Book Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Back in 2014, I was keen to get my hands on Ali Smith's latest novel How to be Both - we'd just chosen it as our next book club read.

In a flurry of optimism, given the Man Booker isn't generally my favourite prize, I bought one of those bundles of the whole shortlist. There were a couple of other titles I thought I might read before the prize was announced.

Needless to say, the only one finished was How To Be Both (which I loved), with the rest of the books consigned to the depths of my TBR pile. Earlier this year I ferreted out Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and was blown away by that, too.

Since then, my eye has repeatedly been drawn to the eventual winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. How stunning must it be to have beaten two such strong contenders? Only one thing for it - read it myself and find out.

Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, captured by the Japanese in the Second World War, is imprisoned in a jungle camp where POWs are forced to build the notorious Burma Death Railway. Here, Dorrigo and his Aussie camp mates endure the most gruelling physical and mental privations. Prisoners have few rights and are treated no better than slaves; malnourished, beaten and literally worked to death. Cholera is rife; despite this, Dorrigo must stand by as his patients are dragged out of hospital to make up work gangs and he's reduced to performing operations without surgical instruments or anaesthetic.

Flanagan writes with sensitivity and authenticity; the frequently harrowing passages in the squalor and monsoon rains of the jungle vividly detail the mental and physical struggle to survive. In their communal suffering, the motley crew of men from the furthest-flung corners of Australia are spirited but never saintly. Tiny Middleton works at such a rate that he sets an unachievable target for the rest of the men, while Rooster MacNeice harbours a festering resentment over the perceived theft of a duck egg.

The pressure on their Japanese captors is also well drawn; driven by a code of honour that sees death as a preferable alternative to imprisonment and always battling to fulfil the ever increasing demands from high command. Yet, the Japanese still show vestiges of respect to fellow officers, and Dorrigo is able to mitigate the worst of their orders by daily negotiating down the numbers of men required in the gangs. Concentrating on leading by example, on being 'the Big Fella' to his men, he's haunted still by the intense love affair he had before the war with Amy, young wife of his uncle. An affair which ended as Dorrigo was leaving to fight and already promised to another woman.
 
While captivated and horrified by the graphic events in the jungle, I struggled to engage with Flanagan's narrative outside of them; the post-war difficulties of the Australian survivors returning home, the rehabilitation of their Japanese captors into family men. While this sounds equally engrossing, for me the prose veers here towards the overblown. Most importantly, Amy simply doesn't ring true in my imagination as a living, breathing character. While the depiction of suffering in The Narrow Road to the Deep North recalls Sebastian Faulks' First World War saga Birdsong, the claustrophobic intensity of the affair Faulks describes between Stephen Wraysford and the married Isabelle seems lacking in Dorrigo and Amy's story.

A significant work and a contender, certainly, but this wouldn't have been my pick as winner. Only three more of the shortlist to read and, finger on the pulse, I might be finally able to form a definitive view of the Man Booker Prize for 2014.


The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is published in paperback by Vintage.

Book Review: The Mine by Antti Tuomainen

In The Mine, Antti Tuomainen threads together two contemporary narratives to challenge the traditions of Scandinavian crime writing. This is Finland as a spent dystopia; elements of noir fused with the eco-thriller polemic of Paul E. Hardisty's The Abrupt Physics of Dying or David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, to create a fiction that subtly subverts the genre.

Janne Vuori, investigative journalist for Helsinki Today, receives a tip-off about the hazardous practices of a mining company in Finland's frozen north. He's plunged deep into a black-and-white world of darkness and ice, where the snow must be forced to give up its secrets. Sifting through his findings, Janne becomes certain he's uncovering an environmental disaster. One that may have already claimed the life of a reporter, and that convinces him he's being followed back home in Helsinki.

When the mining company's directors die one after another in mysterious circumstances, it seems militant activists are taking matters into their own hands. But Janne's investigations are muddied, as unresolved elements of his past come crashing back to haunt him. And he must confront the most modern dilemma of all; how to combine his obsessive pursuit of the truth with personal responsibilities - as the father he never had to his young daughter Ella and husband to Pauliina, who has a career of her own.

Tuomainen, translated into English by David Hackston, writes with pace and style, weaving Janne's first person story together with blogs, emails and news articles and a second, off-kilter narrative that gradually comes into focus.There are similarities with Ari Thór Arason in Ragnar Jónasson's Dark Iceland series; Janne and Ari Thór are both young men with disturbed pasts, in search of resolution and their own identities. As Janne is confronted with a series of impossible dilemmas, he has to decide where his own morality lies and what it is that he holds most dear.

