It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Going Home, an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted person because of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news because of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, however, that fifty years ago the very structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.

Fifty years on Doris Lessing’s Going Home an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is more effective, indeed more powerful because of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a large slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers were rich – indeed she records that many were abjectly poor – what they had and sought to preserve was an elevated status relative to the black population. She describes white artisans as white first and artisans second. Though trade unions actively sought equal pay for equal work, they never campaigned for any kind of parity for black workers. On the contrary, they demanded the maintenance of racially differentiated pay rates. How’s that for the spirit of socialist internationalism and brotherhood! (I accept there is a misplaced word there…). In fact Doris Lessing records that it was the relatively liberal capitalist enterprises that demanded more black labour, their motive of course arising from cost savings, not philanthropy. So trade unions spent much of their time making sure that companies hired their quota of higher paid, white labour.

Even in the 1950s, she remarks on the likelihood that many Africans were already better educated than their white counterparts. White youth shunned education as unnecessary, while Africans saw it as a possible salvation. She notes that the people who treated the African population the worst were recent immigrants from Europe, particularly those from Britain, who tended to be less educated themselves and drawn from the ranks of the politically reactionary. Such people, apparently, were equally critical of immigrants from southern Europe, and expected Spaniards and Greeks to work for African wages, not the white wages that they themselves demanded.

The situation in Rhodesia, clearly, had to change. Not only was such crass discrimination unsustainable, it was also comic, as are all racially posited class systems. While the South Africans over the border created honorary whites of the Japanese they increasingly had to do business with, the Rhodesians went through their own equally idiotic contortions. An example of such nonsense is quoted by Doris Lessing when she remarks that there was a privileged group of Africans who were granted the right not to carry passes with them at all times, as long as they carried a pass to record their exemption.

But it is also worth remembering that Doris Lessing, herself, was a banned person, unable to travel to certain places and very much under the watchful eyes of the authorities. In Going Home she observes a society that had to collapse under the weight of its unsustainable contradictions. The fact that this took more than twenty years after the book was written was nothing less than a crime, and probably contributed to the subsequent and equally lamentable reaction.

Doris Lessing records seeing a British film towards the end of her travels. She describes it as a “cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of African farmers in their big cars”. Fifty years on, Britain is probably cosy and provincial, and the snobberies are still rife. But now it is not Rhodesia where these reactionaries look down on people of other races overpay and under-educated themselves. It is not in Africa where corporations would dearly love to employ cheaper labour, imported if need be. Rhodesia’s white privilege of the 1950s was obviously absurd. But there are some parallels with economic and class relations in the Britain of today and, like all good books, Doris Lessing’s Going Home may even add prescience to its qualities.

About the Author:

Philip Spires

Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya

http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya. It was an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician, exploits the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a church worker, has just lost his child. He did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael went to the Mission to retrieve a letter from Janet, a teacher, and the priest’s neighbour. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/a-review-of-going-home-by-doris-lessing-267579.html

In Before The Knife Carolyn Slaughter describes her childhood, a fraught, anxious prelude to an adulthood that continued to suffer from its heritage. She tells us early on in the book what caused this anguish, and what gave rise to its associated self-pity, self-abuse and anger. She was raped by her father at the age of six. But then the book unfolds almost without another mention of the trauma until its reality is finally recognized, long after the father, the self-tortured mother, and even the younger sister have gone to their graves.

Carolyn Slaughter’s life, though not fully acknowledged in the book, could only have been lived in a narrow window of history. The British Empire, always eager to install a white face in a position of colonial authority where people of race might not be trusted, elevated many lower middle class émigrés to effective aristocracy. It meant that they could only feel at home, that is, only attain the status they assumed, if they lived outside of the Sceptred Isle. Carolyn’s mother had been born and brought up in India. She had grown used to a life with servants, where sewing, cooking and cleaning could be delegated to the competent. This created time for the important things in life, like deciding what to wear for dinner, what would go with what, and whether the lunch invitees would gel. Not that there were many expatriates to invite in the Kalahari Desert.

Carolyn Slaughter seems to have lived an itinerant’s life. More significantly she seems to have adopted an itinerant relationship with life. It happened as a result of denial, as a result of not accepting or acknowledging what happened to her. The father, a shop worker back home, was a District Commissioner in the Empire when his white face provided his main qualification. His wife, Carolyn’s mother, unable to accept what the daughter had told her or, indeed what evidence proved, slumped into a private depression that never left her.

The author’s African childhood was almost wholly unhappy, even depressing. Her tantrums angered others, her self-abuse threatened her own life, and yet the father who was the source of the tragedy soldiered on, apparently stoically, delivering whatever duty the assumptions of Empire might demand.

