regret at this aspect of growing old, but she is very accepting of the changes. Her own health seems to have been remarkably robust, certainly she describes nothing life shortening, but she finds herself having to take on a caring role, initially, in her seventies, for her mother, and then again over recent years for her cohabiter Barry. In both situations not something she has relished, but something she has endured philosophically. She also discusses the idea and imminence of death, describing her mother's death most poignantly, and another experience at a crematorium which seemed to have quite an impact on her, emphasising the everyday nature of death.

Several of the chapters talk about the things that she has done to try and adapt to old age, the things, like gardening, reading and writing, that have provided her with enjoyment, and solace for the other pleasures that have waned. It is lovely how she is such an optimistic person and takes pleasure from the smallest thing. She is discussing relations between the generations, and how the old are viewed by the young:

"So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having." (p.84-5)

She tells some wonderful little personal anecdotes, in particular one about great-aunt Gertie, who's scandalous behaviour became a family secret. She was plainly somewhat exploited in her role at Andre Deutsch's publishing company and appears to have reached old age without much financial security, though I guess she is the kind of woman who would have found it hard to retire any earlier than 75 anyway, and her retirement has been pursued with such vigour that she has done much of her autobiographical writing during this time. She does talk a little about people she encountered during her publishing career, but I plan to seek out her other books which no doubt discuss it in more detail. She is the second writer recently to specifically mention W.G. Sebald as remarkable (Susan Hill being the other) and I found a copy of his book 'Austerlitz' in a charity shop recently, so it may very well move up the TBR pile based on this second recommendation.

The part of the book I found quite moving and interesting was when she discussed her childlessness. She admits to having had abortions as a younger woman, viewing herself as somewhat devoid of maternal instinct, and when she finds herself pregnant surprisingly at the age of 43 she assumes inwardly that she will do so again:

"But when I caught myself making excuse after excuse not to take the necessary steps just yet; I hit on the truth ; I wasn't going to take them at all; and at that point I suddenly became happy with a happiness so astonishingly complete that I still remember it with gratitude: my life would have been the poorer if I hadn't tasted it, and any child to emerge from that experience could only have been loved." (p.163)

The pregnancy ends at four months with a potentially life threatening miscarriage, an experience so frightening that it overshadows the loss of her baby; she is so glad to actually be alive her response to the loss felt, to her, somewhat muted and relatively short lived. She acknowledges freely her ambivalent feelings towards small children, but as she has got older the pleasures of other people's children, most especially those of Sally (a former lover of Barry's who lived with them in an unusual domestic arrangement for some years), seem to have becomes more significant. In the chapter about regrets (in which this quote appears) childlessness is not one of them. What she does regret is the idea that she was essentially rather 'cold' and that was what made her chose not to have children. Her only other regret is her laziness. It seems like a strange thing for such a woman to accuse herself of. Reading this book I wish I could achieve half as much in a lifetime, but she talks about all the various other things she wishes she had learned, places she could have visited or things to be achieved, and she puts it down to just being happy with the little niche that she carved out for herself and liking a nice quiet settled life. Earlier in the story she had talked about how hard it was for her to become a carer for her mother because of how much it disrupted her own life, how she arranged things so she did not have to move in with her. It is this essential honesty that draws you to her and makes her so likeable. She doesn't mind (another perk, she admits, of old age) what anyone might think of her, and so can be open about her own shortcomings.

I think she felt the need to end the book with a 'life philosophy' chapter, I guess you can forgive her a little self indulgence, because in essence old people can't help but think they have some wisdom to pass on. Her conclusion is not startlingly original, but it is wonderfully expressed:

"The majority of human being leave their genes embodied in other human beings, others things they have made, everyone things they have done: they have taught or tortured, built or bombed, dug a garden or chopped down trees, so that our whole environment, cities, farmland, deserts - the lot! - is built up of contributions, useful or detrimental, from the innumerable swarms of selfs preceding us, to which we ourselves are adding our grains of sand. To think our existence pointless, as atheists are supposed by some religious people to do, would therefore be absurd; instead, we should remember that it does make its almost invisible but real contribution, either to usefulness or harm, which is why we should try to conduct it properly." (p.180)

I loved reading this, mainly because this lady is twice my age; I feel like life has been pretty long already, that so much has happened, and to think that I potentially have the years left to do as much again is just wonderful. This book is a real celebration of life, from the perspective of age, but not just a celebration of what is past, because although she ends with a contemplation of what her final words might be, she is definitely not thinking that this is the end.

Two Books.

The Story of You by Julie Myerson. The lady in the library will usually tell me if I pick up something I have had before, but I think it must have been someone new so maybe she felt it was rude to point it out. Anyway, I have read this before. I started by thinking I had just read the first chapter and then taken it back (I sometimes do that if a book gets very overdue and I know I am not going to find the time to finish it), but then as I read little things reminded me I had read it all. It is a very sad book. It is the story of a woman falling apart. Her child has died, and in trying to cope with her grief she gets absorbed into an intense memory of an incident from her student days and the sense of connection it gave her with the young man involved. And strangely, just when she really needs him, he comes crashing back into her life. But the atmosphere is totally surreal and you have the impression that things are not really as they appear, and in fact they are not. It is almost as if she has to disintegrate in order to pull her life back in to some sense of reality. When she cannot cope with what is happening it is as if her mind creates something to help her understand what she needs and recover. There is a lovely scene towards the end where the kittens are born and they talk for the first time it seems about Mary, her daughter, without trying to hide from the fact that she is no longer there. It feels hopeful, that they will be able to recreate the bonds that held their family together. It is very intense in places. Rosy, or Nicole as her 'husband' calls her, is the only focus of the story, other people are overwhelmed into insignificance by the intensity of everything that is happening to her. The 'You' of the title is unnamed and slightly anonymous even though he figures so significantly in her disintegration.
I have read other things by Julie Myerson and have really liked her writing. I am not sure of the protocol in review writing. I don't want to spoil the story but want to write about the whole book. I think this is why book groups are good because everyone has read it together. Maybe I shouldn't worry too much, but I know it would annoy me to know the outcome before I read a book. It's not as if it is a mystery, and I had already anticipated the twist to the story, but I will leave it unsaid.

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn. Book number two was read in about 24 hours. That is a good sign. I read a review of this in the paper and requested it from the library. I was hooked yesterday evening and stayed up rather late ignoring the telly and reading, and came home from work today and just sat with my cuppa and finished it. This is very much a story driven book. The characters in it are all small and broken. The title tells it all really, everyone has lost something, and the losing has had a huge impact and caused lasting damage to their lives. The little girl Kate loses her dad, and then Kate herself is lost and her loss creates the ripples that overtake the other lives. Lisa loses her brother and Kurt his partner. Even the minor players are all suffering from these losses. They are all just very sad people. And they don't really get fixed in the end, but they do seem to learn something in the process of the story and find some comfort and benefit from it. But alongside the mystery of Kate's disappearance is this terrible shadow of 'Green Oaks', the shopping centre. It is like some gross parody of capitalism, soulless and shallow, where people wander mindlessly, not seeing each other, not caring, not connecting. It becomes the thing that is crushing their lives, even more so than the losses that they have suffered. It is almost as if Kate becomes their saviour, because she brings the other characters together and their need to find out what became of her causes them to find out what should become of their own lives. A lovely book, and a strong engaging story. A debut novel the cover says, so I will have to watch and see what else she might write.