Barefoot Soldier

Barefoot Soldier by Johnson Beharry VC

Johnson Beharry was born in Grenada in 1979, the third in a family of seven.  He wasn’t scholarly, preferring to build things or play with cars, and attended school at the insistence of his great uncle Hamilton, who he lived with from the age of 9.  He spent his summers working in a family car yard belonging to another aunt and uncle, dreaming of becoming a mechanic and a driver.  When some local boys started causing trouble for him because they felt he should be sharing his wages with them, he decided to visit Hamilton’s son and wife in the UK for a month or so.  The month extended into a couple of years and, finding himself caught up with a bad crown, Beharry decided to join the army on the spur of the moment.  He trained and worked hard to get himself physically fit before being sent to a boot camp, two weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Once qualified, he was sent to Iraq as a driver of a Warrior Tracked Armoured Vehicle, where he earned the Victoria Cross by repeatedly putting his life in danger to rescue his comrades.

The full citation of Beharry’s VC can be found here, if you want to know the nitty gritty of what he did before reading the book.  Beharry’s own version of events goes into more detail but also somehow manages to soften the impact of his actions, he does that soldier thing of “any one of us would have done the same thing”.  I’m sure it’s true and his humble reaction to being awarded the highest possible award for bravery simply impresses me more.  In summary, he was given the award for two acts in particular – the first, he had been hit in the helmet by an enemy bullet that stopped just short of entering his skull.  Having lost contact with the men in his Warrior, he went in through a hatch that was exposed to enemy fire to rescue his commanding officer and then went back to get the rest of the men and to drive the Warrior to a place where it couldn’t be used by insurgents.  On a second occasion, the open driving hatch at the front of the Warrior was hit by an RPG which exploded around 6 inches from Beharry’s head.  Despite sustaining serious brain injuries (a surgeon described his skull as “what happens to an eggshell when you hit it hard with a spoon”), he managed to reverse the vehicle away from the immediate battleground so that his injured colleagues could be rescued more safely.  It was at this point that the severity of his wounds became apparent and he fell into a coma that lasted 2 weeks.

Beharry is the first person to have been awarded the Victoria Cross since 1982 and the first living recipient in 40 years.

Impressive bravery aside, the book is actually a very good read.  Beharry wrote it with Nick Cook, a journalist specialising in aviation, so it’s fluid and varied in its sentence structure which always makes for a better book.  But Beharry has had an interesting life and the lead up to his joining the army takes up the whole first half, whilst his Grenadian accent and speech patterns shine throughout.  This is another book that I read from The Guardian’s best unread books of the decade list, Mark Lucas says about it:

Barefoot Soldier by Johnson Beharry VC, published in 2006. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, but should have gone on to take the world by storm. And never did, quite. Johnson was the first living recipient of the Victoria Cross for nearly 40 years. He saved the lives of at least 30 of his fellow soldiers during two separate ambushes within weeks of each other in Iraq in 2004. Little, Brown published it in 2006 with considerable passion, a major marketing campaign, and utter devotion to this most charming and courageous of young men. He’s an example to us all. So why isn’t Barefoot Soldier up there with Bravo Two Zero? Part of the problem, I fear, is that a huge number of people under the age of 40 have no idea what the Victoria Cross stands for. Perhaps the public got confused, and saw him as more victim than hero. Perhaps their antipathy to the conflict itself coloured their response to his experience. Perhaps there wasn’t enough gunfire. And maybe the BNP played a part … I don’t begrudge Jordan her megasales. But I’d prefer to live in a world where Johnson Beharry VC’s astonishing, selfless bravery is more vigorously cherished.

This is a book that describes conflict at the ground level without a sense of judging, that gives a view of Grenadian life and depicts acts of outstanding courage with humour and humility.  It is interesting if you, like my boyfriend, are fascinated by war and it also has a lot to offer if you, like me, will read anything if it sits still long enough.

Journal

Journal by Hélène Berr

NB. You’re lucky to get any review at all for this, I spent most of an hour working on it and then [expletive deleted] WordPress deleted the whole thing.

