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Top Ten Tuesday: Destination Titles

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I don’t often manage to join in with Top Ten Tuesday, but today I’m going to! This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Destination Titles (titles with name of places in them. These places can be real or fictional).”

I decided to make things a little harder for myself by sticking to real places – and, yes, it was rather harder than I expected. I read so many books with people’s names in the title, but placenames seem few and far between. But I have managed to come up with ten that I’ve written about on here, taking us around England, America and Europe. The links take you to my initial reviews, some of which probably are a bit chaotic in their formatting – for which, apologies. And I’ve copied a line or two from each review, by way of introduction to the books.

1. The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens

You’ll leave an Evens graphic novel feeling both unsettled and satisfied. Perhaps that isn’t always the combination you’re looking for from a book – but it is a profound mix, and sometimes feels exactly right.

2. The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal’s presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark’s brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

3. The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson

One of the more surprising choices for Persephone Books over the past few years has been The Sack of Bath (1973) by Adam Fergusson. While they have a range of titles and topics, usually they tick at least one of the boxes from ‘written by a woman’, ‘published in the first half of the 20th century’, and ‘fiction’. The Sack of Bath is none of these things – but what it is is fascinating.

4. Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

The novel concerns the political crises in Argentina, specifically the coup d’etat, in the 1970s. Now, you’ve quite possibly either thought “Oo, sounds intriguing” or “Um, no ta” right off the bat – but the latter group of you should keep reading.

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This link is actually to the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a lovely, moving coming-of-age novel that fits alongside other classics of the genre like I Capture the Castle and O, The Brave Music in a wonderful trio.

6. My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock

A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.

7. Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay

Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

8. Grand Canyon by Vita Sackville-West

If you’ve read any Vita Sackville-West, you might (like me) think of her as a novelist about high society, whether Edwardians in their deviant splendour or old ladies in furs, deciding that they’d get by with only one chauffeur. What I had not expected was a novel about the Grand Canyon, a dystopia future, and a twist that might be more expected in a novel by Shirley Jackson. 

9. Reginald in Russia by Saki

My favourite story (‘The Baker’s Dozen’) is actually in the form of a play, where a widow and widower (once in love) meet again on a boat and decide to re-marry – but realise that between them, they now have thirteen children and stepchildren.  This, naturally, is an inauspicious start to marriage for the superstitious, and one of their tactics is attempting to palm off a child on fellow passenger, Mrs. Pally-Paget.

10. Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

Terrifying and terrible things are happening, but Bates does not inject the novel with undue drama; instead, we witness these events in a kind of a quiet horror and share the simple humanity of the characters. 

The Man on the Pier by Julia Strachey

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Strange at Ecbatan: Old Non-Bestseller Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding/An Integrated Man, by Julia StracheyIf you know the name ‘Julia Strachey’, it’s probably for Cheerful Weather for the Wedding – reprinted by Persephone Books, and later made into a very enjoyable film. Or perhaps you know her connection to Bloomsbury Group regular Lytton Strachey, who was her uncle (though, until I googled it, I thought she was his sister). Well, either way, let me introduce you to another of her books: The Man on the Pier (1951), later republished as An Integrated Man.

“Everything in my life is well ordered and serene. I wake up in the mornings rested and refreshed! And above all with a feeling of virtue. My days are spent unharassed by pressures that torture and distort. At the age of forty-one, I’m bound to admit that I have become that fabulous beast an ‘integrated man’!”

So opens the novel, and you can see why they chose the later title. I’m not sure it’s the most promising opening, and it does sound rather artificial to me – thankfully the tone naturalises relatively quickly. Speaking is Ned Moon, staying with a friend Reamur Cedar (!) in an estate. The opening scene is quite a funny one of him trying to avoid a chaotic maid, and that’s about the most plot the first half of the novel has. The rest of this section is conversation and description, and Strachey does both very well.

Outside, a vast summer confusion was going on. Beetles, spiders, caterpillars, ladybirds, insects innumerable were crawling in and out of flower-pots, and leaping off the tops of grasses. Hedgehogs were stealing cautiously through the long clover in the fields. Amongst the corn, field-mice, rabbits and young partridges were scuttling, where already binding-machines joggled along, clogging the air with petrol vapour. In the little orchard, beyond the yew tree, thistles were seeding and the thistle seeds and the white butterflies came floating about over everything, whilst cows coughed grassily, cats sneezed fishily, and all of this and more besides was being recorded on the air in sound and smell.

