Theme: Crime

Tags

best crime novels, book club, crime books, online book club

Our theme for this week’s book group is Crime. Here are what members wrote about their favourite crime writers and books:

Christine A:

The Cutting Room – Jane Casey

For this theme I thought I’d better read something current and, as Jane Casey frequently features in The Sunday Times bestseller list and the ST is serialising her latest book, I decided to download that. I like reading about the River Thames and the fact that the body (parts) are discovered by a licensed mudlarker got me intrigued too. I was soon into very messy graphic descriptions of violence, murder and body disposal – not my usual reading at all but I found the protagonist engaging and believable and against all my expectations I enjoyed it – partly because in the current lockdown I’m looking for anything that will distract me.

After finishing it I decided that reading crime fiction, the deal seems to be that you have to accept improbable coincidences, once done you go along for the ride.

Dissolution – C J Sansom

The first in C J Sansom’s Shardlake series, the Dissolution in question is Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and is about the murder of one of Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors during a monastery visit. Usually I can’t stand books that take liberties with history but this book hooked me in all the same. It’s a nice bit of escapism with good writing and the main character, a hunchback lawyer called Matthew Shardlake, is a very sympathetic character who bears his physical deformity with good grace. The worst part of the book is the ending – an improbable scenario set in a belfry. I was particularly interested in the historical note at the back where I realised that the author had done his homework properly and his broader historical facts were reliable.

Both these books are part of larger series. The Cutting Room is #9 in its series but for me as a first time reader it worked fine as a stand-alone. Apparently this is not so with the Shardlake series which should be read in sequence as there is an ongoing story and characters reappear later on.

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Tim: 

Dear Criminologists,

I confess to not being a reader of Crime fiction and only recall Murder on the Orient Express read at the age of thirteen on a family holiday in Spain; perhaps it rang a bell as we travelled a few times by train from Victoria to the Mediterranean, 3rd class, not in Orient Express grande luxe.

          My only other crime read which comes to mind is Appletree Yard by Louise Gough, which I think we may have read in the group. Not the usual detective sleuth genre, but a horrifying insight into being prosecuted for a crime one did not commit.

          Not that, having spent a career in criminal law, I am uninterested in crime, just because perhaps fact can be stranger than fiction. There is a murderess somewhere out there against whom I failed to secure a conviction at the Old Bailey! Look out!

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Ted:

I have read very little crime fiction.  On the recommendation of friends I have in the past year read Sleep No More by PD James [ Six murderous Tales]  and one of The Dublin Murders called In The Woods by Tana French. They both had their moments but were not that memorable. Inspiring suggestions anyone?

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Kay:

I rarely read crime novels now, other than for my work as a book editor in which I’m often editing or proofreading crime or thriller books. Starting to think about this theme, it then made me ponder on whether there was a difference between ‘crime’ and ‘thriller’. It seemed to me there should be but I googled the question and found this article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/perfect-crime-fiction-bestsellers-whodunnits-thrillers-leave-rivals-for-dead. This seems to put the genres together. However, I do believe there is a difference. A crime novel, to me, usually involves the solving of a particular crime and usually a detective or amateur sleuth, or perhaps a lawyer, is the protagonist, the central character, whose ‘job’ it is to solve the mystery of the crime. And the ‘solving’ is the very essence of the book; its purpose to the reader. Often a few red herrings are thrown in as devotees of the genre usually like to try to solve the crime themselves, examining the ‘evidence’ and characters as they arise. My mother was a great fan of Agatha Christie and loved being able to guess which character was the murderer before all was revealed on the final pages. In more recent years I’ve enjoyed this little challenge of guessing who the murderer is through watching the wonderful Inspector Montalbano on TV. I’ve also read and enjoyed some of the books, written by Andrea Camilleri, and once bought an Italian version in the hope of it improving my Italian, but it turned out to be written in Sicilian, so was quite difficult to understand!

Thrillers usually involve spies or someone who is running from some evil or threat. Think John Le Carre’s spies, Robert Harris’s historical thrillers and the dark psychological thrillers of Daphne Du Maurier.

