Sally Rooney - Normal People

I must admit that I picked up Sally Rooney's book Normal People because of the reaction from some quarters about her comments on supporting Palestine and the criminialisation of dissent. Rooney is very explicitly pro-Palestine and against Genocide. Some of her detractors, perhaps never having read her work, or even understanding where she was from, attempted to say they would bring the full force of British Law on her head. Hailing, as she does, from Ireland she was remarkably unbothered.

Normal People is very much a novel of its time and place. It is set in Ireland in the 2010s as the country is going through massive austerity and political convulsions. The story of two youngsters growing up has as its backdrop a sense of crisis. The system doesn't work. There's no future. Class differences between the two are important. Marriane is clever, solitary and from a rich background. Connell is popular, attractive and very clever. His mum cleans Marianne's family home. The book is about their love affair and how they come close, grow apart but never leave each other. But it can also be read as the story of two people trapped by a system that leaves them little room for manouvre. Perhaps the best example of this is how Connell abandons Marianne - their love affair is kept secret and in his anxiety for not being thought badly for dating Marianne he takes someone else to the prom. It is of course appalling. It is also exactly the sort of thing that student teenagers do to each other, and it destroys Marianne for sometime. It is also, as we find out, completely unnecessary and Connell carries that guilt for some time.

Sometime later they meet at university and have an on off relationship. Their friends are mostly superficial, though they clearly feel extremely important. Their love is by turns chaotic, painful and beautiful. They never quite get the balance though and neither knows what they want. They discuss politics - there's an early college kid discussion of the Communist Manifesto - and they're both on the left, but not the activist left. There's a certain middle class disdain from both of them towards protest and political action. The one demo they do join - ironically about Palestine - is described in lacklustre and performative turns. Despite the opportunities they have they are trapped - because going to Trinity College takes Connell out of his Working Class life and Marianne from her upper-middle class life and turns them into a classless student. Academia beckons. Or perhaps work in some NGO. Despite Marianne's deep interest in politics - she seems remarkably unengaged with the world. The book makes one focus on the relationship above all else. Perhaps this is Rooney's comment on that Irish decade? Perhaps it is also arguing that the personnal shapes all else. Perhaps its just because its a book about two young people fumbling through life, love and sex. It left me unsatisfied. But it mostly reminded me why university was such an obnoxious experience.

Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

Somewhere in my head I had an idea that Iain Banks' novel Canal Dreams was written for a bet. Someone suggested an utterly implausible plot, and Banks proved he could get it published. For the life of me I cannot find evidence of this on the internet, though I do understand that Banks was never particularly happy with the work.

Perhaps Banks was too much of a perfectionist, because while the plot is implausible, it is certainly an exciting read. It centres on Hisako Onoda, a Japanese virtuoso cellist whose fear of flying means that she embarks on a world tour by boat. Travelling through the Panama Canal as the region slides into war, her and several other cargo boats and their passengers and crew are trapped on the Canal near Panama. As the wait drags on, those trapped entertain themselves with dinner parties, arguments and romantic liasions. Eventually, however, the ships become the target of terrorists who want to use them as a base to attack US interests.

The first part of the book sets up the concept through a series of flashbacks as Hisako remembers her life, and how she came to play the cello. It follows her through music school and a centre point is her first failure to fly. Meant to accompany her orchestra on a plane to tour the US, she's unable to go, and the turning point becomes an emblematic moment for her - both in her transition to adulthood and her image of herself as a loner. 

Trapped on the ship, she falls in love with a flamboant and cocky French officer, who teachers her scuba diving, in exchange for intimate lessons on the cello. In the midst of war and uncertainty this becomes Hisako's first real taste of stablity and love.

But then the terrroists hit, and the book becomes a classic adventure story as Hisako fights for her survival and tries to prevent a wider atrocity. Here I am being vague, because there is a major twist that deserves to be unknown in advance of reading. But it is the destruction of her cello that symbolises most Hisako's transition from to vengeful violence.

The last part of the book is essentially an action film on paper. It is an entertaining read, but perhaps is too much of a stylistic break from the first half to make for that satisfactory a novel. But whether written as a bet, or not, there's an entertaining and clever adventure here that will while away a couple of hours. 

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Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

In chronological order Commanche Moon is the second book in the series that Larry McMurtry wrote about the Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Agustus McCrae. In the order of writing though, it was the fourth. This is in itself interesting, because it means that the book is both a prequel to the pulitzer winning Lonesome Dove, and also a full stop at the end of the stories of the two characters.

But it is as a prequel to Lonesome Dove that the book will be mostly judged. Here I found the work slightly wanting. This isn't because it is badly written, but rather that the plot is hung less around the story and more around the need to manouevre the characters (both major and minor) into the positions they occupy at the beginning of Lonesome Dove. So obvious is this, that the Texas Rangers have a brief hiatus at the eponymous settlement to show it at a slightly earlier stage in its limited development.

Because of this the book sometimes crams in some story arcs. Characters die off rather rapidly, and not always because of murder. Some of the stories seem unfinished. It's unclear what Ahumado's disappearance is all about - there's certainly no closure in these pages - which means that main arc of the first third of the book is left hanging. There's no purpose to this part of the story other than to introduce characters later. If, when reviewing Lonesome Dove, I could say I was impressed by the strength and centrality of the female characters, here they are mostly there as foils for the men. The exception is the portrayal of how surviving female victims of Native American attacks are shunned by white society afterward.

