Wilding the Tame: Two Encounters with Wolves

Wolf's Child, Wild Works in association with Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Felbrigg Hall
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall (Faber, 2015)

Two (artistic) encounters with wolves over the last couple of weeks have got me thinking about our relationship with the wild in ourselves and in nature, and whether there is a difference between the tame, and the domesticated. And just how easy it is to romanticise the wild from an urban lifestyle, without really experiencing it as it is.

Wild Works new site-specific immersive story, produced at Felbrigg Hall in partnership with Norfolk and Norwich Festival, takes us on a fairy-tale adventure that mirrors the Greek myth of Calisto - the nymph turned bear - and the unusual life of Peter the Wild Boy, an eighteenth century boy found living wild in the woods of Northern Germany and brought back to live in the UK.This is what Wild Works do: they set up camp somewhere, meet people, uncover stories, and produce theatre that has that place and those stories at their heart.

In this one, we begin with a warning: do not stray from the middle of the paths - wolves are about, and our safety cannot be guaranteed. Nor can it be for Rowan, mute orphan and heroine of this show, who plays her wobbly fear with strained abandon. We first meet her amid the orphanage of Mother, a prim and austere woman who has dedicated her life to creating civilised order and ladylike manners in a manicured house on the edge of a dark forest. But Mother likes to scare her orphans into propriety. and when Rowan is sent out into the woods with a shotgun, she begins an odyssey that takes in an erotic encounter with some sort of wild stag-man, a pack of wolves, a child, and an inter-generational conflict with Mother and her harem of order.

We're guided around the forest by a murder of crows: they narrate the story and entertain us on the long walks between scenes. The female crow, with her esturine squarking runs away with the show, so fantastically does she capture the playful inquisitive intelligence of the crow.

There are other triumphs, too - a puppet of a young daughter taking her first steps in the wolf pack; the image of mother riding upright on her horse before the great grandeur of National Trust's Felbrigg Hall; and the way that an hour in we realise we have left the path and are totally lost in the woods with no idea which direction lies civilisation. The sun has sunk, the sky is a blueish grey, lighter than the treetops shadowed against it. There are candles lighting our path, sometimes a blue tinge to our destination, but either side is darkness and unknown.

If there is a criticism, it is that of many large-scale site specific works - the shepherding of an audience takes time and, for all the efforts of the crows, breaks the intensity of the story. And while the story they tell feels wild and unrestrained, following a line of theatre goers doesn't. I found myself taken out of the story too often to fully immerse, which after the intensity of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing the night before, was a shame.

There's also a sense of romanticising the wildness. This feels like a story for an urban arts audience. Perhaps I just wanted some proper danger and uncertainty! But its an amazing spectacle nonetheless.

What Sarah Hall does in The Wolf Border is simultaneously less dramatic, and more creative. The novel is about transition and change, mutability, and an interaction between the tame and the wild, voluntary, changeable, permeable. Rather than looking to a mythical past for her story, she sets it the UK today, telling a story of rewilding a tame landscape as the old-order begins to break-down, and wild new possibilities open up in a newly independent Scotland. It's a cunning tale from one of the wildest of UK writers: Sarah Hall's oevre is packed with tales of altered landscapes and characters longing to throw off the shackles of conventional life for something altogether more elemental, physical, less governed by the mind.

The heroine here is Rachel Caine, refugee from a bohemian mother, who has for years been working as a wolf expert in the US. But her life is in transition, and following her mothers death and an unexpected pregnancy, she decides to accept the offer of an Earl who has an eccentric plan to reintroduce the wolf to the UK landscape on his vast estate. In language that is scented to the earthy, metallic Cumbrian landscape, we almost feel as though Rachel is some sort of shamen figure, totemically running free alongside the pack, guiding them towards their natural home. If there is a philosophy underpinning this book, it is that we cannot escape our nature, that we are all part tame, part wild and both parts will get us in the end.

This is reflected in the narrative of Scottish Independence, which sits alongside the main plot. But what starts as a naturalistic presentation of the UK over the summer of 2014, begins to become altered as the vote goes the other way, and the public schoolboy Westminster power-base is challenged. The portrait of Scotland is slightly one-dimensional; a rugged antithesis of ennobled England. But the border is both physical and metaphorical, a transition of mindset as well as of landscape.

Sarah Hall's writing is swift and enthralling, the plot sucks you in and her very real characters enchant. She's one of my favourite British novelists, and her perspective that sits somewhere between naturalist and farmer is an unusual one in the often too bland middle-England literature. There's much familiar about this tale, in setting and atmosphere. It feels like Haweswater meets The Carhullan Army, and I flew through it in a couple of days - very quick for me! - starting on a train from Lancaster to London as I mourned the fading Cumbrian landscape behind me. There's a thrill in the wild, it calls to us like a romantic longling for something we feel we've lost. Something human, though. Governed, by our fantasies and imaginings. Wolf's Child taps right into this, and is limited by it. But The Wolf Border takes a step further, exposing that longing as an empty misunderstanding, and presenting a wilderness that is. It just is. That's Sarah /Hall's brilliance.

Guest Book Review: Archipelago by Monique Roffey

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence. 
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest review by Judith Lal


At first, I was unsure about Archipelago. A few pages in there is a mundane description of  a father preparing some instant macaroni cheese for his young daughter and I thought it was all a bit tedious. But then suddenly it picks up and takes you on an amazing sea-faring adventure. In the process, it explores modern day piracy, politics and race, sex and grief, climate change and environmental degradation, and our complex currant relationship with nature. We also see a wonderfully moving portrait of father daughter relationships, often lacking in literature lately. I loved the girl child Océan who has all the resilience, vulnerability and charm of a six-year-old, and the nice descriptions of her various facial expressions and moods really animated her character. The rhythm of the prose seems influenced by Trinidad and is like the sea itself. The repetitions and easy rhythm seem deceptively simple and quick to read. The only thing that did stand out was the rather over used cliché of the sea as metaphor for woman with malevolent siren powers, but this small thing I could overlook.

The novel reminds me of Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver which I also loved, both coming in the new genre of clim-fiction. But reading this may encourage readers to try Moby Dick which is referred to a lot and also Old man and the Sea. Lots to talk about with this book, there is one erotically charged scene that could make uncomfortable literal reading as a post-colonial metaphor, the subject being large white man visits beautiful and available black sex workers on the island, but the scene has more to do with human emotions of joy and grief than with commercial exchange. Having read Roffey's other work, With the Kisses of his Mouth, I feel comfortable that the scene that is not out of place in the narrative and the portrayal of hollowing grief afterwards puts it into context. I'm interested in the way the author researched the material by sailing herself around the islands, there seems to be a real sense of environmental concern for this fragile network of islands. Nature is wondrous and scary, appropriate that the story of evolution is connected to the Galapagos. Just as we are connected to paradise so we have a responsibility towards it. Paradise is not isolated, nor unaffected by us. A prefect and appropriate summer read that is not afraid to deal with big contemporary issues. Archipelago is a book I shall definitely remember reading in a couple of years time. 