There were times when I lost touch with the sense of depression and foreboding, periods in the book when I knew things were lighter and brighter than the reminiscences suggested. Occasionally, the weight being borne got too much. But then I had a happy childhood, without abuse, indeed with love, affection, and support throughout, so who am I to criticize this insight into a world I never knew?

So, towards the end of the account, when the horror of the abuse can be re-lived in later life and thus partially expunged, we can sense the destructive havoc it has wreaked through the family’s life. It’s a rather one-paced account, but the seriousness of its focus justifies its form.

About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk
Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya. It was an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician, exploits the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a church worker, has just lost his child. He did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael went to the Mission to retrieve a letter from Janet, a teacher, and the priest’s neighbour. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/before-the-knife-by-carolyn-slaughter-551450.html

This is not a review of Losing Nelson or England, England, or a record of visits to Chester. As the title claims, it’s a reflection, a few observations on culture and identity seen through Englishness. The trips to Chester are offered by the way, as a start and a finish.

I don’t recall the year when my dad’s Electricity Board Sports Club decided on Chester as its destination for the kids’ outing. I do remember many of those annual events vividly, however, perhaps because of the unearthly hour at which we had to set off. Britain had no motorways then and dual carriageways were rare. Roads went through town centres, the concept of the by-pass having just reached the drawing board – at least in the north – and adults could still smoke on the bus, despite the fact that potted meat sandwiches were probably being consumed in the next seat. The sandwich filling has a bearing on the tale, since the price of the trip included a packed lunch, usually passed around in bulk, the sandwiches cut in triangles, not the rectangles of home, and set in Toblerone ranges on a teacloth-draped tray. There was an apple or an orange, perhaps, to finish. I don’t know why I didn’t like potted meat, but I can remember persuading my mother to do me a round of bacon sandwiches as an adjunct to the standard fare. Perhaps I was just being greedy, but they did come in handy, if in a rather unexpected way.

I can remember visiting Chester’s historic town centre, all those half-timbered buildings provoking discussions about the Tudors, who they were, how they fit into history, who came before and who followed. The predecessors interested all of us on the trip, because we were from Yorkshire and we could never accept that the Lancastrians had won the war. At least we were in Cheshire! And then there were the city’s Roman origins to consider, leading to my learning my first Latin word when we were told that Chester was but a corruption of “castra”, Latin for camp (the military variety).

And so to the zoo. Yes, there were real zoos in those days. I was a fan of Zoo Time on TV, where Dr Desmond Morris, before his higher primate fame, did live experiments with chimpanzees and rewards, all encased in a Prokofiev theme tune. At Chester I remember I liked the sea lions, found the camels oppressively smelly and learnt that elephants really like cold bacon sandwiches.

When an infant, I used to wiggle the ridges off my candlewick bedspread. I don’t know whether it was a search for solace in the tactile, but it used to exasperate my mother, because I used to pick things into holes. Charles Cleasby, the Horatio Nelson worshipping main character of Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson, often sleeps under a holed and worn blanket of his mother’s whenever he needs reassurance. It’s a covering of peace for him, a way of shutting out the complications of the world and operates physically in the same way that his need to wrap himself in the myth of Nelson protects him mentally. Thus he is perhaps more a worshipper than a scholar. But the myth has become part of his psyche, part of his identity. Nelson’s greatness, Nelson’s genius, are parts of the nation’s greatness and genius and thus, by association, part of Cleasby’s own moral and personal identity. But, wanting to find out more, Cleasby researches Nelson’s history, expecting to confirm greatness and therefore bolster myth. To his increasing dismay and reluctantly admitted disbelief, what he uncovers are the complications of history, the messy realities of war and the personal limitations of the historical figure, who is often revealed as less than competent, certainly less than diplomatic, but also, and more importantly, as a self-seeking, ruthless individual, certainly not a team player. The myth dissolves little by little and so does Charles Cleasby’s hold on reality. As Nelson loses his mythical status, Cleasby’s world simply falls apart. He is no longer able to interpret experience nor relate to his surroundings. The blanket cocoon offered by myth generates an intellectual and mental solace that can both justify and reinforce identity and, once the protecting wrap has been holed for Charles, at least and perhaps for a nation, it is identity itself that is challenged. Losing Nelson is a serious and moving study of the essential role of myth in defining identity and creating psyche, citing its power and its limitations, these derived from its essence of simply being myth.