Pages are devoted to beautiful descriptions, which do not contribute to any sense of momentum but which make the novel very enjoyable to sink into. Sometimes it is the surroundings – sometimes it is merely the day-t0-day lives and habits of those present:

After dinner, reading. And at last bed, with much discussion as to who would, and who would not, have a bath. Finally, Agatha Christie, owls, and the sounds, through the dark corridors, of gushing bath-taps behind locked doors, together with innumerable clickings and latchings of bedroom doors both near and far and… sleep.

So, why is Ned staying here? To discuss with another guest, Aron, the prospect of them opening up a private school together. Neither seem to have any particular aptitude for it – unless self-confidence is an aptitude – but I enjoyed all the discussions. Particularly good is the sibling relationship between Aron and his sister Gwen (Reamur’s wife), who, in that sibling way, is unafraid to poor cold water on his pronouncements. Every time they clash is believable. They bicker without restraint, knowing that no lasting damage will be done to their close brother/sister bond, and able say things that could end flimsier relationships.

Gwen is particularly unsure that Aron’s new wife Marina will be suited to the role of headmaster’s wife. Ned hasn’t met his friend’s wife, as he was out of the country when the wedding took place. It’s clear, from Gwen’s description, that she is of a class and disposition that will struggle to mingle with the wives of teachers – it will be considered beneath her, perhaps, and be awkward for everyone.

We hear a lot about Marina before she appears, and are predisposed to be intimidated by her. Preemptively, we imagine she will be a cat among pigeons. But when does come, with her daughter Violet, something more unexpected happens. Ned instantly falls in love with her. Not only that, he decides with very little hesitation that he must have an affair with her. Even more surprisingly, she feels the same.

It’s hard to see what this mutual infatuation is based on, and it felt like a stone flung in the calm waters of the novel – and not in a good way, at least in my opinion. There is nothing subtle about a stone being flung. The Man on the Pier was such a rich, detailed, calm novel – and the introduction of a would-be affair felt quite ordinary and boring in comparison. It did lead to some of the most beautiful scenes, describing the site of a planned tryst between them – an abandoned and decrepit mansion. Strachey wrote about that location with almost mythical beauty, like describing a fantasy land. But I don’t find the possibilities of an affair anywhere near as interesting as the dynamics of siblings, friends and potential entrepeneur colleagues.

That’s personal taste, of course. For others, the arrival of Marina and the romantic storyline might be when the novel began to pick up. I would so much rather Strachey had kept confidence in her ability to write a strikingly beautiful, often amusing novel about very little indeed. If the first half of The Man on the Pier had kept going in a similar vein, I think it could have been something very special. Either way, Strachey was an excellent prose stylist and observer of behaviour, and it’s a shame that her output was so limited.

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

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I bought The Children’s Bach (1984) by Helen Garner in Oxford’s newest bookshop, Caper, a while ago. I might have mentioned the shop before. From the outside, it looks like a children’s bookshop – all joyful colours and suchlike – and it is, indeed, a children’s specialist. But there is a sizeable section at the back for adult books, all arranged together under headings like ‘the mundane everyday’ and ‘incredible journeys’. It’s a fun idea that invites serendipitous finds. When I came across the W&N Essentials reprint of The Children’s Bach, I couldn’t resist. This cover is so beautiful – one of my favourites of recent years.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner | W&N - Ground-breaking, award-winning, thought-provoking books since 1949

I’ve been listening to a lot of Garner’s non-fiction in the past couple of years, but I did start my reading journey with her about 15 years ago with The Spare Room. My return to her fiction – only my second novel by her – reminds me of how taughtly she tells stories of disrupted domesticity.

In The Children’s Bach, Dexter and Elizabeth meet after years apart. They were at university together but drifted apart – yet, when they reunite, they almost unquestioningly bring their attendant worlds together. Dexter and his wife have two young children, Arthur and Billy (whose unspecific disability is dealt with in a way that felt quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t be done now). Elizabeth is dating an untamed musician, Philip, and he has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth’s closest relationship is with her much younger sister, Vicki, who is still on the cusp of adulthood while Elizabeth is heading into middle-age. The coming together of these families ultimately brings about a crisis.

A synopsis of Garner’s book is one thing. The reading experience is quite another. Garner has cut away at the plot until what is left is really an impression of a plot. There is an excellent scene where each line of dialogue and narrative is clearly a moment from an extended evening – it is the most filmic scene I’ve ever read; the most clearly like a film montage. It’s extremely effective. Writ on a larger scale, that is what the whole of The Children’s Bach does. You won’t find lengthy examinations of motivations and emotions – rather, Garner gives us stark glimpses into these people’s lives. That means that the choices people make play out almost before you realise they’ve made them.