Hélène Berr was twenty-one when she started her journal on 7th April 1942.  Although Paris had been occupied by the Germans for two years by this point, her entries mainly concern visits with friends or to her family’s country house in Aubergenville, the literature she has been reading lately, her violin practices, or her beau Gérard who was fighting with the Free French.  Gradually, the degradations put into place by laws passed by the Vichy regime begin to impinge on her life – the wearing of a yellow star, the curfews in place for Jews – and become all the more real when her father is arrested for wearing his star “incorrectly” and sent to the Drancy internment camp.  Hélène began working for General Organisation of Israelites in France (the UGIF) to help those detained and, later, to hide Jewish children and prevent them from being deported.  Nonetheless, her journal focuses on her whirlwind social life and increasing sense of separation from Gérard rather than the realities of the situation for Jews across Europe or her fears for her father.  After a gap of around ten months in her diary, Hélène’s understanding of her perilous position as a Jew in Paris is much clearer – she has witnessed the deportation of friends and colleagues, she has seen countless children arrive at the orphanage at Neuilly whose parents have been taken by Germans, often despite severe illness or being in an advanced stage of pregnancy.  She hears stories about beatings and other atrocities committed by the Germans.  She and her parents began sleeping at other people’s houses to avoid deportation, but on March 8th 1944, the Berrs were arrested and interred at Drancy.  Hélène was later shipped to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she was beaten to death whilst sick with typhus, five days before the camp was liberated by the British army.  She was twenty-four.

This was another book I saw on The Guardian’s Best Unread Books of the Decade list (and the last one I’ll review for a good while, probably – I’ve not reserved any more at the library) and this is what they had to say about it:

Journal by Hélène Berr, published in 2008, deserves to be read and studied in every school in the civilised world, read and reread for what it tells of the circumstances of the arrest of a young and brilliant Jewish girl in Paris and her eventual murder in Bergen-Belsen, days before that camp was liberated. The story of how the text of her journal came to light so many years later is remarkable enough. The journal, which is a love story too and an account of inescapable horror, is beautiful and beautifully translated by David Bellos, whose Afterword entitled France and the Jews is also essential reading.

Whilst the second half of the Journal does more directly record the inescapable horror and the first part might technically be termed a love story, it doesn’t save it all from being pretty boring and a struggle to get through.  Jean Morawiecki makes an early appearance, while she’s trying to decide on her feelings for Gérard, and the entries that concern him tend towards the “when I saw him, it was as though the sun shined” variety, but there is still little detail regarding how she feels about the people she’s writing about.  She frequently expresses annoyance at a postcard she has received without mentioning content or who it is from.  Mostly, the six months account for Hélène’s whirlwind social life and she expresses a mild bewilderment at being singled out for a religion that she doesn’t feel epitomises who she is as a human being.  There are a lot of people and places named that meant nothing to me, with practically no commentary from the translator/editor to explain anything.  If you don’t know that UGIF stands for Union générale des israélites de France, or General Organisation of Israelites in France, it isn’t made clear when you meet that organisation in the text.  Nor is it made explicit that it was an organisation with close ties to the Nazis and viewed with much suspicion by the Jews in France for that reason, although Hélène’s purpose in working there was more closely tied to her desire to save the lives of Jewish children who could potentially be rounded up by the Germans.

The second half of the journal, the six months leading up to her arrest, is vastly more interesting – in part because there are fewer people mentioned by name and so it’s easier to follow the events described.  Potentially, it was also more interesting because I discovered the index of people, places and acronyms at the back of the book and so could work out who everyone was or where the buildings were that she kept writing about.  The indices are something that could have been mentioned in the introduction, frankly.

Of the few first hand depictions of the second world war that I’ve read, this doesn’t stand out as being anything special.  I much preferred Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man/The Truce, although I acknowledge that he benefited from both hindsight and the ability to edit his manuscript.  Whilst it piques my interest to read about the slow changes in society that were made that resulted in someone like Hélène – a graduate of the Sorbonne, a talented musician, gregarious and charming (or so the introduction tells me) – being shunted to the edges of society and marked as a monster by a yellow star, this could have been improved by an ongoing commentary for an English speaking audience to understand the context a little better.

