Hen's Teeth by Manda Scott

Kellen Stewart is a therapist who on returning from a lengthy sojourn abroad is confronted with the death of a former lover, Bridget Donnelly. She soon learns that while she was away deliberating on her future as well as her relationship with her partner Janine, Bridget’s brother, Malcolm had also died.

Kellen is unsatisfied with the coroner’s report that determined that Bridget had committed suicide. Soon, Kellen becomes embroiled in the seedy under belly of the city of Glasgow: and Bantam hens.

Kellen Stewart becomes amateur detective and like so many literary amateur detectives before her she enlists the help of friends and proves to be smarter than the local police.

Manda Scott’s use of a lesbian protagonist was a brave move back in the mid nineties. At that time it was very difficult to get a lesbian literary lead character to be taken seriously by the mainstream public, media and major publishing houses.

The Scottish writer and internationally renowned crime writer Val McDermid’s first books based around a lesbian detective, Lindsay Gordon, proved a difficult sell. She soon realized that if she wanted to make a living as a writer she would have to change her protagonist’s sexual orientation to straight.

In 2010 in the Independent newspaper, Val McDermid commented on the situation;

“My first three novels, featuring the UK’s first openly lesbian detective, Lindsay Gordon, were published 20 years ago by the Women’s Press, a small feminist publishing house whose output went largely unreviewed by the mainstream press and was ignored by chain booksellers.

Back then, the notion that a commercial house would publish a novel that featured a lesbian protagonist was laughable. I knew that I’d never make a living as a writer if I stuck to writing about Lindsay. Luckily for me, my ambitions to spread my wings and push myself as a writer meant I embraced alternative possibilities.”

           

So, it is with sadness that I have to write that the book is a slightly disappointing read. In 1976, Booker Prize judge Philip Larkin was asked for his thoughts on the books that had been short-listed. Larkin remarked, ‘The books had a beginning, a muddle and an end’.

                This description best sums up my thoughts of ‘Hen’s Teeth’. Many of the characters within the book are wonderfully drawn, in particular Kellen Stewart and Lee Adams but other characters are sketchily drawn; Elspeth Phillips and Janine to name but two.

                This is disappointing especially when it comes to Elspeth’s character as she is a police officer and a lesbian but no mention is made of how she combines these two elements in her life. We never find out if fellow officers are aware of her sexual orientation and if they are what problems, if any, this causes. This would have made an interesting sub-plot.

                Janine was Kellen’s partner for nearly four years. She was one of the reasons why Kellen decided to take a lengthy sabbatical in order to decide if the relationship was what she wanted. But, we don’t learn a lot about Janine and this I believe is a glaring omission for a character who shared the main protagonist’s life. Janine leaves Kellen a few days after her return but leaves the proverbial door open for Kellen to let Jan know what she wants from their relationship.

                Apart from the above-mentioned there are several more glaring reasons for describing parts of the book as a ‘muddle. Here are a few: firstly is Bridget’s dog. The dog, Tan, is killed but some chapters later it is alive and well and lying next to the Aga range and then a few chapters further on it is dead again.

                Next we have the ridiculous scenario where Lee and Kellen decide to break into Malcolm Donnelly’s workplace to retrieve information. They both dress in black with accompanying balaclavas. Both abseil from an adjacent building, over a high security fence and into the grounds of the medical building. It is never satisfactorily described as to how they achieved this feat. Lee manages to pick lock two secured doors but how this is done and what method is used is never mentioned. Then pushing incredulity to its apex two large guard dogs that patrol the ground that encompasses the building are subdued rather fortuitously as Kellen not only knows the dog’s owner but knows the safe word that will make the dogs act like puppies.

                In the books of Ian Rankin or Irvine Welsh to name but two, the city of Edinburgh is written in such a way as make the Athens of the North a distinct character in its own right. Manda Scott’s novel is based in and around the City of Glasgow. However, though various locations are mentioned in the book the City of Glasgow is basically ignored and personally I think that was a missed opportunity.

                As a whole the book is very well written with a mixture of pathos, drama and a dollop of humour. The conclusion and the crime’s dénouement are beautifully written and well paced and results in a very satisfactory ending to the novel.

                Manda Scott proves herself adept at writing within the difficult genre of crime writing. Hen’s Teeth was I believe Manda Scott’s first novel and also the first to feature Kellen Stewart who appears in two other novels, Night Mares and Stronger than Death. As a first novel it has to be congratulated as a standout but flawed novel in the saturated market that is crime thrillers.

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

One by One in the Darkness by Deidre Madden

The story is set during one week shortly before the IRA ceasefire in 1994. Three sisters, Helen, Sally and Kate relate and recollect their childhood during the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. The catalyst for these recollections is the return of the eldest sister Kate, (who now refers to herself as Cate), who abruptly leaves London where she works as a successful journalist for a glossy magazine as an event has forced her to re-evaluate her life.

The book’s chapters alternate between the return of Cate to Ireland and the three sister’s recollections of their childhood. Cate’s life changing event is not that difficult to guess and strangely it is revealed rather early on the book so breaking any sense of tension regarding that particular plotline.

