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).

The Return – Roberto Bolano

Read as leg 7 (Chile) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Although the author is Chilean by birth and upbringing, these short stories reflect his wider world view and experience, spanning the Americas, Europe and Russia.

Many take as their subject a portion of an individual’s life, retold second hand in a style almost verbatim.  As for the ‘heroes’ – they are anything but; criminals, gangsters, pimps, whores, porn stars and, worse of all, poets, all feature heavily.

The best for me was the title story in which a recently deceased narrator observes with understandable distaste the unpleasant fate of his corpse at the hands (thankfully only the hands) of a necrophiliac.

This collection is not for those who like a good tale with a punchy ending; most of the stories simply share a slice of the unusual before fading away without resolution, and so maybe reflect life rather than art.

The Gates – John Connolly

The hardback cover is striking and attractive – a blue, black, and amber rendition of the night sky, the suburban streets, silhouettes of figures (human and otherwise) and, in front of an indeterminate redness, a set of black wrought iron gates dangerously ajar.

For these are the gates of Hell and unseemly things are on the way out, summoned by a combination of Mrs Abernathy’s séance in the basement of 666 Crawley Avenue and an unexpected event at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

A small boy and his dog witness the former and soon become the main obstacles to the achievement of Hell on Earth.  Using courage, ingenuity, school friends with useful skills (cricket and a knowledge of black hole physics) and a helpful demon with a grudge, the battle is waged.

The premise and prose style indicate a target readership of young adult, but what age?  The hero is about eleven but the humour is dark and the footnotes introduce serious science.

The perils of choosing a book by the cover became evident - loved its artwork but felt a few decades old for the text.

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s name for the milieu in which the polite society of the early nineteenth century mill around, show off, seek amusement, manoeuvre and score points.

Becky Sharp should not really be part of it, convention decrees that her lack of pedigree and means condemn her to serve the great and the good rather than join in their games.  But she is young, attractive, accomplished, witty and quite without scruples when it comes to social climbing.

Amelia Sedley, equally young, equally attractive if not so vivacious, has better pedigree and more means, at least initially.  But while Becky schemes for her own benefit, Amelia puts others first.  As Becky sees and exploits weakness, Amelia is blind to faults and is indiscriminately loyal.

The story of the two women, and the men they attract for good or ill, meanders over 600 pages.  For the modern reader too many of these pages are choked with Thackeray’s asides gently satirising his time.  In the rest the tale develops at a steady pace, widening to embrace the ups and downs of two moneyed families, the Osbornes and the Crawleys, whose scions (George and Rawden) have a major impact on the heroines.

Country estates, London town, the Battle of Waterloo, and the spas of Europe all feature over the twenty year or so span of the book before a climax of sorts enables the reader to exit the fair with good grace and a sense of both achievement and relief.

The Man Who Disappeared – Clare Morrall

That is Felix Kendall, accountant, who disappears before the police can arrest him for his money-laundering part in a wider criminal network.  All well and good for him to escape, but what about the family he leaves behind?

Wife Kate and the two children face a future at first uncertain and then all too real as their creature comforts - big house, private schools, the leisure to study for an art history degree - are peeled away.  Kate must take over the role as breadwinner and family rock and the kids have to adapt; and what is worse in their world, becoming part of a single parent family or having a dad labelled as a criminal?

It is an interesting premise, and Morrall unfolds the narrative from all angles with an understanding and empathy that reflects the daily slog each must make against a misfortune whether or not of their making.  Kate, suffering guilt by association, searches her past for missed clues; similarly the holed-up Felix examines his history for where it all went wrong. The children have minor dramas, but to no obvious purpose.

In truth not much happens for much of the book; what dramatic tension there is revolves around whether Felix will resurface or not, and if he does how will the family react?  There is a flurry of action just before the end, and a resolution of sorts for those still reading.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme – Lars Mytting

The narrator, Edvard Hirifjell, lives with his grandfather Sverre on an isolated farm in rural Norway.  There are reasons beyond geographic for their isolation.

Edvard’s parents died while holidaying in France when he was just three, the circumstances unusual if not mysterious, particularly as he was with them, survived, and was found days later many miles away.  His grandfather, tarred by his eastern front service in the Nazi-supporting Norwegian Legion, is largely shunned by the local community so it no surprise Edvard is a bit of a loner.

When Sverre dies (no spoiler - it happens early in the book) Edvard gains access to photos and documents that rekindle his curiosity over his family tragedy.  Now totally alone he starts asking other people questions that his grandfather had previously fended off.  What was his mother (‘a French drifter’ according to his grandmother) doing in rural Norway in 1965 before she had met his father?  Why did  Sverre’s brother Einar, a skilled cabinet maker, leave Norway for good in 1939; if he was, as reported, executed by the Germans in 1944, then who has made and sent the distinctive coffin for Sverre’s burial?

That item has come from Shetland and Edvard resolves to travel there and pick up the trail of his family history, leaving the farm in the hands of old flame Hanne.  She fails to appreciate his new obsession but agrees to mind the shop in his absence.

In Shetland revelations abound.  Einar’s trail is picked up; a young Scottish heiress is encountered who has an agenda of her own that may coincide or conflict with his; more documents are unearthed; false identities and hidden truths emerge; and all point to a certain sixteen trees that grew in the Somme in 1914.

The book is multi-layered and intricately plotted with atmospheric descriptions of wild and starkly beautiful locations.  Edvard’s journey is both physical and emotional, almost bringing to mind that of Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations (there are even echoes of Satis House and Estella).

The outcome is uncertain to the last but what is not in doubt is the lasting good impression of an epic tale that drags in history, mystery and even a little carpentry.