Intermezzo, a novel by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney is generally seen as one of the most interesting current novelists in English and so I was reluctant to follow the trend and take up this latest novel as soon as it was published. However, I ended the book fully understanding why she has gained her reputation. This latest one deals with a similar subject to her previous ones: the complications of human relationships.  I am always intrigued by books about sibling relationships (e.g. Patrick White’s The Living and the Dead or Lionel Shriver’s A Perfectly Good Family), perhaps because, as an only child, I missed out on them in reality. Intermezzo ticked that box as it describes the relationship between two very different brothers, a decade apart in age as they struggle with difficult relationship with other people as well as with each other. 

Rooney’s skills as a novelist are in full flight here and I find myself finding not only the storyline compelling but continually stopping to admire the way in which she enhances it with tiny naturalistic details about how the characters behave and engage with their environment. She seems to adopt two different styles of writing: one, brief and terse when it relates to the older brother Peter and one much more traditional relating to the younger Ivan, a more cautious and solid character. However, as the plot develops and we learn more about them, our sympathy towards them changes and the style of writing subtly changes along with it. 

The storyline doesn’t need to be explained; it’s about the sexual relations of the two main characters, each of them complex in their own way.  Peter is a solicitor who is in love with two women, one with whom he has a long-standing relationship that has been damaged by an accident and one with a much younger woman with a chequered background.  Ivan leads a very different life; he is an expert chess player who develops a relationship with a much older married woman.  And that is really the only subject of the novel, but it is sufficient and retains our interest entirely on account of the expertise with which the book is written. 5*

In the Blood, a novel by Jenny Newman

It’s always good to move away from the comfort of reading novels about people like oneself and to dip into fiction with scenarios remote from one’s normal life.  I think of, for example, Pure by Andrew Miller, based on the excavation of a Parisian graveyard just prior to the French Revolution, or Paul Harding’s This Other Eden, about ethnic cleansing on an island off Maine in the early twentieth century. 

The subject of In the Blood is equally one I know almost nothing about: fox-hunting in post-Second World War Britain. Jenny Newman’s latest book tells the story of a young teenage girl, Jacqueline, who had been evacuated from Liverpool as a pre-school child during the war to a farm in Wales, which specialised in breeding hounds for fox-hunting. Spending her early years in that environment meant that she became not only naturally Welsh-speaking but also expert at the skills required in breeding and looking after these specialised animals. 

Her life there came to an abrupt end, however, when her mother, who was a city girl with no interest in fox-hunting, appeared at the farm to claim her back and to take her to live with her in Westmorland on a, seemingly coincidentally, fox-hunting estate, where she acted as a servant to the owner, a Major Wetheral. This dramatic change of circumstances was not to Jacqueline’s liking but gradually her skills in training and looking after hounds and, ultimately, in hunting foxes gained her credit with the staff on the estate, even although she was still only in her early teens.  And, despite attempts to prevent it, she made one close friendship with the only surviving son of the owner, Oliver. 

The storyline is relayed in the first person, as if told by the young girl Jacqueline. Much of the book is therefore concerned with her thoughts on the other characters, on the slight she felt in having been abandoned by her mother, and on her failure to understand all the details of her situation.  While at times the narrative seemed to me out of keeping with what a 12-year old girl would think, or write (but how would I know?), this technique means that the reader is kept in similar suspense. The climax of the novel comes with an incident involving her friend Oliver with the result that (avoiding any spoiler here) the circumstances of her life and that of her family are finally revealed, but only in the last chapter and in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. 

There was quite a lot in the novel about foxes, dogs and horses that I struggled to fully understand and so I didn’t acquire any enthusiasm for fox-hunting as a consequence. (But I do know that that was not the author’s intention.) The strength of this well written book, though, lies in the sympathetic description of the various human interactions and the dynamics of the plot. 4*

Secondhand Time, a novel by Svetlana Alexievich

This 623-page book is really a documentary study, but has all the characteristics of a novel in that the reader engages with the lives of individual characters and their stories.

It starts with a very useful historical summary of the events in the USSR at the end of the 1980s that led to the installation of Mickhael Gorbachev as leader, the handover to Boris Yeltsin and the failed attempt to re-install a hard-line Soviet government against what was, at the time, perceived (at least in the West) as a popular demand for the removal of the Communist regime. How this led to the rise of Putin and the current Russian political system becomes clear.

