Yes, Wifedom (2023) is about George Orwell’s largely forgotten wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and the important, yet unacknowledged role, she played in his life and work, but it is more than that. It is an excoriating assessment of the general neglect of women who are gathered by artistic men for their own personal and artistic betterment.
A high-wire act is not awe-inspiring if you can see the wires. Invisible and unacknowledged, a wife is the practical and often intellectual wiring that allows the act to soar; and for it to be truly astonishing, the wires, and the wife need to be erased both at the time, and then over time.
Her portrayal of George Orwell – real name, Eric Blair – reveals him to have been cantankerous, needy, useless at any manual work, generally ill and egocentric without anything, except his writing, to be egocentric about. A sexual predator and a misogynist: he treated women as mere service providers. Also, Funda doesn’t hide her mild contempt for Orwell’s many biographers, all men, for erasing Eileen O’Shaughnessy from their books just as Orwell did from his work, like some male club of matedom keeping it all in house, slaps on the back and “Well done old chap!” But remember, in the mid twentieth century, patriarchy was still the dominate force.
Funda has come under some criticism for ‘trashing’ a famous writer’s reputation, but as she explains in the text, a ‘good’ book can be written by a ‘bad’ man. Understanding more about him, his wife and marriage doesn’t lessen her admiration for Orwell’s work – she may not now love the man but she still loves his writing.
I read Funda’s first book, Stasiland (2002) and loved it for telling compelling untold stories of life behind the Berlin Wall. I read All That I Am (2011), her first novel, and remember nothing about it. Here, Funda, has audaciously combined biography, memoir, polemic, social commentary and imagined conversations: fiction – it’s a heady mix and a great one – to create a truely memorable world of a forgotten woman who contributed much to the artistic output and fame of her husband. Her life with Orwell was one of poverty, struggle, sacrifice and determination but with an unwavering belief in his art and the ultimate success of it.
She followed him to Spain where he wanted to fight against Franco. He didn’t do much; she did a lot; she worked for the political organisation he was fighting for. After Franco’s victory she, her colleagues, and Orwell were in danger. She narrowly escaped imprisonment – when some of her colleagues did not – and, along with her own, saved his life. In his Homage to Catalonia (1938), his account of his experiences in the Spanish civil war, which she edited and typed, she is never mentioned.
He needed her but she didn’t deserve him.
So women are said to have the same human rights as men, but our lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not.
Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) are now classics, his most famous works, and rightly so, but both had great input from the writer’s wife, not only as editor, typist, and researcher, but also as a contributor and sounding board, sometimes in bed, for his ideas, slip-ups, and decisions.
Funda reprints Eileen’s letters to friends where you can hear her whimsical tone, sense of humour and self-deprecation which are characteristics of the ensemble of characters in Animal Farm. You can ‘hear’ Eileen’s influence.
The golden age of feminist literature may be over but here’s one that should, and probably will, be added to that lexicon. It’s a great and uplifting read. Highly recommended.
Here is a fascinating interview with Funda by Sarah Ferguson on the 7:30 Report from July 2023.
This book is the best of what fiction can do: it takes you out of your time, your place, your beliefs, your expectations, and your complacency. Its appearance of truth, verisimilitude, is so strong it’s hard not to feel that this is memoir – how does he do that? – yet Tan Twan Eng, the Malaysian / British author, was born in Penang 30 years after the action, 1941-46.
The novel is written in two parts. The first and longer is a slow burn of friendship, self-awareness, family, and discovery. The second is a rollercoaster ride as WWII decimates the contented and almost healed world of the protagonist, Phillip Hutton, the Chinese / British son of a wealthy English businessman whose completely English family seemed complete before he came along.