Unlike earlier works there is more focus on Native Americans, though unfortunately like earlier works, most Indians are depicted as bloodthirsty savages. At least Buffalo Hump a Commanche chief in this book has his violence given context, and the depiction of the actual raid he led is rather well done - even if there is a little too much lingering on violence against the Whites.

McMurtry is, to be fair, more sympathetic to the Native Americans here than I was used too. Though the main characters are either violent sadists (also true of Ahumado) or eccentric wanderers. Not great really.

Looking at the book as the end of the story, despite its position chronologically, makes the book somewhat more satisfying. Its easy to read this and find Lonesome Dove just around the corner, which makes the reader feel the ending is merely a pause. The love/hate relationship of the two characters, scarred by battle, love and loss, positions them well for their roles in Dove. But the novel was undermined for me by its transitional nature. Read in chronological order would be my advice - but understand that Dove is by far the better, and more rounded novel.

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McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
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Daniel Mason - North Woods

Ever wonder what happened in the house you live in before you did? Or on the land it stands on? North Woods is an entertaining, if disappointing, exploration of this intriguing concept which follows a small plot of land in Massachusetts from roughly the time of European colonisation onward. The people who live there, from a couple whose illicit love affair means they must flee a tyrannical puritan colony, to twin sisters who succeed their father in the house and grow one of the most beautifully tasting apples in an orchard on the land to modern times when families, isolated individuals and lovers make the place their own. The land, and the house on it, grows and shrinks over time as people make adjustments removing beloved orchards, neglecting (or loving) the land or even digging a swimming pool.

It is an intriguing idea, but the author is trying too hard to be epic. The book feels like a loose collection of interconnected stories tied together by the land and the supernatural elements that mean many of the characters remain in the house and influence those that come after. The problem is the supernatural element doesn't quite work - it is too unclear how and why the ghostly remains influence the world and why - and the ending just doesn't work. Some reviewers have enjoyed what they see as an ecological story in the book - but this is just window dressing. The woods are cleared, they regrow, and some species arriving on American shores from elsewhere, having an impact through the book. But if anyone expects this to produce a metaphor for humanities' impact on nature, or even something deeper, they'll be disappointed.

North Woods is not a particularly bad novel. But I struggled to be that enthusiastic. It's a one trick pony.  

Ismail Kadare - The General of the Dead Army

Twenty years after the end of World War Two, a General is sent from Italy to Albania to find and bring back the bodies of the soldiers killed there. He leaves with a fanfare, carrying with him the hopes and expectations of hundreds of people whose sons, husbands and fathers died, and never came home. In particular the General hopes to find Colonel X, a senior soldier whose body was never found, and whose wealthy and influential family want it returned.

Travelling with the General is a priest and the two form a bond which is more than professional, but not quite friendly. Their world views clash, as the General approaches the task with a mechanical eye - a professional job that needs to be done, and measured out in lists of names, measurements of skeltons and careful identifications. 

But the land itself is full of ghosts. The official international trip is hardly welcomed by the peasants who fought off the fascist invaders, and the long days, the difficult terrain and the tension take their toll on the General who begins to fantasise as his stress develops, that the dead soldiers are an army of his own, manouvering on some old battlefield. The priest questions him - does he think it would have been better if he had led them? Its a poignant question because the General clearly does think so. The reality of war is not something he really knows - though the diaries and stories he hears of the dead soldiers teach him that the war, and the Italian troops, were not the brave heroes of his imagination.

Into this tangle of emotions and stress comes and added problem. A German general is here too. Removing their own bones. Inevitably the two clash. But really want causes the General to finally break down, and indeed brings out his contempt for the host nation and its people, his failure to really understand the nature of his task, and the impact upon the Albanians who were the victims, is the reality of the work. Despite the pomp and circumstance of his initial journey, there's little glory or thanks here.

Its a terrific novel, which says alot about Albania in the post war period, and its attitude to its "fascist" enemies of the past. 

Michael Christie - Greenwood

In 2038 the last forest survives on a remote island off British Columbia. The world's woodlands have been destroyed by a cataclysmic disease, that has destroyed huge swathes of humanity and undermined the global economy. The forest, private land, is tended by scientists and forest guides who maintain it for the wealthy tourists to visit to be "regenerated in the humbling loom" of the last trees. Jake Greenwood shares her name with the billionaire owner of the island, a timber tycoon whose wealth was based on the ravaging of North America's woodland. Now Jake is heavily in debt and desperate to cling on to her job.

The Greenwood island is at the epicentre of this multigenerational story. Jake is the latest of a long line of people, who have an association with the land and the forests, and after the opening chapters that detail her place on Earth, the story skips back 150 years to tell how the rich got rich and destroyed the land, woods and people along the way. Its an epic tale, much of which centres on an itinerant veteran of World War One who makes his living tapping maple trees for syrup, and comes across an abandoned baby. Persuded by the powerful and wealthy agents of the millionaire father, Everett carries the baby through a North America wracked by economic depression. This story forms the centre piece for the remaining links to Jake, and the modern world - the story of an abandoned baby and a world gone chaotic around her.

Its an amazing tale, and Michael Christie has done wonders to weave countless threads together. From the 1930s depression era railroad cars to Earth First style direct actions against logging equipment, the book is filled with fully drawn characters, who constantly force the reader to ask themselves why we live in a world with so much beauty at the same time as hunger and destruction surround us. But this is no crude political tract, its a story that links future dystopia to a chain of events - both human and economic. The powers unleashed by a handful of billionaires in search of yet more wealth, draw countless others into the swirling maw. The trees that are stripped and destroyed and burnt along the way, merely fuel for the accumulation of wealth, yet poignant reminders of what we stand to loose. Great novel.