In England, England, Julian Barnes inhabits similar territory, but humorously. One character lists quintessences (there are more than five) of Englishness and many, perhaps most, are myth, by nature or association. And the purpose of identifying these icons of Englishness is to facilitate the construction, by Sir Jack Pitman on an eventually independent Isle of Wight, of an England Theme Park, packed with imitation and reproduction experience, collected together to take the strain out of tourism. Theme Park England becomes, itself, the quintessence (just one) of corporate identity and presence, with the products on offer being seen and marketed as “better” than the originals. It’s all a great success until, that is, the imitations begin to adopt their assigned identities. Smugglers become a problem when they start smuggling. Dr. Samuel Johnson changes his name to – guess what? – Dr. Samuel Johnson and begins emulating the behaviour of the historical figure, along with a few of his own improvisations for added effect. The King thinks he’s a king and Robin Hood and his Merrie Men yearn to be real outlaws. They are all in breach of contract. Through humour, the book asks questions about what is essential in national personal identity. The project identifies myths and reproduces them as second order experience which themselves become as capable of fulfilling the role of identity creation, definition and perpetuation as the real thing. So, by extension, the book questions how we create, assume and sustain cultures and their associated values.

The existence of myth and its potential to influence identity and culture are highly relevant to my second day out in Chester. This time as an adult I revisited the half timbering and Roman roots, the zoo having been transformed by changed notions of the animal. And a new reality asserted itself, redrafting the assumed permanence of my childhood memories. Unbeknown to the child, the half-timbering is largely nineteenth century reproduction and imitation. If it prompts discussion on Tudor England, it does so only by assumed association learned elsewhere. And the extant Roman elements of Chester are miniscule, reduced to a few piles of stone. The town’s official guide book, which I bought to help interpret the visit, pictured a Roman Centurion on its cover. He carried a shield with the words “Tetley Bitterman” emblazoned where one might have expected “SPQR”. At the end of the visit a myth I hade grown up with had been largely exploded. The history, itself, is not the myth. It’s the evidence that’s claimed on its behalf that is the problem. No wonder Sir Jack’s Theme Park attractions were as good as the real thing when the original was originally a theme park. The myth may survive the reality, I suppose, if the individual still wants to believe it. And, by the way, I have never managed to ask elephants if they really do like cold bacon sandwiches.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, a novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/reflections-on-a-pair-of-novels-losing-nelson-and-england-england-and-a-couple-of-trips-to-chester-205569.html

It is not often that a novel comes to hand that has been prized, praised and pre-inflated. Half of a Yellow Sun was in that category when I opened it and began to read. And I was captivated immediately. I read the first hundred pages at a pace, delighting in the ease with which the Chimanada Ngozi Adichie used language to draw me into the middle-class clique centred on the University of Nsukka which provides the core characters of her book. Their infidelities, their inconsistencies, their desire, despite the servants, for equality and freedom are symptomatic of their time. The dissimilar twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, one imagines will provide a vehicle for parallel and different lives, providing contrast and metaphor, and I eagerly awaited their stories to unfold.

The book’s sections alternate between the early and late 1960s, the latter period in Nigeria, of course, being the Biafran War. And, yes, the characters live through the war, and their lives and their natures, and along with them their country, are transformed by it. Perhaps even their own identity is redrawn, especially once the promise of a recognised nationality is promised and then denied. Eventually there are vivid scenes of the war’s brutality, its double standards, its compromises, its cynicism, its racism and its starvation. The images are graphic and vivid, unforgettable even, and the ability of war to undermine utterly and profoundly any assumption that an individual might harbour about an imagined future is movingly portrayed.

So why then was I so disappointed with the book? All I can offer, I’m afraid, is that eventually I found it shallow. Its apparent concentration on the domestic lives of the characters undermined their credibility as members of an intellectual elite and rendered them two (or perhaps even one) dimensional. Chimanada Ngozi Adichie carefully tells us that Odenigbo is a mathematician and in love with his subject. He covets his personal library, which he loses in the war and then has replaced by a benefactor. But in my experience, mathematicians are passionate people – and are usually passionate about mathematics. No mathematician I have ever met avoids all mention of personal academic interests in social settings as scrupulously as Odenigbo. I didn’t want the novel to become a textbook, but if characters were ballet dancers, surely we would expect to hear of the roles they had danced and the music that had moved them. Of Odenigbo’s academic character we hear nothing. Why is he therefore endowed with knowledge and interest that is never explored? Perhaps he only exists as a character to interact with the twin sisters.