I was for many years, back in the 1990s, a great fan of Robert Goddard. I remember even staying up until 4am once because I couldn’t stop reading one of his books (I was on holiday so such a mad thing was more easily done!). His most well-known book, Into the Blue, was the first I read and that got me hooked. I had friends and family similarly hooked so we passed copies round and talked about them, which is always fun.

P.D. James certainly sits in the traditional crime genre and for a few years I became totally hooked on her work. She managed to combine great tension and mystery, a strong engagement with the solving of the crime, with fantastic writing and strong characters.

There are some crime writers I get to read regularly through work and the ones I’m always particularly pleased to be given are books by US writers Jonathan Kellerman and Harlan Coben. When you have to read every single word because you’re being paid to, then a book that not only holds your interest but even sometimes makes you not want to stop working although it’s getting late, has a lot going for it.

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Margaret: 

They are all old-fashioned murder mysteries, and their presence on my shelves displays battered covers, fluffy pages and stains from my reading in bed with tea and biscuits – all the hallmarks of much loved rattling good yarns. All three concern carefully plotted crimes.

The first two, Brat Farrer by Josephine Tey, and Crooked House, by Agatha Christie, are well known, but I think worth revisiting. Brat Farrer was based on a famous impersonation case (the Tichbourne Claimant), and serves up an ingenious, detailed plot, with fully-fledged characters and a peculiarly unsettling atmosphere which builds up superbly to its climax. Suspense is powerfully maintained to the end, which, while being thoroughly satisfying, is truly sad.

Agatha Christie named Crooked House her own favourite book. It is her classic puzzle, relying heavily, as usual, on dialogue to drive the plot, a device which has kept her books fresh. The final unveiling of the killer in the crooked house inhabited by its family is clever and unexpected, but psychologically sound.

Both these writers’ murderers share a very distinct set of characteristics. I say no more.

The third book, by Margery Allingham also needs no introduction. Many readers think The Tiger in the Smoke – published in 1952 – is her best book. Here, we meet her detective, Albert Campion, wrestling, as so often, with a complex family and local London scenario. The description of a killer on the loose in the fog of fifties London is vivid and chilling. The events and incidents that lead to Jack Havoc (wonderfully named) becoming a calculated and cold-blooded killer form the main thrust of the book. Allingham puts together a clear picture of the makings of a killer. But only Allingham would also offer a measure of compassion and a picture of a torn and desperate nihilism, which leads to miserably anonymous end.

 

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Christine B:

I enjoy the books of the  present group of crime writers who set their stories in Italy – Donna Leon, Michael Dibden and , above all, Andrea Camilleri with his mouth watering descriptions of the delicious meals he needs to feed his brain, so very important for the detective, Montalbano,  in beautiful Sicily.

But, a big but, my absolute favourite is Dashiell Hammett author of The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man and his first novel written in 1929 Red Harvest.  He led the way in the States showing the corruption, rival gangs, labour disputes, massacres, a laconic femme fatale and the excitement of New York.  The  laconic narration throughout is shown with the detective going to talk to the female suspect :

She drew her brows together and asked:

“You mean he knew someone meant to kill him.”

“I don’t know.  He didn’t say what he wanted.   Maybe just help in the reform campaign.”

“But do you- ?”

I made a complaint:

“It’s no fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff, does all the questioning.”

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Louise: 

I have three authors to recommend – but not much more to say.  I couldn’t find their books among my mess of a library (now the weather has turned, time for a sort-out) so cannot review them,  but I just recall devouring them in my youth – nearly always read in a single ‘binge’ sitting.

One is the great Dashiell Hammett – 1894 to 1961 – and whose lover was equally great writer Lilian Hellman, of The Children’s Hour, and I recall in her memoirs her revisiting of their discussions about writing and how much he taught her. Hammett is the author most famously of The Maltese Falcon, but I remember him most for the Thin Man in a book of three crime novels I bought in a single volume (was fond of volume reading in those days). He is said to be the creator of the modern American Crime Novel. Also I believe the inspiration for Raymond Chandler – 1988 -1959 – creator of Philip Marlowe, whose books my father treasured and I still have, although I don’t remember enjoying them as much as Hammett’s.