Phillip’s Chinese mother was his father’s second wife. Although the youngest, he feels he is in the middle: in the middle of everything, being pulled this way and that, fielding heavy demands on him from every angle: the Malay locals, his Chinese forebears, his English father, and, most importantly, his Japanese instructor in the ancient Japanese martial art of aikijutsu, testing his loyalty, his responsibilities, his obligations, and his sense of self. Phillip gathers all these strands of himself into one comprehensive knot and so is able to finally understand himself and his place in the world, or so he believes. Then the war arrives in December 1941 and everything unravels. But young Phillip discovers that all those strands of his life that he thought were fighting him, pulling him, were actually teaching him; he does the unthinkable, then recants, then … no, no spoilers here.
For anyone interested in the mysterious art of writing fiction don’t bother with all those vlogs on YouTube giving free writing advice from ‘experts’ most of which look like they’re just out of high school; you’ll find out more about writing fiction by reading this book, but read it like a writer: search for the ‘way’ and ‘how’ he writes and understand how he makes it so real.
The Gift of Rain (2007) was Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel, and it was long listed for the Booker Prize as was his most recent, The House of Doors (2023). I’m now searching for his second, The Garden of Evening Mists (2011), also a prize winner – it won the Man Asian Literay Prize – and which has been adapted for big screen by HBO. Highly recommended.
Here Tan Twan Eng talks about the perils of being a new writer.
Listen to Tan Twan Eng’s advice to new writers here.
Irish writer Colm Tóibín, Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024. This is his eleventh novel.
As a Tóibín fan it was like coming home to a cosy room as I settled in to page one and his simple very clear narrator’s voice with its always formal tone elicited by mainly short sentences with no contractions. It’s been twenty years or so of novelistic time since the happy ending of his novel Brooklyn (2009) when Eilis Lacey, from Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s home town in County Wexford, NE Ireland) returned to Brooklyn to continue her role as the recent wife of Italian, Tony Fiorello and to raise a family on Long Island.
Tóibín wastes no time and opens the narrative with the plot point that propels the story: a stranger arrives at Eilis’s front door with a piece of harsh news and his even harsher promise to make things worse. She lives in an enclave of the Fiorello family including her parents-in-law and Tony’s married brothers and she has forged a place in that family that she thought was secure but it’s her reaction to the news, and the only action she feels she can take, that causes her to doubt everything she has done in the past. This is despite her in-laws offering to solve the problem for her. Her stubborn Irish decision is played against the Italian pragmatic approach which she finds untenable. She refuses their help.
This is a common novelistic format: begin with an explosive event and then fill in the backstory along with the repercussions of the bomb. The reader is hooked from page one.
Brooklyn is an immigrant tale and the choices an immigrant must make, personified in the story as two men, one Irish and one an immigrant, like herself, forging an American life. She returns to Ireland to find if she has made the right choice; a little foolhardy since she has already married the Italian-American, something she does not tell anyone including her mother. She returns to America, her choice forced upon her because of her previous decisions. So, there has always been a doubt lurking in the dark, in the back of her mind and this doubt is brought to the fore in this new novel of a much older Eilis Lacey, a married American, secure, and with two teenage children.
She returns again to Ireland on the pretext of her mother’s forthcoming 80th birthday. Her twenty year ago Irish lover is still unmarried, but plans are underway to fix that. Can the way forward get more bumpy? Yes. Her children arrive! How does Eilis navigate her return to the family and ‘her Irish home’? She makes mistakes but will she learn from them? Meanwhile Tony, her foolish but devastated husband waits longingly for her to return to ‘her American home’. Once an immigrant, always an immigrant?
Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been translated into 59 languages making him the most translated Irish writer of all time.
Evan Keogh is a minor character in the first novella of Boyne’s Elements Quartet, Water (2023) where, like, Earth, it is told in the first person; this time by Evan and his life after he fled the little island off the Irish coast forever, but left with the smell of its earth still under his fingernails.
He has an innate talent for football but no interest in it. He wants to be a painter. His upbringing was hell. An isolated backward place with a brutal and hateful father, a silent and down-trodden mother, and a best friend who betrays him. No wonder he ran away. He has vowed never to return to that island, he knows he is attractive, he is at ease with his sexuality (but always falls for the wrong people), and very ambitious. However, life doesn’t pan out as expected.