And the problem is repeated with Richard Churchill who, we are told is an Igbo-speaking English radical. I knew a lot of sixties radicals and they were never slow to offer an opinion or, indeed, place themselves squarely in a space on the ideological chessboard. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we never learn if Richard is a Marxist, Maoist, Leninist or Trot. He never mentions Castro or Ho Chi Minh. He doesn’t appear to have any position on capitalism, society, business, the Third World, South Africa, Central America or even Viet Nam. I found myself wondering which sixties decade saw his radicalisation. When Chimanada Ngozi Adichie tells us that he travels to Lagos to attend a function in honour of the state funeral of Winston Churchill (perhaps no relation), I began to wonder if he was an early- (or indeed late) born radical Tory. I have been an expatriate myself, so I can forgive him his attendance of the function, but not his total silence on the issues of the day.

This becomes especially problematic when both Britain and the Soviet Union are mentioned as assisting the Federal Forces in the destruction of secessionist Biafra. What sixties radical, given the inevitability of his assumption of a Cold War bifurcated paradigm to underpin his ideological position, would not have pondered and discussed this at length, even in bed?

Eventually we also have to read along with continued adulation of Ojukwu. His Excellency might even be the Great Helmsman, himself, given that his free-thinking minions seem unable to mention a criticism of an historical character who eventually fled to Ivory Coast to save his skin and live his life in relative comfort after leaving millions of his own people dead. Perhaps he had to be preserved to fight another day, as he eventually did, if in a different way, but surely no sixties radical would have left his role unquestioned. It doesn’t ring true, and an opportunity to develop a character like Richard through his own and inevitable disillusion was ignored.

And then we are presented with a pair of American journalists that the radical Richard has to greet and service in his role as a promoter of the Biafran cause. They are both called Charles and apparently have the same nickname, Chuck – which surely should have been Charlie of the “right” variety to enhance the farce. They are simply not credible. We can probably accept as deadly accurate that the majority of Americans neither knew where Biafra was nor cared a jot about its plight, since the attentions of the politicised were focused elsewhere at the time. But the presentation of a pair of foreign correspondents as crass as these is surely incredible, as is, equally, Richard’s apparent patience in dealing with them.

I did also become mildly annoyed at what became quite extensive use of Igbo words when they seemed to offer no extra flavour, meaning or understanding. I have no problem with the use of local terms to enhance a feeling of place and sound, but their over use tends to obfuscate. We really wanted to know what these people thought, but we were never told.

So what are we left with? Half of a Yellow Sun is a beautifully written, beautifully composed domestic tale of fidelity, infidelity, loyalty and opportunism. The contrast between the characters’ and therefore the nation’s lives at the start and the end of the decade is engaging. But because their psyches are never really explored, we never understand any motives or, therefore, any consequences. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun was a thoroughly enjoyable experience which, with hindsight, I would have foregone.

Author: Philip Spires
<About the Author:

Philip Spires

Author of Mission

http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/something-of-a-disappointment-half-of-a-yellow-sun-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-205580.html

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of contemporary or historical events which themselves become re-interpreted by the fiction. In Restless, Boyd’s latest novel, he has re-stated this ability and, if anything, written it larger via a smaller form.

The historical element in Restless is supplied by the activities of an offshoot of World War Two intelligence. Ostensibly a private, dis-ownable initiative of a particular group, Boyd suggests that it formed an integral part of the British strategy, during the early part of the war, to force the United States to join the Allied effort. The fact, therefore, that it was undermined and subverted so that it perhaps aimed to achieve the opposite of its brief was probably par for the course when espionage meets its freelance counter, but the denouement is surprising and wholly credible.

In front of this backdrop of fact meeting fiction, we have a landscape of human relationships. Ruth is a single mother in Oxford. She, herself, has had certain German connections, nay relations, hence the motherhood. She makes a living teaching English to foreign tutees, has several dubious visitors, dreams about completing an aging PhD and generally spends much of her time looking after a precocious five-year-old. And then her mother becomes someone quite unknown to her. The widow in the Oxfordshire retreat suddenly becomes part Russian, part English, with a French step-mother. She possessed several different identities before she became Mrs Gilmartin and most of these were fiction to provide cover for the others. How many of us, after all, can claim to have known our parents before they were parents?

So, as Mrs Gilmartin the mother reveals to her daughter via instalments of an autobiography that she is really Eva Delectorskaya, recruited in Paris to conduct a campaign of wartime disinformation in the United States, the complications of life gradually attain the status of the mundane. Recruited, perhaps, because she was rootless and thus expendable, Eva proved herself intellectually and operationally superior to her manipulative managers and survived the posting that was supposed to achieve their subverted ends and, at the same time, erase her potential to supply evidence. Many years later, Eva, now Mrs Gilmartin, feels the need to get even, to expose the double or triple-cross for what it was and deliver at least a prod to the comfortable, self-congratulatory but traitorous British establishment that ran her. Daughter Ruth becomes the means.