The third is the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, 1903 to 1989.  His heady combination of sex and crime were enthralling to a young woman in her late teens. For me he captured an era of seedy thrills laced with grit and intoxication and grit,  just as Hammett did. I headed to Paris on my honeymoon partly in memory of reading his books (which may not have been set there) and we did find ourselves, being low in cash, spending our week in what turned out to be a former (I thought) brothel on the Left Bank in view of Notre Dame. But the glamour and the thrills had gone. As has that era of crime.   And now I am hooked on TV crime drama which, somewhat sadly, has taken the place of great, thrilling crime reading.

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Do let us know about your favourite crime writers!

 

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Book Review: ‘The Years’ by Annie Ernaux

Our reading choice this week was Annie Ernaux’s The Years. I mistakenly listed it as a ‘novella’ (it was for our short stories/short book evening) but it is in fact non-fiction. Tim chose it and here’s what he has to say about it:

Tim:

I chanced upon this book – maybe a Guardian review – and ordered it. I hope you have secured a copy, it is sold out in some sources  Read the Guardian review, much more erudite than my random comments.

Part of its appeal to me is that Annie E is my contemporary and the book could be said to be a stream of consciousness from birth /childhood in 1940 until her retirement as a teacher/writer c.2006. She has gone on her recherché du temps perdu and for me has found much which is nearly lost .

I hope you will not be put off by the fact that this is the search of a woman brought up in France, educated and working in France. I feel our countries and the lives we have lived on both sides of La Manche have so much in common that there are numerous resonances. Perhaps not a book for for the Brexit attitude.

I am an ardent Francophile; I spent time with a French family in my teens who became lifelong friends and I worked in France for a year in 1962/3. Many visits, especially to Paris, and holidays followed.

The book is continuous with no chapters; however the nearest to chapters are memories aroused by photographs in chronological order, I’ve counted ten, sepia, black and white, the arrival of colour and then – remember? – the cine camera!

She grew up in a working class rural background. “For some education was a chance to escape.”

“The increasing rapid arrival of new things drove  the past away ……people just wanted to posses them.”

“The dreams of writing in a language no one knows ……words are ‘little embroidery stiches around a tablecloth of night.”

Teenage years are well portrayed, especially young sex, no PILL and then its arrival. “The thing most forbidden, the one we’d never believed possible, became legal; we didn’t ask the doctor ……that would be indecent.”

“We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.”

Of course for many years the colonial wars, Vietnam and Algeria were a constant. I recall a wounded young man returning to my family, both legs broken in an explosion, and we had to carry him to the loo.

Then De Gaulle and the Algerian war, raising terrible moral issues .”Torture, the cancer of democracy.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

Of course De Gaulle opposed British entry to the EEC , saying we were not suited ….how right he was proved to be .

With increasing material goods, prosperity came increasing pressures; she recalls her parents reproach: “be happy with what you’ve got”. Now we knew that all we had didn’t add up to happiness but that was no reason to abandon THINGS.

Enough ! Perhaps the raison d’etre of this book is “To save something from the time where we will never again be”.

Click here for the Guardian review mentioned above.

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And here are thoughts from others members:

Ted:

The Years is a mix of autobiography, history and culture covering the period 1941 to 2006. There is so much to this book. The political history of France from after the Occupation, the 1968 student revolt and beyond was of less interest to me than some of her other more personal insights of which I will mention a few;

 

Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, perhaps one of the greatest is a person’s ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age.

She describes the transition of France from an austere post-war culture, from her parent’s ‘Be happy with what you’ve got’,  to a consumer society driven by materialism, where people wanted to possess new things and did not question their usefulness. It was unfulfilling… ‘Now we knew that all we had didn’t add up to happiness, but that was no reason to abandon things!’

The explanation she offers for all this purchasing was that it ‘created a brief illusion of renewal. More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M’.

May ’68 became a way of ranking individuals. When one met someone new one wondered which side they’d been on. This made me think about how an individual’s Brexit choice would be regarded in the future.