Each section of the book is a verbatim interview with individuals, more women than men, who were affected by the breakdown of society as communism was abruptly and dramatically replaced by capitalism.  For a few people this was exactly what they had hope for; these mainly younger people prospered and welcomed the appearance of consumer goods and the opportunity to make money.

For others, however, the tales they tell are overwhelmingly tragic. Any financial security they had was lost as the structures of the State were demolished and many public employees lost their jobs and had to resort to their own initiative to find a source of income. Those unable to do this successfully lost their homes, which were then sold off to the private sector and became unaffordable. Most people were unprepared for such a dramatic change to their lifestyle. 

At the same time, we have even more troubling narratives from individuals who were the victims of the Soviet paranoia about political opposition, as far back as the time of Stalin, with details of the harrowing policies of imprisonment and torture. 

The most intriguing aspects of these interviews is how little real understanding we (at least I) in the West had of the serious negative consequences of the demise of the Soviet regime, however much it led to the freedom of its citizens from harsh communist restrictions and oppression.

You don't have to read all this book at once, because you can dip in and out to read each of the individual interviews in isolation, although it is continually compelling to carry on and read more of these grim but fascinating tales. 5*  

Leave the World Behind, a novel by Rumaan Alam

I was waiting for this author’s well-reviewed next book to be published and so read this in the meantime. It turned out to be another apocalyptic storyline, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with less literary merit but more popularly approachable in style. 

The story occurs within a period of only two days.  A white middle-class American family from Brooklyn splashes out on renting a luxurious AirBnB on Long Island. The place lives up to their expectations but on the first night they find that all TV networks and internet cease working due to a blackout affecting at least the whole of New York City. They are surprised by the appearance at the door of an elderly Black couple who, after suspicions have been allayed, turn out to be the owners of the property and have fled Manhattan due to the blackout and the general sense of panic there. 

The plot develops around how these two ethnically and financially diverse couples deal with what is an unspecified but ever-increasing threat to humanity.  Although they have no clear understanding of what is happening, various strange and stressful incidents occur that start  to affect the health of the children and that suggest an irreversible breakdown of society.  

The plot is compelling and deliberately encourages the reader to read on to find an explanation for the mysterious occurrences and it would be a spoiler to say what happens. However, the book sits somewhat uncomfortably between a social commentary on American life and a melodrama/horror story that is never fully resolved. 3*

Addendum:

While I was reading the book I noticed that it had been made into a film that became the most popular movie of late 2023. This seemed surprising; so I watched it on Netflix. The comparison between book and movie is an exercise in how to popularise literature to suit the expectations of Hollywood-style movies. The white American characters were fairly similar to the book but, for some reason, the Black characters were completely changed.  That could be the subject of a sociological study in its own right.  And the suspicious incidents were grossly exaggerated, presumably to enable sensational CGI sequences.  Moreover, extra characters were added and a gunfight introduced, again to comply, I guess, with audience expectations. The ending was also altered to allow some sort of resolution that wasn’t in the book.  Obviously these changes were successful as the film became very popular but it does lead to the question of why the author permitted the screenplay to deviate so far from the novel.  

The film doesn’t appear in this blog as I didn’t go out to watch it, but if I had I’m sure I would have given it no more than 1*.

Kairos, novel by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German by Michael Hofmann)

I had just finished reading this long book when the announcement was made that it had won the International Booker Prize. My opinion of the novel differed from that of the jury. 

Much of the hype surrounding the prize was based on the idea of a novel that had been long-awaited since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uniting of East and West Germany. In fact, I have read more than one novel on that theme in the 25 years since it happened.  Erpenbeck’s previous work was highly acclaimed; so there was clearly an expectation that she would bring something new to the subject matter.  It tells the story over a few years in the 1980s of a relationship between an 18-year old student and a man older than her by over 30 years. This starts and continues throughout as a sexual relationship (with considerable detail) and as the relationship develops it starts to become uncomfortably abusive, both physically and psychologically. We see the characters, Hans and Katharina, in various settings, in restaurants, in her flat, on a visit to Moscow, etc., but apart from the background location, we listen to the same repeated conversation from them about their opinions and feelings about their relationship and very little else.  