It opens in the days before a notorious rape trial. The narrative is two pronged: before and after. Evan, now a famous and wealthy soccer player is accused of accessory to rape; his straight mate, Robbie, accused of the crime itself. As the poor boy sits and waits for the trail to begin we learn about his life in London and how he ended up is such a threatening situation. Then comes the trial itself when we hear the testimony of the rape victim, an intelligent girl called Lauren. But we don’t hear about the testimony of Evan and Robbie; there’s a novelistic reason for that.
What impresses me about Boyne’s writing is it is so clear: the situation, the characters, how they feel, and his narrative choices that keep important plot events dangling before your wished discovery, just out of reach, until you are aching for them.
The scenes of sex and violence are vivid but Boyne’s words lead the reader to imagine them; he doesn’t actually describe them in detail. In other words, there’s more going on in the reader’s head than on the page. That’s good writing in my book, so don’t be fearful of what you might read.
Evan’s final decision is a very satisfying one, but will it finally rid him of that sour smell of his home island’s earth?
The next installment of The Elements Quartet is Fire, scheduled for release in November 2024.
Bill Goldstein, the founding editor of the books site of The New York Times on the Web, reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s “Weekend Today in New York.”
In 1922 the literary world buckled and, according to Goldstein, broke under the weight of four powerful novelists. This is an account of what happened.
In January 1922 Adeline Woolf, everyone called her Virginia, turned forty and was very sick with influenza which stopped her writing; T. S. Eliot, everyone called him Tom, 34, had been over worked, unhappy, in therapy, but now quietly confident since he had started writing again but fearful of returning to work in the Bank that trapped him between the concrete and the sky; E. M. Forster, called Morgan, 43, was sexually and artistically frustrated; and D. H. Lawrence, called Bert, 36, had the threat of his books being banned(Women in Love, 1921, ” … ugly, repellant, vile”), and a libel suit against him so wanted to know “For where was life to be found” and thought by going to a quiet place by himself he might find it: Ceylon, New Mexico, or New South Wales.
All four had achieved some degree of literary fame: Woolf had published two novels and the third, Jacob’s Room, was waiting for her final revisions, however her illness kept her away from her work. Eliot had published successfully TheLovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock in Poetry magazine in 1915 and had been a regular contributor of reviews and essays, primarily for The Times Literary Suppliment right up to December 1921. Forster had achieved great success with a series of novels, usually about the English aboard, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905 but by 1922 nothing had appeared after the very successful Howard’s End in 1910. Lawrence was more infamous than famous and had had Women in Love published in June 1921. It garnered bad reviews, and low sales. This added to the outrage caused by its prequel, The Rainbow, 1915; it was withdrawn by the publisher after it was banned under the Obscene Publications Act. Lawrence had also characterised in the latter work, an acquaintance, Philip Heseltine, and thought he had disguised him enough, but Heseltine was not fooled and threatened legal action.
For all four writers 1922 did not begin well.
Artistic endeavour is always trying to solve the problems of the art form itself. How does a writer write an autobiography and make it interesting without using the boring phrases, “Then I went …. she cried and so I said …., Then I said, and he went ….”? Novelists for centuries have been using description and dialogue to draw a character; but in an autobiography how do you create an image of the narrator. There must be another way? Yes, there is, and one of the first writers to find another way was James Joyce who began his autobiographical novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) like this
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
First of all he writes not in the first person, but in the third (very radical, this is an autobiography, remember) and the above opening is not dialogue, it is prose; it’s not said by the protagonist but by the narrator using the language that the little boy, James, might use to describe what he sees and what he sees is himself! It’s as if the third person narrator is not some all-pervasive, god-like know-it-all but an imp sitting on the shoulder of the little boy seeing the world through his eyes and hearing the thoughts in his head. This literary device has become known as free indirect discourse, or as the literary critic of The New Yorker, James Wood, calls it, ‘close writing’; and it’s as common today in contemporary fiction as Vegemite is for breakfast. But it can’t be used in the first person because the first person doesn’t need it.