Archipelago was published in the UK by Simon and Schuster in 2012. Edition shown is the paperback edition, ISBN: 9780857203113, 358pp

Judith Lal works in the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium library. Her pamphlet Flageolets at the Bazaar was chosen as a poetry book society recommendation. Her poems have been published in various magazines including Poetry London, Poetry News, The Rialto, Ambit, Magma, Mslexia, The North, and Aesthetica. They have also been published in the Indian anthology The Harpercollins book of English poetry.

Book Review: More Than This by Patrick Ness

*Spoiler Alert: it is difficult for me to review this book without discussing a plot twist. As such, it may be better left until you've already read the book.

Occasionally, upon sitting down to write a review, I find myself trying to picture George Orwell in his 'cold and stuffy' bedsit writing reviews. And as I do so, I try to ask the question: 'What would Orwell think?'

I admire George Orwell for his capacity to strip away all veneer of style and get straight to the meaning of a book. He's a total utilitarian; if a book doesn't do something, or if it doesn't reflect a political view he is comfortable with, it is slaughtered. The clarity of his critical eye amazes me, even where I disagree with the execution of it. And by thinking of him, I try to engender greater critical assurance in my reviews.

Were Orwell alive today and asked to review More Than This, I fear his vicious pen would be scathing. For Ness comes perilously close to presenting without outrage a fictional world in which global collapse has resulted in humanity willingly swapping personal liberty for something safe and comatose. There is even a character known as the Driver whose job it appears to be to ruthlessly maintain the status quo against any challenge. To Orwell, writing in the 1930s and 40s, More Than This would have seemed startlingly reactionary.

And yet, in making this comparison I find myself realising how different modern society is to that which Orwell would have recognised. Reviewers of today will be likely to frame discussion about this book as another statement of Patrick Ness's implacable refusal to cow-tie to the supposed conventions of what young adult fiction can and can't be about. Ness is every bit as radical as Orwell, though as thinkers they are possibly as opposite as it is possible to be. If there is a central concern in Ness's literature it is that human beings are sympathetic, even when at their most horrible, and that an understanding of the world lies in understanding people, warts and all. Where Orwell lives in the black and the white, Ness is in all the shades of grey between. I admire Orwell for his certainty about the world, but I love Patrick Ness for his uncertainty.

More Than This begins with a teenage boy, Seth, dying in icy cold water, his drowning body smashed against the rocks. Yet he wakes up naked and exhausted in a dusty, abandoned world that appears to be the suburban English street he grew up on. Is this an afterllife? Is he in hell, forced to spend eternity on his own, with vivid agonizing memories of his life assaulting him whenever he shuts his eyes? Memories of the tragedy that drove his family across the Atlantic to America, memories of friendship, love, and betrayal, and all that led up to his death. As Seth explores his new world and tries to understand what is going on, we can't help wondering: what is going on?

More Than This is at its best when it is least dramatic. The plot begins being about life after death and turns into a science fiction distopia in which humanity has abandoned a dying planet to live in a networked virtual reality and yet doesn't ever quite get anywhere. But around this, we have a story about feeling trapped as a teenager and certain that there must be more than this to life yet not knowing where or how it will happen. There is a wonderfully touching, supportive loving relationship between Seth and his best friend Goodmund, that will see it challenged by homophobic people the world over, but which shows everything that young love should be. Ness is a writer with absolutely no time for thoughts about what young adults should and shouldn't be exposed to. If it exists, it is fair game is his approach, and I congratulate him for it.

More Than This doesn't grab me as intensely as his other books have. The distopia feels underdeveloped, the afterlife underwhelming. But the flashbacks are brilliant. I may like to try and imagine what George Orwell would think about a book, but I don't need to agree with him. Patrick Ness is a phenomenal writer. More Than This isn't a phenomenal book, but well worth reading nonetheless.

More Than This was published by Walker Books in September 2013. ISBN: 9781406331158

Guest Book Review: Fallen Land by Patrick Flanery

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence. 
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest Review by Ann Browne

Fallen Land is probably the best novel I have read this year. It is set in the present, in the shadow of the global financial crisis, but there is a feeling of the not too distant future about the events. This allows the book to work both at the level of realism and of parable, a device which enables Flanery to present an extreme and powerful vision of a failing society. 

The Fallen Land is America but it could be almost any developed society that is disintegrating or suffering economic, moral and social collapse. Its citizens have been cast out of what could have been a paradise. The American dream has become a nightmare. Built on the misery of others, the land and its people are rotting. This is a haunting and bleak picture of a society in which no one trusts anyone and where greed and fear have become its guiding principles. 

Patrick Krovik, the character at the centre of the novel, is an almost archetypical tragic hero. He is a hard-working, self-made man, devoted to his family, determined to make a good and secure future for his children but with an obsessive, unthinking belief in the fulfilment of his American dream. Instead of succeeding he loses everything - his family, his business, his ambition and his pride. He is reduced to living without dignity like a trapped and wounded animal that must be put down. 

Louise Washington, the other central figure, acts as a foil to Krovik. But there is no place for her memories or dreams in this society. In this world even social enterprises such as prisons and schools are run for profit and their regimes are organised in ways that are intended to produce unreflective automata rather than civilised citizens. 

Krovik is destroyed and Louise cannot survive so what is the future for developed societies? Does it lie in the hands of those who create obedient robots without individuality, personal hopes or a sense of community? And will the inhabitants continue to trample on the past rather than learn from it, pursuing returns and revenue at the expense of civilised and humane values?  

Fallen Land is an ambitious novel on a grand scale.  It presents big ideas and asks big questions about society and the direction it might take. It has and will, I am sure, continue to stay with me.

Fallen Land was published by Atlantic Books in May 2013. ISBN: 9780857898777, 422pp

Ann Browne
I have been an avid reader for as long as I can remember. I was fortunate to be able to share my passion for reading, writing and language first, as a teacher of young children and later as a lecturer. Now that I am retired, I can immerse myself in books even more. Being part of the 2013 Summer Reads readers’ circle was an absolute joy. I discovered new authors and enjoyed discussing the books with others. I am sure that the 2014 readers’ circle will be just as rewarding and exciting. 

Guest Book Review: England's Lane by Joseph Connolly

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence.
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest Review by Rachel Narkiewicz

For readers who can remember England in 1959 this was real nostalgia.  A country still recovering from war, with its hardships and stiff upper lip approach to life.  The memories of the local row of shops each with its smells and personalities.  They always seemed familiar and unchanging.  A reminder that so relatively recently fish fingers for tea followed by a munchmallow was a real treat.  It is a far cry from the Malls we now have, filled with food outlets full of choice and excess.  Where eating out is the norm for many.  A reminder also, that in 1959 people were still hanged in this country.  We might reflect on what constitutes progress in our society and what doesn’t.  What does remain constant is that as people we still share the same hopes, fears and aspirations as those in 1959.  We have the same secrets kept from our neighbours, our family and sometimes ourselves.

