Category Archives: Book review

Book review

I rarely use the term ‘must-read’, but if ever a book deserved the term it is Mary Ann Sieghart’s wonderfully powerful ‘The Authority Gap‘. It’s a difficult book to summarise, but at the same time one anecdote will tell you almost all you need to know. The author was once at a dinner party. She was sitting next to a banker, who asked what she did. She listed her career – political columnist, former associate editor of the Times, broadcaster, chair of a thinktank. Instead of responding with details of his own CV or with a follow-up question he replied “Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” She was 50.

Women will respond to this story and the many other anecdotes and statistics in this book with (I am sure) recognition and exasperation. Men on the other hand will quite possibly respond with astonishment – are things really that bad, are we really such monsters? Sorry guys, but yes, and yes, and Sieghart has the numbers to prove it.

“The authority gap” – the term Sieghart uses to describe the way women are not taken seriously in public and professional life – is documented by the author in scrupulous detail. We have all by now heard the term ‘unconscious bias’. None of us are free from the insidious effect of this phenomenon, men and women, but what I found genuinely shocking was just how pervasive this gap is. This book is full to the brim of appalling examples where women are undermined, undervalued, and discriminated against in all aspects of their lives – not in some remote primitive country but in the so-called advanced societies in the West. There’s no escape from this phenomenon, from the classroom where boys are given eight times more of their teacher’s attention than girls, to the US Supreme Court where female Justices are interrupted four times more often than male ones, 96% of the time by men?

Any parent can do a simple exercise to test their own bias. How clever are your kids? Are the boys brighter than the girls? I don’t know if this will work if you know the theme of this book, but when (British) parents were asked to estimate their child’s IQ the average score for boys was 115 and the average score for girls was 107? This is a vivid demonstration of the authority gap at work, but the effect is far more pervasive – for example the way children are described can shape their behaviour, as can the toys they are given to play with.

So that the text is not too dryly academic, Sieghart interviewed dozens of women at the top of public life including Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard, Major General Sharon Nesmith and Lady Hale. All without exception had experienced examples of the authority gap in their public lives, despite having fought their way to the top of their professions. This approach lighten the text but is not without its difficulties – the author recognises that many of these women have risen to such seniority in their professions that they now do not face the barrage of sexism that most women experience – they are listened to when they speak, they are not interrupted or condescended and patronised. Well not always, because even the most senior women in the world reported being overlooked at time, judged on their appearance, or threatened with sexual violence by online trolls.

The text ends with a helpful checklist of things we can all do to address this issue. This final chapter entitled ‘No Need to Despair’ sets out the changes needed to close the gap, such as checking the language we use when speaking to our daughters and our sons, noticing if a woman is being interrupted or ignored in meetings, and yes, reading more books by women. On that final point, I was rude in an earlier post about the novels suggested to address the fact that most men read very few novels by women. What I hadn’t done is check whether I was guilty of this same imbalance in my reading habits. I was shocked when I finally got round to checking my ‘All reviews – by author‘ page to find that more than three quarters of the books I have reviewed over the last ten years were written by men. I wasn’t surprised there was an imbalance, but three quarters! I will ensure I read more works by women in the future, that is a promise to myself.

The Authority Gap is an obvious companion text to Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women. Both books are meticulously researched and evidenced, and both illustrate without the possibility of equivocation the shocking ways in which society is biased towards men. Invisible Women exposed the inherent assumption in much design work that the default model of the human body is male – that it is the male which is important, and any adaptations to suit women are often an afterthought, if they happen at all. The Authority Gap (which I think is a less attention grabbing title, which is my one very minor criticism of the book) shows that women face bias in every aspect of their lives, a bias that is so deeply engrained even in what we like to think of as progressive societies that we often don’t notice it, or taken it for granted. It was shocking to see the extent of this issue laid out so clearly, but encouraging that it can be changed once the issue is acknowledged.

The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart 2021

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Book review

10 minutes and 38 seconds is estimated as the time it takes for a dying brain to shut down. The scientific basis for that estimate is neither here nor there. Shafak uses this as a starting point to explore the dying moments of sex worker “Tequila Leila”, whose body has been dumped in a bin on the outskirts of Istanbul. As her brain begins to shut down, Leila tells her life story in the ten minutes and thirty eight seconds she has left of consciousness.

She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she had believed to be lost for ever. Time became fluid, a free flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable.