Jenny Erpenbeck - Go Went Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go Went Gone was first published in German and deals with the important political issue of Europe and refugees. It's central character is a retired, and widowed, professor of literature, Richard, who finding himself at a loose end after retirement, discovers a community of African refugees who have set up a tent city in Oranienplatz, central Berlin. From late 2012, Oranienplatz was the site of such an encampement and Erpenbeck's book clearly draws on this political protest movement and its consequences, as well as individuals who were part of it. 

Richard is drawn to the refugees, his personal isolation, and his feeling that his life lacks direction in retirement, lead him to think about documenting the lives of the refugees. Quickly however he finds himself helping, encouraging and teaching them. 

I was initially skeptical about the book, worried it was going to turn into a "white saviour" trope as Richard solves all the individual issues that the refugees suffer. Instead it is quite the opposite. Richard finds himself unable to push through the legal barriers erected by a racist German state that provent refugees finding sanctuary or work. He is frustrated that the skills of these men are not utilised by a country desperate for young and experienced workers. He is trapped by the logic of a charity based system of refugee support that only treats the men as passive victims. And finally he is poleaxed by the horrors that he has seen.

Erpenbeck depicts all of this with sympathy, nuance and anger. One of the refugees, Rufu, is medically treated for psychiatric issues. Yet it turns out his fundamental problem is not mental health, but a agonising dental issue that no one has diagnosed, because no one has treated him as a human being and tried to communicate properly. Instead they assume he is having some sort of psychotic episode. Osarobo would like to learn the piano so Richard offers him the use of his own instrument. Richard buys Karon land in Ghana, not because he is a white saviour (he is...) but because the barrier has broken down between them. Richard sees the refugees not as numberless refugees who survived the perilous crossing, but as humans like him.

Since its publication racism directed towards immigrants and refugees in Germany has only increased. State support has been reduced, the lives of refugees have become harder, and the growth of fascist and far-right organisations has fuelled animosity and hatred towards the communities who are desperately seeking a new life and assistance. This book is not a political polemic. There's pages denouncing the European Union whose racist policies have led to thousands drowning in the Mediteranean and fuelled the far-right. But implicit in the book is a sense that liberal politics, when scratched, are really not that liberal - but quite racist.

There's a clever plot line in the book when Richard's middle class, intellectual and academic friends gradually realise that one of their own group is actually quite racist. The shock to them is real. The refugees and their situation, as well as their resistance as they protest the government's plan to displace them once again, has forced the liberal intelligensia to see things differently. The refugees here are not a backdrop - they are humans who want to live their lives, but are forced to fight back because the system itself won't let them have lives.

The ending is, well, ambiguous. Just as the refugee problem under capitalism with its borders, barbed wire and nation states will always be. But there is hope, on an individual level, for Richard and his friends. Their is sympathy, mutual learning and the sharing of meals. But if Jenny Erpenbeck's novel tells us anything - its that this is no solution to the fundamental problem. But that does not mean we shouldn't fight to make people, and governments, see refugees as humans who can help us build the future we want.

Louise Erdrich - The Mighty Red

Set in the lonely east of North Dakota, The Mighty Red is an impressive novel that draws out the isolation of small town, rural America and casts it against the swirling realities of capitalist agriculture, ecological degradation and loneliness. Alongside this Louise Erdrich draws out a story of a local tragedy that has left the town's population scarred and desperate for love to heal their collective wounds.

The novel opens with Kismet Poe, named by a whimsical mother, who hopes that hear daughter will escape that confines of small town America. But Kismet is in love with the bookish romantic Hugo, while being heavily courted by the high school sports star, aspirant farmer Gary. Kismet is too kind to refuse Gary's marriage proposal, and the confines of American culture to restrictive for anyone, even the adults, to understand that youngsters don't need to get married to enjoy sex and love for their early years. As Kismet falls into a marriage she knows she doesn't want but cannot say no to, their wedding day is nearly ruined as Kismet's father absconds with the church renovation funds.

Kismet is now trapped, literally, by Gary's family. Stuck on a farm whose topsoil is vanishing before everyone's eyes. The neighbours are trying out new-fangled organic, no drill farming, but they're the weird ones. Preferring to grow food instead of the local sugar beet cash crop. Hugo leaves his bookshop (Erdrich's novels often seem to feature bookshops, presumably like her own in Minnesota) and heads to Williston to make his fortune in ND's gas fields. Fracking is booming.

Kismet has to escape, but doing so means learning what really happened at that town tragedy, whose participants seem to have sworn some sort of pact of silence. The cover-up needs to be uncovered - not for legal reasons, but so that everyone can move on.

Erdrich has constructed a lovely novel of humanity, youngster's trapped by their circumstances and isolation, and the inward looking life of the adults. The drugs, drink, poisoned air and rapacious capitalism that undermine any effort to be different - or indeed normal. Kismet's at the heart of this, her steely character surviving the twin buffeting of her father's betrayal, her new family life and a soulless marriage. Her escape is wonderful, as is her steadfastness. It's a beautiful book. Louise Erdrich has her finger very firmly on the pulse of America. It will be interesting to see what she writes in the coming years.

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Larry McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is one of the best regarded Western novels of the 20th century. It certainly sustained me on a trip through the American West. The two main characters of that epic story, Woodrow F. Call and Augustus "Gus" McCrae, are two Texas Rangers. Legendary men of the frontier whose job was to enforce frontier justice and stop the Native Americans halting the White settlers. Dead Man's Walk, published a decade later, is the Woodrow and Gus' origin story. The tale of their first travels with the Texas Rangers, and the story of how they develop their friendship and the knowledge that enables them to survive on the frontier.

