Death of an Ordinary Man

Novelist Sarah Perry's first non-fiction book, Death of an Ordinary Man, was recommended by Susan Green a few weeks ago. Looking back at Sue's review, I see that she used the exact words I was planning to write here: almost unbearably moving. Perry's father-in-law was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, worsened rapidly and died at home just nine days later. How well I could relate to Perry's panic and bewilderment, her pleas for help, for someone to come round now, now, now, we don't know what to do. And yet surprisingly quickly, caring for David becomes routine and manageable and not scary at all; Perry describes a sensation of a woman's hand on her shoulder and feels the reassurance of generations of carers behind her who have faced this challenge and met it, as she and her husband do, too, folding the process death into part of life.

I was amazed at the speed and compassion (mostly) of the health workers who rolled swiftly into action, delivering a hospital bed, nursing care, morphine, special sheets to David's home with a minimum of fuss. I have no idea if similar systems are in place here; I guess I might find out one day. It might not have been the best time for me to read this book, as I'm currently caring for my ninety-year old mother who was recently in hospital with an infection and is taking a while to recover. But I was also able to recognise myself as one of that long line of carers who find themselves able to deal with incontinence, dirty sheets, coaxing tiny spoonfuls of ice cream into a reluctant mouth, organising medication and all the rest of the work of caring. 

The very last image of the book was so incredibly beautiful, it made me cry.

Sometimes I stand at an upstairs window after dark when the city is getting ready for bed, and watch the lights go out one by one in rooms where strangers live. And if I stand there long enough I find, in compensation for the gathering dark, other lights arriving out of nothing -- the passage of a car turning for home, lamps switched on in bathrooms and bedrooms on the outskirts of town, streetlights marking roads I know quite well. Then I imagine I've walked out of the city and up what passes in Norfolk for a hill, and that I can see spread all around me  this same pattern going on over and over: lights, everywhere, coming on where there was no light, then shining for a moment or an hour before fading slowly to an ember, or being suddenly extinguished. On and on it goes, far ahead and behind me, over borders, horizons, seas, summoned up and going out in their own time -- illuminating barely half an inch or fully half a mile, and each light particular, never to be repeated or replaced: all those other lights. All those other towns.

Eleanor Jones is Playing with Fire

Eleanor Jones is Playing with Fire is the third novel in Amy Doak's tremendously enjoyable series; the first two are Eleanor Jones is Not a Murderer and Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret. In this book, Eleanor is still a new-ish student in country town Cooinda, but she's managed to gather a group of friends around her and some of her social awkwardness has mellowed, though she still speaks her mind. She's even got a kind of boyfriend! But Eleanor seems to attract trouble -- or does she go looking for it, as her friend Holly the police officer seems to believe? This time, in a tinder-dry rural community, someone is setting fires. But who could it be? And why?

Amy Doak has created an appealingly forthright and funny protagonist in Eleanor Jones, but she doesn't carry the story alone. Doak is adept at exploring issues of friendship, loyalty, small town politics and toxic masculinity in this novel, all wrapped up in a satisfying mystery plot (not actually a murder this time, though initially it seems like it might be). I really enjoy the way that Eleanor has collected some adult allies, and her willingness to ask questions about things that other people take for granted. I really hope there are some further installments to Eleanor's adventures!
 

Ancestral Journeys

Jean Manco's Ancestral Journeys was a Brotherhood Books impulse buy, and I didn't really know what I was getting. It's actually quite a scholarly book, though packaged up appealingly with lots of pictures and break-out sidebars to break up the text. It's a multi-disciplinary approach to tracking the movements of peoples across (mostly) Europe during prehistory, drawing on archeology, genetics and linguistics to piece together the likely shifts of population, whether by invasion, wandering, retreat or expansion.

I must admit that some of the detailed explanations of DNA haplo-groups made my eyes water and I tended to skim those sections! But Ancestral Journeys excels at painting a big picture of climate changes, the spread of agriculture, and the rise and fall of empires. I found the sections about language the most engaging -- I'm always up for a discussion of Proto-Indo-European and its descendants in modern languages. Ancestral Journeys covers millennia, from the very first humans emerging from Africa, right up to the Vikings, in a relatively short and easy to digest package: a great overview.
 

Impossible Creatures: The Poisoned King

This sequel to Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures takes us back to the Archipelago, that magical world peopled by talking animals, dragons, flying unicorns and other incredible beasts. The Poisoned King introduces us to twelve year old Princess Anya, whose wicked uncle is hell bent on taking over the kingdom at any cost, even murder. Guardian-to-be Christopher, from our world, joins forces with Anya to solve the mystery of who is killing dragons (spoiler: it's the wicked uncle) and to save Anya's father, the true heir.