Here memories focus on the people who were important in her life. Along the way we find out how she became a sex-worker, coming from a rural, conservative Turkish family life where independent behaviour by women was severely curtailed, to live in the red-light district of Istanbul where she has a freedom, of sorts, and is able to develop a number of relationships and friendships. As the minutes of Leila’s life tick down we slowly learn more about her life, its tragedies and moments of joy. It’s a touching portrait of a difficult life where Leila’s ebullience manages to somehow overcome all that life can throw at her – until her brutal murder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The second half of the novel has a very different tone and structure. Leila’s disparate group of friends who we have been introduced to in the first half – Sinan, with whom she grew up; Nalan, a trans woman who ran away from her family in Anatolia; Jameelah, a victim of human trafficking from Somalia; Zaynab, a Lebanese refugee with severe health issues; and Humeyra who was born in Mesopotamia and fled an abusive marriage – come together to rescue Leila’s body from the horrible cemetery were it has been effectively dumped, a place for only the poorest and most marginal members of society (a real location – as with most of the novel the places and events referred to are all real). They dig up her body and take it across Istanbul to be buried with proper respect. This part of the novel has a totally different feel to the first half – there’s almost a ‘mad-cap’ adventure aspect to the way the grave-robbing takes place with little planning or discussion of the risks.

This novel is a thought-provoking consideration of gender issues in modern Turkey. It comes as no surprise to read that Shafak has been investigated by Turkish prosecutors for addressing child abuse and sexual violence in her fiction writing, nor that she has moved to the UK recently in order to avoid this potential censorship. On that initial point, I’m not usually a great fan of trigger warnings, but if ever a novel needed a TW flag it’s ’10 minutes and 38 seconds‘. Early on it contains a description of child sexual abuse which plays an important part in the narrative structure of the novel, but which I found hard to read. This novel was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and Shafak’s most recent novel The Island of Missing Trees is doing very well and has been shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shafak 2019

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Book review

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am currently reading Michael Slater’s very detailed biography of Charles Dickens. One of my main ‘take-aways’ from the work thus far is that Dickens was so much more than a novelist, even if that is what he is predominantly remembered for today. He wrote an extraordinary volume of work, and no genre was beyond his reach – plays, poetry, short stories, journalism, writing for children, travelogues, and essays, as well as an amazing number of letters. This has encouraged me to explore some of his work outside his novels, which led me to The Chimes.

Following the success of A Christmas Carol (1843) Dickens wrote four further annual Christmas stories. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, (1844) is the second in the series (The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) complete the list).

The book was written during Dickens’s year-long visit to Italy. Its title is from Faust’s line in Henry 4th part 2 “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow!” in which he reminisces about their adventures in their youth. There’s a tone of regret for days past in the line which forms a backdrop to the story. As with virtually all Dickens’s work there is also a campaigning purpose to the text, of sorts, as we shall see.

The story opens on New Year’s Eve. Trotty Veck, an ageing messenger (this is before the days of postmen) is cold and hungry, but cannot leave his post until he has earned something for his family. His work is casual and unpredictable – the gig economy is nothing new. He shelters in the shadow of the local church and his day is measured out by the sounding of the church bells, the chimes. His daughter Meg brings him some food, and announces that she and her fiancé Richard have decided to wait no longer and are to marry the next day. Their happiness is disrupted by the intrusion of the appalling Alderman Cute and his friends who make Meg and Richard feel that being poor they have no right to marry.

Trotty carries a letter for Cute to Sir Joseph Bowley MP. Bowley is spending the last hours of the year settling any debts to ensure a clean start to the new year, and advises Trotty to do the same. When the MP hears that he owes rent and other debts he berates him, showing no understanding of the position of the working poor. Again, sounds familiar? Trotty however tends to agree with him, indoctrinated as he is into thinking that the behaviour of the poor is the problem rather than their condition and circumstances. On his way home Trotty meets Will Fern, an impoverished agricultural worker, and his orphaned niece, Lilian. He kindly takes them home with him and shares what little food he has, in a genuine act of charity.

The midnight chimes are no occasion for celebration in this starving household. Instead they call to Trotty, who in a dreamlike state goes to the church and climbs the belltower. There he sees the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants. This is an hallucinatory vision from something out of Dante or Bosch: these goblins are not bankers (a la Rowling) nor engineers (a la Pratchett) but menacing, supernatural figures who chastise Trotty for his lack of faith in mankind. It slowly becomes apparent that Trotty is now dead, having fallen from the belltower years before. The reader is left to wonder whether this vision is part of his eternal torture, or, as with A Christmas Carol, more in the way of a warning?