It is not just new ways of expression that all writers look for but new ways to solve old problems. Woolf, Eliot, Forster, and Lawrence always had difficulties writing their next work even if their previous work was successful. “That worked! Why don’t you write one like that again?” remains the continual cry to all writers.Even Forster, the most commercially successful of the four of them, was always afraid of repeating himself.
Painters of the same period sought to bypass the ‘real’ bit in order to paint, say, serenity, by trying to paint serenity with just the paint on the canvas, not trying to be something else, a face or landscape, to ‘portray’ serenity. In other words, they painted not what they saw but what they felt. Writers similarly de-focused the ‘real’ bit and concentrated on, not what the characters did – the plot – but what the characters felt and thought. The plot became internalised.
Before January 1922 was over Eliot and Lawrence had succumbed to the influenza that brought Woolf so low and was rapidly becoming an epidemic to rival the devastating outbreak of 1918-19 that killed more people than the Great War. At least for Eliot the influenza kept him away from the bank and, despite the disease, hard at work on his long poem. His ill wife also being absent was yet another and usual worry out of the way.
On his way back to London from the unsuccessful trip to India Forster bought and read Proust’s first volume, Swann’s Way. He was “awestruck”. Woolf, with her illness almost past, read him in the spring while working on an essay about reading and dabbling with and reworking a character from her first novel, The Voyage Out, Clarissa Dallaway, into a short story called Mrs Dallaway in Bond Street.Both Woolf and Forster were enthralled with Proust’s use of memory to evoke the current state of mind of a character. In the opening scene of the short story, which eventually evolved into the novel Mrs Dallaway, Woolf has Clarissa arrested by the chiming of Big Ben which announces the convergence of the past and present, not only in the character’s mind but also on the page. Very Proustian! Clarissa Dallaway in Woolf’s first novel is described by the narrator but Woolf was determined in this one, this modern one, to have Clarissa think everything the reader needs to know about her. As Woolf wrote later to a friend, she didn’t mind being sick as “Proust’s fat volume comes in very handy.”
Woolf, who wrote that she wanted to write like Proust, didn’t of course, but it was because of him that she began to write like herself again.
Joyce was different. Woolf and Joyce were both the same age, and Joyce in early 1922 had “a novel out in the world, a massive – expensive – box of a book”, Ulysses, and Woolf had not published a novel in two and a half years. She was jealous. Bert Lawrence ran away to New South Wales and began a book where no one takes their clothes off, but since the libel suit against Women in Love was unsuccessful, the (negative) publicity sparked interest from readers and sales swiftly grow. Morgan Forster at home with mother burned all his “indecent writings” and embarked on a new novel, A Passage to India.
If the English literary world did actually break in two in 1922 it was because of Proust and Joyce. Proust’s monumental seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu variously translated as The Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, and labeled in some quarters as the greatest novel ever written, came out in English and Joyce’s Ulysses, which began as a serial in an American magazine and consequently banned, was finally published in book form that year. It is also the year that Marcel Proust died. The major effect was on writing and therefore the literary novel took a turn to the introspective, to the experimental, to the perverse and in so doing left a lot of readers behind, sticking stubbornly to the realism of the previous century; and most of them still do. They want a painting of serenity to be paint on canvas masquerading as a face or a landscape. However, it is true that because of what happened to literature in 1922 the relationship between writer and reader was changed forever.
This is a fascinating book, well written, and full of information about writing and writers… if you like that sort of thing.
You can watch the charming and playful School of Life animated videos, narrated by Alain de Botton, on James Joyce here, Marcel Proust, here, and Virginia Woolf here.
Here, you can watch a short biographical video on T. S. Eliot, and you can watch a short video on D. H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess, here.
You can download all the novels and short stories of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, including all 7 volumes of The Remembrance of Things Past, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, for FREE, here.
Here, you can download the major works of E. M. Forster, for FREE, and you wan watch a short film of Forster talking about writing novels, here.
