I have a bit of a soft spot for a BBC Sunday night drama and although a novel rarely seems to translate to screen without some disappointment, the BBC’s recent adaptation of Jones’ award-winning debut did a pretty good job. Racing through it in a day, I managed to finish just in time to watch its visual transformation and although, as with most adaptations, nuances were lost, the depiction of post war suburban life was enticing.
Some viewers complained it was ‘too depressing’ and certainly the early death of Lewis’ mother by drowning is a traumatic moment. Dealing with her death in very different ways, Lewis and his father embark on a fractured relationship that a snobbish and judgmental community do little to help. Self-harm and parental abuse of children are key themes in this relentlessly emotional plot but it would be a poor Sunday night drama where at least some enduring happiness wasn’t provided as a conclusion to the weekend.
Fragmented syntax. Disturbingly beautiful imagery. Broken prose with riffs of reported speech. This is not an easy book to read.
“Did you actually look at this before you bought it for me?” I asked K at Christmas.
“It won some kind of ‘Women’s Prize’ didn’t it?”
“And your thought process was…?”
“You like women and all that feminist stuff…I thought you’d be all over it!”
This is the same sort of logic that meant a second book shaped present turned out to be a recipe book entitled: “What the f*@# should I make for dinner.”
“You never know what to make for dinner…well actually, you never make dinner…”
K had neglected to look at the inside of this charming piece of literature as well. He assures me he would never have bought it otherwise. There’s something a little off-putting about being told to ‘boil some fucking water’, before ‘chopping your shitting onions.’ It’s definitely not conducive to cookery motivation.
The first page of McBride’s novel is perhaps not very motivating either. The first paragraph reads:
“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stiches of her skin she’ll wear your say.”
Continuing with this syntactical dexterity for the whole of the remainder of the novel, the reader could be forgiven for giving up at the first hurdle. I certainly did during the first couple of times of reading. The third time I decided to power through a few chapters in one sitting, which turned out to be much more rewarding.
McBride won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014 with the stream of consciousness style novel, that took six months to write but nine YEARS to get published. You can see how the challenging, impressionistic voice contributed to publishers’ timidity. Mashed up dialogue causes confusion but also an honesty to her messed up, exceedingly troubled narrator:
“In the morning. Stung my eyes. Awake now? Are you alright? I’m a. And what have you to tell? What? God you look desperate are you she says laying on my bed. Wag fag at me. What have you been up to? He? Who? Just I. I. Jesus Christ you know what. My grandfather died. Well if that isn’t the look of you you have. He? Who? Yes. Who? What? I just need a spot of sleep. Well there’s a cup of tea there. Thanks. And I’m staying the week. Oh right.”
Linguistically challenging, it becomes easier to read if you imagine the prose as poetry, punctuation becoming redundant in places and needing to be inserted in others. There is a lyrical quality to the words that surprise, creating moments of beauty in an otherwise thoroughly depressing plot.
As far as that goes, the ingredients are reassuringly Irish. A young girl suffers the traumas of a brother with a brain tumour, an absent father and a religious fanatic for a mother, sexual abuse by her uncle, and sexual abuse from strangers. It’s a litany of pain that would test anyone’s sanity.
And test the reader it does. In a good way.
* I am the K in question in the passage above. I feel that the tone of these sentences misrepresent my thought process at the time. Rather than the stereotypical ‘pick-the-first-one-off-the-shelf-with-a-sad-woman-on-the-front-as-she’ll-probably-like-it-then-I-can-be-done-with-this-shopping-bollocks’-approach, I was actually a bit vexed trying to find a suitable book and a lot of reading of Amazon reviews on my phone in Waterstones and scratching of my head went on. The cookery book on the other hand just looked a bit sweary and it made me chuckle.
I’ve been feeling a wee bit feminist this year. So much so that my A Level students began checking on entering the room whether it was a ‘feminist Nazi’ day. Anyone would think I was force-feeding them Angela Carter and Carol Ann Duffy (both on the syllabus) but by the end of the course, I had them demanding to be allowed to spread the message of equality in school assemblies and identifying themselves as ‘feminist warriors’. Feminist mission achieved!
At the start of the year, I raced through Laura Bate’s ‘Everyday Sexism’ suddenly finding a name for things that had pissed me off in the past without ever really identifying them as sexist, misogynistic and discriminatory. Teachers who would tell boys in Primary school to ‘stop crying like a little girl’ or that time I wrote to the Advertising Standards Agency to complain about an advert that suggested ‘her indoors’ needed to be deceived about a guy going to the pub to secretly watch the football. I suggested that maybe she would actually like to go and watch the football herself rather than stay at home and make his tea but apparently this depiction of modern life was acceptable.
I moved a bit more slowly through Laurie Penny’s ‘Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution’, a provocative read, which focused more on freedom for all, whether that means inventing new gender roles, or the need to give those oppressed by a patriarchy (men included because of the social pressure to behave with a macho masculinity) a voice.
‘All the Rebel Women’provides a counterpoint to these texts, exploring the Fourth Wave of Feminism and considering recent global events that have shaped this. Issues such as Female Genital Mutilation, the battle over page 3, the fact that a worrying percentage of the Internet is porn and the pressure on young girls and boys to conform to expected gender roles such as unhealthy ideals of beauty and behaviour, are discussed in relation to anecdotal examples, which highlight the relevance of this continued battle.
Growing up, I was aware that I’d been named with a nod and a wink to strong females such as Emily Wilding Davison and Emily Bronte. Davison famously ‘threw herself’ in front of the King’s horse in a dramatic climax to the fight for women’s suffrage. One hundred years later in 2013, historians argued about whether her actions were a deliberate protest or whether she simply slipped at the wrong moment. Embarrassing perhaps, however, having been jailed 9 times and force fed 49 times, I’m not too comfortable questioning her courage and dedication to the movement.
