The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, a visit to Sri lanka

Occasionally a reader chances on a real discovery. A few rupees to spare in Colombo International Airport in Sri Lanka prompted the purchase of a few books by local authors. Travel, if undertaken with interest in the world rather than the self, has cultural immersion and experience as a requirement. Foods, art, history, religions, cultures and music are all on the list, but literature and writing must also figure. What a reader would not predict from a cover that featured bananas and little else would be the fact that this set of short stories would prove to be nothing less than a revelation sufficient to deserve the description of “masterpiece”.

The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku is the book in question. It features seven short stories running to a total of around fifty thousand words, so is short enough for the traveller to consume before the west-bound aircraft out of Colombo even reaches Doha. But do not think that this implies something slight. On the contrary, the subject matter of these stories gets right to the heart of the social structure of Sri Lanka, its political and religious conflicts, its war, its highly unequal society, even its often fractious relationship with Britain, its former colonial master.

These stories address many issues and illustrate many arguments, but do not think for a moment that they are in any way didactic or heavy. The reality is quite the opposite, in that the writing style is sophisticatedly simple and transparent, the plots deceptively straightforward in their ability to convey complication with superb empathy. There is the Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim triangle, the Sinhalese-Tamil war, relations between the sexes and the generations, devastation by a Tsunami, the effects, intended and otherwise, of foreign aid, and even cricket. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will marvel at the brilliance with which these contexts are woven deftly into the tales of ordinary folk. A reader who has never been to this beautiful, troubled, welcoming and often frenetic island might even feel that these stories were the same as a visit, so vivid are the descriptions and so apparently real the scenarios. We even have a government minister being pushed though a crowd by the driver of his four-wheel SUV. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will recognise the requirement to get off the road. The reason, by the way, why minsters’ convoys behave so boorishly in traffic, is that they assume that bombs are never far away.

If this set of stories, The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, contained only The House in Jaffna, it would still be worth buying, just for those twenty pages. In just a few thousand words, Insankya Kodithuwakku addresses inter-generational and cross-cultural differences, captialism’s empty consumerism that sees personality as merely the sum of consumption, the nature of nostalgia, the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, the fate of Jaffna and, overall, the appreciation of life being a process of change. It is nothing less than a masterpiece of the genre.

And Insankya Kodithuwakku’s writing style is always beautifully transparent, always engaging and regularly surprising throughout this set of stories. Insankya Kodithuwakku certainly displays a great talent. If you know Sri Lanka, you will adore these stories. If you have never been, then they will take you there for an authentic, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining visit. Please do read The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

Though written in the mid-nineteenth century, The Warden by Anthony Trollope addresses themes that are highly relevant to contemporary issues. Prime amongst them is a consideration of the freedom and integrity of the press. In the novel, the eponymous warden, one Mr Harding, finds himself subjected to something of a public witch-hunt over payments of money that apparently cannot be justified.

Mr Harding is paid by the church, the Anglican Church, of course. At least that’s how things seem on the surface. He is the warden of a sheltered house that is home for a handful of aged and infirm workers, whose welfare is provided for by a long-standing trust fund. The legacy also provides for the allowance paid to their warden. The allowance is, shall we say, generous, especially compared to the funds that contribute directly to the inmates’ welfare.

Mr Harding has a daughter of marriageable age. She is courted by a Mr Bold whose character demands that he is duty bound to seek out justice where other may prefer continued indifference or ignorance. Mr Bold begins to take an interest in Mr Harding and the legacy. Stories - accusatory stories - begin to appear in the press. The newspaper, one in particular, is just not going to let the story rest. The unsuspecting Mr Harding is embarrassed in the extreme.

What the contemporary reader will find difficult in this scenario is appreciating the role and status of the church in the story. Mr Harding is employed by the Anglican Church. He is answerable to a Bishop, who lives in something known as a palace. A century and a half ago, the church was the very epitome of the establishment and respectability, whilst its employees and associates were professionalism and integrity personified. To some extent, they were above criticism and, crucially, they themselves believed this. And when the eight hundred pounds a year income that Mr Harding currently receives turns out to be misappropriated from funds that the bequest intended for the home’s inmates, all hell breaks loose.

The press continues its campaign. Both sides employ expensive, posing lawyers and both sides visit potentially influential friends in high places. And, in the midst of it all, we have Miss Harding on the opposite side of the argument from Mr Bold, her sweetheart.

But it is the involvement of the press that captures contemporary interest. Scandalised by the alleged mis-appropriation of charitable monies, stinking rich newspaper proprietors beat drums on behalf of the poor to make a hollow, if penetrating sound. The pursuit of celebrity, the nose for scandal, the propensity to claim a status above everyone else’s morals, all of these aspects of public posturing by the press remain familiar today. Apparently it was always in the public interest to sell as many copies as possible and by whatever means. And it always was the case that a public scandal over hundreds of pounds produced profits for the press barons measured in thousands.

The issues are all resolved, but not in a way that might have been predicted at the outset. A modern reader may well find the detail of the ending unlikely, but also it might be refreshingly unlikely. But it all goes to prove that in the last one hundred and fifty years some things have actually changed.

The School of Night by Alan Wall

At first sight, The School of Night by Alan Wall seems to be a novel about English social class. The childhoods of Sean and Daniel are spent in Yorkshire, Bradford to be precise, though the town remains recognisable but strangely anonymous throughout.  Social class differences can be keenly felt against a backdrop of contrasted industrial revolution profit and graft of the type presented by this city whose fortunes were spun in wool.

Sean, whose mother died young and whose father is usually inside – and that does not mean in the house, has been brought up fairly conventionally by his grandparents. His only eventual inheritance is his grandfather’s snooker cue. Dan, on the other hand, is from a professional family with a large car and a detached house. Daniel’s mother has the same vowels as everyone else, but she is also beautiful and made up to be different. She adopts a few airs and graces to keep the world at bay. The two lads, however, forge a pragmatic friendship. Both are academically gifted. They might just get to Oxford.

Sean does just that. He reads history and literature and develops what becomes a lifelong interest bordering on obsession with an Elizabethan group centred on Sir Walter Raleigh. Their name, The School of Night, gives the book its title and also figures in a rather opaque and otherwise perhaps inconsequential line in a Shakespeare play. Further research leads Sean to a quest into the authorship of Shakespeare’s work. He cannot accept that a man whose daughter remained illiterate could have authored such work. Sean seems to forget the example of his own origins, or perhaps he might be rejecting them? Of this we are never sure.

Daniel, on the other hand, does not make it to Oxford. He doesn’t get the grades and decides to stay on at school for an extra year to improve his scores. The friends are thus separated. Dan never makes it to university. He abandons school, enters the family business in perishables, takes up with the girl that Sean left behind, marries her, has children and builds businesses, successfully.

Sean drifts into a steady if undemanding job as a researcher in the BBC while Dan builds his mansions. Sean takes up with Dominique and soft gates open into the promise of a new life only to close again for familiar reasons. He continues to meander through the intellectual challenges presented by his study of The School of Night and the identity of William Shakespeare while his own life itself meanders from one day to the next. Dan, meanwhile, makes more money, pots of it, and intervenes occasionally. We know early on, by the way, that Dan has died, leaving Sean an immense sense of loss.