For lovers of fictional journalists (my favourite probably being Thomas Fowler in Graham Greene's The Quiet American), Janne Vuori is a gift:

Writing was thinking, a way of bringing order to the world. By writing I worked out what I was actually doing, formulated my true opinion on things. When I was writing, I could shut off everything around me...When I didn't write, it soon started to show...Everything began to become patchy. And the longer I didn't write, the more scattered and restless my mind became.

You can forgive a man like that quite a lot, even if you disagree with his choices. In the heart of the narrative are moments of humour, as Janne unexpectedly finds himself grappling with the logistics of twerking. But for the most part, Tuomainen keeps his reader on a tense, tight rein.

Maybe it's for another story, but I wanted to know more about the women in Janne's life  - his wife and mother - apart from their relationship to their men. They are both called on to make significant sacrifices of their own; what do they think of each other, how do they get along? It's an indication of Janne's personal struggles and single-minded pursuit of his own agenda, that there's still so much more to know.


The Mine by Antti Tuomainen is published in paperback and ebook format by Orenda Books. Many thanks to Karen at Orenda for my review copy.

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

Imagine being limited to speaking just 140 words a day; that’s exactly what happens to Bernadette and Oliver in this accomplished production from the University of Warwick’s recently-formed Walrus Theatre company. Words – tumbling and jostling with all the force of a white-knuckle ride – are the essence of this bare stage two-hander from the pen of Sam Steiner. Apparently, an average person uses 123,205,750 of them in a lifetime; here their loss is all the more starkly felt as they’re ruthlessly legislated away.

Bernadette (Beth Holmes) is a trainee lawyer and Oliver (Euan Kitson) a musician and political activist when they meet in a pet cemetery for the funeral of a cat. At first, they’re uninhibited, able to use all the free-flowing words they want. Bernadette questions Oliver’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, while her profession obviously rankles with him. But, as their relationship deepens, the shadow of the Hush Laws looms over them, limiting their speech. Bernadette – practical, career-focused and, like so many of us, in denial that it will ever happen – doesn’t foresee the devastating consequences. Idealistic Oliver senses danger and goes on protest marches that ultimately prove useless. As the Orwellian laws are introduced, the couple rush to spill out their last uninhibited words of freedom, an ‘exorcism’ that raises more questions than it has time to answer.

Holmes and Kitson are engaging and likeable as they circle the stage and their two unadorned microphones, flexing together and apart in moves tightly choreographed by director Ed Madden to sometimes reflect, sometimes challenge each other. As the timeline zips back and forth – one minute they’ve just met, the next they’re each announcing the number of words they have left over from their day – we see their relationship move from infatuation and love through to boredom and disillusionment. Without the adequate number of words, they struggle to express themselves, to resolve issues and move on.

Through this everyday couple’s on-stage chemistry – polished now by repeated performance – the focus of the personal convincingly illuminates the social, political and philosophical consequences of such draconian limits. Bernadette, when in court, is allowed a special dispensation of additional words, dividing society into verbal ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. When each word needs to count, its meaning matters. A qualifier like ‘really’ becomes thoughtless and extravagant, two words like ‘love you’ run together to make a saving. And yet, one of the most endearing moments is when the couple spontaneously bursts into a gloriously wasteful rendition of the theme from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

A show honed to great acclaim on the tiny stages of Edinburgh is in danger of wallowing in the relative size of the Factory Theatre, but still it works. Despite an ending that tries to wrap things up a little too neatly, it’s a clever and incisive exploration of free speech and the power of words.

Reviewed on 18 November 2016 | Image: Contributed

 

Book Review: The Exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto

In The Exiled, police detective Anna Fekete takes a break from the cold of Finland to return to Kanizsa, the Balkan village of her birth. But, what's meant to be a relaxing holiday turns into a fresh investigation, as her bag is stolen and the thief found dead next day in the mud of the riverbank.

Anna can't help but get involved - even though her intervention is not entirely welcomed by the Serbian authorities. Details of their investigation don't ring true and she suspects something is amiss. As she probes more deeply into the background of the dead man - a Romany living on the marginalised fringes of society - she becomes more and more convinced that his death was no accident. She finds evidence of traffickers taking advantage of the thousands of refugees trying to cross the border into Hungary, of corruption and cover ups by officials. And, most frightening of all, a trail that leads back to her own family, that threatens to reopen the wounds of hurt and grief from her past.