In a series of visions very similar to those shown by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Trotty is shown how the lives of his family play out in the future. Despite their best efforts to make a good life, Richard becomes an alcoholic, Will is unable to earn a living because of his earlier criminal convictions, which lock him into a cycle of imprisonment and brief release, and, in the absence of a loving family around her, Lilian becomes a prostitute. Meg is driven to the murder of her child and suicide, but is rescued at the last minute by Trotty’s ghostly intervention.

The story ends with Trotty waking up as the bells ring in the New Year. All he has seen has been a vision of a possible future, one which is not pre-ordained. Another future, in which Meg and Richard marry and in which his family and friends prosper is open to him, although how he will achieve that future without changes within wider society is unclear. The Chimes seems to suggest Trotty and his family, indeed his class, are masters of their own destiny; the goblins and the spirits of the chimes focus on his sins of condemning the fallen and poor:

‘Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good—grasping in their fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still when bruised and dying in the gulf below; does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity. And you have done that wrong!’

Has he, or is it more Cute and Bowley, representatives of the judiciary and the legislature, that have failed the fallen and disfigured?

It’s hardly surprising that a story of such sinister ambiguity has not prospered compared to its predecessor. Although highly popular in its time – five different productions of The Chimes were on stage within weeks of publication and it sold 20,000 copies in the first three months – the story’s goblins are no longer part of our cultural landscape and have no Christmassy connotations whatsoever. The reader will be happy that Trotty and his family have survived another year, but their problems are as deep-rooted as ever and there’s no suggestion that Alderman Cute or Bowley MP are going to help them any more than they have previously – if help is going to come it needs to come from Trotty and family themselves. The fact that Trotty helps William Fern escape prosecution and offers him shelter offers some hope that by working together they can avoid the worst that Cute and Bowley can throw at them, but this is scant consolation in lives marked by cold, hunger and want.

I am not sure this is more than a curiosity rather than a representative of Dickens’ shorter form of writing – I will need to read more of that to make a call on that – but it’s not a story I could honestly recommend as being either heart-warming or particularly chilling. It has its moment, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. At least Dickens wasn’t on auto-pilot here, just serving up generic Christmas related stories of poor people over-coming the odds – he genuinely tries to do something very different, although I suspect it may not have seemed as strange to mid-nineteenth century readers as it does to us today.

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens, 1844

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Book review

I think I need to reread Persuasion. The mood you are in and the time and care you dedicate to the process of reading can all have an impact on how you perceive a novel, and for whatever reason I was hugely disappointed with Persuasion, Austen’s last completed work, which I am sure says more about me than it does about this novel. But on this reading alone I’d go so far as to say the incomplete and hurried nature of the conclusion, and the short length of the work (around half the length of Pride and Prejudice, for example) is evidence of it being a late draft completed in the final months of her life (it was published after she died) which had she lived would have seen the extensive revision that was the hallmark of her methods of composition for earlier works.

Austen is unquestionably a writer of genius, her control of point of view and narrative technique is unparalleled, and not least critics love Persuasion, which all suggests the problem may have been with me, not the novel, and that I need to give it another chance.

The plot of Persuasion treads familiar romantic ground – young people in Regency England trying to find suitable partners to marry, but it has something of a new twist. Persuasion is about love the second time around. Anne Elliot, middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, baronet, lives in the shadow of her older sister Elizabeth, now in effect head of the household following their mother’s death, and Mary, her younger sister who has recently married a local minor aristocrat, Charles Musgrove. Charles had previously asked Anne to be his wife, and once rejected had moved on to the younger sister with that relentlessness and lack of sentimentality that characterised marriage making in this period. Anne is now 27, dangerously old for a woman of this era and at risk of spinsterhood. What is not widely known about Anne (within the novel) is that when she was 19 she had previously rejected an earlier marriage proposal, having been persuaded by her mother’s friend and her own confidante, the widow Lady Russell, that her suitor, Frederick Wentworth, was not good enough for her. Captain Wentworth, as he now is, was at the time without prospects or connections, and marrying for love was an improvident thing to do.

Wentworth re-enters Anne’s life when Sir Walter lets the family estate to Wentworth’s brother-in-law, Admiral Croft. Since their initial romance, Wentworth has fought in the Napoleonic Wars, been promoted to the rank of captain and amassed a significant fortune from capturing enemy ships – being in the Navy could at this time be a very dangerous but very well-rewarded profession. Once Wentworth is reintroduced it is clear he and Anne will end up together, but the only question is how they will be reunited, and which of the many available young women introduced into the plot he will mistakenly be thought to be in love with before the inevitable reconciliation. Visits to Lyme Regis and Bath feature along the way, where the plot’s false starts and red herrings are overcome and the multiple other threads quickly resolved, more in the manner of an early Shakespearean comedy than an elegantly plotted Austen romance.