As the characters’ lives unfold, the reader begins to expect some form of resolution of the book’s multiple and apparently disparate themes. The School of Night, Sir Walter Raleigh, Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, literature, history, sexual awakening, education, social class, friendship, loyalty, Bradford, they all mingle without ever really forcing a mix. Surely there will be some significant event that creates a synthesis powerful enough to round off this admixture of elements into a single, plot-forming whole. But Alan Wall is far too good a writer to stoop to such banality. These are characters who retain their interests because they are interested in them, not because they can be made to serve some cheap literary trick.

When Sean is made redundant by the BBC, Dan reappears in his life with an offer he cannot refuse. New, previously only imagined realities unfold and an occasional, sometimes disturbing truth surfaces. But Sean realises it is better not to ask questions. It is amazing what we will do to help a friend, even if the friend might not deserve the attention, let alone the required and inevitably assumed devotion.

The School of Night is about deception and eventual resolution via discovery. We interpret any situation only with knowledge currently available and inevitably there remains much that remains unknown, even about ourselves, let alone our closest friends and acquaintances, let alone shady figures from history. The School of Night seems to be a novel about doubt and our insatiable desire to resolve it, always with at best only partial success.

American Scoundrel by Thomas Keneally

The title of Thomas Keneally’s American Scoundrel leaves little to the imagination. The only unknown is to whom the label might be attached. Before we begin the title tells us that the declared subject, one Daniel Sickles, is charged, sentenced and already committed. The fact that in reality he was charged but also acquitted leaves enough space of doubt to generate sufficient interest to prompt a reading.

Daniel Sickles, in short, was a cad and a bounder, but perhaps might not have appeared so by the standards of contemporary mores. An inhabitant of high society in mid-nineteenth century USA, he managed to achieve fame, notoriety, wealth, military success, national stardom and much else, apart form the Presidency, itself. He lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, a leg that had fame of its own, celebrity sufficient to find a place in a museum cabinet. It was an exhibit that the be-crutched Sickles liked to visit with his guests. “I’d like to show you my leg,” he would whisper to his female acquaintances, a phrase that from anyone else would not be suggesting a ride in a carriage.

Daniel Sickles was a member of the social and political elite of New York and Washington society. He was a member of Tammany Hall, and so had some pretty influential and powerful friends. He was a Democrat who leaned both ways on the issue of slavery until the split finally came, when he declared decisively for the Union. He became an officer in the army and commanded a unit at the Battle of Gettysburg. By chance, planning, talent or incompetence, depending on whose version of history is trusted, he led a decisive move in the battle. He also lost a leg. As a result, Dan Sickles became something of a famed hero as well as an infamous manipulator, his supporters worshipful, his detractors derisive.

His reputation derived from before the war. He had married Teresa, a beauty of Italian descent several years younger than himself. In what was at the time perfectly acceptable and even honourable behaviour, he continued to visit prostitutes - and even take them as travelling companions - while he expected a faithful and devoted wife to care for house and home and also provide for all his surplus needs. When Dan’s wife sought her own physical solace via an affair, Dan shot the fellow, out in the open in Washington’s Lafayette Square.

Along with descriptions of Gettysburg’s battle, Dan’s trial for murder forms a second major part of the book. Basically, Dan toughed it out on the basis that his wife was his property and her lover had violated that property. He was acquitted. He also, it must be recalled, had some significant friends. Thomas Keneally’s treatment of the case and its associated issues makes the book worth reading if, at times, tending to the prolix.

Overall, we appreciate that Dan was gifted with longevity and was an obviously powerful character. Equally, Teresa’s beauty, her passion, her lamentable marriage and her eventual withering demise from tuberculosis present a vivid and rather endearing picture. But then by the end we also feel that we have never really got to know either of them. American Scoundrel is a very good book, but one feels that its subject might have demanded better.

The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble

The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble is at one level a story of two marriages, the Vassiliou and the Camish. Its focus is on two characters, Rose Vassiliou and Simon Camish who, even at their first meeting, find themselves inexorably drawn to one another.

Rose Bryanston was brought up in an upper middle class English family. The rambling country house in Norfolk figures large towards the end of the book when Rose and Simon make an unscheduled weekend visit to her parents. Rose has married Christopher Vassiliou, of Greek origin, and has settled near Alexandra Palace in north London. They have three children and have separated. Rose has also inherited and has given the money away, taking to heart the Bible’s advice on rich men and the eyes of a needle. Perhaps that’s why Christopher has left her. They are squabbling over the children, as one would expect when rational people, so capable in the area of analysis and reason, apply their powers selfishly.

Simon Camish is a specialist on labour relations and trade unions. He is also a writer and is co-authoring a book on aspects of his specialism. He is also resident in north London and also has three children of his own. He is married to Julie who, despite everything we are told, does not appear to be the kind of person who would fall for a man whose main interest was trade unionism. Her dismissive materialism is often tinged with a barbed anger.

These characters soon begin to develop their obvious penchant for thought and analysis. They seem to be capable of endless, un-paragraphed free association from almost any starting stimulus and leading to any imagined end. And it soon becomes a process apparently without end. Consciousness streams forth in long, unbroken flows, often appearing strangely directionless, sometimes almost repetitive. At times Simon and Rose seem to be so obsessed with themselves that they seek to analyse even the mundane, a process that always endows the mundane with deep, if passing significance. It seems that they seek implications in every catchable breath. Christopher, Rose’s husband, on the other hand, seems to be direct and largely pragmatic, while Julie, Simon’s wife,  is often short tempered, dismissive, prejudiced and more inclined to worry about the curtains than the eternal.

By the middle of the book, we are completely engrossed with these people but, to be charitable, we can hardly associate with them. They dwell on every thought, meander through past and future, while apparently taking any present for granted. Rose and Christopher are fighting over the custody of their children, but we feel that they themselves are the only people in their thoughts.

Eventually, The Needle’s Eye does develop its own direction. But it is a long journey and, despite a drive from London to Norfolk, we feel we have travelled very little from where we started. But then life is like that, isn’t it? How many plots do we live? In The Needle’s Eye we share the lives of people, perhaps live them a little. We become participants, not mere observers, but we never really know the characters because they probably don’t really know themselves. I suppose we are different nowadays…

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble is a book with a hyphen in the title. This is apposite, since it presents a tale of two sisters, Louise and Sarah who, in a short but intense period of their lives, realise that there is an enduring bond between them, even if that bond may be no more than an agreement to compete.

Louise and Sarah have both been to Oxford. Louise is three years older than Sarah, who estimates that her sister is thus also three inches taller than herself. They are both beautiful, desirable young women, clearly drawn from society’s existing elite and destined not to tread beyond the boundaries of their class. Sarah’s first person narrative begins as she graduates, just as her older sister is about to marry Stephen Halifax. He is an awfully sophisticated author – whose books, nevertheless and by common consent, are pretty ropey – who seems permanently to roll in it, where ‘it’ refers to a mixture of money and whatever it is that allows an individual to claim the label ‘Bohemian’. (Being born in Bohemia would not endow that status, of course. We are literary, darling, not literal!) And Louise is twenty-four, for God’s sake, if we still demand His approbation in the 1960s.