It is obvious from the start that the novel sets out to be an allegory, or at least a reflection, of the relationships between West and East Germany during the 1980s, with one power dominating in economic terms but the other holding (or believing that it does) the moral high ground. The domination and abuse by Hans becomes worse when he discovers that Katharina has had a one-night affair with someone her own age, even although he continues to live with his wife and family throughout. I tried to relate the timeline of their relationship to the history of that period, but found there is no obvious analogy and desperately wanted to get to the point — quite near the end — when the wall came down so that I could see how their relationship changed.  This did happen, but not in a way that seemed to relate to the event and not even in a way that was easy to understand. Or maybe it was too subtle for me to detect. 

Erpenbeck’s writing style is considered one of her strengths, but I found it irritating.  There is little conventional punctuation and speech is included without speech marks or an indication of the speaker, so that a lot of time is spent guessing about the meaning. Other novelists manage this technique well and there is some merit in it but, since almost the whole novel is based on the intimate conversations of the characters, it is stretched to its limit. 

It took me a while to get through it. Clearly the Booker International Jury recommend it, but I can’t. 2*

The Vanishing Half, a novel by Brit Bennett

The theme of this book is the ‘passing’ of light-skinned African Americans as white. The story is about two such American twins and how their attitudes to race and colour differ. As happens, the small rural community in which they live is populated by people with similar genetic make up and takes a dim view of people who dilute that racial purity through relationships with Black people with darker skins. The twin sisters grow apart, one (Desireé) returning eventually with a darker skinned child and partner to her home town, the other (Stella) marrying a white man and entering the American middle classes in an all-white neighbourhood and entirely rejecting and concealing her heritage. 

There are several sub-plots, a few too many perhaps, about Desirée’s friends, — individuals with trans or bisexual identity issues, brought together by a theatrical impresario. Stella’s relationship with her adult daughter and how that affects her conscience about her deceit is the second main theme. Ultimately the relationship between the sisters is brought to a crisis in a subtle way with the death of their mother. 

The author’s work is popular and the literary style unexceptional. But the book was worth reading for an insight into a subject about which I had no knowledge. 3*

Prophet Song, a novel by Paul Lynch

This was the Booker Prize winner of 2023. It was reviewed as a book of ‘our times’ in that it portrays a society slipping from democracy to totalitarianism and how that affects the lives of innocent individuals in a near-future Dublin. 

The main character, Eilish, lives with her trade union-employed husband Larry and four children. She also cares for her father, who lives independently but is in the early stages of dementia. Larry and his associates are involved in a campaign and strike action in pursuit of increased pay for teachers. While little of the political background is explained, it is clear that a right wing government has recently been elected. With almost no warning, her husband and many of his associates in the trade union movement disappear. Their arrest is deemed necessary to avoid civil unrest. 

We follow Eilish as she fails to obtain information about her husband, as she deals with curfews and restrictions, objections to which are violently suppressed, and as she worries for her teenage son who is a target for the authorities.  Ultimately, she is prepared to see him flee the country (to Northern Ireland across a rigidly closed border) and to accept that her plans and dreams of a better future for her family are destroyed this dramatic political change. 

Some of the writing is repetitive as the author attempts to reiterate the daily problems that individuals would face in those circumstances.  However, by dwelling on the prosaic details of everyday life, the author drives home the message that lives can be rapidly and dramatically destroyed if liberal democracy is allowed to erode. That it is set in Dublin rather than Moscow or Budapest or Tehran makes it all the more frightening. 4*

The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy

Another novel about a dystopian society, this time written in 2006 and winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction at the time.  

This is a true post-apocalyptic tale, of an un-named man and his young son, also un-named, as they find themselves travelling southwards in an American landscape destroyed — turned to ash — by an event (nuclear war, asteroid collision, accelerated global heating?) that remains undefined throughout the book.  Society has broken down and all other survivors need to be treated as enemies in the continuous search for food, shelter and warmth.  Travelling south seems to afford some hope of something better, but there is no transport other than to walk through deserted towns, scavenging for, or stealing, food and ignoring any humanitarian instincts one might have. 

The struggle that the man and boy have is detailed on a daily basis and, although each day is much the same as the previous one, the writing is nevertheless compelling as we share the almost monosyllabic conversations between the two characters.  We are presented with a real sense of the instinctive need of a father to ensure the survival of his son.