There is an obvious temptation to see Austen using Anne’s story as a way of working through her own personal issues. Austen had been engaged at one point but hurriedly called it off, and it is possible she regretted choices made in her romantic life. For her there were to be no second chances, so writing a story in which a lost love is finally recaptured must have had at least some element of wish-fulfilment. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin described Persuasion as Austen’s “present to herself…. to all women who had lost their chance in life and would never enjoy a second spring.” I don’t find this way of looking at novels as semi-autobiography or therapy as particularly fruitful – Jane isn’t Anne any more than she is Elizabeth or Fanny.

So what are the concerns I have about the novel? It is clear from her correspondence that Austen wrote Persuasion during the illness which was to take her life. Her usual method of composition, working and reworking the text and plot, was simply not available to her – she didn’t have the time or the energy, and it shows. Plotlines are hurriedly disposed of without the usual care – the most obvious example being the way Mr William Elliot, Sir Walter’s heir, is introduced, courts Anne, and is exposed as a scoundrel. This Mr Elliot is a two-dimensional villain whose motivation is simply to ensure he inherits the ancestral home, which is due to do anyway, even without all the Machiavellian plotting. His precise role in the family structure – why he is the heir – is never clearly explained (unless I missed it!) and the way his deviousness and duplicity is exposed is clumsy in the extreme.

As a character, Anne is not as dull as Mansfield Park‘s Fanny Price, but she equally doesn’t come alive compared to an Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood. At first she is described by the unsympathetic narrator as ‘faded and thin‘, as ‘haggard‘, and that ‘her bloom has vanished early‘. Captain Wentworth on his return to her company passes a similar devastating judgment, commenting (in a phrase Anne crushingly comes to hear) on ‘the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom‘. However, things aren’t as bad as these judgments might suggest, and some restorative sea air puts colour back into her cheeks. After a short while at Lyme (albeit in November) Anne is attracting the attentions of the passing William Elliott:

“As the passed, Anne’s face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of. She was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced. It was evident that the gentleman … admired her exceedingly.” (Chapter 12) (Sir Walter on the other had thinks ‘sharp winds‘ can make a women ‘grow coarse’, and on that basis decides not to buy his youngest daughter a new hat and pelisse in case it encourages her to go out in the wind!)

The chapters in Lyme and Bath had the feel of the characters treading water waiting for the reconciliation between Anne and Captain Wentworth. When this reconciliation finally happens it feels rushed – he overhears her speaking with a friend of his, and writes her a letter declaring his feelings, which she happily reciprocates. This was the one scene Austen is known to have re-written. The earlier version survives, in which Wentworth’s sister and brother-in-law take a much more active hand in engineering the couple’s reconciliation, which to me seemed a lot more believable and authentic.

Many of the other characters don’t step off the page. Anne’s younger sister Mary is better sketched than many, and while her hypochondria is a character trait Austen had used before, (with Mr Wodehouse) this is largely forgotten once the novel moves on. Elizabeth the older sister is barely two-dimensional and remains wooden and forgettable. Lady Russell, who advises Anne not to accept Wentworth’s original proposal, is equally and disappointingly weakly drawn. In fact none of the secondary characters are comparable to the wonderful sketches you see in earlier novels of characters such as endearing gossips such as Miss Bates, awful aristocrats like Lady Catherine de Bourgh or villains like Willoughby. Equally the plotting is disappointing. In the great Austen novels we are always aware of events ‘off-stage’, even when the central characters themselves are unaware. There are plenty of hints that there is more to Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill’s relationship than Emma is aware of with a careful or second reading, and the way Austen charts Elizabeth Bennet’s journey from anger to love with Mr Darcy is utterly convincing, but there is nothing of comparable significance in Persuasion.

Or at least I didn’t find it on this read, which as I have said could easily be down to my reading of the novel rather than the novel itself. So I need to reread it. Of course I am not going to dive into it straight away, but find a time and place when I can give it the care it needs. Until then I would love to know whether you shared my concerns or can point me to where I have gone wrong.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen, 1817

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Book review

I’m slowly making my way through Michael Slater’s biography of Charles Dickens at the moment, and at one point I came across a reference to Dickens’ fellow author Catherine Gore. I had not heard of Gore before. She was a prolific writer of what become known as ‘silver-fork‘ novels. The ever-reliable Wikipedia tells me that silver-fork novels:

“dominated the English literature market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s. They were often indiscreet, and on occasion “keys” would circulate that identified the real people on which the principal characters were based. Their emphasis on the relations of the sexes and on marital relationships presaged later development in the novel.”