In my attempt to find and read all of Patrick’s fiction works – only a few to go – I’ve hit some barriers: some of works are not easy to find. This one, Friendly Fire (2005), has been elusive but I discovered it on my sister’s bookshelf; she found it in a second-hand bookshop.
Sophie is fourteen, an orphan, and in a home, Wakefield House, not the horrible cliched narrative of harsh and sadistic masters in an old grey and foreboding stone mansion, but a warm and caring environment run by a childless couple, Margaret and Keiran, who although they keep their emotional distance from the children who might on any day be adopted they have formed a much closer bond with Sophie who has never sought to leave. According to Gale, “her life is changed through literature.” She is a bright student, even-tempered, and curious and earns a place at a much admired boarding school, Tatham, where she is attracted to and befriends two male students, Lucas Behrman and Charlie Somborne-Abbot. Their developing lives, friendships, sexualities, and their place in the world, home and away, form the book’s narrative. The boarding school trope has been used countless times as a metaphor for society, politics, nations, and even the world. Here it feels more like a family, a benign and nurturing one, but like every family there is unexpected tragedy. Learning doesn’t only happen at school.
Society’s rules, inconsistencies, trivialities, secrets, prejudices, both religious and financial, and, of course, hypocrisies make up the steeplechase that Sophie must navigate, jumping and sidestepping, calling for help, or facing head on, but also falling splat! on her face. Gale is an expert at pacing and plotting; his plot points, both soft and dramatic, sometimes sneak up on you. The climactic moment is dropped into a seemingly casual sentence in such an unassuming way that I had to stop and re-read it to make sure I had read what I thought I had. As a reader I felt buffeted by the narrative but at the same time confident that I was in safe and expert hands. That’s what I like about Gale’s work and why I’m seeking to read everything he has written, and will write.
This book from 2011 has been sitting on my bookshelf for some years, winking at me. I have never been sure if I had read it, so I did. In a book world dominated by thick tomes, a novella like this can be a god-send. Claire Keegan, Foster (2010) and Small Things Like These (2021), an Irish writer, has been lately championing the novella as a legitimate art form.
This is a story about memory: what we remember and what we think we remember. Tony Webster, the first person narrator, is in his latter years and he tells us about his school days when he was nerdish, oh-so clever and amusing and, with his two mates Chris and Alex, a little ahead of the pack – so they liked to think. This gives Barnes a delicious excuse for self-deprecating witticisms about his youthful behaviour as seen from the distance of his much older self.
A new boy arrives, Adrian Finn, quite a bit ahead of them in intelligence and maturity, but who attaches himself to the three friends, which surprises everyone especially the trio themselves. Flattered though they were.
Later at university, hoping that his life will soon begin, he meets the enigmatic Veronica and does all the right things, as prescribed by his conservative and very British culture, which, in reality, is nothing much, just waiting for things to happen. They don’t. However, Veronica does invite him to meet her parents, and brother Jack for a weekend. Jack, in an aside, says, ‘I suppose he’ll do.’ And that seems the belief of Veronica as well. And still nothing happens. But Veronica’s mother, quite likes him, and he quite likes her. You get the impression that she is attracted to her daughters ‘young men’.
Finally Veronica ‘comes across’ but only after they break up.
Life continues, he and his friends drift apart, he finishes university, ages, gets married, has a child, gets divorced but keeps a close relationship with his ex-wife Margaret. He then hears from Adrain Finn via a short letter that he and Veronica are now a couple. Tony is furious.
Part One concludes with the news that Adrian Finn has killed himself, diagonally slashing his wrists (apparently that is the best way to do it) in a hot bath, and left a letter explaining that his suicide was planned and philosophically justified and so no one needs to be upset. He also leaves an apologetic letter for the paramedics and hospital staff that had to deal with his corpse. Adrian Finn; first class honours, first class suicide.
Part Two opens with the elderly Tony receiving a certified package in the mail: he has inherited £500 … and a diary, but there is no diary in the the package. Astoundingly, the deceased is Sarah, Veronica’s mother, who in her accompanying letter tells Tony that Adrian, before his death, was quite happy.