The voices of the characters in England’s Lane were strong and individual.  It was easy to identify who was who just from the style of writing and the language used.  Just as in life some characters were more complex than others.  All those in the book seemed real.  Even when their acts were extraordinary they themselves remained ordinary, which seems like the truth in real life.  We have all experienced surprise when discovering that, for example, someone considered an upstanding member of community turns out to have had their hand in the till.  The author has captured 1959 well.  There may be an autobiographical element to it or maybe he listened closely to the memories of others.  Whatever it was, at times it read as though the reader were watching a film; the imagery was that strong.

And yet, somehow this book did not hit the spot.  Considering it had murder, deceit, extra marital affairs, prostitution and theft it did not turn it into anything other than a gentle page turner.  There seemed to be very little passion.  Some characters were faced with life changing events and sometimes it felt as though their almost pragmatic responses were placid in the extreme.  It felt almost emotionless.  It was English reserve in the extreme.  For readers who lived in that era this could be a trip down memory lane.  For readers to whom this time means little it may have less appeal.

England's Lane was first published by Quercus in August 2012. Edition shown is the paperback edition, published August 2013. ISBN: 9781780877211, 432pp

Rachel Narkiewicz
I am originally (and proudly) from the Black Country and was brought up in an industrial area in a household with no television. With no garden and little green space the local library became my refuge and thus began my love of reading. I am sometimes the rude person in the room absorbed by a book to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

Being involved with the Readers’ Circle is a fantastic opportunity to read a large variety of books including some from genres I would not usually choose. I feel this expands my scope of reading and I very much enjoy sharing my views with others.  Reading their opinions sometimes leads me to reconsider my thoughts and look at the book from a different perspective. I read for many reasons - to escape, to learn, to reflect and also just to enjoy! I can (just) imagine a life without television, films and music but never without books!

Book Review: Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian

My wife and I sometimes play a game to select the next book I'll read. I take a selection from my to-read pile and, without showing her the covers or telling her the title or author, read the synopses aloud. She then picks the book that sounds the most interesting. It takes away some of the extraneous things that influence a decision of what to read, balances out my familiar tropes, and often comes up with interesting results, especially since we don't always share taste in books.

So there we were a few weeks ago, playing this game. And on this occasion, when I had read all five blurbs, I knew exactly which book I wanted to read. Fortunately, she was in agreement. Indeed, her first words were: 'I can't believe you bothered to read the others after the third one. That sounded great!' And this is the synopsis that won us both over.

One summer during the American Civil War, eleven -year-old twins Gob and Tomo Woodhull together agree to forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure, Gob suffers a change of heart, and when Tomo is killed in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo - indeed, all the Civil War dead - back to life. 
As Gob grows up his obsessions deepen and he attracts a host of drifters: a brilliant surgeon, a suffragette, and the forlorn poet, Walk Whitman, all of whom have lost someone they love. As this strange crew starts to assemble the machine, it comes to seem more and more likely that Gob's mad dreams will be realised. But the abolition of death and the success of the machine may come at a price more hideous and awful than any of them can know. 

And so, much to my delight, I came to read Gob's Grief. I absolutely loved The Great Night when I read it a couple of years ago, it was conceptually daring, stylistically exciting, and unlike anything I had read before. Gob's Grief is Adrian's debut novel, originally published in 2000 in the US and now being published in the UK for the first time alongside his other books - The Children's Hospital (2006), A Better Angel (2008) and The Great Night (2010). It is interesting to travel back to Adrian's origins as a writer, and Gob's Grief shows similarly impressive ambition and creativity.

Gob's Grief blends a host of historical figures - including Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and the flamboyant suffragists Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin - into a novel ultimately about the emotions that drive innovation. What unites all the characters is the spectre of death hanging over them: they have lost a loved one, or they can see or communicate with the dead. Adrian combines that anything-is-possible in this amazing new technological age attitude of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century with the trauma post-Civil War where the deaths of 600,000 young men are being mourned, and the assasination of a President has shaken the country: grief fuels change and nothing - even resurrecting the dead - seems impossible any longer.

One of the clever things Adrian does is take two things that must have seemed impossible in the 1860s - resurrecting the dead and equal rights for women - and tie them together so that they feel on a level par: each simultaneously impossible and yet with people fighting to make them happen. The plot then moves rapidly between transcendentalism and realism, replicating Whitman's creative development as a writer and becoming - as Whitman does in one of his most famous poems, 'Kosmos' - a hymn to the universe in all its strangeness and unpredictability. Gob's Grief feels no more 'out there' than novels like Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, a polymath approach to storytelling that is extravagent and enjoyable. 

And running throughout this is a heart-rending account of grief that is so powerful it can be hard to read. What Gob seeks to do here is construct an enormous monument to his grief, something that can express how much he misses his brother, how much he loved him, and how he would do anything to bring him back. At times, it feels as though Chris Adrian is writing directly to his own brother - whom the book is dedicated to and who died in a car crash.

A host a supporting characters feeds the plot and keeps it interesting, including Maci who injects a much needed note of scepticism and humour to proceedings, a scary cave dwelling 'educator' known as the Urfeist and a boy who appears one day, as if resurrected from the dead. This is a sprawling narrative, and there are many other noteworthy aspects to the book - not least the way that the prologue draws you in to deep affiliation with the character Tomo, only to kill him and not have him appear for the next 300 pages - and that probably says a lot about the book's clever construction and thought-provoking content. At times this can feel too much, as though plot and characters are secondary to the pyrotechnics on the page and the novel lacks a little central cohesion.

Gob's Grief is a engaging, rewarding novel, and Chris Adrian is one of the most innovative writers I've read in recent years. At its best this is a novel to delight both the heart and the head. And while it can feel a little bit like a debut novel that grew out of academic literary study of Walt Whitman, it is well worth reading, whether you already love Adrian or are about to discover that you do. He's definitely someone to check out if you haven't already. And Gob's Grief is a pretty great place to start!

Happy Reading.

Gob's Grief was published in hardback by Granta Books in February 2013, ISBN 9781847085818, 387pp

Book Review: Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (translated by Adriana Hunter)

'I like songs. They say things I can’t seem to say. If I didn’t have these rotten teeth I’d sing a lot more, a lot more often, I’d sing my boys to sleep in the evenings, tales of sailors and magical beds, but there you are, we can’t be good at everything, we can’t know how to do everything, all of it, that’s what I tell the social worker till I’m blue in the face.'

I read Beside the Sea on the recommendation of three fellow book bloggers, Farmlanebooks, Savidge Reads, and DoveGreyReader, each of whose reviews contained a phrase along the lines of ‘I’ve never read anything quite like this before.’ How could I resist such a tantalising prospect?