With the advent of television, computers and the internet, a continuous recording of the world was achieved. ‘One lived in a profusion of everything, objects, information and expert opinions’. With all of these ideas ‘it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of ones own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live’.

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Louise:

The Years (a title shared with Virginia Woolf’s last novel) is one of those books that I know is clever and erudite – even a literary phenomenon –  and at the same time I found to be a great struggle to read.  I tasted a sample on Kindle (too late to order the book in hard copy) and then quickly flipped it into an audio book to get a better chance of completing the assignment, as it could accompany me on the daily walk.

And indeed I have reached chapter 13 so am close to ending. Integrating a read and walk on most occasions doesn’t suit me but in this case it did work. Also helped by a few reader reviews which I sought out about a third the way through. One reader luckily echoed my own feeling. This was a slog and life’s too short to slog through a book. Another however, explained the brilliant avoidance of the personal pronoun and the interweaving of personal, cultural, social and national history always without putting anything in the perfect tense and so somehow keeping it moving as if the passage of time was simply in the present. If it hadn’t been for this review, I would have given up.

So, it is indeed brilliant. And so much seems to run parallel (even if French) with my own experiences growing to womanhood and, more, it echoes the strange emotions that come up when turning the pages of a long-forgotten family photo album found at the back of a cupboard (quite a lot of that is happening during quarantine). Annie Ernaux (and her translator) have created an extraordinary narrative – with all the finesse and subtlety to mask what must have also been a serious amount of research into the times (unless she is also a detailed diarist) and make it seem a spontaneous piece of writing, completed in one sitting.

But in the end it didn’t do it for me. The long lists, the monotone delivery (not just the reader) the lack of spark, the (quite deliberate) distancing from actual emotion, seeing all things in one’s life, as she points out at some point, as ultimately insignificant. They are, of course. But life itself depends on not believing that. She references towards the end her (never my or one’s) own struggle with trying to find the right format to write ‘their’ memoir – this is also quite close to the point where she observes that everyone has become obsessed with identity – when once that was simply your name and picture on a photo card.  Yet somehow I was left feeling I would have enjoyed the company of the provincial girl she grew from, better than the intellectual she became.

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Many thanks to our reviewers. Do please comment below if you’ve read the book or have any thoughts to share.

Poems for Easter & Spring

Second Tuesdays are traditionally our poetry evening. When we meet as normal in The Roebuck pub, one of the things that makes this one of my favourite evenings with the reading group is listening to the poems that people have chosen being read aloud.  Sometimes we choose a particular poet’s work to discuss, but a general theme such as tonight’s allows people to bring their own preferences, which tends to lead to some delightful surprises or revisiting shared favourites.

Here are the group’s chosen poems for Spring & Easter:

 

Christine A: 

‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin

I love this deceptively simple poem which gets me every time I read it. Larkin makes reference to the cycles of birth and death which could be sombre but somehow I don’t feel that; I feel uplifted. The first verse deals with that special moment in spring when the trees start to burst into leaf

The recent buds relax and spread, their greenness is a kind of grief

The new leaves are a particularly vibrant green for a couple of days but you have to be quick as they soon turn darker. Not sure what he means by “their greenness is a kind of grief” but I like a poem where some things are left unexplained.

I also love the last two lines ending with an encouragement for new beginnings

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Here is a link to the full poem: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/

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Kay: 

I expected to find hope in my search for spring poems; a time of renewal, leaving the harsh, dark days of winter behind. Hope seemed a good thing to search for in these troubled times as we live through the coronavirus pandemic. I was quite surprised, however, to find some quite grim spring poems, talking of false hope, and immediately rejected those!

William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ seems such an obvious and even uninspired choice, but as I looked through my Poems for the Day and came across it for 16 April, and reread it, its beauty struck me again.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils

It’s such a joyful poem, the daffodils ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’ and ‘a poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company’. I particularly loved the final verse when Wordsworth ‘on my couch I lie … In vacant or in pensive mood’ remembers the sight of the daffodils ‘Which is the bliss of solitude’. In these days of enforced isolation, don’t we all long to find some bliss in our solitude?

