Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

This long-overdue ‘booket-list’ read is Bill Bryson’s 1995 farewell to the UK before moving back to the USA. After a two-decade sojourn in Britain, during which he married and started a family, he picks an eclectic mix of places to visit. Using mainly public transport and low-budget accommodation he zig-zags north from Dover to John O’Groats before returning to his home in the Yorkshire Dales.

En route he exercises his wit and erudition in recounting his travels, the places he goes and the people he meets. Corporatisation of the town centres, decline of resorts, illogical transport connections, and rude people all get a withering tongue-lashing. But he also waxes lyrical on the delightful eccentricities, the charm, and beauty that he finds in the country that, he finally admits, he likes very, very much.

As always with Bryson it is funny, with laugh out loud lines, but also insightful and intere4sting.

Ripeness – Sarah Moss

Edith (73) lives alone on the west coast of Ireland. Alone but not lonely. She has friends, like Gunter (with whom she has benefits) and Meabh (with whom she swims and drinks coffee). Gunter is an incomer like her, but Meabh is local born and bred. It’s a good life, settled in the wild, windy and wet landscape.

When Meabh confides in her that an unknown, unsuspected, illegitimate half-brother has tracked her down and wants to visit from the US and connect with his past, learn about his birth mother, it brings to Edith’s mind another illegitimate baby parted from its mother over fifty years previously.

Seventeen-year-old Edith, had her plan for a gap year in Europe (a place awaiting at Oxford) amended to take in a trip to Lake Como where her elder (by some years) sister, Lydia, is holed up to have her baby away from prying eyes. Edith, armed only with A-level Italian and experience of birthing lambs on the family hill farm in Derbyshire, rolls up her sleeves and pitches in.

Lydia is a ballerina in a top company; the pregnancy is an inconvenient interruption in her career; the baby, when it comes, is to be shipped off immediately through a convent network to a “good home”.

Edith’s two narratives, half a century apart, are related in Moss’s unfussy prose that beautifully captures the distinctive landscapes of the two locations. The character of Edith, in youth and experience is finely drawn and provides for a thought-provoking and elegiac read.

May Contain Nuts – John O’Farrell

Alice and David Chaplin, and all their friends, know what is best for their children – a good education, in a good school, where good children are pushed to excel, complemented outside school by good extra-curricular activities such as ballet, music, French conversation, museums and theatre. It’s a bubble, a comfortable middle-class bubble. But it is about to burst for the Chaplins.

Their daughter, Molly, is due to leave her private prep school, Spencer House, and start secondary education. The ‘only’ place to go is the exclusive, fee-paying, Chelsea College. But it has high standards to maintain, and an entrance exam needs to be passed. Now, Molly is bright and intelligent and has, in common with all her friends, a private tutor to boost performance, but she has a ‘problem’ with exams. She does poorly in a mock test and continues to flunk practice papers at home. With her whole future on the line (according to Alice), and Battersea Comp beckoning, drastic measures are needed.

Alice’s plan is a recipe for disaster, and O’Farrell charts the unfolding chaos with characteristic humour, all the while taking mocking swipes at the helicopter parenting of the middle class.

It all works very well, treading the fine overlap between the farcical and the credible. And, being O’Farrell, the moral message comes through by the end to provide a funny and feel-good read.

The Women of Troy – Pat Barker

The war is won. Troy has fallen, been sacked and burnt. Every man, boy, and foetus (just to be on the safe side) killed. The women, grieving wives, mothers, and orphans, are divvied up among the victors.

Helen is taken back by Menelaus, a surprise to many of the Greeks who blame her for all the death and destruction, but there again, she remains a stunner and able to charm her way through life (and death). Andromache, widow of Trojan hero Hector, is taken by Pyrrhus, teenage son of dead Achilles, and incompetent slayer of old King Priam. Cassandra, daughter of Priam, virgin priestess raped in the temple during the battle, is picked by Agamemnon – a choice that is just asking for trouble.

These women of Troy join long-term captive Briseis who, carrying Achilles’ child, has been married off to Alcimus. This acquired respectability gives Briseis privileges in the camp which she uses to keep up morale and mitigate the treatment of the captive women.

Though the war is over, the Greeks remain camped between the ruined city and the sea, which has become impassable due to persistent adverse winds. The Gods are clearly displeased, but who is to blame? Pyrrhus who won’t allow Priam to be buried? Menelaus for taking back Helen? Or Agamemnon for marrying Cassandra despite having a wife back home?

Pat Barker relates the fate of the Trojan women with candour. They may be in the same boat but that doesn’t mean they have to like each other. Rivalries and jealousies have to be managed to survive, and Briseis needs her wits about her as the wind blows, tempers shorten, and a sacrifice has to be made.

Though this second book of the trilogy lacks the bloody intensity of the first, it bubbles along compulsively enough with subplots emerging, some resolved, other left to play out in volume three, which is nestling on the bookshelf ready to go.

