Day of the Accident – Nuala Ellwood

When Maggie Allen comes out of her coma, ten weeks after the day of the accident, her memory is hazy.  Two things she learns quickly: her child is dead and buried and her husband has cleared off leaving her homeless, penniless and at the mercy of the welfare state.

That is not a good place to be when in a fragile mental state and there are lots of tears amid feelings of loss, guilt and recriminations.  She knows she is in some way responsible for Elspeth’s death but the chain of events leading to it has more links missing than in place.

Her condition is all the more frightening for her as it brings back to mind an earlier period of mental ill-health that followed an incident in her youth.  Is that connected to the accident somehow?  This is a novel, so probably yes; but how?

The twin mysteries unravel slowly with a third added for good measure by the periodic insertion of letters written from a daughter to her mother, neither named.  Are they real or imagined; genuine or a fabrication; who are they from and to?

Maggie’s frustrations at her inability to remember or even function effectively in her new circumstances are vividly portrayed, but possibly overly so.  The unsympathetic reader may say, just get a grip, woman.  This means when events unfold and clues lead to a dramatic conclusion, Maggie’s transformation from quivering wreck to clear-thinking heroine is remarkable.

Nevertheless the plotting is clever with the obligatory twists and turns and the ending, though not entirely convincing, works well enough.

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson

A constant reminder is needed when reading this book that it is non-fiction as otherwise the tale would consistently fail the ‘as if’ test.

For mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates the attraction of the 21,000 ft. Siula Grand peak in the Peruvian Andes was its isolation and the consequent knowledge that there they could rely only on each other.  No-one waiting in an Alpine village down the hill, no mountain rescue poised to help, at their camp only a hiker they had picked up in Lima, along for the walk not the climb; and of course in 1985 no mobile phones.

After some acclimatisation and reconnaissance climbs Joe and Simon set off for the unclimbed west face of the mountain.  The ascent is full of challenges – snow, wind, altitude, ice, rockfalls, difficult terrain – but nothing unexpected, nothing unprepared for.  It is the descent that goes wrong, terribly wrong.

Joe has a fall, is badly injured and Simon’s efforts to get him down are truly heroic.  But bad goes to worse and when you are being pulled out of a melting snow seat by the crippled man you are roped to, and he is hanging over a yawning crevasse 150 feet below you, what do you do?

The moral dilemma is central to the book; its resolution and outcome is astonishing.  Time and again the author’s name on the cover has to be checked as the odds of his survival lengthen, page by page, from unlikely to impossible.

There are climbing terms used but there is no need to be a climber to appreciate the writing.  The emotions are raw but the prose is polished; and even if it were otherwise the resilience of the man would deserve a reading.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson

The Thunderbolt Kid, of course, is Bryson himself, the young boy living in Des Moines, Ohio during the 1950’s.  And life and times is what we get with recollections of his early life growing up in the Midwest and reflections on the social trends and national events of that formative period in the USA.

The recollections are often funny, laugh out loud funny, helped by childlike exaggeration that fits the voice and tone of the memoirs.  And the reflections are insightful ranging across race relations, nuclear armament, consumerism and communism to name but a few.

Why the Thunderbolt Kid?  That is his alter-ego after joining the ranks of the superheroes that populated the comic books of the day.  His superpower – that of blasting those adults, and there were many (teachers, neighbours, shopkeepers, cinema managers), that he found frustrating, obstructive or unpleasant, into oblivion.

Bryson at his brilliant best.