Posted on

Book review: The Water Cure

THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh

I was intrigued when I first saw an email from NetGalley inviting me to read this book. Could it be the same Sophie Mackintosh I once met at her university, and performed with in a surreal, one-off performance of a play written by our friends and taking place in someone’s student accommodation? I have only vague memories of it and I doubt Sophie remembers at all, but full disclosure: yep, same Sophie.

It seems apt, then, that when reading her debut novel The Water Cure, you feel as if you’re constantly hampered by a veil, a net curtain, something blocking you. You’re underwater perhaps, and everything’s a bit murky. Mackintosh arranges things exactly as she wants them, and you are granted knowledge only when she wants you to have it. There is no second-guessing of plot here. I shall talk very little about plot in this review because you do need to read it and unpeel the onion she creates for yourself. Take everything at face value, but be aware it might all fall away…

There are three sisters, this we know from fairly on. They are isolated and live with their mother and no other people. Their only contact is with each other. Their father left for the mainland some time ago – there are hints about toxins in the air, special preparations have to be made each time he leaves to get provisions – but he hasn’t come back. We don’t know what might have happened to the rest of the world to cause it to be so polluted, or why the island the sisters inhabit was somehow spared. It’s drummed in to us that men are bad, and only King (the name they use for the father) is to be trusted.

We learn that the unusually spacious accommodation the women seem to reside in was formerly some kind of shelter or sanctuary for women. It’s implied – nothing is concrete in this novel – that either the catastrophic event on the mainland stopped the women from coming, or that the shelter stopped serving its purpose. We don’t know.

The novel is divided in to various chapters, each headed usually by the name of one of the sisters, or we are to understand, in the third person. Seemingly interjected are notes from the mother, in italics. This was my understanding of how each voice was introduced and it may be wrong, but it added to the fluidity of the narrative. Nothing got stale as we see events from different perspectives. Everything we know is challenged and unreliable gatekeepers are, by the end, mostly discovered and clarified. I believe the novel ends neatly but not unrealistically so. The tale is told.

The novel is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and the shortlist will be announced on 20/09/18.

Posted on

Book review: On the Bright Side (Hendrik Groen)

**** / *****

After having adored the first “diary” by Hendrik Groen, I was excited to find out what the now 85-year-old had been up to. Although perhaps unsurprisingly a little bleaker in tone, the writing still feels searingly true to life. There is love and loss of all kinds in the second year Groen documents. There are of course more outings for the Old-But-Not-Dead Club, progressing to restaurant gatherings and even a trip abroad. For a time of life that can be extremely lonely for far too many people, Groen absolutely has it made, living as he does in the home with his friends, fighting the Director by re-forming a residents’ committee. There are new characters and dramas in the home. We learn a little more about Henk’s long life. Drawn out from memory almost casually is the death of his young daughter – not in a sensationalist way, since it is likely more than fifty years – but rationally, with acceptance. I am not sure exactly who Hendrik’s target audience is, but I recommend his diaries to all. He professes a desire to write his first novel “next year” – actually 2016 (this second book was published in his native Netherlands in January of that year). I understand via Google Translate on a Dutch publishing news site that the novel will indeed be published in 2018. I hope for an English translation soon after.

On the Bright Side: The New Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen is published on January 11th by Michael Joseph (Penguin UK)

Posted on

Book review: THE ESSEX SERPENT

THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry

I had little idea of what to expect from this book, save for the first page I read before buying it. On completion, I feel I have lived at least the full year depicted in its pages between Essex and London. The writing is delicious and exquisite. Sarah Perry weaves so easily between the narratives of each character it is easy to forget you are not actually each person in turn.
The writing is often poetic but never denigrates to being flowery or extravagant. It simply and delicately paints a tempting picture of Victorian England, whilst including important issues of the time such as the housing crisis, poverty, a pre-NHS healthcare system and inequity. Sound familiar? There is love and lust, unrequited and not; there is friendship and hatred, the rich and the poor. It is a stunning tapestry of an era none of us have experienced, yet we still face many of the human problems today. It is the kind of polished writing that will make any author reading, aspiring or published, jealous at their comparative lack of skill.

Between the goings-on of Victorian society there was of course the matter of the Essex Serpent. Perry has created such a believable world in the fictional village of Aldwinter, bolstered perhaps by the real-life seventeenth century legend of such a beast. It permeates village life and becomes main character Cora’s – if any of them is truly the main character, it’s her – obsession. In the end everything is fairly neatly tied up, which may disappoint those who wish for further tragedy, but it felt fitting to me. Immediately after finishing the book I wanted to know more – to check whether Aldwinter was fictional or otherwise, to read the legend of the Essex Serpent – things I had stopped myself from checking before for fear of spoilers. In short, I highly recommend this book – the best I have read since Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a book similarly ebbing between its characters’ thoughts and experiences. For those of an aural disposition, THE ESSEX SERPENT was recently adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, and is available to listen for a few more days.

Posted on

Book review: Wonder Women by Sam Maggs

I had the opportunity to read and review this book, to be published in October, via NetGalley. Here is my review.

There are many positives to this book. I learnt about women I had never heard of, and a few faceless known names were given form by record of their achievements. I am not sure exactly the target audience the author was seeking, but it seems a bit muddled. A white male like myself would seem, for a change, not to be it. There were many references throughout the book to “us ladies” sticking together, to paraphrase, and the book seemed to be trying to skew fairly young by removing the G from the ends of words and other youth-orientated contractions. This was a little off-putting but not necessarily bad, I suppose. Just something that may need clarifying, along with the capitalisation of the B in “Black” when referring to race. Why?

Otherwise I enjoyed reading the book. There was a wealth of information about the backgrounds of many of the women featured – again, I would’ve preferred a focus on the invention/achievement of the individuals, but this is not an academic text. It was accessible, I found, with the frustration being that, especially for the women further back in history, there is so little confirmed information. This leads to “maybe” and “perhaps” in place of verified information, but this is not the author’s fault. Clearly a lot of research was done in the writing of this book, and various people are thanked in the acknowledgements for help with this.