Anna is a complex character - as readers of Kati Hiekkapelto's previous two Fekete novels The Hummingbird and The Defenceless will already know. Living in one country with her roots in another, she finds it hard to feel fully at home in either. Her policeman father was killed on duty while she was still a child and, in following in his footsteps, she's driven to extremes in her singular dedication. Her mother wants nothing more than for Anna to settle down with a family of her own - the accepted feminine role in traditional Kanizsa - but she is unwilling and unable to conform.

As in The Defenceless, Hiekkapelto mines themes that resonate with the world today; of migrants forced to flee from war, enduring the most abject conditions in their desperate scrabble for survival. Of racism, prejudice and playing politics with people's lives. Of a village fighting to retain its values and identity. In the midst of this she places Anna and her family, her loss of her father and older brother and renewed friendships with villagers who have never left Kanizsa.

Hiekkapelto writes in her signature taut, gritty and unsparing style - translated once again from the Finnish by David Hackston - though at times it feels like the insights into Anna's home life are weighing the story down. For me, it takes longer than in previous books for all the elements to come together - there are too many new friends and family members to fully get to grips with, perhaps. But the help she receives from Finnish colleagues leads to breakthroughs and her new relationship with Péter, a man she only began flirting with for information, becomes an intriguing aside. In the last third of the book, the tension mounts as the enormity of the crime is uncovered, leading to a shocking and satisfying conclusion.

The Exiled is published in paperback and ebook by Orenda Books. Thanks to Karen at Orenda for my review copy.

Theatre Review: Trouble in Mind at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

 

 

In the aftermath of a brutal 2016 election dividing the US along racial lines, Trouble in Mind offers a particularly timely glimpse of segregation in mid-20th Century America. Laurence Boswell’s latest production for the Ustinov revives Alice Childress’ trailblazing but overlooked work, originally produced Off Broadway in 1955; a race-play-within-a-race-play. It’s a powerful, funny and ultimately disturbing portrayal of the stereotypes African Americans have fought against for generations, which still resonate all too clearly with a contemporary audience.

Wiletta Mayer is a singer and actor with a lifetime’s experience, glad to take on the mother’s role in a new work, Chaos in Belleville, set in America’s deep south. She may have a low opinion of the play’s merits, but she’s willing to go along with it to keep the white director happy. Only as rehearsals progress does she begin to question its authenticity; simple black characters depicted through the prism of a white writer, protected from their own foolishness by the benevolence of a white boss.

Tanya Moodie turns in a powerhouse performance as Wiletta, simultaneously still excited by acting in the theatre and wearied to her bones by the limitations of playing ‘Mammies’ and ‘Jemimas’. She’s spirited, bold and brimming with energy; mining the nuances of every emotion, her larger-than-life bravado runs into sudden, devastating moments of defiance, as Wiletta gradually realises she’s no longer willing to gratefully accept the crumbs from the white man’s table.

While this is overwhelmingly Wiletta’s story, under Boswell’s vivid and well-paced direction, the whole cast is superb. The play’s other black characters may agree with Wiletta, but they’re less willing to put their jobs – and lives – on the line; veteran actor Sheldon (Joseph Marcell), the only one to have seen a lynching in real life, questions whether he would whittle a stick while his own son is in danger, but does it anyway. Kiza Deen’s Millie is bright and sassy in life but will only go through the motions of her part, while Daniel Ezra’s eager and naive John quickly discovers the compromises he must make to survive in theatre. Meanwhile, Jonathan Cullen delivers a mercurial portrayal of white director Al Manners, who has his own agenda; paying lip service to motivation and black lives, he’s ultimately dictatorial, ruthless and lacking in any real empathy.

Polly Sullivan’s set design has all the meticulous detail we’ve come to expect at the Ustinov; a dingy 1950s Broadway stage area for rehearsal, littered with mismatched furniture and assorted props. Alice Childress was herself an actor and Trouble in Mind is rooted in her own experiences; a work of rare intensity, excoriating humour and textural depth, that deals not only with racism but touches on sexism, too.

Could this be why the play, which won an OBIE award in 1956, has been so infrequently performed and too often neglected since? Ironically, it might have got to Broadway had Childress agreed to compromise with a white director’s demands to change the ending. Occasionally, it may seem to have too much happening to absorb in any one sitting, but this production of Trouble in Mind is not only an overdue revival; in the light of current social and economic upheaval, it also serves as an unsettling reminder of a patriarchal past that is still exerting its grip.