The book begins with their first expedition in which their party is hunted and nearly destroyed by the Comanche chief Buffalo Hump. Buffalo Hump is a experienced and skillful hunter and killer. He doesn't simply kill off party members one by one, he traps and hunts them like animals. His plan is to terrorise the White people off. It's a frightening experience that scars the two Rangers permanently. But not enough to prevent them joining a gung ho expedition into New Mexico to capture Santa Fe. This expedition is a disaster too, failures of leadership, experience and equipment lead the 200 strong force to be decimated and reduced to a motley crew of forty who are captured and tortured by the Mexican Army. The Dead Man's Walk of the title is the desert journey the remaining Rangers and the Mexican troops are forced to make. One that claims many lives.

Like Lonesome Dove this is a novel that doesn't pause for breath. There are a sequence of events that blend into each other. Most of them violent and characters are often only introduced to be knocked off a few chapters later. At the heart is the growing story of love and respect between Woodrow and Gus, their growth into adulthood and the sharing of experiences that bonds them. The growing love between Gus and Clara, a young woman he meets near the beginning of his adventures and will feature throughout the series, is actually a backdrop between the love of the two men.

It works well as a novel, but I was uncomfortable with the depiction of the Native Americans. They are always violent and bloodthirsty. While they are clearly fighting for the lives and society, they feel two dimensional, depicted as violent killers to give the White characters something to revolve around. I've seen online comment that suggests this is to do with how they are seen by the main characters. But it feels lazy and inadequate. McMurtry could have rounded out Buffalo Hump and his contemporaries, but instead they're too simple - untrustworthy, violent and superstitous. It felt like the worst stereotypes of the previous century and detracted from an otherwise excellent novel.

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Cyprian Ekwensi - Jagua Nana

Jagua Nana is a remarkable, but forgotten, novel. Set in Nigeria in the immediate aftermath of independence, it centres of Jagua Nana, a forty-five year old sex worker who retains her skills, beauty and fantastic dress sense. She is an icon of Lagos, a woman whose clothing and makeup sets the fashions for everyone else. And a woman who is desired by many men.

Jagua wants to settle down and have children. She hopes to do this with Freddie, her twenty something lover, a school teacher, but one who has ambitions. Freddie wants to go to London, to study at the inns of court and return to Nigeria a lawyer who can help transform the country into a modern democracy. Jagua's plan is to pay his way, and ensure he qualifies, then returns and can help her lead the life she dreams of. 

But the tension between her life as a sex-worker, relying on her clients from the exotic Tropicana club to keep her in the life she has, pressures her relationship with Freddie until it snaps. Unable to see past Jagua's sex with other men, Freddie moves to England without Jagua's help. In his absence Jagua is cut adrift, finding solace and excitement in various dalliances and relationships in the country around Lagos. Here her urban street skills are a hindrance in navigating the countryside and its more traditional life, but also offer new ways of thinking to those stuck outside the capital. Her good looks do no harm either:

Here in Ogabu, men dressed well but sanely. Women were beautiful, but not brazen. They had become complementary to the palm trees and the Iroko, the rivulets and the fertile earth. TGhey were part of their surroundings as natural as the wind. Whereas in Lagos man was always grappling to master an environment he had created. It was money, money, yet more money.

Freddie's sudden return as a promising young politician standing in the local election as a radical, democratic and anti-corruption candidate upsets the apple cart. Initially, unable to see past his recent marriage to a young woman, Jagua initially decides to destroy him by supporting the other candidate. But the personal tensions become intensely political. 

Jagua Nana is a remarkable novel because its story is a deeply personal one set against the backdrop of Nigeria's emergence into post-colonialism. It's intensely political, but with a small p, because it doesn't take up big questions of struggle. Rather it is focused on the consequences of individual and very personal decisions and sacrifices, made within bigger contexts. But front and centre are the stories of women's lives - stories that show how women fight to change things, to achieve their dreams and to break free of the limitations forced upon them by their social circumstances. 

I loved this book. It was first published as part of the African Writers Series, curated by Chinua Achebe. I was very lucky to find a copy randomly in a second hand book shop, which proves it is always worth taking a punt on an unknown writer. See if you can hunt it down.

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Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

I read Creation Lake while off sick from work, devouring it in a couple of days. Two parallel news events however seemed apposite. The first was the killing of US healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seemed, at least on initial evidence, to be linked to the way that privatised healthcare denies insurance claims, leaving poor people to suffer. The second was the ongoing British inquiry into Spycops, the infiltration of leftwing and environmental groups during the 1970s, 80s and 90s by police, which often "destroyed lives".

Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake deals with just such a spy, a covert agent, sent into environmental groups to discredit them by encouraging acts of violence. It is hard not to imagine that Kushner didn't have the British Spycops in mind when she wrote it. Indeed her own spy, a freelance operative rather than a state agent, Sadie Smith, refers to similar events were cops fathered children. She herself is prepared to use sex and love to manipulate her targets, dividing her opponents and creating false ideas of loyalty.

Set in France in the recent past, Sadie is trying to undermine a group of harmless, if eccentric, communalists in the rural countryside concerned, alongside the nearby farming communities, about the draining of aquifers by multinational corporations. Sadie's infiltration is aimed at discrediting the movement by encouraging it to go further than any individual members want to go - toward violence.