And then, on the other hand, Garner gives some scenes unexpected breathing room. As David Nicholls highlights in his enjoyable introduction: ‘Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand.’

But the main star of The Children’s Bach is Garner’s writing. The unwavering, merciless observation she brings to her non-fiction is less intimidating in fiction, but no less present. She is exceptionally good on small domestic moments – and, much harder, equally good on the occasional abstract or nebulous moments. Here’s something which combines most – the recognisable ‘braced for more sobbing’ leading into a lovely dream scene.

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

Threaded throughout the novel is music. The soundtrack – of Bach, of Philip’s grungier music – is never used heavy-handedly, but at the same time gives us insight and a rhythm to the story.

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

The only drawback I found with The Children’s Bach is how unknowable the characters are. Or is that a drawback, or simply a choice? Garner’s impressionistic writing is stunning to read, and every paragraph has the weight and confidence of a poem. I often stopped and reread sentences simply because they were so beautiful with such well-judged balance to them. But I don’t think I could describe the characters. Philip and Vicki are the exceptions to that rule, but the others felt like ciphers – or perhaps like containers for Garner’s beautiful observations and discrete moments. Is it deliberate, or a casualty of the novel’s sparseness?

Some critic apparently said The Children’s Bach was one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, which is the sort of silly thing that critics say when they want to get noticed. I can think of many short novels that I think are probably better, though perhaps not many that are as delicately and deftly done. With stronger depths to her characters, it would be a masterpiece. And perhaps those depths would come with rereading – my main takeaway from the experience is that I’m keen to reread, and perhaps find still more than I did this time. While googling for reviews, I discovered that Whispering Gums did exactly that.

So, how to conclude? I think there’s a strong chance that this is a brilliant novel, and it’s certainly a brilliant piece of writing. And perhaps it couldn’t have been such a beautiful reading experience if it had been more grounded. Or perhaps it would feel more grounded the second time around? Well, why not find out for yourself?

Norah Lofts – now in British Library Women Writers series!

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I realise I haven’t yet said that Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts is out in the British Library Women Writers series – with another lovely cover:

It’s another quick turnaround – I only read it for the first time in March, and loved it so much that I instantly recommended it to the series. Here’s what I wrote at the time. I’m so glad the editorial team said yes, and that fans of Norah Lofts’s historical fiction will be able to discover her under a different mode. It starts out as a witty, fun domestic novel with a delightfully eccentric heroine – hard to beat ‘Penelope Shadow’ for excellent character naming. It becomes something much darker and more page-turning and unexpected.

I’m very excited to see how this one goes down!

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

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Such a Fun Age: 'The book of the year' Independent (Bloomsbury Publishing): Amazon.co.uk: Reid, Kiley: 9781526612144: Books

I don’t hear much about the latest fiction, but there are some titles that break through my early-20th-century mindset. Everyone was talking about Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid five years ago, including being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and I think it became even bigger during the pandemic. Better late than never, I listened to the audiobook – and, yes, everyone was right. It’s one of the best 21st-century novels I’ve read.

The novel opens with a brilliant ‘set piece’. Emira is out for the night with friends, in her party clothes and a few drinks down. She gets an emergency phone call from Alix, asking her to take Briar for the evening. Briar is a three-year-old whom Emira often babysits, and she agrees to come straight away and takes Briar to a nearby supermarket. Emira is African-American; Briar (and her parents) are white. When an older white woman sees them together, she thinks Briar is in danger and speaks to a security guard. He refuses to believe Emira is the babysitter.

It’s an excellent way in to a clever and nuanced novel about race in contemporary America. None of Reid’s central characters are out-and-out racists. What makes it so thought-provoking, and often hard to read, is that Reid is spearing the white progressives who are so self-conscious about being anti-racism. Alix is a writer and influencer whose project LetHer Speak has unexpectedly spiralled her into fame, while Emira starts a romantic relationship with a white man, Kelley, who witnessed the supermarket incident and urges her to go public about it. He doesn’t understand what repercussions Amira would face.

There is much more going on in Such A Fun Age than race, though. Emira is a brilliant portrait of a millennial who is overly qualified for the job she has, and is about to fall off her parent’s healthcare plan, but has no sense of her future. “Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.” Alix is a complex character, swinging between sympathetic and the reverse, anxious and ambitious and never entirely comfortable in what she is doing.

There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like ‘Dope Bitch’ and ‘Y’all Already Know’, then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed.