It is time she did something with her life, settled down, started a family, at least aspired to the respectable. Sarah laments her sister’s good fortune. For years one side of her assumed future has yearned to attach such trappings to her own life, a standpoint to which she might only occasionally admit in mixed company. There is a gentleman friend, but he has hopped it across the Atlantic for a while to do some research. She wonders if he will ever come back. In matters of the heart, the immediate is always more likely to stir the emotions. Throughout A Summer Bird-Cage the two sisters interact and we hear Sarah’s version of the envy, the bitchiness, the conflict, the resolution, the co-operation, the closeness and distance of their relationship. There are several parties where new people appear to gossip, to speculate or to provoke. Much is learned in these highly ceremonial gatherings about others. And, as far as plot goes, that’s about it. There are some flaming rows, but no-one draws a gun. There is conflict, but no-one’s life is threatened. There’s duplicity, but the greatest sting is committed by a taxi driver who goes off with a whole two shillings of extra and undeserved tip. 

But even as early as the nineteen sixties lovers would sometimes take baths together! Via Sarah’s frailties, imaginings, intellect, prejudice and eventual good sense and loyalty, Margaret Drabble presents a magnificent study in character and the human condition. If the reader were to pass Sarah on the street, not only would she be recognisable, she would immediately demand greeting. “By the way,” the reader might ask her, “did you really feel such resentment at everything your sister…” And no doubt Sarah would reply at length and in detail. In A Summer Bird-Cage the encounters are real. The events are credible. The failings of these people are purely human, rendering them completely three dimensional. Yes, the society they inhabit is rarefied, elitist and limited in its world view, but surely they existed and, via this superb novel, still do.

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd purports to offer a sister volume to the highly successful London: The Biography. To a point it succeeds, but in general the feeling of pastiche dominates to such an extent that the idea of biography soon dissolves into a scrapbook. The book presents an interesting journey and many fascinating encounters. But it also regularly conveys a sense of the incomplete, sometimes that of a jumbled ragbag of associations that still needs the application of work-heat and condensation in order to produce something palatable. Thus a book that promises much eventually delivers only a partially-formed experience. Ostensibly the project makes perfect sense. London: The Biography described the life of the city, its history and its inhabitants. There was a stress on literary impressions, art and occasional social history to offer context. This was no mere chronicle and neither was it just a collection of tenuously related facts. It was a selective and, perhaps because of that, an engaging glimpse into the author’s personal relationship with this great city. Thames River flows like an essential artery through and within London’s life. Peter Ackroyd identifies the metaphor and returns to it repeatedly, casting this flow of water in the role of bringer of both life and death to the human interaction that it engenders. And the flow is inherently ambiguous, at least as far downstream as the city itself, where the Thames is a tidal estuary. At source, and for most of its meandering life, it snakes generally towards the east, its flow unidirectional. But this apparent singularity of purpose is complicated by its repeated merging with sources of quite separate character via almost uncountable tributaries, some of which have quite different, distinct, perhaps contradictory imputed personalities of their own. Thus Peter Ackroyd attempts by occasional geographical journey but largely via a series of thematic examinations to chart a character, an influence and a history that feeds, harms, threatens and often beautifies London, the metropolis that still, despite the book’s title, dominates the scene. These universal themes – bringer of life, death, nurture, disease, transcendence and reality, amongst many others – provides the author with an immense challenge. Surely this character is too vast a presence to sum up in a single character capable of biography. And, sure enough, this vast expanse of possibility is soon revealed as the book’s inherent weakness. Thus the overall concept ceases to work quite soon after the book’s source. A sense of potpourri and pastiche begins to dominate. Quotations abound, many from poets who found inspiration by this great river, but their organisation and too often their content leaves much to be desired. Ideas float past, sometimes on the tide, only to reappear a few pages on, going the other way. Sure enough they will be back again before the end. Dates come and go in similar fashion, often back and forth within a paragraph. No wonder the tidal river is murky, given that so many metaphors flow through it simultaneously. And then there are the rough edges, the apparently unfinished saw cuts that were left in the rush to get the text to press. We learn early on that water can flow uphill. Young eels come in at two inches, a length the text tells us is the same as 25mm. We have an estuary described as 250 miles square, but only 30 miles long. We have brackish water, apparently salt water mixed with fresh in either equal or unequal quantities. Even a writer as skilful as Peter Ackroyd can get stuck in mud like this. At the end, as if we had not already tired of a procession of facts only barely linked by narrative, we have an ‘Alternative Typology’ where the bits that could not be cut and pasted into the text are presented wholly uncooked – not even prepared. Thames: The Biography was something of a disappointment. It is packed with wonderful material and overall is worth the lengthy journey but, like the river itself, it goes on. The book has the feel of a work in progress. This may be no bad thing, since the river is probably much the same.

The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

The Seven Sisters is a superb novel by Margaret Drabble. Seven characters – who all happen to be women – eventually find themselves on a classically-inspired Mediterranean journey. It is a trip of literary and perhaps psychological significance. Thus extracted from their respective comfort zones – if comfort is a relevant term to describe their life-scarred lives – they react individually to their collective experience in quite different ways, differences driven by personality and personal history. But almost defiantly they remain a group determined to share the experience.

The central character of the book, Candida Wilton, became a Virgilian. Attending a class to study the Aeneid provided the label and the partially adopted identity. There were others involved, of course, all under the splendid wing of an aging retired classics teacher. Candida has moved to London from Suffolk. Approaching sixty, she finds herself single again, divorced from a husband who has sought more tender pastures in which to graze. Occasionally she blames herself for his desertion, especially when reality focuses attention on herself. Somewhat surprisingly Candida is also estranged from her three daughters, an estrangement for which she usually takes responsibility.

Reality may have offered a different interpretation and indeed at one point we believe we are getting one. Like may aspects of reality, the experience proves illusory. So now alone, after the gentility and perhaps predictability of rural married life, Candida’s move to a small flat in a none too salubrious area of west London presents something of a challenge. As she embarks upon her fight for independence, Candida keeps a diary in which she records events, reflections, descriptions, and almost anything that is commonplace. She swims, she prepares skimpy meals for one, starts to recognise the local down-and-outs and attends her Virgil class. In time she accommodates her loneliness as well as her past.

When an unexpected windfall allows some flexibility in her life, she invites her acquaintances and friends on a journey to Carthage and Naples to follow in the footsteps of their man, Aeneas. The woman they engage as their guide becomes the seventh of the sisters, all of who are women of varied and contrasting backgrounds. They are determined to share their experience, but individually respond to it in remarkably different ways. But collectively they leave Dido to her funeral pyre in pursuit of their wandering sailor.

The Seven Sisters is not a novel with a linear plot where events form the story. Margaret Drabble is a much better writer than that. Her novel is simply about the lives of the women involved, how they cope differently with surviving each day and how they approach life’s demands and rewards. It is Candida’s perspective that is always at the centre of the narrative, and it is through her estimations and reactions that we come to know the others. And so vivid is the portrayal of these lives that they almost leave the page to come alive. They seem to have rather more than three dimensions. Inasmuch as it is possible to know anyone, we feel we know all of these women by the end of the trip. That in itself is surprising because Candida at least is not even sure if she knows herself. In Margaret Drabble’s hands, no life is ordinary and it is the experience of life, itself, to read her engaging and moving novel. The Seven Sisters is no more or less than a remarkable study in character. And Aeneas left Dido. Is there anything new under the sun?

Winter In Madrid by C J Sansom

C J Sansom’s Winter In Madrid goes a long way beyond the habitual territory of the historical novel. Not only does it present fiction alongside documented history, it also depicts some real people, and not only figureheads such as Generalissimo Franco. On the contrary, the people concerned become real characters in Winter In Madrid.