Entering the movement though means Sadie has to assimilate the movement in part. Since this is France, the movement's politics are shaped by the heirs of Guy Debord, those influenced by his situationalist films and ideas. Sadie hacks the emails of one Bruno Lacombe, the ideological leader of the movement, whose abstract thoughts on human nature, evolution, geology and society's construction are highly influential. As she obsessively reads these emails, Sadie is drawn to their rarified nature - pulled into Lacombe's world, even as she despises those who follow him.

There's a lot of exposition here, and I lost some patience with Kushner's use of Lacombe's emails to tell a wider story. But Sadie is well drawn, and her descent into obsessiveness, even while she doesn't become a member of the movement is fascinating. You get a real sense of the way living secret lives messes you up. Nonetheless she remains an unpleasant, manipulative, and emotionless person. There's no love for anyone else - in the movement or indeed within the opposition. All of which leads to a rather satisying ending for the activists's side, and an ambiguous one for Sadie. Creation Lake has a lot in it for leftists looking for an unusual take on the spy novel that reminds us that spy's don't have the glamour of James Bond, but are dirty, backstabbing thugs who care little for ordinary people.

Lee Child - Die Trying

This, the second Jack Reacher novel, follow a pattern that I suspect will become common place in the series. Jack Reacher randomly finds himself in a violent and unusual situation, which requires him to use his skills to violently escape. In his way will be a succession of dangerous enemies and their less than able henchmen. At various times Reacher will utilise his military knowledge, brawn and brains to defeat these enemies, while the reader gets to learn about a variety of military hardware.

It's all, remarkably satisfying, and Die Trying is perhaps apposite this week, given that its "bad guys" are far-right, Nazi, American militas living in the backwoods of Montana. Reacher finds himself kidnapped alongside a young woman, who turns out to be with the FBI and an important target for the Nazis. The Nazis aim to use her in their elaborate, and completely unfeasible plan to secede from the United States, and build a new country on the lines of the US constituion as they interpret it. It's all very Make America Great again.

Luckily Reacher is no proto-Trumper and he blows up, machine guns, and fights his way back to a vision of liberal America that never really existed either. Along the way he has sex after burying the crucifed corpse of someone who defied the milita - which proves that it takes all sorts really. It also has the least exciting cross-America road trip in literarture. Die Trying's a classic thriller packed full of silliness and escapism - perhaps not as polished as the first one. But that doesn't really matter.

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James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce

This 1941 novel by James M. Cain is not one of his best known, though it was made into a film starring Joan Crawford as the eponymous Mildred Pierce. That film, apparently, gave the story an upbeat ending. This is remarkable, because the novel is certainly not upbeat, and instead describes a life of bittersweet travails. The Hayes Code had a lot wrong with it.

Mildred Pierce is a middle class housewife, one of thousands brought low by the Great Depression. Her husband brings her lower, leaving her in the early pages of the book for his mistress. Pierce is left alone with two daughters, and finds her only hope of employment in menial jobs that she thinks are beneath her. 

Its a powerful start. Cain takes as his subject a woman undone by economic circumstance and her husband's misogyny. His subject is not the usual one in novels about the era - working class victims are better heroes of novels than the aspiring middle class. Above all else this is a novel about class. Mildred Pierce uses her contacts, her business acumen and her good looks to drive a project forward. She wants to rebuild her position in order to ensure her eldest daughter Vera loves her, and respects her.

Vera is the villain of the book. Her greed, her snobbery, her love of money and fame, and her ability to use others goes unnoticed by Mildred. Her mother can only see good, not the double crossing. As Mildred's success grows, she is once again brought low. But this time it's not capitalism, but her need to buy Vera's love. It means, really, that there cannot be a happy ending. The two main women characters' are so flawed as to be unable to find a mutual way out. But it is Mildred who is left to pick up the pieces.

This is a powerful novel. But it's grim. One reads it hoping it will get better. But every success brings the seeds of failure for Mildred. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for the futility of real happiness under capitalism. Cain may not have had the politics of anti-capitalism. But he could see it around him. In Mildred Pierce he put it on the page.

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Kevin Barry - The Heart in Winter

The town of Butte, Montana, USA, was built on mining. Its miners came from everywhere around the world, and their labour lined the pockets of the mine-owners to the extent of millions of dollars. Not for nothing was the town known as "the richest hill on Earth". The miners, of course, worked hard, long hours in dangerous conditions. Today the most sombre place for visitors to Butte is the memorial to the lives lost in the Speculator mine disaster of 1917. Another place to visit is one of the town's former brothels.

Both these aspects of Butte are part of the plot of Kevin Barry's novel The Heart in Winter. Set in the 1890s, one of its two central characters is Tom Rourke, an Irish immigrant who failed at being a miner, but now makes a living by selling dope, and casual work in the local photographer's shop. His nights are spent in Butte's bars and brothels. 

Polly Gillespie, on the other hand, is a mail order bride. She arrives at the station and within minutes is married to the zealous religious man Long Harrington, a manager at the Anaconda mining company. Her background is less clear, though its obvious she is not the shy virgin that Harrington thinks. Her marriage is immediately dark, as her new husband flagellates himself, presumeable for the sin he commits with Polly. On meeting Tom at the photographers, Polly is immediately taken. Soon they are fleeing through Montana's forested mountains, on the back of a stolen horse whose money bags are filled with the rent collected by Tom's former landlady. Rent that Tom rarely paid. Leaving the lodgings burning, and with little in the way of survival gear, Tom and Polly, escape into the woods and meet a succession of random, eccentric characters - precisely the types you might expect to be living in the woods in 1890s Montana. Religious, eccentric and brutalised. They are persued by three violent sexually obsessed thugs, hired by Harrington to return Polly and murder Tom. 

