The Trouble with Goats and Sheep – Joanna Cannon

Ten year old Grace Bennet lives at no.4 The Avenue, somewhere in England, the only child of Derek and Sylvia.  It is the sweltering summer of ’76 and something is amiss in the cul-de-sac of eight dwellings.  Mrs Creasy has gone missing.

It has been reported to the police by Mr Creasy and among the adults in The Avenue speculation is rife.  Grace and her best friend Tilly decide to help find the ‘lost’ Margaret Creasy with an approach culled from a confusing sermon by the local vicar, who advises that the way to avoid getting lost is to ‘find God’.  Grace and Tilly proceed to look for God among the neighbours.

Thus we are introduced to the residents and while Grace narrates throughout, her daily updates are alternated with private glimpses into the lives, past and present, of the likes of the officious Mr Forbes and his dominated wife, the thoughtful but ineffective Eric Lamb, the nervous ‘thin’ Brian who lives with his mum Mrs Roper, and the brassy single mum Sheila Dakin.  Then there is Walter Bishop who lives alone at no. 11 and is shunned by the rest for a perceived misdemeanour years previously.

It is a multi-layered read.  The innocent perspicacity of Grace’s comments on the adults’ behaviour is brilliant; her deep affection for Tilly, punctuated by casual cruelty, rings true.  The unfolding of the adult relationships is darker and the gradual revelation of past misdeeds is very well done – right to the very end.  In all the use of language is original and vivid.

That there is good and bad in everyone is made clear enough.  Although the vicar’s sermon tells of how God will separate the sinful goats from the righteous sheep, for Grace, as a mere human, the trouble is that it is not always easy to tell the difference.

Educated – Tara Westover

Tara Westover’s memoir reads fresh, as it should as she is still a young woman and the events she relates took place within the last quarter century, a fact that often is hard to believe.

Born and raised in the wilds of Idaho in a Mormon family dominated by a father of increasingly extreme beliefs, she was denied registration of birth, access to mainstream healthcare and formal education for most of her childhood.  As were her six siblings to a greater or lesser extent; all expected, required even, to help out in the family concerns.  Father ran a scrapping and building business and her mother was a midwife and herbalist ministering to the many in the state who distrusted hospitals, doctors and drugs.  It was a dangerous environment but one that built resilience and fortitude.  It also made for bullying and submission to the paternal dogma of distrusting the government, its agencies and anyone outside the family.

Tara’s gradual, painful tearing away from her roots, not without false starts and setbacks, is related in searing fashion as her lack of elementary education clashes with her thirst for knowledge and her evident natural talent for academic study.

That conflict pales against that which forms the main theme of the book – family expectations and upbringing against the individual and self-determination, and her repeated and fruitless attempts to satisfy the demands of both.

The book succeeds on all fronts.  It is a fascinating and scary account of life in the backwoods; a harrowing account of a powerless girl at the mercy of her father and brothers; and an uplifting sermon on how an education can liberate and enable the mind to encompass, analyse and deal with seemingly irreconcilable forces.

Stone’s Fall – Iain Pears

The book starts not with businessman extraordinaire John Stone’s fatal fall from his study window on to a London street in 1909, but with his widow’s funeral in Paris 44 years later.  That event releases a bundle of papers, part of the estate of one Henry Cort, into the care of the elderly Matthew Braddock.  And it is Braddock who narrates his story first as a preface to those of Cort and Stone that he finds in the documents.

Braddock tells of his involvement in the events of 1909 when as a young reporter he was employed by Stone’s widow, Elizabeth, a woman he finds both attractive and intimidating,  to compile a biography of the deceased.  Except the job turns out to be much more than that; intrigue and danger abound as well as shady characters like Henry Cort.

Cort’s narrative comes next and concerns his time as a young man in Paris in 1890, having been recruited as an unofficial agent of HM Government.  This brings him into contact with John Stone just as the international industrialist is first introduced to Elizabeth, an exiled Hungarian countess who holds influential salons in the French capital.  A crisis emerges and Cort finds it is up to him to save the day.

The third narrative takes the reader back further, to 1867 in Venice where a young John Stone arrives as part of a year’s travelling.  The city, then a mere backwater, exerts an enervating hold on many who wash up there, but not Stone who is beginning to put his business ideas into practice while engaging in a dangerous affair.

The stories have resonance in that each feature a young man pursuing a goal, confident he is control of events, while others in the background are trying to manipulate or use him for their own hidden ends.  The similarities of Braddock, Cort and Stone require a clear mind to be kept on whose story is whose.  In each period the historical, political and economic context is detailed and rings true.

Each narrative alone would make a decent novel.  Combined subtly and intriguingly, and topped off with an ingenious denouement, they make for a richly satisfying book – for those who have the time and patience to read the 600 pages with sufficient care (or like this reader, have the foresight to make notes of significant names, dates, linkages and potentially key events).