But this book also has its own position to present in relation to the events of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath, whose horrors form not a backdrop but an integral part of the novel’s plot. Three boys – Harry, Bernie and Sandy – do time together at an English public school. They are very different characters from equally different backgrounds. Harry is an orphan raised rather distantly by an aunt and uncle. Bernie is the son of a working class London shopkeeper family. He attends the private school by virtue of a scholarship. He has socialist leanings. Sandy is the rebellious son of a bishop. From the start he has the air of a cad and a bounder. When, later, all three become involved in the Spanish Civil War, they predictably side with different actors in the conflict.

Bernie, as you might expect, becomes a communist and joins the International Brigade. Harry, having studied languages and already visited pre-war Spain, is eventually lured into an apparently establishment position as a translator in the British embassy in Madrid. But alongside his linguistic services, he has another, less communicated job to pursue. Sandy, on the other hand, presents a more complex picture. No, he did not merely join the nationalists and thus oppose the other two: he was always far too driven by individualism to follow such a predictable course of action. Sandy goes into business in Spain, cultivating links with the fascist Falange. At the same time, and with obvious paradox, he also assists Jews fleeing Nazism to find passage from France to Portugal and thus further afield to safety. It may be that his brand of disinterested individualism renders his business activity merely pragmatic. On the other hand… 

And then there are two women, Barbara and Sofia. Barbara is British, a former Red Cross employee. Briefly she met Bernie during the war, and then he returned to the front to disappear, presumed dead. After years of change, Barbara met Sandy and, in his own way, did much to boost her damaged confidence. They are also living as man and wife, but – in a country where holding hands in public is outlawed – they are not married. Along with his assistance for fleeing Jews, this second layer of risk provides a flaw in the construction of Sandy’s character. Surely he was a sufficiently mercenary operator to have seen these potential pitfalls and taken steps to avoid them?

But then it’s fiction. Harry and Barbara met in his earlier visit to Spain, when he also became involved with a family from a poor, republican area of Madrid. When he revisits the area, he meets another family being supported by the efforts of Sofia, who remains a left-wing sympathiser. Harry and Sofia find their relationship develops. The existence Sofia’s murdered clerical relative provides yet another interesting layer of complication that really does bring home the brutality of civil war. As the plot of Winter In Madrid unfolds, the novel provides the reader with a strong desire to uncover its secrets. Sansom is a real story teller and the book works extremely well on the simple level of a thriller. But it also remains a faithful – largely faithful – to events as they happened and the individuals who perpetrated them. And it achieves its end of describing the complexity of relations in Spain – political, economic and social – with great success. In addition, it manages to sustain a clear position of its own and without the use of polemic. Winter In Madrid thus attempts significantly more than most populist fiction dare even try. What is more, Winter In Madrid achieves its aim with remarkable success, even if, on occasions, its plot devices may seem a little artificial. But they what plots, including those that happen in war, are not artificial?

From One Master To Another - Po-on by F Sionil José

Po-on is the novel that completed F. Sionil José’s Rosales project, in which, over five books, the members of a single family appear to live out the very detail of Philippine history. Po-on does not actually start in Rosales, the fictitious town in central Luzon that gives its name to the saga. Here we start in Ilocos, a northern region apart, with its own language and culture. At the outset, we learn from an old Spanish priest that a local Cabugaw sacristan, Eustaquio, shows much promise and is recommended for the priesthood. But we also come to know a local lad called Istak. He is a devout Christian, but also deeply rooted to the traditions of his people and family. As a devout Christian aspiring to the priesthood under a baptismal name, he remains an Ilcano allied to the faith of his colonial masters. Istak’s father has lost an arm. It makes life as a peasant farmer quite difficult. The circumstances of that loss have been unclear to the wider family. And, when the old priest moves aside to allow a younger, less paternalistically-minded man to assist with business, the family’s relations with the Church change. What unfolds is a metaphor for the whole relationship between Filipinos and Christianity, a description of a desire to become the church’s faithful servants being exploited by raw power employed cynically to secure economic and political gain. Status, of course, is at the root of everything, and a poor peasant tends to be short of that particular commodity. There is a fracas and the family has to move. They flee south, joining forces with others who have nothing to lose. They run the gauntlet of the Spanish military police, the guardia civil, and they survive. But there are real trials and tribulation along the way. It is, of course, Rosales where they settle. It’s a town that provides opportunity in the shape of a plot to rent and another that can be claimed after clearing. Thus, with a new identity in a new location, the displaced family can create a new life. And, just as they start to discover this new lease of life, their nation claims release from Spanish domination and Americans arrive to take control. But initial euphoria gives way to further struggle as the new masters declare their intention to change the methods, but still to retain the control of a colonial ruler. And, just as the family fled to Rosales, to new opportunity, there emerges for Filipinos as a nation to need to seek a new future where Filipinos will have control over its own destiny. Thus Po-on brings us into the American era and the early years of the twentieth century: Po-on is historical fiction at its best, in that it brings history alive, alive in the lives of its characters.

Lucky by Alice Sebold

It is possible to start reading Lucky by Alice Sebold under the misunderstanding that it is a novel. As the opening pages unfold with their description of a violent rape, it might be just another crime novel. The horror is tangible, the sensations evoked predictably nauseating. A few pages later, when the reality of the book’s memoir becomes clear, however, the initial reaction seems to become one of embarrassed over-statement until, that is, the work’s true and admirable complexity begins to emerge. Alice Sebold was eighteen years old when she became a rape victim. An academic father and an unpredictable mother had been perfectly good parents, despite their own failings or limitations. Similarly, it seems, Alice Sebold became a complex victim, on the one hand the completely innocent and wronged party who had been wantonly violated by a violent criminal, but yet on the other a person who somehow, via her own quite unremarkable behaviour and lifestyle, could not immediately endear herself, even via her victim status, to those who might offer sympathy or assistance. Perhaps sympathy could never have been enough to diminish the grim reality of Alice Sebold’s experience. Only empathy might have helped, and that was largely impossible. But the subtlety of Alice Sebold’s account of her experience of rape and its aftermath is precisely her ability to empathise with others who had similar experiences and who had, at one stage or another, fallen victim to one of the pitfalls on the way to justice. There is the subject of consent, of course, an issue that cannot really be judged when no-one else was present at the time. There is the issue of identification and having to be confronted again by the assailant. There is the issue of character and trustworthiness of the victim, qualities that inevitably are clued from lifestyle, attitude and deportment. And where does consideration of such things lead when the act of rape was not actually conducted at knife-point, when the victim cannot identify her assailant and when she openly begins to sleep around, use drugs and get drunk? Alice Sebold’s Lucky deals with all these issues and deals with them with subtlety and interest. But overall the victim’s involvement is paramount and it is this sense of sharing in the experience that is the book’s greatest and perhaps enduring achievement. There is doubt and insecurity to be lived through, alongside the continuing pain, as well as revolting physical and mental horror. Lucky takes the reader frighteningly there in an engaging and compelling way. Sometimes life takes you where you do not want to go. We are not blessed by such experience, only by the ability, eventually, to cope with it.