It also could have been improved by not having been used as a fly catcher by the previous lendee, finding little bug corpses as I turned the pages was more than a bit gross…

The Other Hand

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

The back of this book exhorts me not to tell you what it’s about.  The magic, apparently, is in the telling.  But as it’s nigh on impossible to talk about a book without mentioning at some point the plot, I’m afraid I might have to spoil it just the tiniest bit…

Two years ago on a beach in Nigeria, Little Bee met Sarah and Andrew O’Rourke as she was fleeing an unimaginable nightmare.  Now, she is an illegal immigrant in Britain and is looking to them for help.  Only her return to their lives brings back memories they had both tried to suppress, for their own sanity as well as for the sake of their son Charlie.

OK, now you know enough for my review to make sense but not really enough for the “magic” to be ruined.  I hope.

Chris Cleve splits the narration of the book between Sarah and Little Bee, giving them alternate chapters in their own voices.  Which proved to be an early stumbling block for me – I just didn’t find Little Bee’s voice to be all that credible when I knew that the book had been written by a 36-year-old white British man, not a 16-year-old Nigerian girl.  I’m not altogether certain that he did Sarah especially well either, but I’m more forgiving of a man imagining himself to be in the mind of (probably) his own wife.  But having recently finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which is set before and during the Biafran-Nigerian war (30 years before this book takes place), I still have those voices echoing in my head and Little Bee’s doesn’t mesh at all well.

Maybe it says something about me, but I didn’t find the chapters set in an Immigrant Detention Centre to be all that horrifying.  Don’t get me wrong, it sounds plenty awful and I’m glad that I don’t have to live in one, plus being locked up for 2 years for no reason other than because they can do that to you is deeply inhumane and worrying, but the idealism that Sarah – the voice of the author – displays goes some way towards undermining the horror.  Sarah is convinced that by simply stating a case and talking to the right people, by making bad things public, the badness can be washed away like the tide erases a drawing in the sand.

The structure of the book and slightly trite dialogue doesn’t especially help with the weaving of a narrative that I could get lost in.  The first twenty pages are essentially dialogue free (aside from some imagined chats that Little Bee has with the girls of her home village), which made me think from the start this is an author who isn’t comfortable writing dialogue and the rest of the book proves the assumption to be true.  He sticks rigidly to imagined accents and grammatical tics when they could have been dispensed with to make the story more free-flowing: no matter how true to life a four-year-old’s speech patterns are, reading “I is in mine bat cave” or “I want mine Daddy” gets annoying quickly.

Overall, this just didn’t live up to the hype for me.  The cover is littered with quotes from newspapers that say things like “searingly eloquent” or “ambitious and fearless”, which make me wonder if they were reading a different book to the one I had in my hands.  Even the ending chickens out from having any kind of resolution, almost like hitting the fade-to-white moment as Thelma and Louise look at the Grand Canyon rather than 5 minutes later.  For the “magic” to be ruined, there has to be some in the first place.  Read Half of a Yellow Sun instead, that’s my advice.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Mariam is the bastard child of a wealthy Herat businessman and one of his housekeepers.  When the housekeeper’s pregnancy becomes obvious, she is sent away to raise her child in a mud hut on a hillside, separated from society by the shame of having a married man’s baby.  Jalil visits Mariam and her mother once a week and Mariam dreams of being taken away from her small hut, embraced by her father’s family and her half-siblings and going to school.  But in pursuing that dream, she makes a mistake that will come to haunt her.  It directly leads to being married to a man 30 years her elder and taken to Kabul, 650km to the East of her home, a world apart from everything she has ever known or loved.  In her new home, next door a girl is born on the eve of the coup that heralds the rise of communism in Afghanistan.  Laila is encouraged to learn and think for herself by her father, a progressive ex-schoolteacher, whilst Mariam’s spirit is crushed by the demands of Rasheed, her selfish and cruel husband.  But when the mujahideen succeed in ousting the Soviet occupiers, they turn on themselves in an explosive and ongoing battle for control.  The unrest has tragic consequences for Laila’s family and she is forced to join Mariam and Rasheed’s home, a place of violence and unhappiness.