In ‘Spring’, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring’ and of ‘The glassy peartree leaves and blooms’. And in John Clare’s ‘First Sight of Spring’, he writes of ‘The hazel-blooms, in threads of crimson hue, Peep through the swelling buds, foretelling Spring’.

Wishing all a happy and hopeful Spring!

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Margaret:

I meandered among some Scottish poets,  but decided to spare you all Burns and overdone vernacular.

But here is the lucid and lovely Kathleen Jamie’s “May”

Again the wild blossom

powering down at dusk, the gean trees

a lather at the hillfoot

                              And a blackbird, telling us

what he thinks to it, telling us

                             what he thinks…

How can we bear it? A fire- streaked sky, a firth

decked in gold, the grey clouds passing

like peasant folk

                          Lured away by a prophecy.

                                              What can we say

the blackbird’s failed

to iterate already? Night calls:

the windows of next-door’s glass house

crimson and then go mute

I think this evocation of the blackbird saying all there is to say about the splendour of spring is beautifully done. Leaving us, “mute” , with our stirred feelings.

Kathleen Jamie is a prize-winning author and essayist, who is Chair of Creative writing at Stirling University.

Another Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, has the same fresh, forensic, sharp eye for detail and abiding love for, and admiration of, the creatures of the earth.

Here is a little excerpt from a poem of his, “Frogs”

Frogs sit more solid

than anything sits. In mid-leap they are

parachutists falling

in a free fall. They die on roads

with arms across their chests and

head high.

( There are two more delightful similes to follow).

Two poems are enough, but if anyone wants to find awe and fear in nature, I recommend MacCaig’s “Basking Shark”.

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Christine B:

Poem for Tuesday:

SPRING
Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels,shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrushes eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring;
The ear,it strikes like Lightnings to hear him sing:
The glassy pear tree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue;  that blue is all in a rush
With richness;  the racing lambs too have Fair their fling.What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earths sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning.
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy ,
Most, O maids child, thy choice and worthy the winning.[Strange man, lovely poem.]

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Ted: 

My contributions which are just the first couple of lines of each poem are;

‘I Watched a Blackbird’ by Thomas Hardy

I watched a blackbird on a budding sycamore

One Easter Day, when sap was stirring twigs to the core;

[ It is so simply written but so evocative of the different associations – buds, sap rising, birds singing for mates and nesting – of an Easter spring day ].

‘The Enkindled Spring’ by D.H.Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,

[I like the fiery descriptions capturing the sudden eruption of spring’s new greens.]

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Louise:

I was late to this delightful task, so missed the deadline, but I eagerly looked through your selection, many old favourites and some lovely new delights to seek out.

Yet for me the most beautiful spring poem is so obvious a choice, that I was surprise to see it get no mention at all in any of the collections I looked at (I particularly recommend the Guardian’s choice published in 2014)

There is no title, it just begins:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough… 

This was the first spring poem that sprung into my mind when considering the topic, just as it does every year at this time: a verse so fresh and as renewable as spring itself when the first blossom breaks through on the trees.

What could be more simple than this 12-line reverie by A E Housman on the beauty of spring and the passage of time. Straight to the heart it goes – and that is just where its  delight lies. The poignancy of the season, expressed in so few words that it can only have been penned by a master of the craft.  All the other poems I have read seem over-complicated, even leaden, in their descriptions beside this one, although of course there are many treasures.

And today, in lockdown, what is better than the essential freedom, now seen as a privilege, that is expressed  in the final stanza

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow

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Tim:

William Shakespeare:  Sonnet 98 ….

                               from you I have been absent in the spring

                               When proud-pied April ,dressed in all his trim

                               Hath put a spirit of youth in everything

William Wordsorth:  ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ …….. I imagine this came to all .What I find more interesting ,and probably ignored by the Dove Cottage luvies was WW’s journey to Paris at the time of the revolution and his relationship with Annette Vallon , the mother of his daughter Caroline and what ensued.

                             Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven

Robert Browning:  ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’ I do not imagine that was missed …

Rupert Brook: ‘The soldier’.  Not really a spring poem but I always think of it with the Browning for its evocation of England, BUT he died in Scyros on 27 April 1915 so perhaps just a spring poem.