Girl With Green Eyes by Edna O'Brien

It is fifty years since Edna O’Brien published Girl With Green Eyes. It is conventional nowadays to regard the late 1950s and early 1960s as an era when sexual liberation was beginning. This may be accurate. Certainly the men in Edna O’Brien’s novel seem to bear no little responsibility for any of their sexual activity, whilst the women, who are usually willing partners, take all the risks and bear all the responsibilities. The girl with green eyes uses several versions of her name. They appear to be applied randomly. She is whoever circumstance demands. She is Cait, Caithleen, or even Kate, depending on who is speaking, or where and when the action happens. Cait was previously one of the girls who were Country Girls and the Girl With Green Eyes forms the second part of a trilogy following these young women’s progress from rural assumptions to urban freedom, of sorts. In Girl With Green Eyes the young women have moved to Dublin. Events take Cait, just twenty-one, and a mere student in today’s paradigm, back home to the country and then back to town again. She has taken up with Eugene. He is older than her and, God forbid, married – even with a child. The wife lives in America – where else for the separated? – but she always seems close at hand and something of a threat. Cait has completely fallen for her male elect and news gets out. A rescue party from the country arrives to whisk her off back to the protection of home in the west, where alcoholism and threats of violence keep the peace. Her father drinks all day, but then he’s a provincial sort. He may be excused, since he rules his fiefdom. He will hit anyone to protect what needs protecting and daughters are usually top of the list. Cait describes most of her experiences in the first person. Her friend gets pregnant and has to deal with the consequences. Despite all such practices being utterly illegal at the time, everyone seems to know where to go, how to secure the service and what it costs. In general, the women involved seem utterly dependent on securing a man to provide for them, and seem to live at least half in fear of the urges that propel them. There is this ambivalence within all the relationships. The men are keen to go where they want, but generally do not negotiate on the destinations. The women seem keen to explore, but never journey on their own terms, apparently preferring to be taken along with the ride. By the end of the book, there have been changes in Cait’s life. It seems that these changes anticipate the changes that will begin for women in wider society, but in Girl With Green Eyes such progress has achieved only limited changes in women’s expectations of life. The novel thus subtly mirrors what we must assume prevailed in wider society at the time. It thus presents a contemporary reader with a historical perspective that its author perhaps did not consciously consider at the time. It is surely a richer experience for this added dimension.

A Barcelona experience - Antoni Gaudí by Rainer Zerbst

Rainer Zerbst’s book, Antoni Gaudí – The Complete Architectural Works, is just what it says, the complete works. Treated chronologically and in turn, each of the architect’s major projects is reviewed, described and analysed. Copious illustrations allow the reader to appreciate the often fascinating –and usually fantastic – detail that Gaudí used. The text, elaborate, itself florid in its description, conveys not only the colour and the shape of Gaudí’s work, but also its intent and derivation. Though it concentrates on the buildings, their features, their detail and their innovations, Rainer Zerbst’s book does deal quite adequately with Gaudí’s background and inspiration, though it does not attempt to be a biography.

It may come as a surprise to many readers that it was England and English art that provided the young architect with his model. The theories of Ruskin advised a return to direct contact with nature. The Pre-Raphaelites resurrected both the Gothic and colour, and also employed minute detail throughout a work rather than invite total concentration on a single, artificially-lit central subject. And then William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement provided the social and industrial model that aspired to put art at the centre of everyday life. Finally, and not least, it was the English tradition of the ornamental garden that inspired Gaudí’s treatment of broader settings. All of these influenced the young Gaudí. And at the time he was seen as a something of a radical.

Later, when, if anything, the architect’s style became more fluid and less self-conscious, he had already shaved off his beard and cut his hair in order to aspire to membership of the local establishment. In England, the once revolutionary Pre-Raphs had largely done the same. In presenting Gaudí’s woks chronologically, Rainer Zerbst is able to chart the development of the artist’s style, both personal and professional. The reader can follow the development of a style, see how ideas came to maturity and then were re-used and re-applied. The reader can also clearly understand how Gaudí’s work anticipates both Dalí and Miró, both in its content and its use of colour.

Placing minor works together in a final chapter, however, has the feel of afterthought and does detract from the overall experience. For anyone who has visited Barcelona and has seen some of these buildings close up, this book is a must. It really does fill in the detail that a casual observation would surely miss. And for anyone who has not yet visited the Catalan capital, Rainer Zerbst’s book, Antoni Gaudí, could conceivably provide the stimulus to make that visit at the first available opportunity. Gaudí’s work is something that is thoroughly worth real-life experience. Only in the rather scant treatment of Sagrada Familia is the book rather wanting, but then an adequate description of such a project would be a book in itself. Sagrada Familia, like the man who conceived it, is unique.

The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale

The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale is an extremely well written love story. It is so well written that at times the gentle gradients of its landscape remind one of being driven through Holland. An occasional abyss or ravine would be welcome. Laura used to be Lara. She inserted the ‘u’ because of the regular ribbings at school over Doctor Zhivago. It was clearly that sort of school. Mummy and daddy were pretty accomplished people, mum eventually a professor of virology. Daddy, poor daddy, never made it above a lectureship in social sciences – or something - in a poly. 

These are now all called universities, but we all know that the class labels still attach. They were a naturist family and took their clothes off at every opportunity. Daddy died. Daddies do. Mummy is now in need of assistance, even when naked in the garden, which these days is well walled. Laura did not manage maths at Oxford, poor thing. She blew it. But being able to add up led her to a pretty good career as a freelance accountant. Ability to work at distance allowed her to spend a good deal of her time in Paris. There were relationships. None endured.

Well, they all did, and then didn’t. She is now back with mummy. Ben was one of Laura’s old flames. He too was into viruses and once met Laura’s mom in a professional capacity. He now works with sexually transmitted diseases. He moved on from Laura and married Chloë, who has a funny thing on the end of her name. Things have not gone well of late. The marriage is suffering something of a lull. So, after many a year Ben and Laura’s paths cross again. Their encounter lasts a day and promises to endure.

But Ben has his own responsibilities. Bobby is his disabled brother and he needs support. He seems able to look after himself on the gay pick-up scene, however, and manages to put himself about quite a bit. Treatments are available in-house, after all. Between them, these characters build up understandings and misunderstandings, but there is very little to surprise. At least non-one seems to have a food fad. The book is an easy and enjoyable read, but somehow the people never really come alive. Patrick Gale tells us about their pasts, their families, their relationships, occasionally their fears or achievements, but somehow the sensation is reminiscent of pieces being pushed around a draughts board. It is certainly not as sophisticated as chess, and the moves seem, well, predictable. And that is the problem. These people ooze an under-stated middle class confidence, but they come across as smug, uninteresting and rather self-satisfied. Endearing they are not. They do elegantly populate a story, but their passions are so terribly English. We might pass time of day, but do not expect any part of the experience to offer anything memorable. Perhaps that’s the point.

A Mad World, My Masters by John Simpson

In A Mad World, My Masters John Simpson presents a set of observations and anecdotes drawn from a near lifetime of reporting for television news. Over a career spanning decades, John Simpson has worked on many of the major stories of recent history. He has covered conflicts, such as the Gulf War and the Balkans, general interest stories, such as Hong Kong’s transfer and the new millennium, and more general issues such as such as the drugs and arms trades. But it is John Simpson’s contact with political leaders and heads of state that adds real spice to these memoirs, some of his contacts proving decidedly surreal, all of them offering unusual insight. The book is organised around themes, such as journeys, villains, spies, bombing and absurdities. This allows the presentation of similar kinds of experience derived from different trips. It does also facilitate the reading of the book via casual dips. A consequence is that the whole experience becomes rather episodic. 

Apart from the sometimes tenuous theme, there is little attempt to create a consistent, general narrative. Again this facilitates the casual read, but it might antagonise a reader who wants a tad more reflection from the author. The thematic arrangement also means that on several occasions the reader re-visits a trip, leading to some inevitable repetition of material. This, however, is kept to a minimum and does not detract from the overall experience if an occasional feeling of impatience is ignored.