Beside the Sea is the story of a single mother who takes her two sons on their first trip to the seaside. Life hasn’t been easy on them and she is determined to give them one perfect weekend while they are still young. Stan is eight or nine and his younger brother, Kevin, five. The tale is narrated in the first person by their mother as a sort of stream of consciousness monologue; we follow the them as they check-in to a dreary hotel, stop for hot chocolate at a café, and visit the funfair. But as we read on the full extent of the mother’s situation starts to become clear, holes appear in her narrative, and darker intentions become worryingly possible.

At just 100 pages, this novella carries the tense emotional resonance of a thriller, utterly sucking the reader into the events on the page and bringing the lives of its protagonists uncomfortably to life. It is one of those books that you have to read in a single sitting – there is too much uncertainty to be able to walk away once you have read the first page. And yet like a child hiding behind a sofa from a scary movie, I had to put it down and send a tweet every five or ten pages just to break that tension. Beside the Sea gets to you. It gets inside you like few books ever will.

My wife and I applied to adopt a child last year. As part of that process, we learned a lot about the circumstances from which adopted children come, and this personal context made the book even more significant for me. For anyone seeking to understand the life of a child before being taken into care, this is a must read. The mother is flawed but sympathetically drawn, the children so vulnerable you just want to reach in and protect them. One of the most heartbreaking characteristics is the way that Stan parents his mother, remaining strong for her despite his young years, even while being somehow distant at the same time. He ‘acted grown up but slept like a child with no legs, like he was still afraid and didn’t want to take up too much room and get himself noticed.’

One of the things I love most about reading is that it is an act of empathy: that through stories we inhabit other skins and see the world through other eyes. The value of this cannot be underestimated. Our ability to understand each other and to look beyond our own surroundings in doing so is one of the core aspects of humanity. Beside the Sea is marketed as being about how ‘a mother’s love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay’, yet that should not put male readers off. Great writing can bring any character to life (metaphorically), and that is certainly the case here. This book lets me experience, even at a distance, the mother’s life and I understand that a little better from having read it. For that, I’m grateful.

‘We’re all walking on the edge of a precipice, I’ve known that for a long time. One step forward, one step in the void. Over and over again. Going where? No one knows. No one gives a stuff.’

The experience of poverty on the fringes of a developed society is not something one reads about in fiction often, yet is brilliantly explored here. Sensually this is an uncomfortable book to read. The characters are always hungry, cold, wet, or worrying about whether they will have enough money, and this grey world of limited horizons seeps into the prose. The sea is angry and crashing, the lights from the funfair hallucinatory bright.

The mother’s voice is strong and convincing, if unreliable in its content. Because we see Kevin and Stan only through the distorting view of their mother, her tangled thinking both illuminates and hides everything that is going on. She often mentions the holes in her memory and this creates a situation where the reader is unsure whether anything about this past tense narrative can be trusted.

Adriana Hunter does a magnificent job of creating a colloquial, flowing sort of speech-like narrative. The translation is masterfully composed and invisible. This is a story that could be set anywhere and although it is translated from the French, English readers will have to pinch themselves to believe that this seaside they visit isn’t Skegness, Great Yarmouth, or Bognor Regis in winter.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in recent years is that some of the works in translation I’ve enjoyed most have been those that a translator discovered, fell in love with, and took to a publisher saying ‘this has to published’. That was the case with Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, and is the case here too. Bord de Mer (Beside the Sea) was a French literary bestseller on publication in 2001, and so taken with the story was Adriana Hunter that she translated it unpaid, convinced that readers would love it as she had. However, it took nearly a decade before Perirene Press took it on, and she was proved correct.

Peirene Press was formed in 2010 to bring great European novellas to English language readers. They create a themed reading experience, curating three books a year that can be purchased as a subscription, or individually in bookshops. Beside the Sea was their first book, and has been followed by ten others. I’ve read four, and though none quite matches the emotional battering of Beside the Sea they have each been worth a read. I would particularly recommend The Murder of Halland (an deconstructed crime novel) and The Mussel Feast (a family drama that explores how cracks in tyranny can start to appear). It is publishers like Peirene, who are at the forefront of much that excites me in literature at the moment; I cannot recommend subscribing enough.

Beside the Sea is bleak yet riveting. It moved me as few books ever have. Most readers I’ve spoken to have been similarly effected. Be brave: it depicts life at its harshest but is writing at its most affecting.

Beside the Sea is published by Peirene Press (2010). ISBN: 9780956284020, 111pp  

www.summerreads.org.uk

To read the opening pages from Beside the Sea click here

Book Review: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon (Translated by Ollie Brock, Thomas Bunstead, Lisa Dillman, Daniel Hahn, and Anne McLean)

There is a passage in The Polish Boxer in which the narrator, a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon, tells a musician he has just met about his take on revolutions. I am, he says, ‘fascinated by internal rather than external revolutions…how and why someone is pushed toward a revolution of the spirit, whether it be artistic or social or whatever, strikes me as a far more honest search than all of the spectacle that follows. Because everything after that…is pure spectacle. Everything. Painting a canvas? Spectacle. Writing a novel? Spectacle.’

The Polish Boxer traces the lines of internal revolutions and the journeys of mind and body that inspire, ferment, and resolve them. Part novel, part collection of linked stories, Halfon takes the reader from his homeland of Guatamala, through a Mark Twain conference in the US, and onto an impossible search in snowy Serbia. At its heart lies a game of hide-and-seek as to whether the narrator and author – each named Eduardo Halfon – are one and the same. There’s also a grandfather who claims the numbers tattooed on his forearm are to ensure he never forgets his telephone number, and a classical pianist who disappears in search of the gypsy music he loves. How do our origins shape who we are? And what about our desire to construct identities: the stories we tell that can become more real than the truth? The Polish Boxer plays an elaborate and enjoyable game with all these ideas and remains fun and readable throughout.

Jazz music suffuses the prose. Eduardo is a big fan of the improvisations of Thelonious Monk and the narration works hard to create an impression of improvisation. You can here echoes of other writers throughout, dropped in here and there like indiscernible illusions. A considerable amount of action takes place in dark jazz bars, where smoke billows and twists in the air and conversations are had over lots of drinks. In some ways, the book is best summed up by the image on the jacket: wispy white smoke drifting against a black background, like bones on an x-ray. Unpindownable. Transient. Enigmatic. Descriptions are thrown out then modulated, everything is fluid, seemingly spontaneous. The ‘molasses eyes’ that Eduardo observes in a student one page become something else upon further viewing: ‘the only thing molasses about them was a mistaken memory.’

The Polish Boxer is a fun book to review. Halfon plays games with the reader, poses big questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, manages to be witty, profound, literarily aware, and accessible all at the same time, and then changes his mind on everything. I have a sense as I write that ‘there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.’