I read Hosseini’s first book, The Kite Runner, for a book club that I attended in Leeds with my best friend.  I had gone to visit her for a week to write my dissertation (which didn’t happen) and she thrust it at me one morning saying “I’m going to a book club for this on Thursday, if you wanted to read it and come that would be great!  I know I haven’t given you much time to read it, but get as far as you can.  I loved it.  It’s going to be so fun!”  She was right in one regard – the book club was awesome and I really should try to join one in Cambridge.  In another regard she was completely wrong, I can read a book that size in three evenings easily, let alone in three days when I have nothing else to do except research and write my dissertation!  But I didn’t love it, I thought it was trite and obviously plotted with a tendency to tell rather than show.  I also strongly suspected that the press maelstrom surrounding the novel was more down to it being the first mainstream book published by an Afghan American about the conflict since the invasion than because it was actually any good.  So, I’ve been putting off reading A Thousand Splendid Suns for ages, thinking that chances are it’ll be more of the same.

This book has probably had even more praiseworthy press than its predecessor, plus surely the novelty of an Afghan novelist can only grant added kudos for so long, so I thought I’d give it a go.  From the library (of course!) because I wasn’t certain I’d like it enough to not resent paying for it… well, I can tell you this much – the second half really is good.  The first half isn’t so much bad as it is an awful lot of scene setting.  Hosseini manages to weave a potted history of his country through the lives of his two female protagonists in such a way that the paths their lives take are dependent on the twists and turns of politics.  Laila is born the day the Soviets take control and her mother lives and breathes the ongoing struggle of the mujahideen against the occupiers.  The mujahideen’s successful ousting of the Soviets in turn is the catalyst for bringing together the two female leads, Mariam and Laila, in the struggle against Rasheed’s nightmarish oppression of his wives.  The rise of the Taliban and their despotic rules for women – You will not laugh in public.  If you do, you will be beaten.  You will not paint your nails.  If you do, you will lose a finger -  increases the tension in an unhappy home to boiling point.

I have to admit, the blending of fact and fiction is well done and the second half of the book, in which the political tensions rise and fall more dramatically, is a real page turner.  But I’m not sure that Hosseini writes women all that well – I didn’t feel any kind of kinship with either Mariam or Laila – and his male characters are one-dimensional archetypes.  Plus, because the plot doesn’t really get going until the second half of the book, any serious description of what happens gives away all the major plot points.  It’s not as bad as when I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles* but it’s not far off.  I think essentially I didn’t really want to like this very much and so I didn’t.  It’s fair to say if you liked The Kite Runner, this is better.  If you didn’t like The Kite Runner, this is still better but perhaps not worth a read of its own.

* The plot summary on the back of the book listed the significant moments in chronological order, including the “twist” (for want of a better word) on the second to last page.  Was very annoyed.  I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet (you should, it’s good!) but if you choose to, try to avoid picking up the Penguin Classics edition and reading the précis on the back cover.  Grrrr.

Cutting For Stone

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath and agreement:  I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.

Marion Stone was born to an Indian nun and an English surgeon in Ethiopia in the 1950s.  Born prematurely, he and his siamese twin brother, Shiva, did not take their first breath until after their mother had taken her last.  Their father, shocked that his faithful assistant was concealing a pregnancy and stricken with grief at her sudden death, denies ever having sex with her, much less having fathered two sons.  Abandoned by parents on the day of their birth, Marion and Shiva are brought up by Hema, the resident gynacologist, and Ghosh, another surgeon at Missing Hospital on the outskirts of Addis Abiba.  Missing is a misnomer, the hospital is called “Mission” but was mis-transcribed by an Ethiopian cleric not long after its inception.  Marion soaks up the medical knowledge, his destiny as a doctor almost inevitable, whilst Shiva is drawn to Hema’s gynecology clinic.  But destiny had a way of twining inextricably around people and Marion finds himself distanced from his loved ones by a terrible betrayal, an almost expected death, two coups and the Eritrean struggle for emancipation from Ethiopian rule.

