Bournville – Jonathan Coe

On 8 May 1945, eleven-year-old Mary Clarke sits with her family to listen to Winston Churchill proclaiming Victory in Europe. She lives in Bournville, midlands home of the Cadbury chocolate factory where many of family work. The snapshot of the day gives a flavour of the times and introduces the family whose life will be followed over the next eight decades.

Not so much followed as periodically visited to join them on a further six days of national celebration or significance: the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the 1966 World Cup final; the investiture in 1969 of the Prince of Wales, his wedding in 1981 to Diana, and her funeral in 1997; ending with the COVID-laden 75^th anniversary of that VE Day in 2020.

The theme, of course, is change. Change in society, its material context and more importantly its attitudes. But through all that change the thread of family runs strong even when events and differences stretch relationships to breaking point.

Coe’s prose is easy on the eye but very effective in getting over the subtleties of relationships and developing characters whom we see born, grow, age, and die as the generations pass. Bournville remains the spiritual home to the family and the book ends there as it started, fittingly and quite movingly, with Mary, now 86, socially distancing and reduced to communicating with her family via Skype.

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead

This is an epic novel (all but defying a concise review) narrating the life story of Marian Graves from an inauspicious beginning to her tilt at circumnavigation of the world by flying a longitudinal ‘great circle’ over both poles.

Marian and her twin brother Jamie are born in 1914 to a self-destructive mother and a taciturn father who captains a transatlantic liner. The whole family is on board when a German shell cripples the ship. Mrs Graves goes down willingly with the boat, but Captain Graves, defying convention and inviting opprobrium, gathers his babes in arms and jumps aboard a lifeboat. That leads to a prison sentence and an end to his career. Meanwhile, Marian and Jamie are dumped into the care of an uncle living in rural Montana. They grow up in benign neglect, forming a friendship with local Huckleberry Finn type, Caleb.

A chance encounter with the Flying Brayfogles, a barnstorming aerobatic duo, gives young Marian an urge, a lust, a compulsion to fly aeroplanes. The book goes on to cover her against-the-odds battles to fly. Sacrifices need to be made as her life lurches from bad decision to crisis to disaster while still making progress in her ambition. Smuggling, freighting in Alaska, and delivering WW2 warplanes in Europe lead eventually to the attempt on the great circle.

Interspersed in the historical tale is a first person narrative from Hadley Baxter, a young out of favour actress, who is cast to play the lead in a movie of Marian’s life story, albeit based on the fragments and misinformation available to the scriptwriters. This false perspective, moving in parallel to the main story adds depth and enables a clever denouement, almost providing alternative endings to the story.

The epic scale (600 pages) allows Shipstead to wander off-piste to provide light touch information about early aviation, and to follow episodes in Jamie’s, Caleb’s, and Hadley’s lives, before homing back on to Marian. Hadley Baxter’s delivery may grate, while being ‘in character’, but this is outweighed by the main narrative style which breezes along nicely.

Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor

A teenage girl goes missing in Northern England while out walking on the moor with her family. They have been holidaying over New Year at a village, and the locals inevitably join in the search. But she cannot be found.

In the aftermath, once the police and media (but not the girl’s family) have left, feelings and emotions in the locals remain high – anxiety, fear, sympathy, curiosity, mistrust, and suspicion. McGregor gives snapshot observations of, and conversations between, the villagers. There are no introductions to these characters, they pop up in context then the narrative cuts away to another resident in another part of the village, or to the natural environment around it, which continues oblivious to the human drama.

The year progresses, marked by its traditional milestones – Spring, Easter, the well-dressing, an annual cricket match, midsummer, mischief night, the bonfire, Christmas, and back to New Year. In parallel, the natural world marks time – migrating birds returning, fox cubs are born, vegetation blooms, badgers mate, leaves fall, weather happens.

McGregor takes us through the next year in the same vein, then the next, and the subsequent ten or so in the same style. The centrality of the missing girl fades, but our familiarity and understanding of the village life grows. The fly on the wall point of view is surprisingly effective. We soon feel as involved in village life as is the publican, vicar, potter, newspaper editor, farmers, gamekeeper, school caretaker, and the rest. Then there are the children, contemporaries of the missing girl who, unlike her, grow up into young adults under our watch.

It is a beautifully written, engrossing account of a village, and of lives lived in rhythm with the beat of the natural world around it.

Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann

If the title is odd, the subtitle is more telling – Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI.

The oil comes from beneath the land owned by the Osage tribe. The American Indians, shunted from state to state to make room for the white settlers, in 1870 ended up in this rocky, sterile, and unwanted region of what became Oklahoma.

As for the money, in a shrewd or lucky move, the rights to any subterranean minerals on the reservation were retained collectively by the tribe, to be distributed via ‘headrights’ that could not be bought or sold, only inherited. It turned out there was oil under those sterile soils, and as the volume and price of oil increased in the early 1900s, the headright owners became some of the wealthiest citizens of the United States. Except they were not really full citizens, many designated as financially incompetent to manage their own wealth and placed by the paternalistic federal government under the financial guardianship of mainly white, professional, men. Good intentions maybe, but the result was exploitation on an industrial scale, with many making a good living from the ‘Indian Business’.

But for some this was not enough. A combination of rampant greed and racist resentment led to a trail of killings as a way to funnel the headright income away from the Osage. Execution style shootings, poisoning, a couple even blown up in their house, but no culprits, only inadequate inquests, sketchy investigations, and spurious explanations.

Law enforcement was patchy in those days, less so in the Indian reservations, and largely left in the hands of the local worthies – lawyers, doctors, businessmen – who were most at benefit from the old Indian Business and now from the new rash of dying Osage. When some Osage used their money to bring in private investigators, any who got close to the truth were warned off or died in mysterious circumstances, including falling from a moving train.

Eventually the federal government took notice and J Edgar Hoover, who was establishing a federal bureau of investigation, saw the opportunity to bolster its credentials. A Texan named Tom White was brought in along with a host of undercover agents, and eventually under his persistence the grizzly truth (or part of it) was laid bare.

David Grann skilfully picks through the sorry tale. Tom White’s piecing together of the evidence and unmasking the network of conspirators is contextualised with interesting historical asides and Grann’s own recently researched information, to provide a gripping, if socially uncomfortable, read.