What’s more, its overall narrative is somewhat unreliable. This English translation takes a format that exists
nowhere else in the world. It is a combination of several works by Eduardo Halfon that are brought together into one new book; its plot and themes are therefore as much a creation of translation as of authorship. Indeed translation is the quiet miracle of this book: five translators worked together on bringing it to English, yet it doesn’t feel in the least disjointed. I am yet to encounter a reader who can discern a seam in the writing. And the translation is elegant as well as thought provoking, though one wonders why – despite four of the translators being English – they opted for Americanised spelling.

The Polish Boxer is a veritable feast of discussion points and thought provoking ideas, none answered, all which leave me with a smile on my face, feeling inspired and enthused. But then I love this sort of unspecific atmosphere. The Polish Boxer reminds me of Alexandar Hemon and Jonathan Safran Foer, not just in the experiences of immigration and journeys to eastern Europe, but in the mundanity of them, the drifting, the internal revolutions and the lack of focus. And like Everything is Illuminated, there is a sense that humour is used both as a way to effectively tell a sad story, and to shrink from truths too terrible to mention.

Dichotomies. Grey areas. Nothing is certain. Internal revolutions are quiet and frequently reversed. ‘There’s always more than one truth to everything’ says Halfon at one point. Or often, there is no truth at all. Merely memory and perspective. This is metafiction about the necessity of fiction to describe and interpret reality. But can we trust narratives? Can we trust stories? Can we trust literature? Halfon is drawn to the idea that stories are tools through which reality is made bearable and intelligible. Yet he is equally aware that this romantic notion is incomplete and that coherence and narrative are inventions of literature that have little in common with everyday life. ‘Literature is no more than a good trick a magician or a witch might perform, making reality appear whole, creating the illusion that reality is a single unified thing.’

The Polish Boxer is both self parody and a serious discussion of these issues. It begins in a classroom where students debate the merits of classic literature, particularly works where ‘nothing happens’ or the characters are dislikeable. Implicit comparisons are made with Mark Twain – that twisting, unpindownable clown -  and they are somehow worthwhile. I’m not sure how Halfon manages not to make all this sound incredibly pretentious. Perhaps it is because he is far more overt in his humour and one doesn’t fully believe he is serious about anything. This isn’t a J.M. Coetzee play on fiction and biography where the wit hides in between words. At times it drifts into being slightly too self-referential, and Eduardo’s girlfriend Lia – a scientist who draws graphs of her own orgasms – is one of the few dud notes of the novel.

However, overall, The Polish Boxer is a thrilling experience. If you like it, try The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy, for they share many similar themes. Just don’t take anything Halfon writes too seriously. Despite what the narrator argues in chapter one, there is no ‘correct way to read a story.’ However, his advice might be worth heeding in reading this book: ‘[let] yourself be dragged along in the author’s wake. It matters not whether the waters are calm or stormy. What counts is having the courage and confidence to dive in headfirst…A story is nothing but a lie. An illusion. And that illusion only works if we trust in it…Plato wrote that literature is a deceit in which he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who allows himself to be deceived is wiser than he who does not.’

Dive in! Enjoy the experience. The Polish Boxer is the first introduction English readers have had to a major South American novelist. I distinctly hope there is more to come soon.

The Polish Boxer is published by Pushkin Press (2012). ISBN: 9781408830383, 186pp  

www.summerreads.org.uk

For an extract from The Polish Boxer click here

For audio visual content of Eduardo Halfon discussing his work, click here

Book Review: Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura

‘The country was in turmoil. And there was besides: sickness and growing and dying. How could they do anything but give in, to what was obvious, rather than what was good? In the face of that accumulation.’

Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot, was one of the unexpected delights that come along only too rarely. The story of the final fight by a not-quite brilliant Mixed Martial Arts fighter, it managed to recreate the computer game feeling of having an opponent reach into my chest, pluck my heart out, and holding it aloft, gently squeezing it, from first sentence to final image. It revealed Kitamura as a brilliant writer in her own right; and an air to the minimalist legacy of Hemingway, McCarthy and Coertzee.

Gone to the Forest (The Clerkenwell Press, 2013) confirms such comparisons as entirely appropriate. With sharp, slashing prose and perfectly balanced storytelling, Kitamura explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation.

Tom and his father live on a large rural farm. Ever since he came to the country, the old man has bent everything to him. His unremitting desire, big personality, and ruthless control ensure the farm has been successful, all those around him reliant on him for their safe orbit. But now disruption and native rebellion in the country threatens all he has built, and ill health begins to catch up with him. Tom, cowering in his father’s shadow, has eyes only for the land. It is all he has known. Other farmers circle, danger looms. And when a woman named Carine arrives, the future – whatever it holds – begins to bear down upon them.

In a chapter of pounding intensity, Kitamura brings these man-made tensions together in the midst of a massive volcanic eruption. Fire and brimstone filling the sky. Blocking out the sun. Then covering the land in ash that falls relentlessly. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained.

There’s much Coetzee here, a sort of mix of the wild frontiers of Waiting for the Barbarians and the search for peace away from troubled times of Life and Times ofMichael K. What is particularly clever is the way that Kitamura subtly questions notions of affinity with a landscape. Where much literature associates native peoples with affinity for the land, here it the character of Tom – slow, passive, uncertain; Michael K with privilege – who longs for nothing other than to escape people and live in peace with the landscape. But he is less resourceful than Michael K. Where Coetzee’s character bends a spoon to a natural well and drinks a thimble full at a time – ‘in that way, one can live’ – one does not have the feeling Tom would survive long. And his father’s health is rapidly failing.

On the other hand, the natives here ‘do not believe in property until it is theirs’, at which point they subject it entirely to their will. Cut it up into little pieces. This is the story of the colonialists, but that is not to say that this is a pro-colonial book. It is not pro-anything. Merely presents a series of characters in a fresh light, and the tragedies of upheaval.

Gone to the Forest is a tense, expertly controlled novel. One to read in one sitting. It is short, and the prose races along at a pace not even change can keep up with. Katie Kitamura is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing, and this is a marvellous addition to the already heaving realms of colonial/post colonial literature. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere. 

Book Review: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Original jacket

'When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.'

For lovers of witty, arresting, unsettling prose – prose that reads like the best poetry - Swimming Home is a rare delight. The marriage of unashamedly literary and eminently readable books has become a hallmark of And Other Stories (the independent publishers of this novel) and Swimming Home is another masterpiece. From this first sentence, which introduces the feel of lives running out of control, of impending danger and lust and transformation, Deborah Levy produces a short page-turning cliff-hanger of rare brilliance.