Thus far this review has sounded like a lukewarm reception, but this would be far from the truth of the experience. The book’s subject matter alone is thought-provoking, stimulating and enlightening. In addition, John Simpson’s own observations are quite wonderful. And this mix is persuasive. The reader feels that the book “takes you there” rather than “tells us what it’s like”. It is the vividness of John Simpson’s recollections and related experience that brings so much of the subject matter completely to life that we feel we might have smelled Gaddafi’s flatulence, sensed a Peruvian mayor’s danger or felt an Iraqi Kurd’s bitterness. Anyone familiar with John Simpson’s exemplary reporting for the BBC will expect these anecdotes to contain more than trivia or merely personal experience, and, thus, will not be disappointed. But it is when the author deals with the mechanics and technicalities of news gathering that some of the more vivid experiences appear. We often forget that the process is dangerous, tiring and relentless if the product is to contain even a grain of interest. Throughout, John Simpson acknowledges the difficulties, but he also always recognises the contributions of others to the teamwork that is clearly essential to the process.

This book has much to offer to anyone interested in recent history or current affairs. Even those who are unfamiliar with the author’s broadcasting work will discover engaging and arresting perspectives on many issues and, in some cases, there will be analyses that will question some generally accepted positions. The book may be a little too long, but its consistent high quality ensures that this is barely an issue.

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia is a superb idea, an excellent read and a perfect way of practising the language. The book charts chronologically the eras and styles of Spanish art. It starts with the pre-historical and archaeological, travels via the Iberian period, the Romans and the Visigoths, to the centuries of Islamic art and the Romanesque. By the time we have reached Gothic art, we almost feel we have come up to date. The Renaissance was not as big an issue in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, but the Baroque flowered and led into what the authors call the modern era. Goya is presented quite convincingly almost as a Beethoven of painting, in other words a figure from whose work almost two hundred years of future development can be traced. Picasso, Dali and Miró bring us into the contemporary era and the book’s final pages present abstract expressionism and works of Chillada.

The Spanish text is immediately accessible. The descriptions are succinct and clearly written. Technical terms are included in a useful glossary whose definitions could not be more accessible or better written. Though there are copious illustrations, this is no mere picture book. The examples have been included to illustrate the text and they carry out the task admirably, thus offering quite remarkable clarity to the excellent descriptions of style, technique and content.

What is so intriguing about Spanish art, the fact that separates it from the rest of Europe, is the Islamic period. Artistic and literary achievements in particular during those centuries have continued to influence both Spain’s cultural life and its language. No other European country has this complexity. Too often, however, the Islamic period is presented as something separate, something overcome and wholly in the past. This is not so in Arte Español Para Extranjeros. Not only via references to mozarabe and mudejar, but also by noting how stylistic elements were adopted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish artists and architects, the authors manage to present a portrait of Spanish art that represents a real synthesis. A visit to the National Museum of Catalan Art (MNAC) in Barcelona would point out how the resplendent Gothic period of religious painting in Spain owes much to contact with northern Europe, Flanders in particular, and little to Italian influence.

In Arte Español Para Extranjeros the text presents this relationship with great clarity and also adequately describes the political and trading context that led to these influences prevailing above those from the geographically closer Mediterranean areas. Non-native Spanish speakers who have even the remotest interest in the arts will find this book captivating and useful in two ways. First its very accessibility makes it a perfect vehicle for the language learner to improve reading skills and vocabulary. But on another level, the book’s ambitious project really does deliver clear, interesting and enlightening observations on style and influence. Arte Español Para Extranjeros was a very ambitious project that could so easily have failed to deliver. In the hands of its three authors, however, it has delivered an almost faultless success.

The Girl At The Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks

The Girl At The Lion D’Or, a novel by Sebastian Faulks, presents a love story which is both engaging and poignant. But because of the book’s setting in 1930s France, there is also much historical and political colour that significantly broadens the novel’s scope. Anne is a poor, but attractive girl. Her family life was disrupted by the First World War. In this she is not alone. But, as the narrative progresses, we learn that her story is rather more complex than the common, but still tragic one, of family members killed in action.

In Anne’s case there was also something to hide. Thus she was orphaned, and perhaps never really had a home she could call her own. 

At the start of The Girl At The Lion D’Or, Anne is about to make a change in her life – and not for the first time – by leaving Paris to find a job elsewhere. That elsewhere is Janvilliers, a provincial town, where she is reluctantly accepted as a waitress in the small hotel of the book’s title. Anne is a beautiful woman, perhaps more arresting even than that, and it is not long before some of the restaurant’s clientele are taking note of her charms.

One such client is a middle class businessman called Hartmann. He is married and lives in a large, rangy mansion whose rooms perhaps have their own stories to tell. There develops a liaison that forms the novel’s primary plot. Along the way we learn much about Anne’s background and the Hartmann’s modus vivendi. There are other characters, of course, and these are convincingly portrayed to create a picture of French inter-war provincial life. There’s the owner of the hotel, for instance, who seems reluctant to leave his flat. There’s the domineering – perhaps threatening – manageress who aspires to higher moral ground. There’s a builder who builds none too well and there are others whose attentions, lecherous and otherwise, are arrested by Anne’s beauty.

But also this is France just prior to the outbreak of World War two. There are rumblings about Jews, about ultra-nationalism, about political leaders in disarray who sway this way and that. There are many stories of loss still vivid from the previous war, stories whose pain has not yet dissipated and whose memory will soon be obliterated by new conflict. Sebastain Faulks’s novel is not a spectacular read. It does not try to be so. It is, however, a sensitive, informed and often beautiful portrayal of love set against a backdrop full of quite real humanity.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

If only Milan Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves had been simply an enjoyable read… Several other adjectives come to mind: arresting, compelling, strange, detached, sometimes disappointing. None of these get to the core of the work, a core that, on finishing the book, might seem more elusive than at any time during the progress of the text.

In Laughable Loves we are presented with characters that often seem to behave like cut-outs being pushed across a stage whose set is alien to them. They often seem only partially engaged with their own lives, even lost in their surroundings, no matter how familiar they are claimed to be. They are apparently controlled by others, perhaps by forces not only beyond their control, but also beyond their influence, even beyond their experience.

On the surface, however, this is not a book about totalitarianism or overt control. There are hardly any overtly political themes or references. As a background, as might be expected, this seems to be taken as given. There are references to a faceless system here and there, but this in no Kafka-esque construction of an all-embracing and constraining reality.

In Laughable Loves Milan Kundera seems to imprison people primarily within the demands of their own humanity. They seem to be enslaved by their own, inevitable, controllable but not controlled urges. This is fundamental behaviour that they think they can control, but the fact that they cannot confirms that it controls them. And, of course, the urge of sex, the reality of sex, the realisation of sex, the promise of sex, the deferment of sex, the doing of sex, all of these vie for the forefront of consciousness, their common factor apparently both the motive and the end of all intent. We may play with gods, careers, influence or power, but our ultimate and single-minded motive is the achievement of the momentary majesty of sexual communion. In his film, Casanova may have been likened to an erectile clockwork toy, pre-ordained by virtue of inevitable, hard-wired mechanism to perform whenever wound up.