Precipice – Robert Harris

In the summer of 1914 as Europe stands on the precipice of war, Herbert Henry Asquith, the last (as it turns out) Liberal Prime Minister, wrestles with the international situation that faces the United Kingdom. Only one thing helps him to clear his mind, think things through, and determine a way forward: or rather one person. Not his political aides and allies, nor his long-standing wife and family, but his twenty-six-year-old ‘special friend’ Miss Venetia Stanley.

They write to each other daily, sometimes two or three times a day (that’s what you call a postal service!). He takes her on chauffeur-driven rides enabling secluded talks in the back of his official limousine, and on romantic walks in parks and country lanes. And during the walking and the talking he discusses the confidential affairs of state on his mind. And in the letters, he shares classified information and top-secret telegrams.

Now the Stanleys are establishment, well connected, and though the ‘special friendship’ is noted in their close circles, the extent and exact nature ae veiled in discretion. Until, that is, some discarded documents come to the attention of MI5, and Sergeant Paul Deemer is tasked with investigating their source.

Crafted from the scarcely believable actual letters from Asquith to Venetia (the replies are imagined by Harris) the spellbinding narrative moves through a year of personal and political drama. It is not thrill-a-minute, more like watching a slow-motion train crash. You know it won’t end well but don’t know exactly when and how it will come off the rails.

Full of period detail, with bit parts for the likes of Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Lord Kitchener, it retains interest throughout. Harris is a good storyteller and balances the threads of the narrative – the Asquith & Venetia affair, the Paul Deemer investigation, and the outbreak of the First World War – in masterful fashion.

Unsheltered – Barbara Kingsolver

Willa’s rambling house on Plum Street is falling down, slowly but inexorably. It is not her fault. The property, inherited from an aunt and pressed into service at a time of her family’s financial stress, seemed to offer an opportunity. Now it seems to be more of a threat.

The family likewise is a hotchpotch of unused potential. The magazine that Willa edited has gone bust; her academic husband, has had to take a low paid lecturer post locally; her wayward daughter works a few hours at a community café; and her invalid father-in-law needs full time care but is contemptuous of the state welfare that could help the family cope. And now her son, emerging from a promising but unremunerated internship in the city, has been left with sole responsibility for his months-old baby.

One hundred and fifty years previous, the same plot on Plum Street is occupied by Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher recently married to a young wife who came with dependents – widowed mother and young sister – and this house put up by her father. It has only been built a few years, part of the Vineland community developed (and now run as a fiefdom) by a Captain Landis, but already there are issues with the structure for Thatcher to deal with. A more pressing concern is job security. His contract renewal is in the hands of the headteacher, who is a Darwin-denier. Thatcher’s scientific integrity is under pressure but is bolstered when he discovers his next-door neighbour is a respected amateur biologist and regular correspondent of the Origin of Species author.

Lots happen in the two, time sundered households. Characters and relationships develop with a pleasing richness. Both settings exude authenticity and Kingsolver seamlessly slips in some persuasive, liberal-leaning socio-political points of view. Overarchingly, do the crumbling houses serve as a metaphor for the materialism of their times? Is the effort to shore up the edifice worth the candle, or is it better to let it fall and move on?

Can Willa and Thatcher come to embrace the concept that unsheltered at least you can see the sky, you can let the daylight in?

An interesting, engaging and thought-provoking read, highly recommended.

The Patient Assassin – Anita Anand

On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, British soldiers under the personal command of Brigadier General Reginald (Rex) Dyer, entered the Jallianwala Bagh, a seven-acre former walled garden that had become a dusty recreation ground and public meeting space. It was crowded that day. The usual gatherings to socialise and partake of the street vendor food were swollen due to a festival at the nearby Golden Temple, and by those come to hear an address promoting peaceful protest against British rule.

Political tension was high. The First World War was in the balance, and Indian troops were fighting on the front. Political gatherings had been forbidden, though the prohibition had been sparsely proclaimed. The soldiers did not order the crowd to disperse. They simply opened fire on Dyer’s orders, discharging 1,650 rounds of rifle ammunition in ten minutes of carnage before withdrawing, leaving five to six hundred dead and maybe three times as many wounded.

Eighteen-year-old Udham Singh was in Amritsar that day to do some business for a relative. He had been in the Bagh that morning but had slipped away to do the deal. When he heard the shots ring out, he returned to find his friends dead or dying. He swore revenge on the British Raj, as personified by Rex Dyer and his civilian chief, Lieutenant Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer.

Udham Singh was a low caste orphan with no education or resources, and it took him twenty years, and many false starts, to get himself into a position to carry out his vengeance (though by then one of his targets had already died). He got the other one and willingly paid the price. This is no-spoiler, it is history and is revealed in chapter one - though personally being ignorant of the full story, I would have preferred that reveal to have been held back to the end.

Anita Anand, whose grandfather in similar fashion narrowly escaped the massacre, guides the reader through the history of Indian resistance and suppressed rebellion interweaving the personal stories of Udham Singh, Rex Dyer, and Sir Michael O’Dwyer with the geopolitics spanning the two world wars.

It is a well-written, interesting, disturbing, and fascinating account of a shameful colonial episode, not wide enough known. I recommend you read it.