On the surface, Swimming Home is riddled with clichés in both characters and plot – it is essentially a family drama populated by wealthy, artistically inclined characters whose lives are falling apart until the arrival of a mysterious stranger who throws everything into chaos – yet Levy takes these familiar elements and crafts them into something new. There is barely a sentence that didn’t produce some physical reaction in me as I read it. The writing is a firework spectacular. You feel the words, engage with them emotionally and sensually as well as intellectually. They rise around you, come alive in your mind, transport you to new and unexpected places. Deborah Levy creates a hallucinatory dreamscape of colours and symbols and metaphors, a psychoanalysts playground where every word, image, and object is significant and post-Freudian ideas of sex and death drive the plot forward. Swimming Home is a concentrated study of psychological states, of perceptions of depression and the impact diagnosis and medication can have on lives.

The Jacobs – celebrated poet Joe, war-correspondent Isobel, and their 14 year-old daughter only-daughter Nina – are holidaying in the south of France with Isobel’s friend Laura and her husband Mitchell. The atmosphere is taught and competitive, barely buried marital strife, infidelity, financial concerns, and work-life inequalities rife amongst the adults. It looks like being a long summer, particularly for Nina. That is, until they wake one morning to find Kitty Finch floating naked in their pool, red hair and green nails, arms pointing ahead like a starfish, like a superhero. Marshall mistakes her for a bear. She has confused her booking dates. Isobel invites her to stay. The mermaid steps out of the water to disrupt their plans and guide them through their summer. She is a poet and she is quirky, fun, psychologically unstable. She quickly becomes the centrifugal force around whom the other characters circle.

'Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.'

Yet Kitty is no femme fatal; she is as vulnerable as they are, entranced by the poet she has read and the words he has given her. She and Joe are united by their experience of depression and antidepressants. ‘Give me your history and I will give you something to take it away’, he has written about his experiences of medication as a teenager. There is a theme here, between knowledge and forgetting; the amnesia that Joe and Kitty resent is contrasted with longing to forget that Isobel as a war-correspondent exposed to knowledge of the bleakest things in life dreams of. The reader quickly realises that there will be things learned on this holiday that will change things for everyone.

Levy borrows a technique from Emily Bronte in telling a tale about women through the façade of a male central character. The women are not always likeable, but they are powerful, compelling and determine their own stories, act in their own ways, without translation by male sensibility. Gender roles aren’t simple. On the surface, Joe is a typically serially unfaithful bipolar poet, yet he also plays the role of sole parent to Nina when Isobel is away. The women are enigmatic, the scope of behaviours available to them broader than in many novels.

Readers will feel all sorts of artistic spirits in the background – Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Arthur Miller plays, van Gogh paintings, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca were just some of those that arose for me – but Swimming Home owes its compelling brilliance to the fearsome intellect and lyrical prowess of its author.  There is little to criticise here. That it was turned down by a host of mainstream publishers for being too literary for a tough economic climate says much about the uncertain, fearful, artistically confused publishing world of the moment, and their – sometimes - lack of faith in readers. I'm delighted that the Booker Prize has reflected the rise of exciting small publishers in its shortlist for 2012.

Swimming Home is an elliptical novel. Time shifts and disorientates, narrative focus moves between characters. Scenes and motifs repeat and evolve. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely,’ Kitty says on multiple occasions. ‘But you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.’

Liminality dominates. Swimming Home is perilous, teetering on the brink of dream and wakefulness, of metaphor and literal, of medicated health and unmedicated madness, of childhood and adulthood, of life and death. Water is both a refuge and a prison. Dive in, submerge yourself, and feel it surround you.

Swimming Home was originally published by And Other Stories in October 2011. ISBN 9781908276025. 
Since Booker longlisting, it has been republished to meet demand by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571299607, 176pp.

Book Review: Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Translated by Rosalind Harvey)

 ‘I love three-cornered hats, because they’re mad soldiers hats. You put one on and you feel like running off all on your own to invade the nearest kingdom.’

Down the Rabbit Hole is a masterpiece unlike anything I have ever read. Like a world-class soufflé it is subtle, complex and challenging in its depth of flavour yet light and airy in the mouth. At sixty-eight pages, it is barely a novella, and yet it is hard to believe more could be packed into those few pages. I’ve laughed uncontrollably each time I’ve read it. Wit oozes from every sentence. And yet the comedy is blacker than night; for all the charm this is also a disquieting and tragic picture of life and a biting satire that turns many of the giggles to ash in your mouth.

Tochtli – our narrator, his name means ‘rabbit’ in Nahuatl, Mexico’s main indigenous language - is a young boy growing up with his drug baron father in their palatial Mexican compound. He loves hats, is fascinated with samurais, guillotines and the French Revolution, and what he most dreams of is a Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus to add to his menagerie of wild animals. He’s as precocious as he is unworldly. Each night before he goes to bed he reads the dictionary and learns difficult words. Some of his favourites are sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, devastating and enigmatic; they form the lexicon with which he understands his life and horizons and the basis of his narration.

The problem for Tochtli is that his horizons are disastrously limited. His father, Yolcaut, is as paranoid and protective towards Tochtli as he is devastating to his enemies. Tochtli is not allowed to leave the palace, has no-one his own age to play with, and knows only thirteen or fourteen people in total. He’s not sure which it is because sometimes he can’t be sure whether people he knows are still alive or not, Add in the dead and he’d know more people,
‘Seventeen or more. Twenty easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.’

Yolcaut’s gang is the most macho for at least eight kilometres. They bribe, they traffic drugs, they have rooms packed with guns and they feed their victims to the tigers. Anything might happen and anything goes. Down the Rabbit Hole is a fantastical world, a nightmarish inversion of Alice in Wonderland that oscillates between realism and surrealism and by presenting such polar opposites manages to achieve both simultaneously. The genius lies in the way in which it is narrated. Imagine a more completely realised version of the child narrator of Room – or Alice herself – telling a narcoliteratura tale of guns and gangs and drugs and girls and you have an idea of what it is like. Adam Thirlwell describes it in his introduction as ‘a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.’  But where some experiments with form and perspective could feel academic or cold, this is as warm and engaging as one could hope for.

Tochtli is delightful. He has a pure visceral enthusiasm for life and knowledge and he recounts what he sees with macabre matter-of-fact vibrancy, without commentating on what he sees. It is his incomplete understanding of the world around him that injects the humour and pathos into what takes place. He sees things in black and white and by responding to them in a logical way, looks beyond nuance to see the bigger picture somehow more clearly. Because he is such a floored narrator the reader is encouraged to look beyond, to interpret and read between the lines of his sordid tale. What one finds there can make for uncomfortable reading.

With Yolcaut he plays a game where:
‘one person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.
‘One bullet in the heart.’
‘Corpse.’
‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’
‘Alive.’
‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’
‘Too early to tell.’'