It would be a spoiler to reveal how the story ends, other than to say that it leaves the reader with only a very tiny glimpse of hope. 5*

The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by Gavin Stamp

At first sight one might wonder how a 225-page book could be written about one single building. However the author has the ability to generate interest and enthusiasm for the whole process of how this memorial to the 73000 soldiers killed in that one single battle was imagined and created by its architect Edwin Lutyens at Thiepval in Northern France. 

The book covers critically the post-war political structures that determined how the loss of life should be commemorated.  It also deals with the details of the building at various stages in its construction and compares it with other memorials. Although Stamp expresses admiration for the architect, whose work is now recognised as being among the best of British architecture, and praises the ultimate design of the monument, he never loses sight  of the fact that the First World War was an appalling tragedy that should never have happened and that the monument should never have been required. 5*

Long Island,  a novel by Colm Tóibín

This is a sequel to Tóibín’s most popular novel Brooklyn, and re-introduces the same characters 20 years later.  There is a short explanatory page or two to bring those who have not read the first book up to date, but otherwise it could stand alone. 

The main character Eilis has remained in New York, is married to an Italian immigrant plumber with a large Italian family and has two teenage children. Their uneventful life is suddenly shattered by the revelation that Tony has fathered a baby by one of his clients and the husband of the woman concerned threatens to leave the baby on Eilis’s doorstep when it is born. This leads Eilis to return to her home town of Enniscorthy in Ireland, where her mother and brother still live.  Also still there are her former best friend Nancy and Jim Farrell, whom Eilis had promised to marry twenty years earlier before surprisingly making the decision to return to New York (the subject of the earlier book). 

Tóibín presents the reactions of each of these three main characters to the events as they unfold, with none of them fully aware of what the others know.  The love affair of Eilis and Jim is re-ignited and Eilis has to make the same decision she made twenty years previously of whether to stay in Ireland with Jim or to return to the US. To reveal the ending would be a spoiler, although the conclusion is not as straightforward as might be expected. 

In my opinion, Brooklyn was the better novel. Some of the writing in Long Island is not up to the standard expected of Tóibín; was this a novel demanded by the publisher after the success of Brooklyn and its film adaptation? While Eilis’s character has clearly developed in both confidence and intelligence since she was first invented, we learned very little more about Jim Farrell; his character is presented with very little depth. I would not be surprised to find these two books developing into a trilogy or for there to be another film in the pipeline. 4*

Amongst Women, a novel by John McGahern

The fourth novel I have read in the last six months that has been set in Ireland; I should avoid any more for at least the rest of the year. 

This was written in 1990 and is thought to be McGahern’s best novel.  He was an acclaimed writer of mainly short stories and an important influence on the writing of Colm Tóibín. 

It is an inward-looking tale of a farming family dominated by the patriarchal and abusive widower Michael Moran, father of an estranged elder son, three daughters and a younger son. We catch sight of the family with the last four children still living at home and working on the farm as Moran decides to marry a younger local woman and bring her into the family. There is no tension, as one might expect, between the new wife and the children.  The tensions lie in the tight grip Moran has on his children’s lives and their attempts to break free from his influence, even while they all have a deep love and respect for him.  This affection is quite difficult for the reader to understand as his behaviour toward them is inexcusable at times and it is the elder son, who managed to escape the home environment before the story started, for whom we have the greatest respect. 

Each of the children eventually creates a life of their own, either in Dublin or in London.  They each do it in their own way, by overtly rebelling against their father or by more subtly maintaining the relationship from a distance. It is at the end of the novel, when Moran dies, that we fully understand the hold that he has had over them and how it has affected their lives. 

A depressing story but told in a compelling way; I finished the book in three days, almost a record. 4*

Old God’s Time, a novel by Sebastian Barry

Barry’s most recent novel, perhaps not up to the standard of some of his excellent previous ones, but an interesting book all the same.  It tells the story of a former police officer in Ireland, Tom Kettle, who had previously been involved in the attempt to investigate a child-abusing Catholic priest and the murder of his senior colleague. (Abuse by the Church is such a common theme in Irish novels that I tend to check before reading that it isn’t involved yet again, but in this case the book was recommended.)

The story unfolds from the vantage point of Tom’s being jolted out of a gradual recognition of his depressing life after retirement (his wife and soulmate and both of his children are all dead) by being dragged into a renewed attempt to investigate the murder and to re-open the case.  Very gradually and often deliberately unclearly we are given clues as to what happened to the priest and his senior colleague and how Tom was involved at the time. His memories of these events are confused, or he chooses to render them unclear, even while recollecting clearly other events from his past. We are given a number of false clues or dead-ends, just as might well happen in a police investigation. And, even at the end of the novel, we are still left not completely sure of what is fact and what is the imagination of the main character. 