The novels focus on the lives of the aristocracy and the manners of the high society, in particular that of the Regency period.

Other writers in the genre included Theodore Hook, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Lady Blessington and Lady Bury. Bulwer-Lytton is principally remembered for coining phrases such as “the great unwashed” and “the pen is mightier than the sword“, as well as the famously bad opening line “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals.”

The purpose of this entry, which I am eventually getting to, is that until I fell down this particular internet rabbit-hole I had never heard of this genre of English fiction. Perhaps I should have but I suspect this is not just my blind-spot. Its novelists are to all intents and purposes no longer read; the vast popularity of their novels is forgotten and few of the books are still published (although they are readily available online, of course). Which made me wonder – will any of the popular genres of the early twenty-first century be completely forgotten in a couple of hundred years? Not just the books and the authors, but the whole category of works into which they fall? Will Young Adult literature still be considered a meaningful classification? Science Fiction? Real-life Crime?

The other question that occurred to me was – what other popular genres of literature have been forgotten? Now that is a rabbit-hole you could spend a long time down!

Finally, if you were wondering whether ‘silver-fork’ literature would be worth resurrecting, here’s a short summary of one of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, Zanoni:

“Zanoni, a timeless Rosicrucian brother, cannot fall in love without losing his power of immortality; but he does fall in love with Viola Pisani, a promising young opera singer from Naples, the daughter of Pisani, a misunderstood Italian violinist. An English gentleman named Glyndon loves Viola as well, but is indecisive about proposing marriage, and then renounces his love to pursue occult study. The story develops in the days of the French Revolution in 1789. Zanoni has lived since the Chaldean civilisation. His master Mejnor warns him against a love affair but Zanoni does not heed.”

Silver-fork novels

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Book review

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is currently running a survey to find the top ten ‘essential books for men written by women’. The press release promoting the survey claims that “most men simply don’t read books by women”. Support for this claim is provided by research by Mary Ann Sieghart (who chairs the 2022 judges’ panel) in her book The Authority Gap. This research was based on the top ten bestselling female fiction authors including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood and Agatha Christie which showed that only 19% of their readers were men and 81% women. For the top 10 bestselling male authors (including Dickens, Tolkien, Lee Child and Stephen King), the split was 55% men to 45% women. Whether you can extrapolate national reading habits from just 20 authors is debateable, but the general finding – that men read more men authors than women authors – seems right.

Why should that be – why don’t men read more women authors? The Women’s Prize approach seems to suggest that it is simply because there are loads of great women authors out there that men aren’t aware of. It has prepared a list of sixty books by 56 women and is inviting people to vote for their favourite. (The vote closes on June 6th 2022). Obviously this is a way of getting more attention for the prize itself, which is fair enough, but I wanted to consider the reasons why men don’t read women.

The list is interesting. The vast majority of the nominations are from the twentieth century or later. Jane Austen is ignored, as is Emily Bronte. Charlotte Bronte appears but her recommended novel is Villette, not Jane Eyre as you might expect. Arguably this is because everyone already knows about Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights – the purpose of the exercise is to recommend less well-known works. It’s not surprising that there is a degree of well, to be blunt, virtue-signalling in some of the nominations: Ian McEwan nominates We Had to Remove this Post by Hanna Bervoets, which was published in May 2022, while Andrew Marr nominates Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, also published in May 2022. Andrew Billen nominates the relatively ancient The Candy House by Jennifer Egan which was published way back in April 2022. Several of the other novels nominated date back as far as 2018. Are these really novels that will attract men to read them, or do these nominations tell us more about the people making them?

So why don’t men read women authors? Is it simply that men haven’t come across the novels in this list before? That seems unlikely. The Handmaid’s Tale is not really obscure is it? The list includes three Booker Prize winning novels (Girl, Woman, Other, The Sea, The Sea, and Possession). Novels such as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (which won the Pulitzer Prize) have sold vast quantities and surely need no further promotion. It’s not so much that the novels in the list aren’t the right ones (although authors such as Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge should have been mentioned, and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet should be on every must-read list) but that awareness isn’t the issue. Men know about women authors but choose to read male authors.

There aren’t any easy answers here but I wonder whether the issue can be traced to childhood reading habits. There’s evidence that boys read fewer books and spending less time reading than girls. Once genre reading patterns are established in the early years then they can be difficult to shift.