Poor Tochtli wants to be macho like the rest of the gang (the only other option in his understanding is to be a faggot) and he makes a pretty good effort at it. His view of the world can often be shocking and alarming. But he can’t be as macho as he wants to be. He’s vulnerable, pathetic even, and without any power over his life or surroundings. He suffers crippling psycho-somatic stomach aches because he is allowed to cry when he’s ill without being called a faggot. At one point he becomes mute in effort to control his little world. In Transactional Analysis terms, he is a textbook case of an Adapted Child, and Yolcaut an adult incapable of being a parent. It’s a disastrous cycle of violence begetting violence, emotional damage begetting emotional damage. As Tochtli says in the opening pages, ‘I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.’ Later he goes even further, describing himself as ‘the most pathetic person in the whole universe’. The tragedy of the book is that he is, unfortunately, for once correct.

And all the while nagging themes of imperialism and failed democracy play out in the background. Villalobos has said that he wanted to write a book without moralisations about a subject that has been moralised too much. He achieves that and so much more. His exceptional control over Tochtli’s narration – he only ever mentions that which is of interest to him, no extra world-building, no wider context or history; hence the novels short length – create a claustrophobic, intense novella and he writes from a child’s perspective amazingly well. Added to this Rosalind Harvey’s adroit and inspired translation and you have a novel that refracts major social issues through the eyes of a young boy, creating a strange, momentous, crazy hybrid that delights and rewards on every page. In Tochtli’s words, Down the Rabbit Hole is an immaculate, enigmatic, and devastating book.


Down the Rabbit Hole (ISBN: 9781908276001) was published in 2011 by And Other Stories, a wonderful new publisher set-up on exciting and idealistic principles. They operate on an ethical, not-for-profit basis, decide what to publish based on feedback from readers, and believe that great new books will be heard about and read thanks to the combined intelligence of people. They publish four books a year, and subscribers receive numbered first editions and a thanks in the back of each book.
To find out more about And Other Stories, or to subscribe, see www.andotherstories.org

Book Review: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

‘I might be the villain of this story. Even now, It’s hard to tell.’

The Borrower is a bibliophiles dream: a warm, playful and erudite deconstruction of storytelling convention and celebration of adventures in reading. From the enigmatic and immediately engaging first line (above) through to its similarly capricious last line – ‘Let’s say that it does’ – Rebecca Makkai takes the reader by the hand and together you venture into the quirky realms of a tale which is at once both implausible and strangely emblematic.

Lucy Hull is a bookish children’s librarian in small town middle-America. She enjoys shaping children’s imaginations through stories, and delights in sneaking them books she thinks they should read behind the back of their overprotective parents. Yet outside of work she is a little bit lost: she never intended to come to Hannibal, Missouri, at all and now that she has, the rebellion against her father that precipitated it has lost some of its shine. She’s one of those lost twenty-something women, self –aware yet lost, that art finds endlessly compelling.

One morning, she arrives at the library to find her favourite patron – 10-year old Ian Drake: precocious, addicted to reading, and forced to attend weekly anti-gay classes run by Pastor Bob – hiding out having run away from home. He’s desperate for an accomplice and before she realises it, Lucy finds herself accidentally sort-of kidnapping him. Together, they set off on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to nowhere in particular, seeking an adventure like those they’ve read about in books.

Lucy is a borrower of all sorts: not just a librarian employed in the lending and borrowing of books, but an adult who has borrowed a child, and a woman who has borrowed her identity from elsewhere, be it the stories she has read in books, or those of immigration that she has inherited from her Russian father.

One of the things that comes across when reading The Borrower is how much fun Rebecca Makkai seems to have had in writing. (Or maybe that should be Lucy has had, since it is narrated in the first person, and intended as a book written in retrospect). The Borrower is sardonically witty and tricksy throughout, with set-pieces involving ferret shampoo and road trip songs providing frequently funny moment. Makkai delights in referencing and then playing with its influences and precedents. There are parallel’s drawn with Roald Dahl’s tales of childhood rebellion, adventure, and the importance of parents who make these possible – particularly Danny The Champion of the World and James and the Giant Peach - and the permissive whoever you are and wherever you come from undercurrent of L Frank Baum’s Oz books. This is a book for the National Trust’s 50 Things to Do Before you are 11¾ ethos: children being adventurous free from health and safety concerns and over-protective parents.

And yet there is a darker, troubling, side to these recollections. The spectacle of Lolita looms. Throughout, Lucy wrestles with the ethics of what she has done. She may not have inappropriate intentions toward Ian, yet she remains an adult who has run away with a child without his parent’s permission. And because, on the surface the situations are so different, it makes the echo of Humbert Humber’s claims at being (metaphorically at least) kidnapped by Lolita’s innocent beauty, all the more intriguing.

‘It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.’

There are weighty issues being considered here, but they are raised without being overly worthy and the moral questions posed by a narrator whom one cannot help but side with, even if you feel slightly uncomfortable for doing so. Perhaps it is because we recognise ourselves in her, in her uncertainty in herself, in her idealism, in her passion for books which emerges unscathed.

‘I do still believe that books can save you.’

Book Review: All That I Am by Anna Funder

“When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It was Monday afternoon.” 

All That I Am opens with history on a knife edge. The Golden Era of the Weimar Republic – artistic, progressive, intellectual, experimental, permissive, excessive, - is passing and a new one of extremes about to dawn. So well trodden is this history that we think we know what will follow, but one of the outstanding things about Anna Funder’s debut novel is that it reveals a side to the history hitherto largely uncovered: the early years of the Nazi’s terror, the persecution and expulsion of political opposition, the extent to which other countries were desperate not to antagonise Hitler, the long arm of the Gestapo reaching out further than anyone dared believe. As she did in Stasiland – a reportage collection of personal stories from behind the Berlin Wall that won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction – Funder casts a fresh and vibrant eye on forgotten stories. All That I Am is another marvellous book.

 

 The characters here belong to that Weimar generation: they are the World War One survivors who vowed that war could never be allowed to happen again, the political reformers who saw progressive social democracy as the antidote to imperialist conflict, the artists and journalists who captured the atmosphere of the 1920, the teenagers inspired by the language of the future.

All That I Am is narrated alternately by celebrated German playwright Ernst Toller in New York in 1939 as he seeks to re-write his memoirs, and an elderly Ruth Wesemann in 2001, who receives the recently rediscovered memoirs in the post. Reading these memoirs unlocks her memory and events come flooding back and soon overtake her. Between them, Ruth and Toller bring the unremembered – Hans Wesemann, Dora Fabian, Berthold Jacob, Mathilde Wurm (all whom existed though are here sometimes linked in ways they were not in life) – back to life. Their story is of bravery and conviction in the face of history, of desperate opposition to the reprisals that followed the Reichstag Fire and subsequent exile in London. There, powerless and with threats against their lives growing and the UK government turning a blind eye, they continue to struggle, desperate to warn the world against what is happening before it is too late.

The extent of Funder’s archival research is impressive, and her decision to novelise the events a wise one. It allows her to marry the personal stories of her characters with a broad brush stroke approach to history. Fact, interpretation and biography form the framework for All That I Am, but it is the fiction that makes it a great book. Funder imagines the characters back to life in vivid detail; readers will be quickly engrossed in their milieu, standing alongside them in terrified defiance.