As usual, Rundell delivers a pacy, magical adventure with plenty of heart. I wonder if she was influenced by Eva Ibbotson, because Rundell set her first book in the Amazon, a beloved Ibbotson location, and there is something about the emphasis on love, courage and compassion, and the love of the natural world, that reminds me very much of Ibbotson's novels. I also loved the fact that hereditary royalty is dismantled at the end of the book! Now that wouldn't happen in an Eva Ibbotson novel.
 

Light and Shadow

Mark Colvin was a veteran ABC journalist who died in 2017, about a year after this autobiography was published. Sadly we never got to read the second volume he hinted at in this book. It doesn't seem like nearly ten years since he died; I well remember his mellifluous tones on Radio National.

The subtitle of Light and Shadow is Memoirs of a Spy's Son; clearly the publisher felt this was the strongest hook to draw people in, and it is a fascinating element of Colvin's story. His mother was Australian, his father English, and it was confirmed when Mark was an adult that John Colvin was actually an agent for SIS (MI6). John's most exotic postings (under cover of being a diplomat) were to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and Ulan Bator in Mongolia to keep an eye on the border between China and Russia at the height of the Cold War. (It was while young Mark was visiting his father during this time that he was given the information about the death of Lin Biao who significance he totally failed to realise!)

But Mark's own life also makes a gripping narrative. He fell into journalism at a young age, worked at Double J when it was just starting up, covered wars in Iraq and the Whitlam crisis, started The World Today and for many years hosted the evening current affairs show PM. It was a remarkable career and his family background, which he kept secret, made it all the more dangerous -- he'd been warned by his father never to visit Russia, for example (though he did). Light and Shadow is a thoroughly absorbing and informative read, one of those unknown gems that you pick up sometimes and provide rich rewards.
 

Wild Swans

I am extremely late to the party on Jung Chang's international bestseller from 1991, Wild Swans. If you've been living under a rock for the last thirty years, Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women living in China through the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Jung Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine; her mother was a dedicated Communist Party official; and Jung herself eventually studied English and emigrated to the UK.

Wild Swans has been a school text almost from the moment it was published. My younger daughter used it in studying Revolutions and the copy I've been reading is hers. My ignorance of China's history is shamefully almost total, and Wild Swans filled in quite a few blanks for me. I vaguely knew about the Cultural Revolution, but not quite what a horrific period it was, nor the extent of the arbitrary violence and cruelty it unleashed. The tides of being in and out of favour washed Chang's family to and fro; sometimes they enjoyed quite a lot of privilege, sometimes things were absolutely desperate.

For me, Wild Swans started slowly and it took me a while to become captured by the story. The book really came alive for me when Jung Chang herself appeared, and I sometimes found the parts about the internal machinations of the Communist Party head-spinning. However, I was excited when simultaneously reading Mark Colvin's autobiography, Light and Shadow, to come across a section when Colvin was travelling through China in the early 1970s and he was told about the death of important general Lin Biao -- a very deliberate piece of information-planting whose significance young Colvin completely failed to recognise! Thanks to Wild Swans, I already knew the background story of Lin Biao, so this story meant much more than it would have otherwise.

 

Helm

I feel like there's been a bit of a buzz around Sarah Hall's novel Helm, which is centred around the only named wind in the UK (I must admit I hadn't heard of Helm and didn't realise that it was a real thing: a unique, powerful, occasional force). It's such a cool concept for a novel and Hall has constructed a rich narrative of interweaving strands through the history of human interactions with the wind. Hall has given Helm a wild, poetic voice, and it has motivations and desires of its own, which adds a distinctive flavour to the novel.

For me, some of the narrative strands were more successful than others, though Hall has obviously expended a lot of effort in creating authentic and researched stories for each time period. Most of the narratives are focused on attempts by humans to tame or measure Helm: a medieval churchman who sees Helm as a demonic force; a Victorian scientist who wants to set up an elaborate machine to dye the air flow; a modern climate scientist who becomes paranoid in isolation; a Bronze Age wise woman who sees a sacred stone in a vision and dedicates her life to finding and erecting it. Often the protagonists are women who develop a special relationship with the wind, like Janni, a victim of 50s psychiatric treatment who is eventually reclaimed by Helm as Helm's own.

I especially loved the Janni story and the Bronze Age narrative, perhaps because they both came to a satisfying conclusion. Some of the other plotlines petered out or ended anti-climactically, but there is more than enough meat here to compensate, and the actual prose is rich and wild and gorgeous.
 

A Glove Shop in Vienna

I pulled this Eva Ibbotson book off the shelves at the Athenaeum just because I knew I hadn't read it yet; it wasn't till I got home that I realised that it was actually a collection of short stories. I hadn't known that Ibbotson wrote a large number of short stories for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Women's Journal before she became established as a novelist -- when A Glove Shop in Vienna was published, she had only two novels to her name.