Their love affair is powerful and intense. It is brilliantly written, though the reader instinctively knows that it will not end well. Few lives seem to in Barry's portrayal of a Montana run through with profit hungry multinationals and with Native American genocide only a few years in the past.

Barry's writing is tight and clipped. This is not a long novel, though he packs a lot into each sentence. It is sparse, to the point of frustration at times. I found myself wanting a few longer descriptions of events. Reading this too fast means missing how events completely. But the pace fits the story of two lovers on the run, and its a fantastic portrayal of life on the edge of Western civilisation, in a place where as Sergio Leone put it in Few Dollars More, "Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price". 

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Doig - Bucking the Sun

John Grisham - The Runaway Jury

It has been many years since I read a John Grisham novel. But back in the late 1990s and early 2000s I had several favourites. I was a particular fan of The Runaway Jury which I read several times. It is the story of a jury in a case where the widow of a smoker who died from cancer is suing a large tobacco corporation. It is a high stakes trial. If the plaintiff wins, there'll be immediate damages of millions of dollars. The risks for the multinationals though are much bigger - the potential for tens of thousands of further lawsuits.

In order to try and best skew the jury towards a favourable verdict, both sides of lawyers have teams trying to understand who the jurors are. The most unfavourable came be removed at jury selection - the most likely to give big monetary damages for instance. The others might be swayed by more nefarious and illegal means. Bribes, pressure on family members, or other acts. Its highly illegal, though possibly quite realistic, and Grisham has a brilliant cast of utterly amoral and immoral characters trying to win the case for big tobacco, and having access to huge slush funds to make it happen. 

But then there's Nick and Marlee. Nick is on the jury, and no one seems to know anything about him. But he seems to be able to steer the jury. Influencing them to get proper food and cutlry. To get day trips to break the monotony of sequestration and to even act collectively seemingly at random. How is he doing this? Marlee approaches Fitch, an unpleasant fixer for the tobacco companies, with a generous offer. For plenty of renumeration she'll ensure Nick delivers the verdict.

It is a fantastic, if unbelievable, setup. Grisham tells it well though, and creates a real tension by the end. The reader must know which way the results going to go, but how will Nick and Marlee get away with it. There's a fantastic tension between Fitch and Marlee that Grisham nicely develops. It borders on lust on Fitch's part. Not in a sexual way, but because Marlee offers something that he, a veteran of dozens of such trials, can only dream of - the ability to dictate the outcome of a jury's decision.

The Runaway Jury has everything. A humiliated multinational. A cast of unpleasant characters who usually get their comupance, and a nice win for the underdogs. Despite it feeling dated in places - not least because the technological references are now very dated - this is a fun, satisfying read. Particularly for those of us whose lives have been blighted in one way or the other by the tobacco companies.

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NoViolet Bulawayo - Glory

What a remarkable work Glory is. A brilliant satrical novel about post-colonial struggles, the way that the hopes and dreams of liberation struggles can be diverted and destroyed, and how that despair can turn into revolution. But perhaps most remarkable is how NoViolet Bulawayo tells the story.

George Orwell's famous political satire on the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, tells the story using animals in a human world. Bulawayo tells her account of post-colonial Jidada with a cast of animals. Jidada is a fictional country, but the story is based on the struggles in Zimbabwe, where a movement to overthrow British rule was turned into the dictatorship of Mugabe. Glory focuses on a coup that overthrows the aged Old Horse ruler which, instead of bringing the freedom and hope the animals long for, delivers another brutal dictatorship. It is a parable of the 2017 Zimbabwe coup which saw the Old Horse Mugabe overthrown and Emmerson Mnangagwa installed as the new President.

Bulawayo tells the story through her animals. Their personalities in part dictated by the animals they are. The brave exile Destiny returning to Jidada is a goat, the vicious paramilitary regime enforcers are all nasty dogs. The masses range from chickens and kittens to pigs and sheep. It is two donkeys who raise a banner "Sisters of the Disappeared" at a government rally before the regime disappears them. 

But the novel is much more than the adult fairy tale that this setup suggests. Bulawayo experiments with different methods of telling the story. There are twitter threads, songs and chants. It is a briliant way to capture the atmosphere of both Zimbabwe and the mood on the streets. I was particularly struck by the snippets of conversation from the food queues. They range from sullen acceptance of the situation, to naive hope in the regime to growing radicalism. Like any developing revolution there's a mix of contradicatory moods and ideas. Bulawayo captures this better than any contemporary novel I've read.

It is no surprise that Bulawayo acknowledges all the "Jidadas of the world, clamouring for freedom" and says "A luta continua". While the novel finishes on the glory of the successful revolution, its climax is the revolution itself, as the dogs tear off their uniforms, throw down their weapons and break from the regime. The voices from the police, as they realise they are outnumbered by a combatative and confident mass movement, is perhaps the best depiction of the state's armed bodies of men being broken in the midst of revolution I have ever read. The fact that NoViolet Bulawayo makes this book simultaneously achingly beautiful and painfully sad is a tribute to a fantastic novelist. It is a revolutionary classic.

Len Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945

Len Deighton's novels dominated the 1980s. His trilogies of spy series were massive bestsellers. His books on the Second World War, in particular, Bomber were justly well received and non-fiction books on the war and cooking also bear mention. Deighton's works filled my Dad's shelves, though I only really read the ones about aircraft! The spy novels were a little too intellectually challenging for young me.