P.B. Shelley: ‘The serstine plant’

Wilfred Owen: ‘The spring Offensive’ – a grim spring .

Robert Frost:  I was hoping for a treasure from this great lover of nature, Vermont, but a quick search disappointed ….’Spring Pools ‘

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Wishing you a happy Spring. Do let us know your favourite poems for this season in Comments below.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Tags

Bernadine Evaristo, best novels of 2019, book reviews, Booker Prize 2019, Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo, online book club

Welcome to another ‘online’ week at The Richmond Hill Reading Group. We continue to make our way through our exciting reading plan for the next three months during the coronavirus lockdown and share our thoughts online through this blog. Members are contributing wonderful reviews of our chosen books or thoughts around themes each week.

This week we read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. The choice was based on the book sharing the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood (for her book The Testaments) in 2019. We all knew Atwood’s work but most of us, not Evaristo … so what would we think? Here are some thoughts:

Christine A: As I opened up Girl, Woman, Other and read the first few paragraphs my heart sank as, like so much contemporary fiction, it seemed to be issue-led and the obvious box-ticking – race, gender, feminism – really stuck out. As Evaristo says of one of her characters, it felt as though the writer was wanting to challenge the reader’s expectations. No bad thing in itself but best to settle into the storyline first. So initially I struggled but, thanks to Louise’s comment about there being a definite rhythm to the writing, my reading became more fluent. The narrative developed well and the characters acquired depth and eventually I found myself hooked. So much so that I agree with Philippa Perry’s comment on the blurb ‘some (characters) are so “other” I have to stretch myself to see them. Mind expanding’

So although it gets off to a slow start there is plenty of deft characterisation and witty one-liners along the way. The one slight gripe I have it is that it’s a very corny ending. We could have done without the Eplilogue as Penelope is a very minor character and those loose ends didn’t need tidying up. But that’s a very small criticism of a book I sank into and ultimately really enjoyed.

If you haven’t listened to it, here is a very good BBC Radio 4 interview with Bernardine Evaristo (and her family) recorded shortly after she had won the Booker Prize – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009jcm

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Louise: Somewhere, when I was prepping to enjoy Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel, I saw a review that went something along the lines of: “If you want to understand Britain (or it may have been London but I don’t think so) and British society as it now, read Evaristo.”

That’s a hopeless paraphrase and I can’t be bothered to trawl through the reviews again right now ( a few links at the end), but I will say that a thrill went through me last year at the announcement that  this wonderful, ballsy writer had been jointly awarded the Booker. It would have been a bit more ballsy of the Booker panel if they had had the courage to make it a solo award, but I suppose a cry would have gone up if Margaret Atwood had not been acknowledged (really, did she need to be, with a TV series or two safely behind her?)

I first read Evaristo, by accident, around 2004, only because her verse novel The Emperor’s Babe collided with an interest I was pursuing (briefly) in the Romans in Britain. I had never heard of her (perhaps her stellar career was in its early stages) but came across the book in a library and it looked fun. It was. I have rarely been so excited by a book. I secured a copy of my own immediately. The story is sassy, sexy and moving. A romp which twists and turns as you see Roman London through the eyes of Zuleika, a Sudanese girl, moving from the bed of her fat, boring husband to the arms of Septimus Severus, the Emperor.

So the opportunity to be pressed into reading Girl, Woman, Other was to be relished.

Unfortunately, like others, my too-busy quarantine life (stretch, piano, garden, walk + share today’s funny memes with friends) means I have only reached page 150 of 453 and am about to start in on ‘Bummi’.  But I can say that I am enjoying her characters at least as much as the Babe. It’s a very different sort of book, of course: the meter is more sophisticated, skilfully mingling prose and verse – the rhyming couplets have been left behind –  and the subject matter is not as close to my interests as Roman London,  so it has taken a bit more dedication to engage with.  And I do feel, as the reviewer said, that through the female stories read so far, I have gained an insight  that people of my ilk and age group rarely get, into contemporary London as she is lived now. Or was before the Quarantine. It is a wonderful speculation to think what Amma, Yazz, Dominque and Carole would be doing with the lockdown.