It's possible that a whole volume of Eva Ibbotson short stories might be a bit much to consume in one go. The usual Ibbotson ingredients are all here -- intense romance, love at first sight, tragic partings, gentle humour, Russia and France, beautiful and trusting young girls, brave and sensitive young men... It's all very lovely and perfect comfort reading, but I was happy to intersperse these stories with other reading material.

Maybe my favourite was the final story, 'A Question of Riches,' which is in some ways not a typical Ibbotson story at all: it features a young boy at boarding school who sent to stay with each of his grandmothers in turn -- one is rich and haughty, one is poor and loving. Have a guess which grandmother Jeremy chooses to spend Christmas with?
 

Drift

Drift, a free verse novel by Pip Harry, is next on my list of CBCA Notables -- this one didn't make it to the short list, but I ended up enjoying it very much. Nate has just moved back to Australia from Singapore; girl next door Luna is struggling after becoming the victim of a viral video. Nate's dad is still in Singapore, and his mum Amber is almost incapacitated by a back injury. When a swarm of bees invade the walls of Amber and Nate's house, it opens up a new world of beekeeping to Nate and Luna, and enables community bonds to form.

This is a gentle story, despite the violence of Luna's history, filled with tentative connections and slow unfurling. Luna's salvation is running; Nate makes friends with the musical theatre kids. And of course, their developing friendship becomes a source of strength. Traditionally I haven't been a huge fan of verse novels, but Drift (still not quite sure what the title refers to, but it does capture the atmosphere of the book) won me over -- it's so warm and tender, and it was lovely to come back into the world of bees and beekeeping (my first fantasy novel, The Singer of All Songs, had bees in it, and I had to do lots of research). 
 

The Body Keeps the Score

Apparently, trauma-informed care is all the rage in psychology at the moment, and a large part of that is probably due to this book by Bessel van der Kolk, which has become a word of mouth bestseller since its release twelve years ago. Clearly the message of The Body Keeps the Score has struck a chord with readers and practitioners, and it definitely struck a chord with me. I'm fortunate that I haven't experienced childhood trauma myself, but people close to me have, and so much of this book rang true as I read about people under stress reverting to childhood states of high arousal, fear and helplessness (of course, it can also manifest in anger, aggression or running away). 

The core of van der Kolk's work turns on the realisation that talking or medication alone can be inadequate to touch the deep, embodied memory of trauma (he began his trauma work mostly with returned soldiers suffering from PTSD, but the same conclusions also apply for sexual assaults, accidents or childhood abuse). Van der Kolk uses a variety of techniques to release the deeply held tension in his patients' bodies: breathing, yoga, theatre and singing, as well as quite theatrical role-playing therapy which might seem a little woo-woo to some but apparently can be very powerful in integrating traumatic experiences into a coherent sense of self.

Most intriguing to me is EMDR (Eye Movement Desenstisation and Reprocessing), which at first blush does seem completely woo-woo -- patients relive traumatic memories while watching the movement of the therapist's finger in front of their eyes -- but is in fact extremely effective. This does make sense when you consider that this process mimics the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, during which memories are integrated. A member of my family, who has had a lot of conventional talk therapy, swears by EMDR. 

The Body Keeps the Score is a gripping, lively and persuasive read, and I'm not surprised it's been such a huge success and so influential. 

No Fond Return of Love

No Fond Return of Love (1961) is a minor Barbara Pym work, and I think it might have been the last one published before the long hiatus which led to Quartet in Autumn in 1977 and her rediscovery by a new audience of fans. It's not her best work, but it features the usual cast of middle-aged spinsters and attractive clergymen; there are also some young people floating about. There is a strong sense that the world is changing and that these young people are inhabiting quite a different reality from their elders -- where women are expected to work and live independently, rather than be content to perform volunteer 'good works' attached to some church, where they can go out drinking and dancing with relative freedom.

But even a second tier Barbara Pym is worth reading, for comfort if nothing else, and I am in the mood for comfort reading. It's so relaxing to escape into a world of seaside boarding-houses, sherry before dinner, pink velvet hats and jumble sales for the organ fund. It's a small, self-contained world, untroubled by politics or protests or violence or passion -- even love, though a disruptive force, is still obliquely expressed and sensibly regulated. It's weird that the momentum of the novel, such as it is, is provided by Dulcie becoming a kind of stalker of Aylwin Forbes, who she's met briefly at a conference: she checks out his brother's church, she goes to stay at his mother's hotel. And ultimately it seems that her obsession is going to be rewarded, which is perhaps not the best message! Dulcie and her eventual friend Viola are freelance indexers, and the original title of the book was A Thankless Task, which in some ways fits it better.