I enjoyed the complexity of the tale, even if it might not be as appealing to anyone who likes a clear-cut storyline. 4*

Demon Copperhead, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver

This extremely long prizewinning novel —560 pages— is an updating of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, although there would be little detriment in the reader being unaware of that fact.  As it is, I was able to relate much of the story, both storyline and characters, to their equivalent in the Dickens book and so that added some interest. 

Demon tells the story of his own life from an 8-year old to, probably, late teens. It is his style of narration that makes the novel so compelling. He is a victim of society in the same way that David was. The location is impoverished rural Appalachia, Knoxville the nearest metropolis. He was boring up in a trailer park by a hopeless, drug-addicted, widowed mother. When his mother fails to cope or when he is abused by one of her violent boyfriends, he finds comfort in the support of neighbours the Peggots, to whom he turns at various points throughout the book. When his mother dies he becomes a ward of incompetent social services, who foster him out to an exploitative commercial farm or to another equally uncaring foster family. 

At the age of 12 or so, Demon manages to escape to find his grandmother, who does make an attempt to look after him and gets him a place in a family of a football coach where his sporting skills are in demand. The coach’s tomboy daughter Angus befriends him like a sister. However, a sports injury leads him to be prescribed oxycontin at the time when its dependence-producing properties were still being concealed by the manufacturer. He is soon addicted and much of the plot thereafter relates to his drug-fuelled lifestyle and the characters he meets in that social circle. He has a relationship with a drug-dependent girl Dori, whom he loves but is unable to save from drug poisoning and death. 

As a result of this tragedy and the deaths of some other friends, and as happens with David Copperfield, Demon finally makes good through his determination dry out in a drug dependency clinic and to return to his home, where he recognises his true feelings for his foster sister Angus.  This sounds like a Dickensianly sentimental ending, but the spiky narrative, the sharp and clever characterisation of his friends (particularly, Angus) save it from that criticism. The only real criticism I do have int he light of the length of the book is the excessive emphasis on the details of drug abuse by his circle of friends, but that is the serious problem today for deprived children that the author here very successfully highlights. 5*

My Town: An Artist’s Life in London by David Gentleman 

The author has lived in London for almost seventy years, more or less in the same place.  Throughout that time he has sketched the city, or at least a small part of it, and witnessed a lot of change. His work has become familiar through, for example, railway station murals and postage stamps. 

The illustrations span a period from the 1970s to some very recent work, showing how his technique has changed relatively little over that period, or only marginally, despite his output being so significant. A nice book to browse on if you are familiar with central and North West London. 4*

Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism by Barnabas Calder

I’m not sure how I managed not to have found this book before, as it was first published in 2016. 

The author, an academic at Liverpool University has produced a perfect book for Brutalism enthusiasts.  It has all the rigour of an academic book — fully referenced and indexed — but reads like a persuasive personal account of how he developed his enthusiasm for concrete and Brutalist buildings.  

The book divides into chapters each dedicated to a specific building or set of buildings, all of which he has developed a close connection, from a bunker-like concrete folly on the west coast of Scotland to the National Theatre on  London’s South Bank. Most interesting of course is his take on the Barbican, my erstwhile second home, as, although I had read a lot about the buildings and their history, I found some fascinating new facts. Other familiar buildings include the two Goldfinger Trellick and Balfron Towers, the Engineering Department at Leeds University and the National Theatre.  Less interesting as a building perhaps is the now-demolished Newbery Tower of the Glasgow School of Art, included as the author was a member of staff at the School of Architecture in Glasgow at some point. An unfamiliar but rather splendid building — the New Court at Christ’s College Cambridge — is also included. 

Calder doesn’t find all Brutalist buildings to his liking and the works in particular of Richard Seifert,  which he describes as unashamedly commercial come in for justified criticism, particularly in light of their short life or current deteriorated condition. The argument for retention, re-use and remodelling of existing building rather than demolition is touched on but is probably an important issue in the author’s most recent book: Architecture: from Prehistory to Climate Emergency, which is on my waiting list of books to read. 5*