The sister’s childhood is almost idyllic. Their parents own a farm an hour’s drive from Derry. This distance from the cities and towns of Northern Ireland keeps the horrors of the troubles at arm’s length as it also must have felt to those on mainland Britain. The girl’s only connection to the Irish troubles was during their visits to towns like Antrim where they would witness preparations for the Orange Walk; Union Jacks hung out of windows, Orange arches with symbols of a compass, a set square and ladder painted brightly on them.

“And yet for all this they knew that their lives, so complete in themselves were off centre in relation to the society beyond those fields and houses”

However, this insular life soon changed when the British troops moved into Northern Ireland in 1969. With British Army checkpoints around their county and the subsequent visits to the sister’s farm by soldiers the troubles in its many nefarious guises had intruded into the sister’s childhood.

With the atrocity that was Bloody Sunday in 1972 the troubles also came to mainland Britain with the bombing of the Aldershot Headquarters by the IRA. I mention these events as I believe that the sister’s farm may be alluding to the British mainland during the same period of time of the 1960s and 1970s.

I found the story interesting but not fascinating. Each of the sister’s characters was used as clichéd ciphers for Ireland. The eldest sister Kate loves Ireland but needs to leave its sectarian bigotry and religious intractability and becomes a success which she wouldn’t have found if she had stayed in Ireland. The middle sister, Helen becomes a lawyer and defends terrorists even though a horrific experience has befallen her family. The third sister, Sally becomes a primary school teacher like her mother. She hates and loves Ireland in equal measure but stays due to her loyalty to her mother.

The dialogue is rather lumpen and incongruous. There were times when the dialogue did not ring true especially that spoken by the sisters.

Helen’s gay friend David is a superfluous character and seems only to have been shoe-horned into the story to possibly prove how open minded Helen is.

Of all the fictional books that have been written about the troubles, Cal by Bernard Maclaverty or Gerry Seymour’s Journeyman Tailor to name but a few, One by One in the Darkness in my opinion would find it difficult to a part of the any list of the top twenty books on the subject of Northern Ireland and its conflict.

Oringinally published at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1997 Shortlist)

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood My rating: 4 of 5 stars

  And that is how we go on. He asks a question, and I say an answer, and he writes it down. In the courtroom, every word that came out of my mouth was as if burnt into the paper they were writing it on, and once I said a thing I knew I could never get the words back; only they were the wrong words, because whatever I said it would be twisted around, even if it was the plain truth in the first place. And it was the same thing with Dr. Bannerling at the Asylum. But now I feel as if everything I say is right. As long as I say something, anything at all, Dr. Jordan smiles and writes it down, and tells me I am doing well. 
While he writes, I feel he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me--drawing on my skin--not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end, but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord.
And inside the peach there's a stone.

In Alias Grace, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1997, Margaret Atwood tackles a historical mystery from a small town in Canada in the mid-19th Century. Did Grace Marks participate in the murder of her employer and his housekeeper/mistress or was she simply an innocent bystander taken hostage by the stable-hand who was convicted and hanged for the crime? The real Grace Marks was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison, and eventually Grace was released. Atwood approaches the events in the tale through the device of a young doctor, Simon Jordan, who comes to interview Grace in order to test methods of dealing with amnesia. The novel alternates between two points of view. Grace reflects on her current situation, as in the quote above, and also provides edited and unedited versions of the answers to questions Dr. Jordan asks her. The other perspective is the young doctor's. He struggles with big and small decisions about his own personal life, while at the same time trying to discern the truth about the crime Grace is accused of committing. Through these two lenses, the novel explores class issues, sex roles, the nature of memory, and the 19th century spirtualism craze, among other themes. The characters are well and sympathetically drawn. Grace is a strong, perceptive and appealing heroine. Her life history has made her both wise and circumspect in her dealings with those around her. Dr. Jordan is younger and more naive, and serves as a fascinating counterpoint to Grace. Atwood begins each section of the novel with selections from literature and from contemporary documents about the historical murder case. The book gets under your skin, and is very hard to put down. In some ways it is the most straightforward and accessible of the Atwood novels I have read, but that doesn't make it a simple book. It's a suspenseful and fascinating read.

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

I have read a lot of Holocaust books in the course of my journey through the 1001 Books list. Each book has moved me, has added to my understanding of the time and place, of the experience of those whose lives were torn asunder by the large and small horrors. This book may be the best, though it comes at the subject more obliquely than many. The language, the psychological depth, the complexity together left me breathless. Here is my Goodreads review of Fugitive Pieces which begins with the book's opening passage:

Time is a blind guide.


Bog boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.  


No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Let me begin by saying that whatever I type here, I will not do this book justice. You should read this book. I do not give 5 stars lightly, and this volume, which won the Orange Prize in 1997, had earned 5 stars in my mind by just a chapter or two in. In reading farther, I never felt the urge to revise my assessment. This book eases into your soul and takes up residence.