And in this book, Kundera presents people who mimic such automata, except that occasionally a spring gives, or a cog slips. “Ah, ladies and gentlemen,” he writes, “a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anyone or anything seriously.” But almost no-one in these stories is eventually serious about anything, except the sex drive that controls them and whose realisation so often results in no more than sensations of the ephemeral. Immediately it is the next time that is yearned. They are thus all sad, quite absurdly sad, even as the invisible hand that manipulates their cut-out play in an alien theatre makes them move and perform. Even sadder is the human cut-out who doesn’t even believe that such a controlling hand might exist.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Time is undoubtedly linear, but our perception of it is not. And for Claudia Hampton, the principal character of Penelope Lively’s novel, Moon Tiger, time, manifest as her life, is a veritable jumble of memories, unfulfilled ambition, probabilities and denied possibilities. She is confused, at least on the outside, and lying infirm in a nursing home bed. But her mind is alive with a life lived, a life she distils to share with us. Claudia´s confusion, however, is only an external phenomenon. Internally her memory is sharp, if not ordered. She reminisces on childhood, eager sexual awakening in adolescence, a career as a war correspondent, historian and writer, an affair or two, one very special but doomed, an eventual marriage, maturity, parenthood and old age, but not necessarily in that order.

Events are assembled and revisited. Along the way there has been death, birth, a miscarriage, disappointment, fulfilment and ambition, seasoned with shakings of passion, hatred, pride and not a little incest. It has been an interesting life, especially remarkable for the way that Claudia relives it for us. Claudia’s memories are often intense. There is an attention to detail that renders her character completely three dimensional, four if you include time. She has struggled – and continues to do so – with what seems to be a fundamental lack of love for her daughter, Lisa, and a deep impatience with her grandchildren.

Jasper, her partner, was something of a disappointment, but at least a reassuring one, after war had dealt cruelly with what she herself had wanted. Claudia not only recalls but also relives her passion. She has often been free with her affections, but she has only once given herself completely. Her recollections of the horrors of war are both raw and stark. There is no heroism here: heroic deeds maybe, but only when the protagonists effect them by default. But in many ways Claudia’s life stopped those years ago in the nineteen forties.

What life promised would never be realised and what it had generated died before it truly came to life. Living has thus been a compromise that Claudia herself was only partially willing to make. It is into the gaps left by compromise that occasional views of her from another’s perspective add real spice to the narrative. Moon Tiger is a complex, challenging read. It is so rewarding, however, that time stands still while you read, but then, at the end, seems to have flashed by in an instant. The instant, of course, was Claudia’s life. Moon Tiger was a brand of mosquito repellent that Claudia and her lover burned during their brief time together in Egypt. What was left was just a little ash.

The Republic Of Love by Carol Shields

Republics do not have kings or queens, nor princes or princesses, so, we must assume, fairytales are out. Winnipeg is not exactly a republic, and, at least in terms of their love lives, two residents of the city, Fay and Tom, seem to inhabit a world where fairytales are inconceivable. But that place might not be Winnipeg: it might be closer in to themselves.

Despite – or perhaps because of - having had a multitude of mothers, Tom has been married three times, each attempt turning success into apparent and mildly painful failure, with or sometimes without associated acrimony.

For her part, Fay, at thirty-five, has had several relationships of varied length, but none has led to wedding bells, a fact that seems to trouble her, sometimes. Tom is a radio presenter. He hosts one of those late night phone-ins aimed at insomniacs, but usually attracting the opinionated.

His mood, his history, his takes on where life has taken him clearly influence his style. Rises or dips in his personal life are immediately apparent, communicated without trying. But do not assume that anything offers even influence to what the contributors say. Rest assured, they will offer precisely what they want, perhaps precisely what they have been fed, if only because they are all as self-absorbed as everyone else. Fay works more regular hours.

She is an ethnologist and works in a folklore centre. She is heavily into mermaids, and perhaps they are also into her. She researches the mermaid myth, catalogues sightings, interviews people who have seem them, travels the world giving papers on our social and psychological need to invent these creatures. Mermaids, though overtly sexual and obviously female, are eventually sexless, unless they have exaggerated tails. They are both alluring and inviting, but, being half fish, they are cold-blooded and cold. They tempt, but cannot satisfy. Obviously Tom and Fay are going to meet.

They, along with their accumulated baggage, join forces and, as a consequence, begin to see life differently. But each is still influenced by relatives, acquaintances, ex-partners, ex-in-laws, new partners, parents and anyone else who might have an opinion. They all count. They all influence, especially when stiffness of apparent resolve can be easily bent by contradiction, shock or surprise. And so Fay and Tom’s relationship develops to what Carol Shields deems it should become.

Throughout The Republic Of Love is beautifully written. Carol Shields’s prose is often witty, elegant, telling, funny, incisive or provocative all in one. A single sentence can turn on itself to frighten or mock its own beginning. This is a book worth reading for its style alone. But it offers more than elegance of expression. These characters have all the confused confident complexity, the undirected and variable resolve we would expect from non-ideological adults in the last decade of the twentieth century. It would be interesting to revisit them twenty years on to see where they are now, to know if anything might have lasted. In The Republic Of Love they certainly come to life.

Fools Of Fortune by William Trevor

Generally, genre thrillers are books without thrills. Someone gets killed. Turn the page and it happens again to someone else. There’s a chase, a near miss; da capo al fine; repeat. There are never consequences. Characters seem to exist – they never come to life – in an eternal present devoid of either thought or reflection. Plot is a series of events, while characters are mere fashionably dressed acts. William Trevor’s beautiful novel, Fools Of Fortune is, in many ways, a whodunit – or better who done what – thriller. But it transcends genre because it is the consequences of the actions and their motives that feature large, that provide plot and ultimately a credible, if tragic humanity.

Fools Of Fortune is a novel that presents tragedy not merely as a vehicle for portraying raw emotion, but rather as a means of illustrating the depth of ensuing consequence, both historical and personal. In conflict it is easy to list events, quote numbers, suggest outcome, but it is rare to have a feel of how momentous events can have life-long consequences for those involved, consequences that even protagonists cannot envisage, consequences that can affect the lives of those not even involved.

William Trevor’s book is set in Ireland. Its story spans decades, but the crucial elements of the plot are placed in the second decade of the twentieth century. They do involve the First World War, but really as a sideshow to the issue of Home Rule for Ireland. The Quinton family are Protestants living in an old house called Kinleagh in County Cork. Willie Quinton is a child, initially home schooled by a priest called Kilgarriff, who has a highly personal view of the world. We see many of the events through Willie’s child eyes, including a surreptitious meeting between Willie’s father and a famous man who visits on a motorbike. The family owns a flour mill. They are quite well off, a fact that is clearly appreciated by some and resented by others. Crucially, it is this availability of finance that leads to a downfall, events that lead to deaths, destruction and calls for revenge. Willie’s life is transformed for ever.

Over the water, the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park, Dorset, have a daughter called Marianne. The Woodcombes and the Quintons are related. Marianne is Willie’s cousin. On a visit to Kinleagh she falls in love with Willie. She is a small, delicate girl. She has experience of a Swiss finishing school, a stay that brings exposure to practices that are not wholly educational. Marianne returns to Kinleagh to find Willie. She has important news, but finds that devastation has hit the Quinton household, a culmination of events beyond the control of any individual. No-one wants to talk about what might have happened, and no-one admits to the whereabouts of Willie. Marianne stays to wait for his return. It proves to be a long wait.

