Room: a different kind of true.......

The novel is called "Room", and a few pages in it becomes obvious that the action is going to take place in this room, inhabited by five year old Jack and his mother, known as Ma. Already at the outset this is no ordinary book, and no ordinary room. First of all, I notice the strange truncated language that mother and child converse in. Then the harrowing truth dawns on me that this eleven foot square room is the only world Jack has ever known, and that he and his mother are each other's entire world.

I wonder how Emma Donoghue is going to sustain her readers' interest under such confines for just over four hundred pages. Will all the "action" stay in the room, or will we ever get to see outside of it? It is a feat of inventiveness and imagination in which she does not disappoint!

The inventiveness runs right through the book, starting with Jack's vocabulary and speech. His young mother constructs a false reality for him, scaffolded by a rigid routine and punctuated by ingenious games. Ironically, she spends the kind of quality time with her son that most mothers would aspire to but never achieve. Throughout she is driven by a fiercely protective, sacrificial love, but she knows that in order to escape the room, she will have to deconstruct this false reality that has cocooned Jack for the first five years of his life.

How does one survive such an ordeal: the young mother deprived of her freedom at nineteen and subjected to unspeakable degradation; and the young son, secure in his mother's love and in the familiar surroundings of their captivity, forced to accept that there is a scarier world outside?

Stories are a different kind of true,"writes Donoghue, when Ma is explaining to her young son what is real and what is make-believe. "We're like people in a book, and he won't let anybody else read it."

The characters in this book have a reality and originality to them that stays with the reader long after the last chapter is closed. The love between mother and child is potent and charming, and Emma Donoghue has pulled off a tour de force in combining the truly horrific with the utterly wonderful. Read this book, and I guarantee you will have a greater appreciation of what is good and true and real in this damaged world of ours.

West Coast

I love Kate Muir's writing from the days when I used to enjoy her column in the Saturday Times Magazine, the predecessor to Caitlin Moran, who currently inhabits that column with such panache. I loved to read all about her postings in Washington DC and Paris, which she covered with a great degree of humour as an outsider looking in at the quirky ways of foreigners. So I expected this novel to be a complete wheeze from start to finish.

Indeed, now that I have done shuttling between the metropolis inhabited by Fergus MacFarlane, the novel's protagonist, and the place of his birth on the West Coast of Scotland, I can reveal that whilst there is some dour Scots humour, there are also some sad, reflective bits. In fact, it is much darker than I expected, populated by loss, alienation, rent boys, squats, drugs, and alcoholic binges. 

Fergus, born in a small-minded West Coast fishing port, Burnoch, is desperate to escape its restrictions and low expectations. Along the way he finds a vocation: edgy, art photography, and becomes famous, moving in the same circles as the Saatchis and the Joplins, and going from living in a dingy squat to working in a trendy Hoxton studio cum loft, and living in a millionaire's pile in Belsize Park. It's a world away from his mum Isla's bungalow "Marbella" back in Burnoch, with it's ruched sateen blinds, known locally as "hoor's knickers", which I have to confess to lusting after myself in the late eighties! She sadly squandered her opportunities to leave the town when she fell pregnant with Fergus at seventeen, and never subsequently managed to escape its confines. Fergus is absolutely determined to get out of town, and when an opportunity presents itself, he goes at it with a kind of death wish. 

There are some great pictures of the excesses of the self-indulgent art world and its parties, where agents woo rich Russian oligarchs at exclusive sushi bars, the slivers of fish laid like scales on a human mermaid. There are photography trips to war-torn Baghdad to capture the grisly aftermath of suicide bombs, and to death row in Houston to photograph the condemned and their last meals, with Fergus cruising around in a rental car playing "Dropkick me Jesus through the goalposts of life" on the radio.  It is an expansive novel covering the years from 1978 - 2007,  and clocking up considerable mileage on photographic expeditions.

Despite his fame and artistic achievements, Fergus remains deeply unsatisfied and cynical of the art world, nursing an alienation from his former life, as deep as the differences between North and South. After making a bit of a mess of lots of things, the resolution comes from closer to home than he could imagine. As Kate Muir herself once said in an interview about this book: "The thing about roots is that they keep you upright. They're the ballast in your life, the thing you're never going to throw away."

However, there is still one unresolved issue in my mind: is it really true that if one feeds Alka Seltzer to seagulls, (a recreational sport for bored teenagers in Burnoch, and a story once told to me as a student in Aberdeen), they will explode, or is it just an urban myth?

Just a thought from a mere mortal...

Now that they are planning to open up the Man Booker prize to American authors, I'm just wondering how long the short list is going to be. I heard one critic on the radio saying that judges would have to read four hundred novels! She was lamenting the fact that she only ever manages to read two books a day. Well, it's taken me all Summer to get into double figures. I don't think I even managed to read two a week!

How do people do that and not have their brains burst? I couldn't possibly read so fast, or retain any details of the plot at such speed. So it is with a sense of abject failure that I resume my noble quest to shift as much reading matter as possible off my bookshelves, and out of my small terraced house. I am the plodding Shire horse to their literary thoroughbred. 

                                                                             Versus

Which type of reader are you?