The Edge of Everything

Next read on the CBCA Notables list was The Edge of Everything by Miranda Luby. This is Luby's second novel and I liked it a lot. Lucy's older brother Charlie has died in a freak accident and thrown everything about Lucy's life into chaos. Her former best friend is being too sensitive around her; her new friend doesn't even know that Charlie is dead; the boy she'd been kinda-sorta starting to get together with has backed off. Her parents seem to be coping okay -- but are they really? And an existential black hole is opening up inside Lucy that she's afraid to confront.

The Edge of Everything is a solid, satisfying novel packed with poignant moments and big life questions. The characters are well-rounded and sympathetic, and Lucy is an attractively dorky protagonist. There is a deep and realistic sadness hanging over this book, but it's countered by humour, friendship and love. The message is that life can be painful and unpredictable, but that makes it all the more worth cherishing, is something that we all need to hear, whatever our age.

The October Man

The October Man, from 2019, also takes us away from London, though not as far as Winter's Gifts. In this novella, we are in Germany and our narrator is Tobias Winter, who basically has Peter Grant's job (and, it must be said, almost exactly Peter Grant's voice...)

Set in the wine-growing town of Trier, our first mysterious corpse has been choked by mould, which proves to be 'noble rot,' used in wine making. But there's a tangled backstory that involves German river goddesses, ancient wizards, a men's social group, an attempted rape twenty years ago, layers of German bureaucracy and fun compound words, and an over-enthusiastic assistant.

The October Man doesn't really contribute anything extra to the main Rivers of London narrative, apart from a vague warning that magic is increasing, but it's a fun excursion. What's the point of creating this rich, sprawling universe if you don't explore its outer reaches now and then?
 

Jilya

I can't remember where I heard about Tracy Westerman's book Jilya -- I think I might have seen a mention of it on Facebook (sometimes it is useful for some things!) Published in 2024, it's subtitled How one Indigenous woman from the remote Pilbara transformed psychology, and it is concerned with two of my favourite areas of interest: psychology and First Nations culture.

Jilya means 'my child,' and Westerman's focus is squarely on Aboriginal child suicides. The rates of children taking their own lives, especially in remote or disadvantaged First Nations communities, are truly horrific, and should be a huge mental health priority. Westerman has zeroed in on the shortage of psychological supports in these areas as a primary factor, as well as multi-generational trauma and multi-generational difficulties in forming secure childhood attachment.

Jilya outlines some fascinating differences between mainstream Western assumptions and Aboriginal culture -- for example, Aboriginal child-rearing practices that might look like 'neglect' to white, middle class social workers. There is a lot in this book about trauma, including everyday racism, deep grief and loss, and the legacy of familial disruption -- such a heavy burden for individuals, let alone whole communities to bear. But Jilya is also the story of Westerman's own life, and her decades of struggle to establish better data collection and protocols for dealing with Aboriginal communities. There is another whole story there about politics, trying to run a private business, and philanthropy, which I won't begin to try to untangle.

I found the middle sections of the book, about applying specific techniques and practices to First Nations individuals, families and communities, the most compelling, but the whole of Jilya is a riveting and powerful read. More power to Tracy Westerman's arm -- she is accomplishing some amazing work.
 

Bad Behaviour

I was intrigued to read about Rebecca Starford's memoir, Bad Behaviour, on Susan Green's blog (my go-to source for interesting next reads). Starford writes about her year on a rural school campus at fourteen; it's not stated, but it's probably Geelong Grammar's famous Timbertop. Year 9 is a notoriously difficult time for adolescents (though I have heard that Year 8 is the new Year 9). I remember my own Year 9 experience as horribly painful, as friendship groups shifted and I found myself excluded (it all worked out fine in the end).

Bad Behaviour reads like a novel, with memories of events at Silver Creek intercut with reflections of Rebecca's later life, especially her relationships, which were clearly affected by patterns that were set up in that fateful year. I have to say that Silver Creek sounds awful, Starford's experience of it at least. Her dormitory house was ruled by a bully and her clique, who egged on Bec and others to escalating feats of cruel and stupid rule-breaking. It takes a long time for Bec to realise she'd be better off with different friends, and it's hard to comprehend the appeal of the mean girls (I am a steadfast goody-goody, so the glamour of bad behaviour is lost on me). 

Starford writes with compelling immediacy about the ebbs and flows of teen friendship and the weird power that charismatic individuals can wield, though I was less invested in the later relationship dramas of her twenties. Mostly Bad Behaviour made me thankful that I'm not fourteen anymore, and I'd be interested to find out how teenagers would respond to it.