This entertaining, intriguing, and very well written novel takes us through Tony’s attempts to winnow through his memory and re-engage with people he hasn’t seen in decades to answer so many bewildering unanswered questions. Why did Adrian kill himself? Why did Sarah have Adrian’s diary? Why did she leave it to Tony? (Why was it her’s in the first place?) And why won’t Veronica, still enigmatic as ever, tell him what he wants to know? What did he miss all those years ago? AND, where is the diary? Was he so stupid, so unengaged? Did his mistakes then as a young man have anything to do with his mistakes as an older one? Maybe. He was alone then; he’s alone now.
I’m sure that any reader over 50 will see themselves, to some degree, in this book. I loved it even if Barnes throws up some very unflattering mirrors at me.
And last night I watched the 2017 movie version with a stellar British cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walker, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery, and Billy Howle.
Patrick Gale’s literary strength is families, their function or disfunction, coping with disasters, or not, or just getting through each day to the next. His 2009 novel, The Whole Day Through is no exception. However, its structure is a little different in that the action takes place over one single day. This also means that there is a lot of back story. In other words, you get decades of stories all thought about by the main characters over the span of one day interspersed with the action of that day.
Basically, it is about four people. Laura is a work at home book keeper keeping mostly artistic types away from their shoe-boxes of random receipts and allowing them to get on with their artistic lives. She is also single and a carer; caring for her academic mother, Professor Jellicoe, a semi-retired virologist whose body is increasingly letting her intellect down. She is also a naturalist and so spends a lot of time at home without any clothes on. Perfectly natural thinks mother and daughter.
Ben, a sexual health doctor is working at a local men’s clinic, locally known as GUM, short for genito-urinary medicine, having forsaken a career in virology to move away from his wife, Chloe, to care for his younger brother Bobby who suffers from the Mosaic variant of Down’s Syndrome. Although ‘suffers’ isn’t quite the word: he has a job in a shop, he’s almost independent, gay, and promiscuous, and it’s entirely possible that he may be embarking on a relationship with a burly train-driver.
Laura and Ben meet accidentally. Even though they are now middle aged, they recognise each other from their hedonistic student days thirty years before when they enjoyed an overwhelming and glorious love affair. So what now? Ben has fallen out of love with his beautiful wife, who, by the way, still loves him, and he is totally amazed at the re-eruption of his love for Laura in all its gloriousness.
But they are now older and wiser. Wiser? They have responsibilities for other people; people who can’t cope on their own. Family. The couple’s decision is to clear the slate, no-matter how painful it might be, tell the truth, and think of themselves. They have to; they love each other so much! Hope gives them succour; regret they’ve had and don’t want it again.
I’m sure Gale spent exhausting hours getting the timing right: juggling the drama of past thoughts with the drama of the present action so that everything fitted into the thoughts and actions of four people over the course of one day. However, it wasn’t really necessary as it all, past and present, swirls around like a rainbow ripple cake you can enjoy without knowing which part comes from or goes where.
It is an example of familial love clashing with romantic love when ultimately they should be both sides of the same page. The plot point around which the ending depends snuck up on me like a naughty younger sibling. Fiction doesn’t always make me gasp but I love it when it does.
You can buy the ebook, and Audiobook – read by Patrick Gale himself – here.
John Boyne appeared at the 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Irish writer, John Boyne.
Half way through this fourth novel of John Boyne’s, Next of Kin (2006) I thought, ‘What a grubby little tale.’ That turned out to be quite unfair. It’s a crime novel but not a crime mystery; well, it is to everyone except the protagonist and you, the reader; it’s not a ‘who-done-it’ but a ‘will-he-be-caught’. One of Boyne’s major themes in all his work is family, whether it be happy ones or unhappy ones; this one is definitely of the latter.