So one messy life tries to tie up its soggy ends via the actions of another who is apparently yet to attain the same depths of complication. And she succeeds. The fright is delivered. The memory that Eva, the mother, was fundamentally brighter than the upper class Brits who were trying to manipulate her is rekindled. Her training was perfect, but she went beyond it and the plan backfired, irrelevantly as it turned out because greater events intervened. But years later, Eva, Mrs Gilmartin, is still brighter than her boss and, through her daughter’s efforts, she brings a special kind of justice to bear on the double-dealer who ruined, but also perhaps made her life.

In characteristically humble terms, William Boyd reminds us at the end that we are all watched, all awaiting the cupboard to reveal its skeleton, but in our more mundane lives, it is unlikely to be as colourful an event as that which Eva Delectorskaya, Mrs Gilmartin, and her daughter Ruth uncover.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/restless-by-william-boyd-209607.html

George Edalji (that’s Ay-dal-ji, by the way, since Parsee names are always stressed on the first syllable) is the son of a Staffordshire vicar of Indian origin and his Scottish wife. George is thus a half-caste, to use the language of his late-Victorian and Edwardian age. He’s a diligent, if not too distinguished a scholar. He is uninterested in sport, is of small stature and doesn’t see too well. He sleeps with his father behind a locked door, is in bed by 9:30, becomes a small town solicitor who develops an interest in train timetables and, by way of outlandish diversion, publishes a traveller’s guide to railway law.

Arthur Conan Doyle (later Sir Arthur) is born in Edinburgh, completes medical school and generally accomplishes whatever task he sets himself, including becoming a world famous writer. Despite the fact that he kills off his creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, ostensibly to devote time to tasks of greater gravity, popular demand insists that he raise the character from the dead. He does this and proceeds to generate even greater success than before. He marries happily twice and pursues and interest in spiritualism, amongst other good causes.

Perhaps because of who they are, the Edalji family become the butt of the campaign of poison pen letters. When they complain, all they accomplish is the focusing of further unwanted attentions on themselves. When a series of ripping attacks on animals remains unsolved, George, somehow, becomes the prime suspect. Convinced of his villainy, police, judicial system, expert witnesses, jury and press see him convicted of the crime and sent down for seven years. Good conduct sees him released after three.

Sir Arthur wishes to do good and takes up George Edalji’s case. He researches the facts, analyses the possibilities, tracks down neighbours and officials who have been involved. He creates an alternative explanation of events and presents it to officialdom, seeking a pardon and compensation for George, who by this time has transferred to London to start a new life. The two men meet and the incongruity of their assumed expectations of life are as irreconcilable as they are irrelevant to their joint focus on George’s case. After official review, however, the Home Office Committee eventually concludes in an ambiguous manner. Edalji was convicted of the crime and the conviction is declared unsound; but crucially he is not declared innocent. He is therefore found not guilty but then not innocent either and so not worthy of compensation. When, years later, Sir Arthur dies and his associates stage a spiritualist gathering in his honour in the Royal Albert Hall, George is invited and attends, complete with binoculars lest he miss a detail of the proceedings. The illusion of the event draws him in and at one stage he feels himself to be the centre of attention, only to find that it is a near miss. Most of the detail refers to himself and his father, but the reality then points to another who is immediately identified.

But, paradoxically, the quiet George Edalji and his Parsee (not Hindoo) father, Shapurji, were always the centre of attention simply by being who they were. Even Sir Arthur, the son’s eventual champion, states this in one of his letters when he writes that it was perhaps inevitable that a dark-skinned clergyman taking a station in central England would attracts other’s attention of a kind that would seek to undermine him, vilify him and attempt to oust him. The message is clear, that to be different from an assumed norm is to invite hatred, envy, discrimination and eventually ignominy. It is presented as a universal assumption, an unwritten element of universal common sense. Thus, as an intruder, the usual rules of justice will never pertain, a reality alluded to late in the book when George, scanning the Albert Memorial with his binoculars, discovers a statuesque embodiment of the concept of justice that is not wearing a blindfold.

What is eventually so disturbing about Arthur and George, however, is the realisation that both characters are outsiders. George is set apart from his Staffordshire peers by his skin colour and perceived race. Arthur, however, lives no humdrum life. He attends private schools, qualifies as a doctor and then becomes an international celebrity by virtue of his writing. He takes up minority causes and identifies with them but, despite his obvious separateness from mainstream society, in his case his position is never interpreted as a threat or a handicap, obviously because the separateness of privilege has a different currency from the separateness of even relative poverty.