There is vengeance in the air, and unforeseen consequences for a child who apparently played no part in any of the events. She was blameless, a mere recipient of the consequences of others’ actions, of others’ grief. William Trevor tells the tale of Fools Of Fortune as serial memoirs of those involved, primarily Willie and Marianne. Some of the school experiences that form a significant part of the story are comic, and offer some relief to the pressure of unfolding tragedy. But central to the book’s non-linear discovery of motive and consequence is the fact that events can dictate the content of lives, and sometimes individuals appear as no more than powerless pawns in games dictated by others. We are all participants, but not always on our own terms.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

When, some thirty years later, Paul Theroux repeated the journey that he had described in The Great Railway Bazaar, he declared travel writing to be ‘the lowest form of literary self-indulgence.’ His original journey in the early 1970s was a deliberate act, a ruse upon which to hang a book. The travel featured was nothing less than an occupation, whose sole product was to be collected and recorded experience. We, the readers, must thank him for his single-minded devotion to selfishness, for The Great Railway Bazaar takes us all the way there without having to leave the armchair.

The journey began and finished in London. In between Paul Theroux took the orient Express to Istanbul and then crossed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan before doing the length of India. He even went to Sri Lanka by train. Then there was Burma and a meander through South-East Asia. His account of smoking cigarettes in Vientiane will stick in the mind. Malaysia and Singapore were taken in, the latter clearly not being to the writer’s taste. Japan was clearly a curious experience, but the Trans Siberia from near Vladivostok to Moscow seemed strangely predictable, its length being its major characteristic. Eventually, the final leg across Europe hardly counted, a mere step along a much bigger way.

Any such journey can only offer mere impressions of the places en route, but such first impressions are always interesting in themselves, if not always accurate or justified. Thirty years on, some of them may even have historical significance. It would be a challenging task these days to cross the current Iran and Afghanistan by rail. And a contemporary journey would surely cross China, a route barred to the 1970s independent traveller.

But it’s the people met along the way that give the book its prime characters. We never get to know these people and we encounter them largely as caricatures, but it is the experience of travel that is described, and this experience inevitably involves a multitude of these ephemeral encounters. They are always engaging. We expect to be confronted with the surprising, the unknown and the little understood. We expect the experience to be recorded, whilst the mundane is edited out of the account. And furthermore, we do try to make sense of our often confused responses to the unexpected. This is why we travel: at its base it is a challenge.

Paul Theroux does litter the trip with indulgence, however. There is a fairly constant search for alcoholic beverages, for instance. Furthermore, in several places there are encounters with and deliberate attempts to seek out the local low life. Offers of girls, boys, older women, wives, transvestites and every imaginable service are received. Sometimes, the services in question require some imagination. It is easy, of course, to sensationalise experience when it is sought at the margins of what a society dares to admit. In the case of Japan, where much of this material is located, it has to be admitted that the margins are rather wide.

Balancing this crudity is Paul Theroux’s constant desire to reflect upon his love of literature. Some of the material he recollects produces some wonderful insights, surprising juxtapositions and apposite comment.

Travel writing might be pure self-indulgence, but this particular example of the vice transcends the purely personal. It feels like being taken along for the ride. Thus, like all good travel writing, The Great railway Bazaar is not merely an account of another’s observations, it is nothing less than a journey to be experienced.

Sculpture by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez at Klein-Schrueder

In an exhibition in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, sculptor Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez presents a series of works in marble. The materials, white, black and red marble, plus some alabaster, are all sourced from stone quarries in Novelda near the sculptor’s home in Alicante Province, Spain.

These works of Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez bring abstract forms to life. Perhaps it would be better to say that they render the inorganic organic. Smooth, highly finished surfaces invite touch, the glide of a hand, a skim of flat fingers, the gentle curves of their solid forms imitating the sensuous and voluptuous. The concave and convex meet in flowing ridges, clearly delineated but never sharp, junctions that create lines that meander across and through the shapes. These lines create rhythms that add life and even identity to abstraction that never wanders far from a summarised human form.

And between the lines are spaces, voids that run through the sculptures, or sometimes merely cavities whose very hollowness create an inner space that might itself be inhabited, might itself be alive. It is these spaces that create sensation and suggest vitality.

The titles are all simple, clear pointers as to where the viewer should start to interpret. There is Dove, Lesbos, Body. There is no attempt to place confusion or doubt about the artist’s motive here. These are living, organic shapes crystallized in a once living, now inorganic material. They thus become accommodating, inviting objects that invite us to be absorbed into their spaces, just like the organisms that created them.

Close inspection of the red marble of one piece in particular reveals several fossils highlighted within the design, amid the patterns of impurities that give the stone its character and pattern. Snails, ammonites and other animals that once inhabited the lake or sea where the marble formed are thus revealed. The remnants of their crystallized life thus become the surface sheen through which Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez offers his life-affirming forms. The result is both emotionally elegant and intellectually satisfying.

These sculptures by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez are currently on show in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, Cami del Pinar 23, L’Alfas del Pi, Alicante, Spain. The exhibition is open on Sundays from 10am to 2pm.

From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth

Ostensibly From Heaven Lake is a travel book. The description is both apt and limiting. It is worth musing on the idea that travel may be merely a way of collecting a pool of nostalgia for future regurgitation. But this particular description of the author’s journey through China – initially west-east and then north-south in the early 1980s – does not seem to have added very much potential fuel to future’s recollected fires. At the time it was hardly common for an individual to travel independently in China, let alone enter Tibet via Qinghai or – even more unlikely – exit China via Tibet into Nepal. 

But this is precisely what Vikram Seth did, and to add icing to the achievement cake, his preferred mode of transport was hitch-hiking. It is largely the mechanics and logistics of this journey that provide most of the content of the book. Vikram Seth had been a student in China, so his goal was to see some of the less visited parts of the country and to exit, eventually, to India to be reunited, after years in college, with his family.

He did have some language without which, given the twists and turns bureaucracy forced, he would surely not have achieved his goal. Near the start of the book the author is already in eastern China, visiting Turfan which, on the other end of an axis that starts in Tibet, must be one of the strangest places on the planet. It bakes in summer and freezes rigid in winter, is in the middle of a massive desert but makes its living from highly successful agriculture.

On a visit to the karez, the ancient underground irrigation channels that bring water from the distant mountains, the author chances an unauthorised swim against his guide’s advice. The author gets into difficulty. And this seems to be very much a thread that recurs throughout the narrative of From Heaven Lake. A determined first person seems intent on asserting a rather blind individuality in the context of a society that respects only conformity and seeks to exclude anything that suggests difference. In the conflict that ensues between these fundamentally different aims, we are presented with a catalogue of travel that seems to miss much of the potential experience of the country through which it moves. Thus much of the book deals with the process of travel, rather than its experience.

Despite this, From Heaven Lake is a worthwhile read. Besides Turfan we visit Urumqi and the high altitude lake that gives the book its title. The tour moves on to Xian, Lanzhou, Dunhuang and then across Qinghai to Tibet and especially Llasa. This city occupies much of the text, revealing that visiting it was very much at the heart of the author’s consideration. We do meet some interesting people along the way, but they are largely bureaucrats, drivers or officials associated with the author’s travel arrangements. Given Vikram Seth’s experience in the country, there seems to be a missed opportunity here, in that more people would have embroidered the text with more interesting and enduring detail than the repeated travel problems.

In its time, From Heaven Lake might perhaps have been a unique account of a trip that few contemporary travellers would have contemplated, let alone attempted. Today it still presents in interesting account of a personal challenge, but offers too little contemporary experience to motivate the general reader to stay on board.