The book is framed by Marion’s efforts to learn more about the life of his mother, the almost saintly woman who gave him life, who concealed her love for Thomas Stone until the day she died.  But really, it’s about the spiderweb of connections that a person forms over a lifetime, however long that may be, and the effect that twanging one part of the web can have as it ripples across the entirety.  Thomas Stone and Sister Mary Joseph Praise never acknowledged their love for one another in life and it takes her death for Thomas to realise the profound influence she had on him, from the moment they bumped into each other, literally, on a ship travelling from India to the port of Aden.  After the Sister’s plans for ministry go astray in Aden, she seeks out the surgeon at Missing and takes refuge in its walls.  So far, so good.  But when she is on her deathbed, words hanging unspoken between her and the surgeon who is unwilling to operate on the woman he loves, who seeks to remove her ‘cancer’ through crushing and pushing it out, that’s when the story really starts: the history of Marion’s life.

Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia to parents from Kerala, where he was forced out of the country by civil unrest.  His family fled to the United States, where he worked briefly as an orderly before completing his medical training in Madras.  The links between his own history and the fictional one of Marion Stone give the story an air of believability, particularly in the surgery scenes.  But Verghese doesn’t allow his own story, or even historical fact, to cloud the one he wants to tell – real events are moved by two or three years to provide greater dramatic impetus to Marion’s experiences.  Saintly interventions, an almost supernatural sense of smell and twin telepathy are accepted as real but the story isn’t a magic realist one, it’s rooted in the visceral rather than the imaginative.

I started reading this on new year’s day, when I was almost crippled by my hangover.  I don’t know if it was being absorbed in a good book that made me feel better, or the fact that I convinced my boyfriend to go out in the freezing snow and find some tasty junk foods to feed me, but I got about a third of the way through this and was utterly absorbed (when I wasn’t lounging on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, obviously!).  I read recently that this book will feature on The TV Book Club (I think it’s the Richard and Judy book club without R&J) and it’s likely that if John Q Public enjoys this book even half as much as I did, the library waiting lists will be huge.  So get in there now!  The one thing I could possibly say that was negative about it is not that the women have limited roles (I didn’t really notice that when I was reading it, if I’m honest.  I wouldn’t disagree with the point being made though) but that one of the characters, Marion’s unrequited love, is called Genet.  My sister keeps telling her son that he’s a gannet.  Whenever her name appeared on the page, I heard my sister saying “you greedy gannet” which threw me out of the novel slightly.  And let’s face it, if that’s the worst I can say, it must be a pretty awesome book!

+  = panacea.

Random Acts of Heroic Love

Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann

Leo Deakin has woken up in a hospital in South America to find his girlfriend Eleni dead and his world torn apart.  After burying her, the process of putting his life back together is supposed to begin, only Leo doesn’t want to – he wants to discover why they were separated.  He meets Roberto Paconesi, an Italian professor of the philosophy of physics, who suggests that love exists and doesn’t exist all at once, that quantum theory shows Eleni is neither dead or alive.  He inspires Leo to look for love in everything around him.  The tale of Leo in 1995 is interspersed with that of Moritz Daniecki in 1917.  He kissed Lotte Steinberg beside the river one summer’s afternoon and realises he’s in love.  When he’s conscripted into the war, she promises to wait for him and that promise spurs him on to survive everything that happens to him, from making it through battles at the front to walking across the wastelands of Russia from his prisoner of war camp.

I think perhaps this book got off on the wrong foot with me.  Reading about the crushing realisation that the person you love had died isn’t exactly great for lunchtime in the canteen at work and it never really got back onto the right foot.  I found Leo irritating and whiny, making a series of ridiculous decisions and expecting others to make everything better without any action on his part at all.  The sections with Moritz were slightly more bearable, aside from the slight ickyness of his illness which was used as a framing device for his storytelling – he is lying in bed telling his sons how he walked across the wilds of Siberia to get to Lotte, the memory of her kiss is all that sustains him, but because he is very sick he keeps hacking up green stinky mucus and spitting it into a bowl.  Ick.  The frustrating thing is that the author focuses on annoying Leo instead of the more interesting story of Moritz, returning to him time and again as some sort of buzz kill. It might not have been so jarring if the two stories had been woven together, but it is structured so that the leaving-off points are a bit random and the narratives aren’t balanced or reflective.

Eleni is held up as the paragon of feminine love, faultless and blameless, but as she never really appears on the page it’s difficult for us to get to know her as a character and to truly comprehend the weight of Leo’s ongoing grief.