I have probably had Winter on my own shelves since my father died but only recently picked it up. It is a classic 1980s family epic, which has loose connectioned with some of Deighton's other spy novels. As the subtitle suggests, this follows the lives of a Berlin family, the Winters, as they live through the most turbulent times of German history. The Winters are wealthy. As the new century dawns, the patriarch Harald Winter, an industralist is beginning to see the investment possibilities of German rearmanent. Throughout the next four decades, he makes millions from the manufacture of arms, despite initially convincing himself that rearming like this will prevent war, rather than lead to one.

The families' general liberal politics is neatly subverted. Harald has a mistress, a Jew, and the family complains bitterly both about the revolutionary movements that overtake Germany ending World War One, and the rise of the fascists. Both of these, they see, as bad for business. But the Nazis are also good as they stop the left, and Harald's sons are pulled closer into the emerging mass movement with the younger becoming a member of the Freikorps - the fascist movement that helped crush the workers from 1919 to 1923, and then the Nazis itself.

The other son ends up in the US, were he becomes a key figure in the Allies attempts to overthrow Hitler from without. He also ends up investigating war crimes and this leads to their final coming together.

The story is faintly ludicrous. One of those slightly contrived tales that places key figures at key moments in history so the author can tell the story of a particular period through their characters. Deighton however, does it well, not least by making most of the central figures of his book unpleasantly rich bourgeois Germans who make a mint from selling arms, and supporting fascism. As a result the story rattles along through the rise of Hitler and the collapse of Germany. There are plenty of smaller sub plots and intrigues that keep the reader engaged.

However there are some problems. There is a lot of exposition by the characters. Deighton clearly felt that some of the events he describes would be too unknown and needed explaining. This is fair enough, but there are times when the characters talk to each other weirdly because they are really talking to the reader. The other problem is that the book tends to ignore wider events. The War and Holocaust are the background, and I felt their impact and horror was somewhat deminished as a result. It means that the role of one of the sons as a senior figure in the Nazi party becomes more about his attempts to protect individual interests. Not as a cog in a wider murder machine.

All in all, its a good read and its encouraged me to revisit some of Deighton's other works and have a look at the ones I ignored all those years ago.

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George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman and the Redskins

George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels are not particularly fashionable these days. They are very dated in places, not particularly because of Flashman's offensive beliefs, but more so, I suspect because of Fraser's politics. Had Fraser lived longer, there's no doubt he would have written more of the Flashman series, and fans would have gobbled them up. But Fraser's rightwing ideas do not sit well with a new generation coming to terms with colonialism and the legacy of the British Empire.

So why pick up the unpleasantly named Flashman and the Redskins? I re-read this for deeply personal reasons. I first read the book in the late 1980s when I was besotted with Flashman's cowardly run through history. As a teenager the title character's racism and misogyny did not distract me. I was there for the adventure and escapism. This book in particular has a personal importance as it was one of the reads that led me into a lifelong interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the books climax, Flashman finds himself, through ill-luck, and misogyny, at the Greasy Grass wearing a dinner jacket. A close acquatinance of Custer's he fails to get them to retreat and only luck saves him.

Fraser's telling of the battle closely follows many accounts, and he is unearring accurate in details. As fans of Flashman will know, Fraser seeks out historical accounts where a suitable anonymous person is present at some historical juncture and inserts Flashman there. But it is Fraser's romatic retelling of the Bighorn and his own visit there which inserted the Montana battlefield into my subconcious. Nearly forty years later I too was able to visit the Greasy Grass.

But what of the novel? It is in two parts, one telling Flashman's experiences as a Forty-Niner, travelling with a wagon train to Santa Fe, two waggons full of prostitutes and slaves for a brothel with his (third?) concurant wife. There's plenty of unpleasantness here. Flashman uses racist terms, sells slaves and enjoys bigamy and adultery. He sneers at (and fears) the Native Americans and hates anyone who isn't of European extraction (though it doesn't stop him having sex with them). 

But what shines through is two fold. The first is Fraser's unscruipilous attention to detail, drawing heavily on contemporary eyewitness accounts he is able to paint a very realistic picture of life on the Plains and the North West frontieer. The second thing is Fraser's own remarkable duality when it comes to the oppressed and the victim. He has his main character decry them at every opportunity, yet he also avoids romantacising the Native Americans (though Flashman's wife certainly does this) instead recognising that they have a particular way of life that suited the Plains and was destroyed by the European settlers. But while it's wrong to place the beliefs of a character in the mouth of an author, it is  also hard not to see Fraser as agreeing that the Natives were violent and uncivilised. It makes for an contradictory read.

Part two of the book deals with Flashman's return to America in the 1870s, his presence at the failed attempt by the US government to buy the Black Hills and then at key moments in the preparations for the military encursion into Sioux terrority that led to the defeat at the Bighorn. Again, Fraser's research is exempliary. His footnotes are full of references that I really want to follow up for background on events, and Flashman's presence fits well into the real history.

Here is Western history in its gory, violent, racist detail - Flashman is present at a scalp hunt by White militia as they hunt Apache men, women and children for scalps. Its unpleasant, but the problem is that it is played merely as a way to get Flashman from one sticky situation into another. Fraser doesn't avoid the unpleasantness, but it does not detain him. I have noted elsewhere that Fraser's Flashman liberally uses the N word. Fraser might think this is reflective of the language of the times, but its not something that appears in contemporary accounts such as this one of the Indian Rising of 1857.