Let me start simply with what it is about. The book captures the experiences primarily of two men. The first, Jakob Beer, is found as a child hiding buried in mud at an archaeological site after fleeing the Nazis who have killed his parents. Only after he escapes does he realize that he does not know what became of his older sister. The Greek archaeologist who finds him takes him back to Greece, hides him, and then builds a new life with him as his godfather. The second man, Ben, takes up the story at the point of Jakob's death. He is a scholar inspired by Beer's work, and the Canadian child of two concentration camp survivors. The book powerfully chronicles the physical and psychological impact that the Nazis had on individuals and on the territories they occupied, but it does so in gemlike fragments--images, moments, dreams, the reflexive responses of individuals wounded in devastating ways by the horrors inflicted by men on their fellow creatures. Beer is a poet; one gift that the archaeologist gives him is the tradition of using of using language to meet the deepest human experience. As he hides in the house on a Greek hillside, he reads and absorbs the literary traditions of Europe's great ancient cultures. But he is given more. The archaeologist loves him deeply, teaches him to trust and to connect with people, and shares his own love of the earth and its records of truth. Geology is present throughout the book, and in the later sections meteorology is, as well, since Ben's scholarship looks at the impact of meteorology on historic events. And finally, romantic love and both its capacity and failure to transform and transcend the wounds of past experience is gorgeously explored in the lives of both men. The language of this book is remarkable, the themes complex and expertly wrought. There are times it is hard to breathe while reading it. This book deserves to be read and reread, as were many volumes on the shelves of Beer's home in Greece which Ben searches through after Jakob's death, seeking journals to take back to Canada to a mutual friend. It is too beautiful and too powerful to leave behind after a single reading.

Laura's Review - Alias Grace

In 1843, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery were brutally murdered at their home in Kingston, Ontario. Two servants, James McDermott and Grace Marks, were tried and convicted. McDermott was sentenced to death, but Grace's sentence was commuted to life in prison. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood uses scant historical evidence, and the character of young Dr. Simon Jordan, to tell Grace's story.

Dr. Jordan is somewhat of a specialist in mental illness, and in 1859 is granted permission to conduct a series of interviews with Grace at the penitentiary. He hopes to learn her side of the story, not just what her attorney told her to say at trial. But Grace has blocked all memories associated with the murders, and uncovering the truth is a long process requiring much patience. Jordan visits Grace nearly every day, and she recounts her life story from early childhood in Ireland all the way up to the murders.

Very early on, I fell into reading Alias Grace as I would any murder mystery. I forgot it was historical fiction, and began reading between the lines, searching for red herrings and expecting surprise plot twists. But the fascinating aspects of this tale are actually due to its basis in historical fact. In the 1840s, the field of mental illness was going through tremendous change, with many new theories and treatment methods. Many psychological conditions were simply not well understood. And Grace herself was a victim of society's prevailing attitudes toward women. Because she was attractive, some thought she must be the mastermind behind the murders. Others claimed her youth made her an unwilling victim. Margaret Atwood brings out another side of Grace, that of a strong independent woman whose psychological reaction to trauma fundamentally changed the course of her life.




Cross-posted from my blog

Alias Grace - Wendy's Review

The pattern of this quilt is called the Tree of Paradise, and whoever named that pattern said better than she knew, as the Bible does not say Trees. It says there were two different trees, the Tree of life and the Tree of Knowledge; but I believe there was only the one, and that the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same. And if you ate of it you would die, but if you didn't eat of it you would die also; although if you did eat of it, you would be less bone-ignorant by the time you got around to your death. Such an arrangement would appear to be more the way life is. -From Alias Grace, page 459-

In the year 1843, at the tender age of sixteen, Grace Marks was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for her role in the slaying of her employer Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Mongomery (Kinnear's mistress and housekeeper). The case garnered excessive interest in Canada (where the crimes occurred) due to Marks' uncommon beauty, her young age and the juicy combination of sex, violence and what was considered 'the insubordination of the lower class.'

Margaret Atwood has taken this moment in history and created a novel both compelling and fascinating. Told alternately from the point of view of Grace and Dr. Simon Jordan - a doctor who is eager to uncover Grace's lost memories of the murders and determine her guilt or innocence - the story gradually reveals Grace's secrets and her complex personality.

Alias Grace is constructed with an eye to detail and contains beautiful symbolism and exquisite imagery. Atwood's use of quilt patterns both as titles for the chapters as well as clues to the mystery is brilliant. As quilts are layered and stitched together, the stitcher gradually reveals the pattern hidden in the fabric...just as Grace Marks re-constructs her life and the events surrounding that fateful day. Nothing is as it seems. For every character there is a dark side and a light side; good vs. evil; innocence vs. guilt. And even Grace tells us: '...and that is the same with all quilts, you can see them two different ways, by looking at the dark pieces, or else the light.'

Margaret Atwood once again demonstrates her ability to create memorable characters and weave a story which enthralls.

Highly recommended; rated 4.5/5.