Now an enduring memory of my own school history lessons was a textbook reproduction of a mid-Victorian cartoon of the universal pyramid of creation. It had God at the apex, immediately in touch via the saints with the Empress of India and then, layered beneath in widening courses were the gentry and aristocracy, the members of government and civil service, the professional classes and merchants. The working classes could perhaps temporarily ignore their poverty in the solace offered by knowing that they are a cut above members of all other races who, themselves, were just one up from the apes. It was not many more layers down to the low animals, most of which slithered or crawled. Arthur and George ostensibly tells us much about racism and racial discrimination in a society that was portrayed as the apex of a worldwide empire, a heavenly focus for aspiration. It also tells us about the power of presumption and has much to say very quietly and by suggestion about social class and its ability, especially in Britain, to legitimise difference as originality or eccentricity in some areas, differences which elsewhere would be threats.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/a-review-of-arthur-and-george-by-julian-barnes-209611.html

I don’t read many books that claim membership of a genre. In my humble opinion, a work of fiction should aspire to create its own world, describe it, communicate it and then live in it. I want a book’s characters to inhabit the events that are portrayed, events that are clearly influenced by the character’s presence, but which are also usually bigger than any individual’s contribution. Wars don’t exist unless people fight them. Crimes are not committed without criminals. Love stories are made by lovers and ghosts don’t exist.

For instance, in my own book, Mission, there are four wars, but it’s not a war novel. There are at least three love stories, but it’s not a romance. There are several deaths, one of which is a murder, but it’s not a crime novel or a thriller. And then there’s a character who comes back from the dead to haunt an old man, but it’s not a ghost story or a fantasy. In short, it’s Mission, a novel set in Kenya.

So I approached Ken Scott’s crime thriller, A Million Would Be Nice, as a reader unused to the genre’s codes and forms.

Unlike general or literary fiction, I recognise that learning what happens in A Million Would Be Nice is one of the main reasons for reading the book. My review, therefore, cannot reveal too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that there has been a bank robbery. It was an inside job and the scenario for its execution is carefully concocted and inventively created. The perpetrator gets away with it and scarpers with the loot to live it up in Spain.

On an apparently separate thread, we meet Donavan Smith, a quite incredibly vile piece of humanity from Newcastle, of which I hope he is not representative. He’s a successful young thing, a kind of nouveau riche moron, who apparently defines his identity by surrounding himself with requisite items of designer consumption, clearly knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. He has everything, does our Donavan, but he is never satisfied. He wants more.

There isn’t a lot to endear us to Donavan Smith. He’s a misogynist, and occasionally indulges in some quite bizarre behaviour in the bedroom. He justifies everything with quotes from the Bible, a source of justification that was beaten into him by an abusing mother. He lets nothing get in his way. He has his ideas, knows how to achieve them and then ruthlessly destroys anything that might resist. In some ways, he is quite creative.

But one of his conquests becomes an accomplice, because she has inside information about that money that went missing in the bank raid. He needs her and together they visit people all over the prestigious bits of Europe, Paris, Cannes, London, the Costas, Newcastle, to pursue and realise their dream. And believe me, this Donavan is nothing if not resourceful and he certainly has a knack when it comes to making things happen.

The story moves at a fast pace. Different characters are drawn into the thread and many are inevitably cast aside by Donavan Smith, our single-minded, calculating anti-hero. And that is as much as I will relate. A Million Would be Nice claims to be a crime thriller, and a crime thriller is exactly what it is, fast paced, and packed with greed, obsession and ruthlessness.

Ken Scott’s own background as an employee of a major British bank provided him with much of the detail surrounding the original robbery. Since the back cover of the book shows him, like the robber in the book, living it up in Spain, I can only hope that this is as far as the similarity goes. A Million Would be Nice will appeal to readers of thrillers and crime fiction. It has all the elements you would expect and, in the relationship between Donavan and his mother, perhaps something extra as well.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Full details at http://www.ken-scott.co.uk
Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/a-million-would-be-nice-by-ken-scott-a-review-by-philip-spires-216319.html

Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its characters’ world and allows you to feel their lives being lived. It’s a giant of a book in a very small world, a world inhabited by Maggie and her husband, Ira, and, it seems, by precious little else. They are long married, happy, perhaps without really knowing it, and replete with generally unacknowledged failure.