Given Fraser's worldview then, it is notable that his comupance in this novel, is closely related to his racist, philandering, sexist and arrogant behaviour. Flashman is suitably hoist by his petard. It makes for a satisfying ending. But should you, dear follower, read the book? I would argue that for all its attention to historical accuracy, its not a book that stands up well. Those of use who read it for nostalgic reasons are one thing. But if you are new to Flashman, the language, framework and ideas are likely to cause offence. While Fraser mentions many genuine heroes through the book, his anti-hero is the centre of the novel and it leaves far to bitter a taste in the mouth. When I was a teenager I wanted Flashman to escape. Now I hate him. A transition that you can follow through the various reviews below.

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Fraser - Flashman
Fraser - Flashman on the March
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Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars

***Spoilers for both of Tommy Orange's books***

Tommy Orange's second novel Wandering Stars is closely linked to his first, There, There. Unfortunately I had not read the first one before starting Wandering Stars, and I missed out by doing so. Such are the consequences of me not keeping up with new writers. There, There finishes, with a mass shooting, and this forms the centre point of Wandering Stars, but not in terms of events, but as a pivot point for some of the central characters. This is a book about Native America, specifically the lives of working class, poor, Native Americans in urban areas - in this case, Oakland, California.

The book swirls around complex issues about poverty, drugs, guns and Native American identity. It's brilliantly told, not least because it starts in 1864 with the Sand Creek massacre, telling the generational story of a family of Native Americans who descend from one survivor. In doing so it tells how Native American children were wrested from their families and put in dire "boarding schools" to have the Indian civilised out of them, how they were imprisoned and how they fought to keep their identity and their humanity in the face of racism, government indifference and local authority repression. Orange, and his characters, repeatedly make the point that contemporary conditions for Native Americas are rooted in history.

One of the themes of the books is the importance of generational links and ties. The fact these are broken, or not readily known to key characters is crucial. The contemporary characters, who are the focus of the latter half of the book, and whose mother died from a drug related suicide, often feel out of context, lacking roots - despite their close family. Family itself takes on a wider meaning - it is much less about those who are your parents, and more about those who care for you.

After the shooting that leaves Orvil Red Feather with a bullet fragment in his body and an addiction to painkillers, his wider family, including his brothers Loother and Lony, protect and try to survive. They swirl around him, and his daze is not just drug addiction, it is the awareness that this is it. That the American health care system cannot properly care for them all, that there are no real jobs and that school is a meaningless place that trains you to "fly a desk". The schools might no longer force you to cut your hair, stop speaking your language and no longer wear traditional clothes, but they suck the life from you in every other way.

There's a kind of hope at the end of Wandering Stars, one that rests not with magical solutions, but with the solidarity of family and community that keeps people going. Its not the societal fix - nor the restitution that Native American communities desperately need from a capitalist system that still divides and rules, and drives people into poverty. But its a kind of individual hope. Tommy Orange peppers the book with references to Settler Colonialism and injustice. It reminded me that these sores are real, lasting and ongoing. The politics isn't a crude afterthought, but a living thread running through these all too real stories.

If my reading of Wandering Stars was undermined by not having read There, There, I would caution that it's probably not necessary, but likely to add meat to the novel. In a world coming to terms with Settler Colonialism and learning how to fight it, Tommy Orange is a welcome voice.

Related Reviews 

Doig - Bucking the Sun

Ivan Doig - Bucking the Sun

Having read Ivan Doig's beautiful memoir about growing up in rural Montana before I visited that state recently, I was keen to read one of his novels. Unsurprisingly it turned out to be very easy to find Doig's books in Montana's second hand bookshops. He remains, after all, one of the state's most celebrated writers. His books are often set around key moments in Montana's history, and tell stories imbued with historical accuracy.

Bucking the Sun is one of a series of books by Doig set in the north of the state. It is focused on the extended Duff family, homesteaders who have struggled to earn a living from the dry prairie soil, and who are kicked off their land. A New Deal project to build the enormous Fort Peck Dam will flood their farm and the book opens with the government man giving the Duff patriarch the news. The Duffs become New Deal workers on the huge project, which, by coincidence is managed by their son, a leading dam architect. If this conincidence is a little to unbelievable for the reader, it is worth suspending disbelief at this point, as the novel has a lot to offer, despite the contrived set up.

The book opens however with an aging, retired and right-wing sheriff who is thinking back on his career in a old people's home. One unsolved case still bugs him, a case in which two naked bodies were found in a car at the bottom of the Fort Peck resivoir. These entangled lovers were both Duffs, but as the opening chapter concludes, neither was married to the other.

The novel builds up to a climax were the identities of the two Duffs is finally revealed. As the family works on the dam, encouraged and helped along by the senior position of their eldest son, we see their lives, loves and laughs along the way. We also see the hardship of the New Deal work, and the difficulties of life in the West, as the Dam rises, so do the shanty towns around it - a new Wild West. 

Doig's put a lot of research into the book - there is a great deal here about what happened that seems historically accurate. But I found the other things telling. The way women get opportunities from the New Deal that give them a level of independence. The lives and work of sex workers at the time. Yet for me, most fascinating, is the radical history that links the struggles of factory workers in the First World War in Scotland, to the strikes and protests of 1930s America. I don't know what Doig's politics were, but the sympathy here with strikers, underdogs, protesters, sabetours and Communists are apparent. His knowledge of politics is enough to include passing reference to Trotskyists, that will please other leftie readers like myself.

Ultimately the story here is in the telling. To a certain extent I was disappointed with the ending - in fact I wasn't really that interested. If Doig hadn't inserted chapters with the Sheriff's flashbacks, I would have forgotten all about the opening mystery. What I was really invested in was the thing that all the other characters were obsessed with - the building of Fort Peck Dam itself. In fact, I might try and see it, should I ever return.

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