Recent news has focused on the objectification of women in Hollywood with Maggie Gyllenhaal speaking out about the fact that being in her dotage at the age of 37 meant that she was considered to be ‘too old’ to play the love interest of a 55 year old man. The commonplace practice was parodied with expert comedy timing by Amy Schumer in this scene for comedy central. Unapologetic in her honesty, this is the kind of fourth wave feminism that Cochrane identifies as ‘popular and flourishing’. Ridiculing the Hollywood establishment from within certainly seems to be an effective strategy in highlighting this issue.
As Professor Tim Hunt recently found out to his peril, sexism is a hot topic at the moment. Stating the trouble with female scientists as: ‘you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry’, he failed to read the prevailing feminist mood leading to his forced resignation. As blogged about by my feminist friend here, this kind of ingrained, perhaps even institutional sexism speaks of a dinosaur mentality when STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) positions for women, after decades where women were horribly unrepresented in these areas, seem to at last be becoming more equitable.
Sports is another area where sexism is becoming more recognised. Kicking out sexism from football seems to be the discrimination de jour now that football’s governing bodies have been forced to confront racism with some success. Everyone knows what it is, they know it’s not good and they know they shouldn’t be doing it. After Chelsea’s female doctor, Eva Carneiro, was abused with sexist chants during a game, the football club vowed to do something about it. And of course the unprecedented success of the England women’s football team (doing WAY better than their male counterparts) at the recent World Cup, presents far more positive role models for girls growing up and wanting to be involved. Some journalists seemed to struggle with the concept of women achieving anything, let alone in a male dominated arena (see below) but generally there was an extremely positive reaction with the Guardian newspaper reporting prolifically on the tournament.
Shockingly sexist news report. Never mind the ‘tweet’ – how did this get published?!
People are clearly becoming more attuned to potential discrimination. This tweet from the FA was condemned as patronising and sexist:
‘Our #Lionesses go back to being mothers, partners and daughters today, but they have taken on another title – heroes.’
One of the players said it was nice to be called ‘heroes’ and played down the insinuations that they could all go back to their rather more mundane day jobs and being identified in relation to another family member.
Has the backlash gone too far or is it simply, as Cochrane puts it, that ‘in the UK and around the world, millions of women (are) calling for equality and respect, for the right to be treated, essentially, as human beings’ in a far more more vocal and organised way and using social media to do this?
She ends with a warning that seems particularly pertinent for those who have failed to evolve (take note Tim Hunt): ‘Misogynists, you’d better watch out.’
Sheila Hancock is an inspirational woman. A superb actress, she lost both her husbands to cancer (John Thaw died in 2002). Since then she has written two biographical accounts of their lives together and her life since his death. Now in her eighties, ‘Miss Carter’s War’ is her debut fiction novel, which draws on the context of a changing society after the Second World War and right up to the present day.
It’s not something I’d normally have picked up, but as the protagonist is an English Teacher, my Mum suggested it might have some resonance. Miss Carter is certainly an interesting protagonist. With a murky French/English heritage and involvement in the SOE working behind enemy lines during the war, her background is alluded to but never fully discussed. Becoming a teacher at a girl’s grammar school, she forms a deep and enduring friendship with a gay P.E teacher (his sexuality leads to an exploration of gay rights, the disintegrating class system as well as the onset of the new ‘gay’ disease in the 70s) and in her fight for social justice we see an engaging panorama of Britain. From the upheaval of war to Thatcher’s rise to power, Hancock weaves period details into the fabric of Miss Carter’s life.
The historical detail was interesting but felt slightly forced at times. I also found it difficult to warm to Miss Carter herself who at times was annoyingly indomitable and not at all concerned with what felt like a hugely unfulfilling personal life. I found Tony, her gay companion, to be far more interesting. Section 28 – the controversial legislation that banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – leads to his dismissal after students find out about his sexuality and equate it with him being a ‘pervert’. A far cry from modern life you might think, but with gay marriage only recently legalised in the States after decades of activism and this article (Guardian – July 2015), which suggests that many gay teachers feel the need to hide their sexuality in the classroom, perhaps we can’t simply resign this to ‘history’.
I was quite keen to read this after Watson’s previous amnesia-themed thriller ‘Before I Go To Sleep’ kept me entertained in both print and film format.
It was certainly a readable romp as I managed it in a single day, after the school trip I was on went slightly awry and I found myself having to follow the rest of the group with one very late and largely mute child.
The plot, however, with all its twists and turns, ends up in such an implausibly preposterous cul-de-sac you end up resenting the time you’ve invested. Julia, the first person narrator, never quite elucidates your sympathy enough to understand her affair with a psycho stalker with strange sexual predilections and you end up feeling like an uncomfortable voyeur of some less than erotic bedroom scenes.
Ok when faced with hours to kill but prepare, like a bad affair, to be ultimately disappointed.
Sometimes when things aren’t going so well, it’s good to read a novel where the characters are going through something even worse. You can validate your shitty day with the realisation that these ‘people’ are having a far worse time than you are and give yourself a stern talking to. Other times this tactic is just depressing.
Flanagan’s Man Booker prize winner depicts the epic tale of an Australian military surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, who survives the horrors of the infamous Thailand – Burma ‘death railway’. Haunted by an intense affair with his Uncle’s wife, Dorrigo’s life lacks fulfilment as the despair and devastation of the Japanese POW camp continues to pervade his survival.
The harrowing descriptions of camp conditions, the brutality of the Japanese officers and the crude depictions of senseless death leave a lasting impression. Not recommended for a summer beach read but deeply moving if you can hack the trauma.
The Year of the Dragon 