Set in 1936 in London and the Montignac’s estate, Leyville, it’s a story of an orphaned boy taken in by his wealthy relatives and brought up as one of the family, in fact, the most favoured one, but of course, nothing goes to plan, except the crime. Or does it? No spoilers here. Owen Montignac is a clever handsome man made all the more so by a head of startling white hair. He is conspicuous wherever he goes. He runs a contemporary art gallery, and does quite well, even though his contempt for the overpriced scratchings of the mediocre artists he exhibits is j-u-s-t kept in check by his paper thin charm. He, along with his cousin Stella, are the sole survivors of the Montignac dynasty, Stella’s brother Andrew having been killed in a shooting accident many years earlier and the story opens at the funeral and wake for Stella’s father, Owen’s uncle, Peter Montignac.
This opening scene is a test for the reader. The cast of characters at the funeral is extensive since a lot of the significant backstory and attitudes to the deceased and, of course, the inheritance are exposed via the conversations of the mourners. If you are a reader who usually skips over names you’ll get yourself into serious trouble here. Boyne doesn’t make it easy for you: there are two characters at the wake called Marjory Redmond and Margaret Richmond, one is a minor character, the other a major one, but you don’t know that then. Stay alert! And, as if to test your memory for names, this early scene is juxtaposed with a court case where you will meet more people, the well-respected Judge, Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC, his wife Jane, always on the lookout for social advancement, especially if it involves The Palace, and their lay-about son Gareth.
What sets this novel above others of its ilk is the important sub-plot of King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and the dilemma for the country, and in particular, for the constitutional judiciary, that the King places everyone in: will he or won’t he marry her?
Boyne has never shied away from incorporating real historical people into his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Tzar Nicolas and the Romanov’s in The House of Special Purpose (2008) and Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018).
How the plot-lines of the Montignacs, the Bentleys, and the future of the English monarchy are interwoven around a crime, its motive, delivery, and resolution is what keeps the reader enthusiastically turning the pages. It’s. Very. Well. Done.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
It’s going to be difficult to talk about this book, Lessons (2022) without giving away too much of the plot; no spoilers. I’ll try.
The story is about Roland Baines and with a title of Lessons, it’s appropriate that it begins with a lesson: a piano lesson, but this one has lifelong repercussions.
The story isn’t linear but it progresses like a complex cable-knit from that piano lesson when he was 14 years old right into his early 70s.
The writing is dense and not conducive to the one and a half page read in bed before you go to sleep. This book demands your time and attention. It’s also a bit of a history lesson as world events impinge on Roland’s life from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, through the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 to the lockdowns of the 2020 pandemic. Roland was born in 1948, a real Baby Boomer, but only a few years before me; there’s little bits of my history that match Roland’s and those little bits are mainly reflected in his mistakes. It’s Roland’s mistakes – or, if you like, the lessons he didn’t learn – that lay down the path of Roland’s life.
For readers of Roland’s age you too will, I predict, see little bits of your own history as we all can’t be immune to the world and what goes on in it.
Roland’s life, in its teenage beginnings, has enormous potential as a pianist, a tennis player, and as a writer. What he does with that potential and how those choices affect him and those around him make up the spine of the story.
There is, of course, the piano teacher, Miriam, then his first wife Alissa and her German family, his only child, Lawrence, his second wife, Daphne, and an unknown brother, Robert, are all dragged along by the history around them; some do well, others do not.
After his trite little book, Nutshell (2016), which I thought was way below par, so much so that I didn’t bother with his next one, Machines Like Me (2019) Lessons is a return to the classic standard of his Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), and The Children Act (2014). It’s not a return to his early work which was full of darkness and the macabre, but it’s a mature and serious work that delves into what it really takes for a person to fulfil their dreams and how easy it is for those dreams to turn to smoke.
The complexities if its timeline annoyed me a little in the first third, but there is a rhythm there you need to tap into but once you do the book rollicks along to its conclusion; well it did for this reader, anyway. I loved it! (But, please, make time for it and attend to it wholeheartedly)
Lessons is his most autobiographical work, about a quarter he says, and you can hear him talking about the book and his writing life here, in a short but fascinating video from the CBS Sunday Morning program.
You can purchase the book in various formats here.
Michael K Freundt 