Breathing Lessons starts with Maggie picking up the family car after its repair job and spruce up. She immediately runs into a truck and doesn’t stop. She and Ira then head off on a long drive to a funeral of a long lost friend. Memories revisit high school and adolescence as the widow attempts to recreate her wedding service to bid farewell to her husband. The songs her friends originally sang turn out to be highly inappropriate, depending on your point of view, and some don’t want to try to recreate their youth and so become dignified spoilsports. Some old scores are retallied, none settled, of course.

Then Ira and Maggie set off home and decide to call in on their son’s estranged wife and their granddaughter, a girl of seven, it turns out, they haven’t seen since she was an infant. On the way there is a strange encounter with a fellow traveller. Maggie invents a story, for some reason, which he believes. She pursues the scam, is as duplicitous as hell and carries the whole thing off as if it had been gospel from the start. A strange episode.

Maggie is surprised that she does not recognise her granddaughter. Perhaps Anne Tyler is suggesting that the only really important things for Maggie are those she keeps within the confines of her head. Fiona, the estranged daughter-in-law, seems surprisingly accommodating, even more so when details emerge of how poorly treated she has been by Maggie and her son, Jesse. Maggie and Ira clearly weren’t too good at being parents, or grandparents, either.

Maggie convinces herself that she can get the separated couple back together and cajoles her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to motor back to Baltimore with them. She phones her son and arranges for him to call round later that day, after the travellers have reached the family home. It seems that everyone except Maggie is both indifferent and sceptical, but, for some reason, everyone goes along with her suggestions. And, of course, it all goes nowhere. None of these folk, by the way, could be described as intellectual. Not one of them seems to have read a book or, indeed, ever suffered the trauma of a moment of self-reflection since birth. All anyone ever does is react, and then usually wrongly.

Maggie is the book’s central and essential character. Ira, her husband, for the most part busies himself driving, playing solitaire or teaching Frisbee. But basically he seems to hover around the edge of Maggie’s universe, occasionally putting his foot in it by pointing out the odd reality here and there, realities that Maggie expends massive resources trying to ignore or deny. She makes mistakes. She crashes the car every time she drives (two out of two in the book). She constantly imagines herself as God’s gift, a sort of Mrs Fix-It for everyone else’s problems. But she is singularly unable to organise her own existence. She is overweight and yet overeats. She is full of self-justification, almost invariably based on obviously false premises. And she seems to have developed absolutely no powers of self-analysis or reflection, even when reality occasionally forces its way into her existence to contradict her assumptions and undermine her intentions.

I have to admit that I tried to start the book at least three times without success. For me, Maggie’s character was just not quite credible and, if it were credible, I could find no reason why I would want to read about such a person. I persevered this time, however, and the result was a rewarding insight into an uncultured and eventually valueless approach to life that, I suspect, Anne Tyler suspects may be widespread, though I feel that she would not be as judgmental about it as myself.

In the end, all of the characters in Breathing Lessons are failures, who consistently render their own lives a chaotic mess, both inside and outside their heads. They are surrounded by their own mistakes and missed opportunities. These are people who really work at their incompetence and succeed brilliantly. I can’t help feeling that at least one of them, in the normal run of things, would display an intellect superior to a demented parrot and a facility for self-reflection greater than a sooty fireback. But no one ever does. Perhaps that’s the point.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires
Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk
Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya. It was an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician, exploits the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a church worker, has just lost his child. He did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael went to the Mission to retrieve a letter from Janet, a teacher, and the priest’s neighbour. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/breathing-lessons-by-anne-tyler-226365.html

Black Snow is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. This apparent platitude is full of contradiction. The book is perhaps better described as an autobiographical episode, with Bulgakov renamed as the book’s central character, Maxudov. It’s also a satire in which the characters are precise, exact and often vicious caricatures of Bulgakov’s colleagues and acquaintances in the between-the-wars Moscow Arts Theatre, including the legendary Stanislawsky. In some ways, Black Snow is a history of Bulgakov’s greatest success, the novel The White Guard, which the theatre company adapted for the stage under the title The Days of the Turbins. The play ran for close to a thousand performances, including one staged for an audience of a single person, one Josef Stalin who, perhaps luckily for Bulgakov, liked it.

Black Snow is also a sideways look at the creative process, itself. Maxudov is a journalist with The Shipping Times and hates the monotony and predictability of his work. Privately he creates a new world by writing a novel in which the author can imagine transcending the mundane. But the product of this and all creation is useless unless it is shared. Only then can it exist. Only then can the author’s relief from the self he cannot live with be realised. But when no-one publishes the novel, when no-one shows the slightest interest in it, the author is left only with the isolation that inspired the book, but now this is an amplified isolation and more devastating for it. So he attempts suicide. But he is such an incompetent that he fails. It’s the same middle class Russian incompetence that Chekhov celebrated in Uncle Vanya where no-one seems able to aim a shot.