Men should read more women authors, but that’s not going to happen by exhortation alone. Perhaps this reading gap is a reflection of a more serious gap between the sexes in society?

Men Reading Women

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Book review

“They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died.” So begins the tragedy of Vivek Oji, a young man living a double life in modern-day Nigeria. Born on the day of his grandmother’s death, Vivek is seen by some of his family members as her incarnation, marked out by the same starfish-shaped scar.

Vivek’s death marks both the beginning and the end of the novel. It tells the story of his short life, using memories from family and friends alongside his own narration. The fragmented narrative and complex time structure slowly builds into a picture of a life that is brimming with potential but is also, as the reader knows throughout, doomed to be cut tragically short. The main figures in his life are his over-protective mother and his cousin, Osita. It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment that Vivek’s life begins to unravel, but perhaps it is when he allows his hair to grow down beyond his shoulders. This is a breach of convention in his traditionalist home and community. It troubles his family and his neighbours. Vivek’s aunt becomes convinced that a demon is possessing him, and he is traumatised by a violent attempt at exorcism at her church. The unspoken fear of his parents is that it is an outward sign of femininity and that he is gay, which is taboo in Nigerian society. The context here is vital. Homosexuality is not just taboo in Nigeria, it is illegal. The Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill passed in 2014 in response to the legalisation of gay marriage in the West, prohibits marriage between persons of the same sex, forbids any cohabitation between same-sex sexual partners and bans any “public show of same sex amorous relationship.” It imposes a 10-year prison sentence on anyone who “registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organization” or “supports” the activities of such organizations. Even having long hair is sufficient to spark suspicion, and suspicion is all that is needed.

Much of the novel is told through the eyes of Vivek’s mother, Kavita. Her grief drives her to relentlessly try to find out how her son died. At the novel’s climax she succeeds in this quest and finds some sort of peace knowing that he lived at least part of his life happily and on his own terms.

My initial reaction to this novel was that it was an example of the ‘bury your gays’ trope. But I was wrong, and it might be worth explaining why. My understanding of this trope was that gay people in literature, film, television etc are often denied happy relationships, and frequently die just at the point that a fulfilling relationship or personal happiness is in sight. This article discusses the trope in a lot more detail. While the trope originated as a means to allow gay relationships to be portrayed without overstepping social taboos, it developed over time and now more simply represents the expendability of gay characters, particularly in film and on television. At first it looks as if Vivek’s death might fall into this category. But there are a number of reasons why it doesn’t apply here. First, the author doesn’t explicitly describe Vivek as gay. He has sex with other men, but he also wears women’s clothing and make-up, and adopts a female gender identify at times. It is in these moments that Vivek seems happiest and most fulfilled. He doesn’t adopt a specific gender identity (or perhaps to be more precise, the author doesn’t mention one). This may be because he doesn’t have time to explore this aspect of his identity fully, but also because conservative Nigerian society doesn’t allow him the space to do so. For much of the novel the reader is led to believe that Vivek is murdered by a rioting mob because he is ‘caught’ in public wearing female clothes and make-up. The final revelation about his much more mundane death serves to undercut these expectations – what we think we know about people is wrong, and making judgments based upon those assumptions is equally wrong.

This was a thought provoking if somewhat sad novel about the challenges facing gay, non-binary and trans people in modern-day Nigeria. It’s great that authors such as Emezi are now finding their voices and publishers to promote their work.

The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi, 2020

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Book review

I reviewed The Essex Serpent back in 2019, and in a passing comment said “I am … convinced that this would make a hugely popular television series in the right hands.”

Well I am glad to say someone agreed, because the novel is now being televised on Apple TV with the first two episodes being released yesterday. The leads – Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston – look perfectly cast, and the production wisely filmed extensively in Essex itself.

I’m not on any commission from Apple TV – I don’t even have a subscription – but it is nice to see a novel that demanded to be filmed finally making it to the screen. I think a television adaptation (as opposed to a film) is a much more sensible way of telling this atmospheric story, giving the characters time to develop rather than rushing everything to an end in 90 minutes. I hope it does it justice.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (again)

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Book review

Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power, by Sasha Swire 2020

Diary of an MP’s Wife is a deliciously indiscrete and gossipy insider’s account of British politics spanning the second decade of this century. It opens with the election of the Cameron/Clegg coalition in 2010, followed by the Tory’s unexpected election win in 2015, the the unfolding tragedy that was the Brexit referendum, ending in the election of December 2019.