And, for a zeitgeisty novel, it’s much more than an opinion piece with fictional characters. Reid’s plotting is brilliant. Two of the main characters are connected in a way I didn’t see coming, and Reid is so clever in her creation of their lasting resentments from a shared memory differently remembered. Everyone is so believable, and all the novel’s morals are in convincing shades of grey. Honestly, the only bad thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the title. It’s so flimsy and nothingy, and doesn’t tell you anything about the book.

The audiobook is also up there with the best I’ve listened to. Nicole Lewis is a brilliant narrator, and manages to present Emira’s detailed character so well. Emira often replies briefly – things like “Oh, ok” – and Lewis does an exceptional job of using those small moments to show her discomfort, her intelligence, her refusal to accept everything expected of her.

I bought Such A Fun Age in an Audible sale, and wasn’t even sure I’d ever get round to listening to it. I’m so glad I did. It’s gone from a novel I dimly knew about to one of my best reads of the year.

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

And the next club will be…

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Thanks so much for your contributions to the 1970 Club! There are so many books I now want to read (with The Woods in Winter by Stella Gibbons head of the pack) – and some I now know to avoid… There were also quite a few on my shelves that I hoped to get and didn’t, especially Losing Battles by Eudora Welty.

ANYWAY, it’s been fun as ever – and more and more people seem to join in every time. Next year will be the tenth (!!) anniversary of the club, but that’s not until October. First, in April, we will be doing… the 1952 Club!

It’s 21-27 April, but we will warn you nearer the time, of course. Thanks to Karen, as ever, for co-hosting so wonderfully!

The Listeners by Monica Dickens – #1970Club

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The 1970 Club is drawing to an end, and I have a LOT of reviews to catch up on – perhaps foolishly, I’ve been away since Thursday. But it’s been great, as always, and Karen and I will be announcing the next club soon.

But, sneaking in to the final hours, I want to write quickly about The Listeners by Monica Dickens. It’s been years since I read any Dickens, M. – I first fell for her for the wonderful comic memoirs One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet (and the slightly less wonderful third in the trilogy, My Turn To Make The Tea). Far more of her output, though, were more serious novels. I bought The Listeners back in 2009 and had long been intrigued by its premise: it follows people who phone the Samaritans and people who answer those calls.

For those not in the know, the Samaritans run a suicide prevention hotline (I don’t know if they’d use that terminology, so forgive me if not), and I believe you can also walk in. It’s been going for a very long time, and Dickens was involved in setting up the first American branch a few years after The Listeners was published. I’m sure the Samaritans has changed a fair bit since the 1970s, and I know a bit about them from when Mum volunteered there a decade or so ago. What hasn’t changed is the non-judgemental way volunteers answer the phones – having absolutely no idea what will be on the other side. Here’s a kind, overworked volunteer called Victoria:

When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

“Samaritans — can I help you?”

The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

We do later learn who is calling, and it is a genuine call. Dickens goes back and forth into different lives, picking up their crises or mundanities. Victoria is sort-of engaged to a man she doesn’t respect; Paul is married to an alcoholic who mocks the Samaritans; Sarah is young and idealistic. On the other side – the people phoning in – we have Billie, who tries to provoke but clearly needs a friend; desperate, sad Tim who ends up in hospital where he’s too scared to give his name, etc etc.

Oh, I really wanted to like this novel. It’s a theme I’ve never read elsewhere, and I trusted Dickens to portray the characters with empathy and warmth. And I think she does that. But what she doesn’t include is any sort of momentum at all. Despite many of these people being in literal life-or-death situations, somehow the novel is turgid and tedious. I believe a thrilling novel can be written about the lowest possible stakes. These characters have huge stakes – but maybe Dickens took that as excitement enough, and forgot to make any of the writing or plotting interesting. We just pop in and out of lives, with minimal character development and no narrative urgency. I ended up skimming the second half of the novel.

Sorry to end the 1970 Club on a downer, but it’s always helpful in any club to give a full overview of the year – including the books that will be going straight to the charity shop!

Island in Moonlight by Kathleen Sully – #1970Club

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You may well know Brad’s blog Neglected Books. As the name suggests, he reads and reviews books that are neglected – but we’re not talking about authors who could do with a boost, like E.M. Delafield or Rose Macaulay. We’re talking authors who have almost entirely disappeared from the world – their books are near-impossible to track down, and often Brad is the only person to have written anything substantial about them online. One author he often mentions is Kathleen Sully.

Knowing how much he admired Sully, I popped her name on my mental list and kept an eye out – little expecting to stumble across one in the antiques shop in the village next to mine. It was especially surprising, given that they only have about 100 books for sale. But I came away with a proof copy of Island in Midnight (1970).