But then this unpublished book is seen by others, for whom it seems to mean something quite different from the author’s intention. Instead of a novel, they see it as a play. They ask for a re-write, complete with changes of both plot and setting. Effectively, the only way the work can have its own life, its own existence, is for it to become something that denies the author’s own intentions and thus nullifies the reason for writing it. And so Maxudov goes along with things and thus in effect he is back again doing what he does for The Shipping Times, in that he is writing things that others want.

And here is where Black Snow becomes a parody of what was happening later in Bulgakov’s own career. He wanted to write a play about censorship and control. This, obviously, was impossible in Stalin’s Soviet Union, so he set the play in France, basing it upon the historical reality of Moliere. After four years of tying to prepare the play for performance what finally emerged was a costume drama from which all allusions to censorship had been removed or watered down. So Bulgakov’s intended comment on Soviet society was lost. And the play flopped.

So the satirical caricatures are truly vicious. We have an impresario who is incapable of remembering the playwright’s name. We have the opinionated arty intellectual, full of biting criticism and dismissive posturing until he realises he is speaking to the author and then he does an instant, blushing volte-face. We have a character that is so sure about every detail of organisation and experience that they are almost always wrong.

Ultimately, Black Snow is about a creative process where a writer can create whatever is imaginable. But then in communicating it, the receivers change it, transform it into what they want it to be. The writer makes the snow black, the recipients read it as black but change it to white and then probably argue whether it has already turned to rain. Black Snow is an enigmatic, super-real and surreal satire.

Author: Philip Spires
About the Author:

Philip Spires

Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya

http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya. It was an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician, exploits the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a church worker, has just lost his child. He did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael went to the Mission to retrieve a letter from Janet, a teacher, and the priest’s neighbour. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/philip-spires-reviews-black-snow-by-mikhail-bulgakov-242944.html

While many are more familiar with the Stanley Kubrick film of 1980, it is really the King novel that should be placed first in the minds of the literary and film-going public.

While there is little debate that Kubrick’s adaptation starring Jack Nicholson is a marvelous example of horror filmmaking, it has much to thank Stephen King for the original themes of isolation, alcoholism, and mental illness.

Written only three years prior to the films release, King tells the story of Jack Torrance, a temperamental and sometime alcoholic writer who is attempting to rebuild his family after being expelled from the prestigious New England prep school. He decides to take a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel in an isolated area of Colorado.

There, he and his wife Wendy and small son, Danny will spend 5 months alone in the sprawling hotel. His son’s telepathy and visions spell trouble for the family, as he is bombarded with negative and disturbing imagery of the hotel and its grounds. Said to be built on an Indian burial ground and possessing strange powers, the Overlook took the lives of the last caretaker that worked the winter, a Delbert Grady.

The man, filled with rage and slowly going insane, kills his wife and children with an axe, and then proceeds to shoot himself.

Jack dismisses this as an isolated incident, and knows that the secluded winter at the Overlook with be the perfect time to get his writing career back on track.

Before they leave, Danny is introduced to the hotel’s cook, Dick Halloran, who tells him that others (including himself) have the ability to see things before they happen. He calls this “shining”. Before he leaves the family, he tells Danny to shine to him if anything goes wrong (which Dick knew would inevitably happen).

With lack of alcohol and the crushing sense of isolation, paired with the monotony of his writing, Jack begins getting wrapped up in the ghost world of the hotel. He makes friends with the Overlook’s bartender (who is long dead) and Delbert Grady (who does not remember killing his family).

Wendy and Danny notice his decline, and after one particularly violent episode, they lock him in the walk-in pantry. Unbeknownst to them, he is let out by the ghost of Delbert Grady, but on the condition that he will kill Wendy and Danny. He complies, and goes on a mission to hunt them down in the hotel.

Danny shines to Dick Halloran, who races up from Florida (where he is staying for the winter). Jack ends up in the boiler room of the hotel and the Overlook explodes, burning everything inside. Luckily, Danny and Wendy are rescued by a fast-thinking Halloran who drives them away from the burning wreckage.

Many believe that King has failed in later years, but as his third novel (after Carrie and Salem’s Lot) The Shining remains a mainstay of horror fiction.

Author: Allison D.
About the Author:

This review was written by Allison D, who enjoys potential quotes, positive thinking quotes, and a good thought of the day.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/book-review-of-the-shining-by-stephen-king-312014.html