The whiff of entitlement coming of the pages of this text can at times be overpowering. The author is the daughter of John Nott, one of Thatcher’s Cabinet Ministers, and her MP husband is an old Etonian. She frequently expresses frustration at this paradox – being an Old Etonian was seemingly a disadvantage in securing a position in the coalition cabinet when the Old Etonian Prime Minister was looking to appoint a more diverse top team. The summary of the Cameron years 2010-2016 contains few surprises – it was always fairly obvious even at the time that this was a clique of close friends with a largely shared, broadly progressive but still old-school Conservative view of the world. The account of the times spent drinking and plotting with the Cameron set seems entirely authentic:

They are all here, the ones that eat, drink, party together, they are all intimately interlocked, some from university days, some from the research unit, some later, such as with us through the selection procedure. We all holiday together, stay in each other’s grace-and-favour homes, our children play together, we text each other bypassing the civil servants. There are old rows, forgiven betrayals and historic rivalries. This is a very particular, narrow tribe of Britain and their hangers-on. It’s enough to repulse the ordinary man, already angered by the continuing hold of the British class system.

It’s hardly surprising therefore that when the political system begins to take its toll, the personal relationships and friendships under-pinning the Government are also put under pressure. Friendships fray and are broken.

I can’t avoid the suspicion that even the frankest of political diaries have the tendency to edit out the more egregious mistakes and highlight comments that seem in hindsight perceptive. There is plenty of that going on here – at one stage Swire says:

“2020 may be a dim, far-off date in the diary (my note – the reference to 2020 is because at the time this was written, shortly after the election in 2015, it was assumed that the next general would be 2020 – in fact we were to have two elections before then!) but whichever side will win there’s going to be plenty of internecine warfare in the meantime. In fact, and manner of things could happen (watch Keir Starmer rise and rise)” (pg201)

All manner of things indeed.

Another thing you often see in political diaries is a loathing for the constituency activists that the MPs depend upon for funding raising and re-selection, but who can be shall we say ‘difficult’ characters. Swire writes of her husband’s East Devon Conservative Association activists:

“They hate, in equal measure, foreigners, Europe, defence cuts, gay marriage, Liberals, the BBC, Germans, the Japanese, the coalition, and garlic.” (140)

There is some suggestion that Swire had publication of these diaries in mind all along – some particularly scathing criticisms of fellow Tories is softened with an unconvincing concluding sentence or paragraph commenting on the general good intentions of them all. Swire seems not to have wanted to burn all her bridges with the Conservatives, but I don’t think the publication of these diaries will have done her much good. When extracts from the book appeared in the media it was reported that the author was upset by their presentation, suggesting that they had in some way been way been distorted. Is anyone really that naive? It’s easy to see how Tory feathers would have been ruffled – at one point Swire claims David Cameron said to her: “The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one.”

The troubling figure of Boris Johnson slowly emerges from these pages as the years pass. Initially he is a fairly distant, slightly comic figure, but his rise to the top of the Conservative Party is charted with precision. Swire is clearly attracted to his energy and his charisma, but has no illusions about his trustworthiness. His pivoting on Brexit as a political manoeuvre rather than on a point of principle is a matter of record, but it is still interesting to see reactions recorded at the time. David Cameron is recorded as saying that:

“Boris…had always been a supporter of Europe, free movement and migration…this whole episode was to do with his leadership ambitions, nothing else”. (242)

Well no shit Sherlock.

I’m not sure this book actually tells us much we didn’t already know. Hugo Swire was a relatively minor figure in the Cameron Governments, and his wife’s best stories are his, repackaged at second-hand. They may have socialised with the key figures but weren’t in the room when key decisions were made. It’s an interesting perspective from a minority grouping within the Tories – self-identifying as ‘Cameroons’ when the label no longer has any meaning, remaining loyal to the Tories largely over the issue of Brexit when so many others have long since parted ways. Hugo Swire stood down from Parliament in 2019 to spend more time with his money, but it is really hard to see him having any part to play in Boris Johnson’s Brexit Party-lite Conservatives.

Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power, by Sasha Swire 2020

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Book review

Keneally was inspired to write the remarkable story of Thomas Schindler after a chance meeting with Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. In some ways this novel is as much Pfefferberg’s as it is Kenneally’s – his persistence is trying to ensure Schindler’s story had a wider audience was remarkable. He was an advisor to Kenneally during the novel’s development and accompanied him to Poland during his research. Keneally dedicated Schindler’s Ark to Pfefferberg: “who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written.” He was then also involved in persuading Steven Spielberg make the film of the novel.

