angelayoung's reviews
334 reviews

It began brilliantly ... but somehow, after a while, it just didn't engage me. I have a feeling the fault is mine. Perhaps I'll go back to it, one day.

It's clear from Trespasses that Louise Kennedy knows both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland well. Her protagonist, Cushla (whose name comes from the Irish: A chuisle mo chroi: the pulse of my heart or, sweetheart, darling) is Catholic, but she lives and works as a teacher in the largely Protestant North during The Troubles (late 1960s - 1998: Trespasses is set in the 1970s). Louise Kennedy lives in Sligo now, but she grew up a few miles from Belfast (or, as her novel tells us: Béal Feirste, which roughly translates from the Irish as 'the mouth of the river (or sandbar).)

I love novels that are well-written and that, as I read, I learn things from. Trespasses is beautiuflly written: it took me into its Irish world (north and south in terms of language) and taught me Irish words (Cushla joins an English-speaking group of Northerners who want to learn Irish); and Kennedy spins its beautiful and beautifully poignant and cruel world subtly and captivatingly. I didn't want the novel to end. The words sang in my mind and the story drew me inexorably and delightfully on. Kennedy threads subtle hints of what's to come through the novel so that by the time I'd finished, everything that happened made complete (and cruel and heart-breaking) sense. The novel is book-ended with a scene in 2015, the first of which subtly (that word again, Kennedy's writing is so subtle: she fed me hints of what was to come as if she was feeding me parings of cheese) ... 2015, the first of which subtly warned me of what was to come - there's a telling detail that I missed on first reading - but even if I had noticed that detail it would only have added to my sense that Cushla's youthful happiness [spoiler alert] couldn't last. And I would have read on willing it to last and desperate to find out why it didn't.

Please read Trespasses both for the beauty, straightforwardness and humour of its language (and its love of language) and for a heartbreakingly beautiful, compellingly subtle story of love between a Catholic and a Protestant in a terribly divided community.

This book - as its burb says - is full of wisdom for women becoming elder (not elderly): there's myth and practicality, life experience and what to expect. It's a comfort and a challenge to those of us heading into our winter years.

I've never read a novel with cancer-kids as protagonists (no spoilers, cancer's mentioned on the first page) nor one where cancer is as much a character (not written as if it is, but it features, a lot) as the characters themselves, and especially not one that is so beautifully funny and tenderly truthful about teenage love and difficulties and desires and courage and depair, when cancer's always lurking in the background, along with cancer's end-game: death. 

But John Green's incrediblly truthful writing makes for an unexpected lightheartedness in the face of lurking death. Here's Hazel Grace, the 16-year-old proagonist: I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

Her courage and her humour and her truthful despair, not to mention her love affair, make The Fault in our Stars a book full of hope, despite the inevitability of her youthful death.

A friend gave me this book, I doubt I'd ever have found it if she hadn't and I was intrigued by it. The true story of a young American poet (Parini) escorting an ageing, blind Argentinian (Borges) on a short trip through the Scottish highlands is funny, poignant, exasperating (to Parini) and enlightening to both of them. The images of the great Borges with his labyrinthine library of a mind and his extraordinary memory for words juxtaposed with Parini's attempts to keep his volatile charge out of lochs, roads and safe - while learning at the speed of light about poetry - he's an aspiring poet - and poets, is captivating. A quote to intruige you too (I hope):

'Nessie [the loch ness monster] is a myth,' I said.
'Mythos, in Greek,' said Borges, 'is not a story that is false, it's a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight. Think of Beowulf. The protoype for Nessie lies there, in the figure of Grendel, a fallen angel. Envious of the light, he lived with his difficult mother in a cave. You and I have lived in this cave as well, with our difficult and exacting mothers. We bear the marks of our captivity, but we survive.'
'I hardly feel like I'm surviving,' I said.

A few pages later, bellowing Grendel's story while standing up in a small rowing boat on Loch Ness, Borges falls onto Parini (who's rowing) and in his attempts to save Borges, Parini capsizes the boat and they're both thrown into the water ... . It's funny and frightening (will they survive?) and a perfect metaphor for their rocky relationship. It's a great read, I recommend it.

I read O Caledonia because Maggie O'Farrell said she made friends with a person on the sole basis that it was her favourite book and I love Maggie O'Farrell's work. It's very good on a girl's teenage, and before, years and very good on crumbling castles and I laughed many times, but I think I was expecting a Maggie O'Farrell novel (not a sensibile expectation when it isn't written by her) with more richly tangled lives. So although I loved the unfortunate things that happened to Janet and her refusal to be daunted by any of them, and the wonderfully convincing idea that when you're young you either have to be good (do what the adults expect you to do) or defy the adults (and live, in Janet's case, through novels and poetry and other languages) I wasn't convinced by the ending and didn't feel either sorry or sad. Which I wish I had ... .

I love Maggie O'Farrell's work and especially her use of anti-chronology or achronology. Her prose is always lucid and often lyrical and Lucrezia (and Alfonso and Emilia and Sofia especially) in The Marriage Portrait were entirely alive. O'Farrell conjures an atmosphere of threat and fear brilliantly, towards the end particularly, and I believed absolutely in Lucrezia and her talents and her frustrations and her extraordinary hair and her terrifying entrapment. There was only one thing that worried me - don't read on if you don't want a clue to the ending - : how did the rags remain in the lock long enough, without anyone else noticing them and removing them, after Jacopo put them there ? (Perhaps I missed a piece of achronology ... but I felt there was a gap of a few days ... .)

The simple language and the brevity of Small Things Like These show how the novel absolutely doesn't need to be Henry James's 'Loose baggy monster' (of the 19th-century) to tell a fine, poignant, deep and deeply sad (and uplifting at the same time) story. A story of an ordinary man in ordinary circumstances who discovers his origins aren't quite what he thought they were, and when he discovers that, he decides on an act of courageous kindness. I can only hope - because I can still see him in the final pages 'Climbing the street towards his own front door' - that his act is met with similar courage and kindness. (The novel doesn't reveal.)

I came to this novel some time after publication, when a friend gave me her copy. It's magnificent: it reads as if it was written in the Victorian era and the mysterious eponymous serpent and the troubles it causes and the psychological depths it plunges its characters down into are beautifully and brilliantly drawn: what is it that troubles them, really? The serpent's potential presence gets them searching their psyches, or not, but they all react to it: some with horror, Cora Seaborne (the protagonist) with scientific enquiry, some with fear, others with myth and magic and it's all grippingly and convincingly written. The novel is also a portrait of Victorian society: dreadful social housing; medical progess and experiment; a fascination with our ancestry, including our dinosaurian ancestry; relationships between men and women and how they weren't as buttoned as we've been led to believe, then; equality between men and women; reason versus religion. And the child characters were beautifully, realistically drawn.

I relistened to Sarah Perry's interview on Radio 4's Bookclub with James Naughtie and she's clearly fiercely intelligent and did much research, but the novel reads as if she didn't and that's a great trick.

A word of warning: in my opinion, the tv series doesn't do the novel any kind of justice. The Essex Serpent is the kind of novel (all the best novels are) that requires its readers to use their imaginations to conjure for themselves extra details of landscape, to amplify the characters' fears and to imagine what exactly it is that the characters are afraid of, using the writer's fine prose as a foundation from which all else springs. A tv adaptation (or a film) that provides all the images for us makes our imaginations lazy and so the story is far less immersively haunting.