For me, the best part was the end of the book.  Partly because I didn’t enjoy it very much and there was a yay, it’s over! kind of feeling, but also because of a post-script stating that in 1917 Moshe Scheinmann was taken prisoner and also undertook a three year journey across Russia to find his love, also Lotte.  Nothing was known of his journey.  It made the tale more real for me and I really enjoyed the idea of the author imagining the trials his grandfather went through.  Looking up the names of the characters on Wikipedia just now (I finished reading the book and took it back to the library three weeks ago, so I can’t use it as reference) I discovered that the author’s own girlfriend was killed in a bus crash in South America in 1992.  Which may go some way to explaining the considerable self indulgence on his part, as well as the very real and distressing first chapter describing an emotional turmoil that I truly hope I never experience.

I got this out of the library shortly after reserving Wolf Hall, as a strange impulse to read other award-nominated books.  I got Stalin’s Children out following the same impulse (review to follow, I’m midway through it now) and I have to be honest – it’s not an impulse that has served me well thus far.  I’m not hugely impressed by the book and I’m glad I didn’t pay any money to read it or I would have been more annoyed by the overly melodramatic prose and the ridiculous wallowing that the main character undertakes.  Looking at the reviews on Amazon, it does seem to be a bit of a marmite book.  Frankly, I’m relieved that I’m not the only person who thought it was wooden, cliched and, well, annoying.  I wonder if Scheinmann would do better with material that was a little less close to his heart.

agha ajoka

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ugwu is a young houseboy who has recently been hired by Odenigbo, a professor at the University of Nsukka.  Olanna has left her life of privilege and luxury in Lagos to live with Odenigbo.  Richard is an Oxford graduate, visiting Nigeria to study its art and sculpture when he falls in love with Kainene, Olanna’s twin sister.  As tensions rise and war is declared, their lives come together and are torn apart in the struggle, first for for independence and then survival.

Adichie is a Nigerian of Igbo descent and lost both grandfathers in the Igbo-Hausa conflict that took places at the end of the 1960s (although she was born in 1977, so didn’t directly experience the events depicted).  Her passion for the subject and her country is clear in the detail of her writing – the descriptions of the soups Ugwu cooks for Olanna in the early sections of the book, or the rust colour that malnourished children turn in the later stages of the novel.  I didn’t know anything about the war, the tribal conflicts that underline relations in the country until this day, and Achibie’s depiction of events is a rather beautiful way to learn about something so painful.  Her tone isn’t didactic, she has said that she doesn’t alter history to suit the story, she refracts the suffering and slaughter through the eyes of her three main characters, each with their own flaws and interpretations of events.

If I had one complaint about this book, it would be that it took a while to get started.  I read the first 100 pages while standing in a Ryanair queue (and drinking a very good hot chocolate, not all was lost) but I’m not sure I would have pursued it if I had been at home or had another book to hand.  The tensions rise very slowly, with conflicts between the characters – as they betray each other in turn, it seems -  or between the tribal (or the ‘old’) and the colonial (or the ‘new’) being the driving force for the first half of the story, set in the early 60s.  A jump of two or three years takes place around a third of the way of the book and suddenly Odenigbo’s professor friends are discussing Igbo independence at dinner rather than the latest discourse on philosophy, while Olanna’s Igbo relatives in Kano loudly speak Hausa in public places rather than their native language.  Following the ideals or aspirations of the different tribal groups was something I found quite difficult at first, as was the details of which authority figure stood for which aspect of Nigerian society.  Learning more about the Biafran war was something I found very interesting and didn’t really anticipate when I picked up the book.  It’s definitely worth persevering with!

If you’re wondering about the title for this entry, it’s Igbo and translates as “war is very ugly”.