This is white-knuckle storytelling. Through the personal narratives, Funder explores the experiences of the characters, the driving forces behind why and how people are able to be brave, and the results of that bravery on their lives and those around them. She adeptly explores the paradoxical mix of fragility and strength that can sometimes be the make-up of great people.

This is particularly the case with the heroine, Dora Fabian, a ‘sort of German de Beauvior: less sex, but more political”. She is driven by conviction in her cause, self-sufficient and no-nonsense. Ruth and Toller are each enthralled by her – ‘We were the two for whom she was the sun. We moved in her orbit and the force of her kept us going.’ – and so is Anna Funder. In an interview with The Scotsman, she describes the experience of coming across Dora’s story as leaving her ‘thunderstruck and irrational and besotted and intrigued.’ She is a compelling character and it is apparent that, for Funder as well as her characters, this book is a act of love, of recording her courage and self-sacrifice, celebrating and remembering her life.

The same desire to resurrect and testify to those past is apparent in the character of Ruth, whom Funder met in Ruth’s later years, and whose stories first turned her on to the possibility of this book. Ruth is the compassionate core of the novel, an unobtrusive observer of those around her. This personal sympathy could easily turn All That I Am into sycophantic fiction of the worst kind, but Funder impressively maintains a rounded warts-and-all view of her characters. Compassion is a constant theme and one feels that it is the challenge of doing justice to these figures that drove her to write. ‘Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as any’, says Ruth at one stage, ‘once you have imagined such suffering, how can you still do nothing?’

By presenting humanised stories, and enabling readers to experience these vicariously through the characters, fiction has amazing power to change our understanding of the world and compassion for others one person at a time. Funder and I appear to share this idealistic conviction. All That I Am is an exercise in proving the validity of this conviction. But more than this, it is a wonderful read.

The plot starts slowly, with more set-up than feels necessary, but builds and once the characters come into their own it swiftly becomes an involving, compassionate and wonderful novel of love, friendship, courage, espionage, and betrayal. It is both a page-turning thriller and a considered investigation of courage and conviction. The characters are tested at every step, and they respond in varying ways. Some turn, some break, none is perfect. In the end, as Wystan Auden notes to Toller: ‘All that we are not stares back at all that we are.’


All That I Am is one of five Summer Reads, presented by Writers' Centre Norwich. For more information, see www.summerreads.org.uk

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Read an extract
Anna Funder in conversation at the Melbourne Writers Festival

Book Review: The Great Night by Chris Adrian

The Great Night is one of those rare books that I’m impossibly grateful to have found. A modern reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is conceptually daring, stylistically exciting and presents a view of humanity that is stark and powerful and unlike anything I’ve read before.

It is Midsummer’s Eve in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where Oberon, Titania and their faerie kingdom have set up court. But the Great Night celebrations do not go quite as planned. Unable to deal with the all-too human feelings of grief and loss that have assailed her on the death of their adopted son and subsequent failing of her marriage, Titania sets free an ancient menace that threatens to bring an end mortal and immortal life alike.

It is on this night, just after dark, that Henry, Molly, and Will separately walk into that same park and find themselves utterly lost. Like Titania, they are each struggling (and failing) to overcome romantic losses. Henry, kidnapped as a child and now paralysingly obsessive-compulsive has driven away Bobby, the one person he’s ever loved . Molly is rebelling against her extreme upbringing but unable to escape the suicide of her boyfriend nearly two years earlier. And Will, a tree-surgeon, is desperate to patch up his relationship with Carolina, who discovered his infidelity and left him. All three have encountered magic before, but nothing like the faerie magic they are about to be caught up in tonight.

Such an introduction inevitably sounds bleaker than the book is. The Great Night is often laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absurd. Puck is given a new, ominous role, and the Mechanicals make an appearance in the guise of a group of homeless people who believe they can bring down the mayor and stop his evil plot by staging a musical production of Soylent Green.

Simultaneously, The Great Night is existentially mundane and magically extravagant. It charts the luminal space between dreams and reality. Through magic, Adrian presents the profound realities of mortal life, through humour, the unremitting sadness of loss. It is a book of opposites, “at the same time one of the strangest and most ordinary things” I’ve ever read.

Chris Adrian, named in the New Yorker as one of the 20 best writers under 40 years old, certainly lives up to that billing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now a fellow in paediatric haematology-ongcology, he marries literary craft with a visceral understanding of the human body to create one of the most explicitly embodied books I’ve read. The Great Night is psychologically explicit, mortally explicit, sexually explicit. His prose is unassuming and easy-to-read, a coherent medium through which to convey his unique view of the world.

I read The Great Night on the back of two stunning reviews in The Independent and The Guardian. It is a beautiful book to hold and to read and the praise on the jacket fizzes and pops with effervescent exuberance*. Yet just as there are those who think that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about as comic as experimental pile surgery, The Great Night is likely to divide opinion. From such a brilliant premise, the plot sometimes gets indulgently lost and the back stories of Henry, Molly and Will can feel a little forced at times. For some, it will feel a little too like a male sex fantasy in faerie land.

But for all who hate The Great Night there will be those who love it. I’ll certainly be exploring Chris Adrian’s back catalogue further and looking forward to future books from him. This is an intriguing work from a writer who, in a world where too many books feel like they were written from a ‘how to write fiction’ guide, offers a fresh view of the world. He’s a storyteller with an almost unbounded imagination, and he routes his story in the very human lives of his characters. This is exactly what modern fiction can and should be.


The Great Night was published in the UK by Granta Books. Edition shown is the hardback edition, published 2011. ISBN: 9781847081865, 292pp
* The praise listed on the back of The Great Night is some of the most effusive I have ever encountered:

‘Chris Adrian's life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor, his guide and interpreter, as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes. And every report he makes of that world enriches and enlarges our own sense of the world.’
Marilynne Robinson

‘Chris Adrian is truly brilliant. I simply believe him to be a person with a unique way of processing the world around him and the ability to communicate that vision back to us in what is often a startlingly beautiful manner.’
Nathan Englander

‘Chris Adrian is a novelist, a doctor, a philosopher, a literary explorer, the humble clear-eyed prophet of our time. He is an eloquent anatomist of loss, naming and labeling the bones and sinews of grief; he is a comedian dressed in sackcloth, a winking Virgil leading us through the circles of our own earthly hell. But he is ultimately a healer; the genius of his writing lies in its compassion, its ability to make what is broken whole again. To read him is to be understood: to know you are not alone in your misery, your self-doubt, your sins of pride, your wild joys, your insomnia, your madness, your desire.’
Julie Orringer

More on The Great Night:
Patrick Ness in The Guardian
The Independent
The New York Times
Review and Interview with Chris Adrian in the Wall Street Journal
Listen to Chris Adrian talk about The Great Night on NPR