The Palace of Strange Girls

I am a Lancashire lass, born and bred in Blackpool, reading a debut novel by another Lancashire lass, Sallie Day, set in Blackpool, and enjoying the simple pleasure of recognising many of the references to local sights and venues with which I grew up.

I cannot remember how I came into possession of this book. Did I buy it in my local Waterstones, did I spot it in a charity shop, or did a colleague pass it on to me? I suspect that whichever one of these is true, what really attracted me to the book was the back cover with a black and white print of Blackpool Tower reproduced on it. I am always drawn to items with that iconic image on them, whether it be a Cath Kidston design on a beach bag, or a Marks and Spencer's insulated sandwich bag. They speak to me of home, and nostalgia for the past.

The novel is set in 1959 and follows the Singleton family who are on their annual holiday to Blackpool along with most of the population of Blackburn and other mill towns. It is amazing to think that at the height of its popularity in the inter-war years, Blackpool attracted seventeen million visitors a year. By the late fifties, with the demise of the cotton mills and the availability of cheap package holidays abroad, this was on the wane. Sallie Day sets her novel at this point, and has done an excellent job of researching the industrial and social history of the times. There is a real sense of change, and a mixture of fear and anticipation about the future. Not only are the industries and factories changing, with all the implications for employment and trades relations, but the young people are also changing with their dangerous fashions and music. The reader feels this tension between the old and the new worlds throughout the book, as it is at the heart of the Singleton family. 

The father Jack is torn between promotion to Mill manager, or a job offer to be the area union rep. The mother Ruth, is a control freak, unwilling to allow her sixteen year old daughter Helen any freedom to meet with other young people, or to wear any of the new fashions. Her own personal agenda is to move out of her modest terraced home in Blackburn to one of the new semis that are being built on the outskirts of town, an ambition not shared by her husband.

The youngest daughter, seven-year-old Beth, painfully stifled and mollycoddled by her mother after a recent heart operation, is the character I enjoyed most. She just wants to get on with finding all the objects in her I-Spy book, so that she can collect enough points to become a member of Big Chief I-Spy's club.

May I echo the Northern Echo when I say that Sallie Day's debut novel has a terrific sense of time and place. It is populated with Bendix twin tubs, stilettos, suspenders, net underskirts, block mascara, Teddy Boys, winkle-pickers, Babycham and winceyette nighties, with a backing track of Bobby Darin songs. A great End of Summer read.

Reader, I finished it!

As I near the end of my first working week back in the school routine, I have just finished reading Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer. Quite appropriate timing, as the hot, sunny weather we have been blessed with this year is about to break. Tomorrow will be ten degrees cooler, and we are officially into Autumn already.

Eva Ibbotson as she appeared in The Telegraph article

I am not quite sure what to make of this book. It's an enjoyable read, but it tries to straddle both camps of adult and teenage fiction, and ends up being neither. Originally written as an adult novel, I read in a Telegraph article that it had been adapted later on for the teen market. Therein lies the problem I think.

It has what one would expect from an Ibbotson novel. There are echoes of her own nomadic life, lots of snapshots of Vienna and references to the kind of intellectual circles that both her parents moved in. Her mother knew Berthold Brecht, who gets a mention in the play. As a child she was surrounded by intelligent, independent-minded, strong women, who were perhaps the blueprint for the heroine's mother and her two aunts, all heavily involved with the Suffragette movement, and running an alternative home in central London. Ellen Carr, the heroine in question, is expected to be a blue-stocking herself, but she has a passion for cooking, and latent gifts for home-making. She takes off on an adventure as a housemistress at an unconventional Austrian school, where there is much scope for the author to indulge her trademark love of the zany. The school is populated by a band of eccentrics of all temperaments and nationalities, where the children run wild as do the teachers! Were this present day England, Ofsted would be sure to shut it down immediately, but this is Austria just before the war, where there are other more pressing concerns on the horizon.

It is against this backdrop that Ibbotson sets her love story, for that is essentially what this book is. There's a predictability about some of it, and an unbelievability about other bits of it, especially the character of the hapless Kendrick.

Nevertheless, it's a good read with a feisty, beautiful heroine, but with her love interest prone to rolling about on a swan-shaped bed with an operatic diva from time to time, it's not exactly suitable for primary aged kids!

A Song for Summer

Before the Summer disappears, I will just squeeze in Eva Ibbotson's Song for Summer. Known mostly as a children's author, I first enjoyed her work when I read Journey to the River Sea. I spotted this novel in a charity shop, and thought it might be suitable for the school library, but stuck it on the bookshelf until I had time to vet it. Now is that time.

School has been out for the Summer, but now I must resume the day job, so reading will be snatched here and there, where time, energy and commitments allow. 

I have had a really enjoyable Summer of reading and have made a good start at clearing my shelves, but it has been an epic fail in terms of liberating those books out of the house to new homes. This is because although I now feel able to part with these novels, I have done such a good job of selling them to my own family, that some of them now want to read them! However, I suppose it is progress to move a pile of books from one side of the bed to the other, and to share a good read with my loved ones. 

I already know a couple of chapters in that this book won't be making it into the school library, as I feel it is more suitable for secondary aged pupils, having already mentioned female circumcision and skinny dipping teachers. So, I don't know at this stage what I am in for:an adult book, or a young teen read. I'll let you know in due course.....