Schindler’s Ark is in many ways more a history text than a novel. Kenneally has justified the designation of the text as a non-fiction novel (which I know is a recognised literary genre but still feels like a contradiction in terms) due to the inclusion of reconstructed conversations between participants. I take his point, but these are clearly an imaginative way of presenting some aspects of the narrative, and in no way undermine the exhaustive and detailed research that underpins the text. Further there is always a risk that presenting the text as fiction allows sceptical readers to distance themselves from the appalling brutality the novel exposes.

As I am sure almost all readers of this blog will know, Schindler’s Ark is the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman and entrepreneur who during the Second World War helped save the lives of thousands of Polish Jewish men, women and children. They worked in his factories, and he protected them by insisting that their labour was essential in keeping his factories open, and that in turn the factories were vital to the German war effort.

As the war progressed that was a fiction that was increasingly hard to maintain. His workers were moved first into the Krakow ghetto, and subsequently into brutal labour camps. Those were the ‘lucky’ ones of course – many others were taken directly to the concentration camps. Schindler’s factories produced goods that had a very marginal impact on the war – usually just domestic goods – and any weaponry was very low grade. In any event the Nazi’s blood-lust was such that they were prepared to destroy any Jewish people they could find, irrespective of whether they worked in industries critical to the war. So how was Schindler able to protect his workers when millions of others were being taken to the death-camps? His approach was simple – bribery. He spent lavishly on all sorts of expensive and hard-to-find goods to buy influence and favours, and keep the local Nazis pre-occupied and distracted while all around millions of Jewish people were being slaughtered.

Schindler was clearly a flawed human being – a member of the Nazi party, a drinker, womaniser and a war profiteer – and Kenneally’s portrait is unsparing about Schindler’s weaknesses; he makes no attempt to disguise these aspects of Schindler’s personality. It is possible that it was his very unsaintliness that allowed him to make the difficult decisions he had to make every day to preserve the people under his protection.

Unlike any other novel, film or programme I have seen or read, Schindler’s Ark chillingly portrays the brutality of the Holocaust. You think you know what happened, and perhaps want to avoid some of the details. While Schindler’s Ark is unsparing in its descriptions of Nazi brutality it is the mundane aspect of the regime, its businesslike approach to the industrialisation of murder that is so terrifying. The novel also brought me closer than ever before to an understanding of why Jewish people felt and feel the need for an Independent Jewish state, where all aspects of society – the Government, the police, the media and so on – are under the control of Jewish people. Because during the Holocaust Jewish people felt and were powerless in the face of the German state and were unable to look to anyone – other than the rare exceptions such as Schindler himself – for help or protection. I know I am in deep water here and I in no way want to provide blanket justification for the actions of the Israeli state and its sometimes brutal treatment of Palestinian people, but understanding the mindset which leads to condoning that behaviour is for me a new way of looking at the Palestinian conflict.

Kenneally’s determination to do justice to Schindler’s story makes Schindler’s Ark a dense, and at times distressing read. There is a vast amount of detail to be absorbed, dozens of characters who appear briefly and move on, and minute analysis of minor details of the operation of the factory. These details are probably important when weighing the negative aspects of Schindler’s life against the more obvious positives, but a more ruthless editor might have made this an easier read. Not all novels need to be easy to read, of course, but I wonder how many readers will have given up at some point and watched the film instead? The novel’s retitling for its American publication and the subsequent film, List instead of Ark, is interesting. It’s reductive – it’s so much easier to write a list than build and protect an ark. Escaping the Holocaust wasn’t only a matter of whether you were on a list or not. The film’s title, if not the film itself, reduces Schindler’s heroism to a single act rather than the arduous and lengthy process of fighting every day to preserve the lives of the Jewish people under his protection.

Schindler’s Ark deservedly won the 1982 Booker Prize against a varied and interesting shortlist. The chair of the 1982 judging panel John Carey said “This book has behind it a powerful organising and speculative mind, exercising great tact and restraint in the presentation of its terrible story“. This quite in itself restrained compliment is interesting – the powerful organising mind of the author was an important factor in doing justice to the story, even if it does sacrifice some of the narrative drama for a more exhaustive detailed account of events. But the restraint and tact are equally important – it would have been easy to have presented this as an adventure/escape story, which would have been tasteless and disrespectful to those who didn’t survive. In the end it is a portrait of an almost unimaginable horror and a brief glimmer of hope.

Schindler’s Ark, by Thomas Kenneally, 1982

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