There is a slightly odd opening, of two young women sat in a high-class restaurant. They spot an attractive man who comes in – but, as one woman tells the other, ‘he played a mean trick on me’. She thought she was accompanying him to a party – but, instead, he delivered her to a friend who wanted to have an affair. And the friend was blind.

That’s the last we see of those women, but we are introduced to Alex (the blind man) and his friend Max, who goes out of his way to help Alex cheat on his wife. From this introduction, we shift into Alex’s first-person viewpoint. This is how it starts…

Until you’re blind, you don’t know what sight is – that is, if you go blind after having perfect sight. Close your eyes, bandage them, then walk about in the room you know the best – perhaps your bedroom. You thought you knew where the dresser was – eh? You’ve banged your shin, knocked over a lamp – broken the damned thing, no doubt, and landed up in a corner. And you think you know which corner. But it isn’t. And you’re so damned confused that you’re afraid to move again for a minute or two. When you do, you move slowly, cautiously, ready for anything – even a stuffed tiger that your wife bought from a sale that day and didn’t tell you about. And all the while – and this is the worst part – you expect a light to be switched on.

Alex lost his sight in an accident that we never really learn about. I quite liked Sully’s refusal to dress up the narrative with unnecessary plot details – the reader needs to know that Alex is blind, and isn’t able to come to terms with it; we don’t need to know the ins and outs of how it happened. Sully has a stripped-back approach to storytelling, more invested in how people react to their immediate and latest environment, without dwelling unduly on the past.

After an unfortunate sexual exploit, Alex’s wife intends to file for divorce and he determines to leave his current life and his homeland. Though his powers of visual recall are fading, there is one exception to this rule: an island he visited when he was only 20 years old. This is many decades in the past, but he has carried the experience with him ever since as some sort of exemplar of paradise.

Even as I write this, I can see the sweep of the bay as the ship pulled up to the tiny landing stage. The water was as transparent as the air and sky. And blue: the kind of blue you never see in this country. The white buildings set the blue off and the sand was pure gold, with gold’s soft glitter. There were oranges and lemons ripening in the orchards and the leaves of those trees were dark and polished, casting purple shadows. All shadows had intense colour on the island – no greys. The natives of the island were as beautiful as the flowers – and as innocent. And it seemed to me that there was always music: everybody had an instrument and played the thing. I promised myself an accordion but never bought one.

You can see how this sort of idyllic vision would have stayed with him. Impetuously, Alex determines to return to the island and start a new life there. He’s as selfish in this decision as he is in every other. Sully doesn’t waste too much time trying to make Alex a sympathetic character: he is monstrously self-interested, with affections for others but no pretence that he would ever put their needs ahead of his.

His chauffeur, Pell, is persuaded to accompany Alex to the island and get him set up there. As it approaches, Pell (whose perspective we get throughout his chapter) struggles to align what he’s seeing with Alex’s memories. Rather than lapping Meditterean shores in bright sunshine, he sees ‘grey water lashing at the low concrete wall of the water-front’.

Out of season, the island is miserable. Alex is spared the bleakness of the visuals, and can superimpose his recollections of the island of his youth – but he can’t ignore how abandoned and hopeless the island feels. There are no tourists, little industry, and a crowd of locals without much going for them. There’s Lyn, a tart-with-a-heart type who is running low on ‘heart’; there’s the proprietor of Joe’s restaurant whose fondness for Alex will only run as far as his income; there’s Willis, who agrees to be a sort of Man Friday for Alex while supposedly looking out for somewhere he can live – though, knowing this will be the end of their financial relationship, is in no hurry to secure anywhere.

As the story develops, perhaps the most important relationship is one suffused in memories – the woman he had a brief affair with back when he was 20, and the possible consequences of that affair all these decades later…

I know Brad doesn’t think much of Island in Moonlight, but I thought it was really good. I can’t compare with Sully’s other writing, as this is my first of her novels, but I was very much attracted by her writing style. It is sparse, often dialogue-heavy, and the shifts into different characters’ first-person narratives is done sharply, entering straight into their mindset without any fanfare. The plot whizzes by, if it can be called a plot, and there is precious little character development. But there is such an assurance to Sully’s writing that I felt totally confident in being taken wherever she wanted to take me. Island in Moonlight is an odd, sparse book that breaks a whole lot of conventional novelistic rules without putting anything too experimental in their place – and it sold me on Sully. I’ll definitely keep looking out for her.