The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne

In 1945, Catherine Goggin, sixteen years old and newly discovered pregnant, is denounced as a whore by the Goleen parish priest in front of the congregation and sent packing from the church. Her response is to get on the bus to Dublin and start a new life, A life in which a baby cannot figure, so the child is given to a nun to place in a new home.

Skip to 1952 and we discover that home is with Charles and Maud Avery, an unconventional couple, who are bringing up Cyril, now seven, with kindly disinterest while constantly reminding him that he is ‘not a real Avery’. The pattern is set to revisit Cyril’s life every seven years when we share significant events, often humorous, sometimes tragic.

This short review, avoiding spoilers, can only hint at the scrapes, the inner turmoil, the compromises, and the betrayals involved. Suffice it to say that Cyril, being young, gay and living in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, has problems. While the church and state sponsored discrimination reduces in later decades, his outsider status never goes away.

It is a small-scale epic, which builds up an eclectic cast of characters that weave in and out of the narrative over the decades. It is told in the first person by Cyril in a style that is engaging, authentic, and compassionately human.

Though long at 700 pages, it reads much shorter due to its episodic structure and fluent, frequently funny, prose. Highly recommended.

Mr Wilder & Me – Jonathan Coe

Mr Wilder is Billy Wilder, American film maker, whose career spanned five decades and included such classics as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot. Me, in the context of this novel, is Calista Frangopoulou, a woman of mixed Greek and English heritage.

Their paths cross in 1976 when Calista, on a student backpacking holiday to the US, finds herself in Hollywood having dinner with the already famous director, his scriptwriting partner Iz Diamond, and their wives. Serendipity strikes. They are looking for a location in Greece for their next project, she is bilingual, has local knowledge, and a young fresh outlook that the old guys appreciate. But it still comes a surprise when ten months later, back in Greece, Calista is invited onto the movie making crew to interpret while filming there.

One thing leads to another over that summer and as the film moves on to Paris and Munich, so does Calista.

While that period forms the bulk of the novel, it is narrated in retrospect by Calista, twenty years later, as her twin daughters reach the age she was then, and as they too are embarking (separately) on potentially life defining journeys.

It is a curious mix of biography, film directory, inter-generational by-play, and romcom (Calista meets a boy). But beneath it all is a sense of ending. By 1976 Wilder’s career is winding down, the Greek film a last hurrah. His skills, what he does best, are no longer fashionable, no longer in demand. Twenty years later, Calista’s job as a mother, a role she defines herself by, is similarly coming to an end or at least a sea change.

It is tender, slight, maybe subtle, maybe a little self-indulgent in its love for the golden age of cinema. The writing is good enough, expect no less from Jonathan Coe, but give me his more grounded Middle England and Bournville any day.

The Duke’s Children – Anthony Trollope

The Duke of Omnium, ex-prime minister Plantagenet Palliser, finds himself suddenly a single parent when the Duchess Glencora dies unexpectedly. The role should not be that onerous, the children are adults, just about, albeit somewhat immature.

Eldest son (and heir), known as Lord Silverbridge, was kicked out of his Oxbridge college for some high jinks and has been enjoying life since – hunting, fishing, shooting, and clubbing – and now is into horseracing with its associated gambling. Daddy is not impressed and Silverbridge tries to turn over a new leaf (quit racing), seek a new purpose (a seat in parliament), and find a wife. In his sights for that honour is Lady Mabel Grex, attractive and of good aristocratic stock as approved by the duke. She is impoverished, but that is no bar to the heir of the Omnium fortune. She likes Silverbridge well enough but decides not to roll over at his first advances. She will have some fun, make him work for her hand.

The Palliser daughter, Lady Mary, has no such coquetry. She falls hook, line, and sinker for the poor but honourable gentleman, Frank Tregear. (Unbeknown to her, he is on the rebound from Mabel Grex, the parting being mutually agreed as both need to marry for money rather than love). As for the Duke of Omnium, honourable but poor doesn’t cut it with him. He forbids the marriage. Why can’t she find someone suitable like her brother has!

But when an American beauty, Isabel Boncassen, arrives on the society circuit, Silverbridge’s head is turned, he must have her for his wife. But he knows all too well how his father will react to a proposed marriage to the granddaughter of a New York dock worker. And what about the proposed alliance with the house of Grex?

It takes 500 pages to resolve the thorny issues of love, duty, class, and honour, but we get there in the end. The journey is pleasurable if you are not in any rush and able to enjoy the flowing prose and sly wit of Trollope. And accommodate his off-piste side stories of skulduggery in horseracing, politicking, and wagering.

This, the sixth and final of the Palliser (or political) novels, provides a tick for the Book-et List, completing the series that I began in 2012 with a (second) reading of Can You Forgive Her? Given that I previously read the six volume Barchester Chronicles series between 1997 and 2009, I consider myself well and truly Trollop-ed out for the foreseeable future.