It is so tempting, especially in the run up to the yuletide excesses, to grab those heavily promoted volumes with well-known names emblazoned on their covers, but dig a little deeper and you may uncover more unusual treasure.
Here are three books I’ve read this year that I can recommend. Each is very different not only from the other two, but from the run-of-the mill works in their respective genres. There is desire at the core of all three. Permit me the freedom to attempt to add them to yours.
Man at Sea
Liam Bell
This is a wartime and post-war tale that sparks from the air defence of the Mediterranean island of Malta during the 1940s. In its storytelling it is more of a Hurricane than a Spitfire: sure and steady rather than sleek and glamourous. Or, perhaps, even more like a Wellington bomber, also robust, but with twin power plants, as this story has two plotlines thrusting it forwards, one during the second world war and the other a couple of decades later. The successive chapters switch between the two with a merging course being evident from the start. The alternating timeline adds perspective but also a balancing drag, slowing the story to add more tension. The craving here is a double delve into the personal past. Two persons piloting their missions with incomplete charts and unclear payloads. This is an affirming tale, but not without its painful episodes. The plot is sufficiently manoeuvrable to prove some interesting turns, but it is also palliative, not afraid to apply psychological ointment. It is accurate with respect to Maltese and aeronautical detail and the minutia of description evokes a vivid sense of place, time and people. As with real airborne dogfights there is more distance than abrasive contact in the shifting sections of the narrative, but the loops and rolls twist through interesting thematic clouds of devotion, distrust, revenge and betrayal. So, all in all this is more of a cruise than a high-octane sortie, but it is sufficiently well assembled to provide a sustaining sojourn through the scarring legacy of conflict. It is an unusual and interesting approach centred around one of the lesser-explored theatres of World War Two.
ISBN: 978-1-913211-80-6
Available widely, but if you can, please order directly from: Fly-on-the-Wall Press
(Liam Bell has a new novel out: The Sleepless available from the same publisher.)
The Finery
Rachel Grosvenor
Rachel Grosvenor takes her reader into one of those wonderful other worlds very like and very unlike the one we inhabit. Hence you will instantly recognise the niceties and nastiness of a neighbourhood governed by the eponymous regime whose self-interest and secrets are a smouldering fuse for resentment. Although formed from familiar components, the environment of this fiction is uniquely constructed. This is a world containing telephones, radio and electronic marvels, but where horsepower is very much constrained to the four-legged type. Some people live in houses, others in other places, but as with our world, power means privilege and a little knowledge can be considered dangerous. This is also a charmingly witty book and constantly surprising. The way people travel, their non-human companions, the laws to which they must adhere, the age at which they remain physically and politically potent and even the lengths of the chapters, combine to provide a unique entertainment. There is also quite a lot of chestnut broth. In the aesthetic sense this is a naive work, with an uncomplicated logic underpinning and clarifying decisions and consequences and as such it is a pleasing exponent of the fundamental hypocrisy that can fester in the core of an ostensibly egalitarian society. It takes a broad-brush approach to public opinion with nuance and individuality being confined mostly to the core protagonists, but there is an Orwellian Animal Farm quality to it in which the wronged engage a pragmatic resilience, form alliances, and shrug off the dangers to push for change. It is a work that rewards rather than provokes page turning, though the burrs hook stronger as the plot progresses. To begin with, it is the indomitability of the central character constantly butting up against the smugly, though precariously, embedded elite and their lackeys that provides the joy. The second half of the novel is more plot-driven involving underground resistance in both senses. This story made me smile as the protagonist and her pals fought the good fight with the aid of some inventive technology but without resorting to conveniently supernatural solutions. The social message is thereby validated. Enjoyable by adults who like speculative fiction that is not too far removed from reality, this book would also be of value to older young people, provoking them to consider what might lie beneath the finery of public privilege. It is convivial, imaginative, amusing, and life-affirming and the afterglow is as earthy and warming as the chestnut broth.
ISBN: 978-1-915789-03-7
Available widely, but if you can, please order directly from: Fly-on-the-Wall Press
Monstrous Longing
Abi Hynes
There’s always an added satisfaction in finding the ideal title; it is pleasing for both author and reader. This volume provides that pleasure, along with many others, and they are all just a little bit painful. Here I must declare a multiple interest. A person thanked among the author’s acknowledgements is a child of mine and I am acquainted with several others listed there, some of whom have tolerated my Drama classes, as indeed did the author herself, many half-moons ago. Her essays were always eloquent, authoritative and insightful. Her fiction perpetuates those qualities wrapping them now in the blanket of fabrication. Her stories are gut-wrenchingly revealing, showing not just the bone structure of desire, but the marrow, gristle and sinews as well. These stories shock, but also soothe, and then they unveil the less than savoury ingredients that we need to face our fevered minds, or to embalm those thoughts we’d rather not revisit. Good luck with that, this book says, they will come back; you need them too badly. In this weighty little volume you will find, amid the everyday minutiae, the associated moods, memes, motivations and memories that fester and ferment to fool our frame of mind. Abi Hynes keeps those revelations almost hidden, like a mobile phone on a lap beneath a desk. Suddenly there is an alert, and there is no denying that a message has been sent; a text you cannot ignore. Every story affected me, and not surprisingly Lady Macbeth struck a dramatic chord. It is a clever reassembly of stolen quotes that shapes again that most monstrous manifestation of one of those who theatrically longed long ago. Entirely faithful to the Bard’s original creation, this tale shows that theatrical persona afresh, succinctly and with bloody succulence. All fiction is true, but some is factual, and it was the images drawn from real life in Phantasmagoria that angered me. The historical basis for it was relayed verbally to me by Abi several years ago when I went to see her play about Margaretha Zelle (Mata Hari). It deeply saddened me then and cuts just as badly now. It was, however, A Conversation Recorded Before the End of the Experiment that pierced me the most potently. Consisting entirely of dialogue, this is without doubt a drama. It should be heard rather than read. It would be scintillating on radio. Coincidentally, I consumed it over breakfast to a background of talk radio describing terrible territorial turmoil. Those two stimuli clashed and combined, the fiction beneath my eyes amplifying the abomination in my ears. This is a story of desire at its most detestable, and yet it seems, inevitable. The final story – The Savage Chapel – also stabbed deep. It truthfully touches the very soul of transubstantiation. It is a visceral hymn of the heart. Intrinsic unpleasantness tied to inherent yearning is the theme of this collection. It is crucially authentic, courageously autoptic, and painfully prophetic. If you haven’t experienced symptoms similar to those described in this testament, you will. In order to be better prepared I suggest you peep under the cover.
ISBN: 978-1-913624-12-5
Available widely, but if you can, please order directly from: Dahlia Publishing.
See also:
The Finery at times made me smile in manner very reminiscent of my reaction to the work of Carl McGarrigle. See Tick-Wok and Wilder and Thornier.
Abi Hynes sometimes shares a creative crucible with David Hartley, and there are style and topic echoes in their respective works. See Prognostication.
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