Also I love a storyline where the characters overlap but no one dominates – the women come forward and fade back, heard in their own voice and seen through each other’s eyes. It is a much more sophisticated rendition than the tiresome novel form which sees action moving chapter by chapter through different alternating worlds with alternating protagonists whose fate is inevitably at the end going to prove it has been mingled all along.

In some ways I regret (with Tim) that this is a woman-only view – can someone recommend something written about what it is like to be a black man these days?  But then women are Evaristo’s territory and the book’s strength is that she has carefully selected her characters to represent what she feels are the 12 archetypes of black womanhood in Britain today and she stays focussed on her portrayal.  A magnificent achievement. I look forward to the TV series.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/08/girl-woman-other-by-bernardine-evaristo-review

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41081373-girl-woman-other

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/bernardine-evaristos-girl-woman-other-received-half-a-booker-prize-but-it-deserves-all-the-glory/2019/10/28/b22212fa-f97a-11e9-8906-ab6b60de9124_story.html

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/clare-bucknell/fusion-fiction

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Margaret: The structure of this prize-winner, based on 12 characters, and divided into four segments of three characters each, keeps the reader on his/her toes. Although the linked stories structure isn’t all that unusual nowadays (think of Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive” books recently). I did enjoy the poetry-like setting out of the text and the  unpunctuated lines, which brought an immediacy and verve to the narrative. The vivid writing about the lives of these black women in Britain and America is really excellent, and the book definitely  scores on readability.

Once I had become immersed in the narrative, I began to believe that I was in for a true, prize-winning treat. However, about two thirds of the way through the book, the characters began to escape me. It was difficult to keep them all in mind, and therefore momentum was lost. Perhaps fewer protagonists would have afforded the opportunity to develop more nuanced character portayals and a more satisfying plot.

Nonetheless, the details of the lives of the women, and the analysis in detail of the many aspects of feminism over the time period covered is very good indeed. I also relished the lively, not to say ironic handling of current issues of gender and sexual roles.  However, it would be fair to say that some of this was delivered with a certain degree of polemicism.

The ending of the book, with the resounding,   and touching reunion of Penelope with her birth mother, Hattie,  is rather abrupt, but beautifully written. Who doesn’t enjoy a “happy ending”.

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Ted: I have managed to read to page 276. It was initially quite daunting and took me about 50 pages to get into the swing, but by the third character’s story I found it enjoyable. I actually found the unusual style of writing, spontaneous and easy to read.

 

There are threads connecting all of the different characters which added to the interest. Some characters were more appealing than others. There were some very funny situations described by Amma but in that first chapter I found her almost trying too hard to make clever gags. The novel changed pace in Yazz and settled in the Dominique story which became a really chilling description of a controlling, abusive relationship. There are other interesting stories…. Carole, who escapes her inner city comprehensive background by winning place at Oxford and becoming a City Banker. Her mother Bummi’s story is of a struggle which began as a child in the Niger Delta, migration to Britain and eventually founding her own cleaning business. There are  some with heart breaking stories like Shirley’s mother Winsome who came from Barbados to an unwelcoming and alien country. 

 

Some of the characters and their backgrounds are quite unknown to me but it is an insightful account of black women’s lives in Britain of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Fascinating reading and I will finish the book!

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Kay: I’ve only had time to read about the first hundred pages (won’t bore you with excuses!), but have to say that I was hooked from the first page. It was one of those rare and magical times when you start reading a book and know you’re going to love it … and so far I haven’t been disappointed. I love the way it’s written; the rhythm and quite fast pace; the poetical lack of punctuation that contributes to the sense of flow, a kind of stream of consciousness from whichever character is focused on in the chapter. I like its wit and how so much rings true in just odd words and sentence. Can’t wait to read more … in fact I decided not to speed read it to have finished it for today because I want to savour it all!

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I hope our reviews have inspired you to read Evaristo’s book. If you’ve already read it, please share your thoughts in Comments below. We’d love to hear from you!