Bases loaded

The Sweetheart Season by Karen Joy Fowler

It’s 1947 in Magrit, Minnesota, and the men haven’t come back from the war.  Not that there were many men to start with, judging by the very short list of them in the opening chapters… It mainly follows Irini, a spirited 19 year old who works in the testing kitchens at the factory that is the heart of the town, best known for its cereal Sweetwheats.   The book is narrated by Irini’s daughter, who begins with a caveat that she lies and so did her mother when she recounted the story, so any or all of the events might be a falsified.  When the owner of the factory is looking for ways to promote his cereal over that of the rivals, he decides to buy a chimp and dress it up as the figurehead of Sweetwheats.  His wife suggests that they start an all-girls baseball team, who can tour the local area and play the boys teams, promoting the factory and looking for husbands all at once.   The team has to overcome the rivalries between Upper- and Lower-Magrit, between siblings and between other towns to become a success.  Meanwhile, someone is writing controversial answers to the Agony Aunt column in the Sweetwheats newsletter and suspicion is directed at Irini.

A description of the events of the book makes it sound like there are actually events in the book.  There aren’t.  Not a great deal happens.  Sometimes some of the characters go for a walk in the woods.  Then they come back.  There’s a sauna built at one point, but then everyone leaves the sauna and it’s still cold outside.  Irini apparently isn’t very good at cooking, so the recipes created in the test kitchen are given to her to try, as if she can make it, so can anyone.  There’s a fair amount of loose description of cooking, or drinking, or walking, or talking.

I so wanted to enjoy the book.  I can’t even say I didn’t enjoy it, it’s just… nothing happened in it.  The most climatic moment in the whole thing was when a bus carrying the Sweetwheat Sweethearts (as the team is called) crashes and rolls over, but no-one is really hurt and then they go home again, after spending the night in a nearby Summer Camp that was empty (as it isn’t summer).  Oh, spoilers by the way.  Sorry.

meh.

PS. Sorry about not updating the blog on Thursday, like I said I would.  I could make an excuse about the keyboard (which is still a bit on the sticky side) or being busy or something, but truth is I suck at timekeeping!  Anyhow – stay tuned for the next installment.  I’m sure it’ll be dreadfully exciting.

Save the cheerleader, save the world!

Malaria by Susan Hillmore

Sir Alexander Haye visits the island of Mannar, a fact that may or may not be related to his brother Max taking up residence there some years earlier.  It isn’t made clear.  The President offers to give Alexander a baby elephant and Max escorts the creature across the island with its mother.  Whether at the behest of his brother or not is unclear.  Whilst travelling, Max is bitten by a mosquito and, stricken with guilt at allowing the baby elephant to be separated from its mother, retreats to his home where malaria sets in.  The island was once a paradise and now waves of unrest roll across the country, with increasingly violent results – and even Max, in his island home, is not immune.  It’s a separate little island, by the way.  To the main big island, over which the waves of unrest are rolling.

I’ve got a funny feeling I bought this book for the front cover, because when I picked it up t’other day I wasn’t remotely interested in the plot.  But I am doing my best to read my unread book collection, and that’s where this fell, so I read it anyway.  And it’s only 120 pages long, with big margins and some fairly generous line spacing.  This is the cover:

I’m not generally a person who buys books based on what they look like, but I genuinely can’t think of another reason I’d've picked this up.  It certain isn’t the quality of writing or the standout plot.  Because neither of those things exist.  So many adjectives, so little reason for them to be there.  Sample section:

Through blurred eyes he turned away from the light and looked down on sloping acres of neatly tended tea bushes.  Lush shiny leaves sparkled with dew that slithered and shimmered like quicksilver under the morning sun,  He squinted and imagined those camellias in full waxy flower, breaking open their spiral white buds to the bright air.

That number of adjectives is excessive in any circumstance, but in such a short book?  I get the impression from reading it that Susan Hillmore came up with the idea of writing a searing indictment against humanity for its collective rape of the natural world and its diabolic treatment of fellow human beings.  She then goes on to write a slightly smug, self-congratulatory novel that wants to be a searing indictment but fails at every turn.  She takes a fictional Eden-style paradise and shows how the introduction of people has destroyed it, in flowery and overblown prose.  None of the characters are fleshed out enough to care about and the scenes that do have the potential to shock – a bus full of passengers being burned alive, the baby elephant being forceably removed from its grief-stricken mother – are over so quickly that you barely notice them occurring.

The book is full of descriptions of the surroundings, to the detriment of character and plot development.  Annoying enough in any case, but when coupled with such depressing subject matter it becomes some worth actively avoiding.