Runs until 17 December 2016 | Image: Simon Annand

Theatre Review: The Weir at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

There’s a deceptive air of normality at the opening of Conor McPherson’s much garlanded 1997 play The Weir; another evening in a rural Irish backwater pub, where the regulars shut out the howling wind and gather for a few pints and a ‘small one’ or two.

Rachel O’Riordan – hugely successful last year in her direction of Iphigenia in Splott – takes the helm of this co-production between the Sherman and Tobacco Factory Theatres. Transferring to the intimacy of the Factory Theatre from its run in Cardiff, with Kenny Miller’s authentically spit and sawdust bare-wood design, it feels as though we’re listening into a series of illicitly intriguing conversations at the next table.

Yet, there’s a huge hinterland here. As Jack and Jim chew over their day with barman Brendan, their easy familiarity is underpinned by years of shared experience, growing up in the same small community, immersed in its traditions and now comparing betting tips. Then, this evening’s equilibrium is threatened by the arrival of local-boy-made-good Finbar with Valerie, a newcomer recently arrived from Dublin. It’s in seeking to impress the stranger in their midst that the men begin to tell stories from their past; tales veering into ghostly local folklore that also expose the bitter resentments and confessions of their own youth and childhoods.

O’Riordan mines the play for its rhythms; the startling intensity of the monologues, the poignant silent pauses and humour’s intense but welcome waves of relief. McPherson writes with exceptional skill and precision; his characters are quite ordinarily flawed and rounded, each one with their own moving and convincing story arc.

The five-strong company of actors rises to the challenge. Simon Wolfe is magnificent in his embodiment of the foul-mouthed, cantankerous Jack, unexpectedly reduced to displaying his emotional underbelly. You can hear a pin drop during Orla Fitzgerald’s shocking and revealing monologue as Valerie, so haunting and naturalistic is her delivery. Steven Elliot is glib as successful entrepreneur Finbar; in the end, despite his superficial veneer, he’s impossible to dislike. Meanwhile, Richard Clements disarms as the introverted Jim, still looking after his aged mother, and Patrick Moy’s Brendan is the glue that holds this fragile community together.

It’s a story to take home and ponder. Like Brian Friel’s revelatory Faith Healer or Barney Norris’ more recent Eventide, it explores the spaces between everyday life and eternity, the extraordinary emotional struggle and pain we all pack away behind the relief of routine. It also celebrates the power of conversation and the human need to commune.

A well-executed revival of a beautifully written, hauntingly melancholic and unexpectedly humorous play, this newest incarnation of The Weir makes 100 uninterrupted minutes pass in an instant, while still retaining the meaning of each word.

Reviewed on 27 October 2016 | Image: Camilla Adams

Nine things I learnt in nine months of commuting

At the end of January, the company I was working for closed its Bath office and offered me the chance to relocate to a business park near Didcot. And so, a short commute to the centre of a beautiful heritage city mushroomed into a 90 minute car-train-bus ride to an office block in the shadow of a decommissioned power station.

I embarked on the sort of journey to work I hadn't undertaken since my twenties, the major part being a train from Bath Spa station to Didcot Parkway and back again. No The Girl on the Train moments (thankfully), but here, in nine months of commuting, is what I learnt:

• I HATE having cold feet. Train platforms are stubbornly chilly even when the temperature elsewhere is balmy. It took me until mid-July to break out of opaque tights and boots. 

• Every peak-time passenger (myself included) bristles with electronic appliances, BUT... 

• DON'T even think about relying on the GWR WiFi. Apart from being insecure, in my experience it rarely works - except late at night, by which time you've probably given up.

• DO take advantage of extra reading time but be warned; the frequent announcements, nearby conversations and compulsion to people-watch aren't conducive to concentration. High-octane thrillers are better than subtle works of contemplation.

• It's a bubble land, where people discuss all sorts of things they really shouldn't in public. I've overheard details of confidential pricing, contracts, legal cases and even staff appraisals.

• The vast majority of rail staff (though sometimes difficult to find) are fantastically helpful. The same can't be said for bus drivers.

• All sorts of things can be spotted on the tracks: sooty black rats, hairbrushes, a single shoe, a potted plant. Each one has its own story.

• Sadly, people on the lines are all too frequent, too.

• Travel may be exciting but long-distance commuting is tiring, boring and expensive. And that's when it all goes to plan. You really need to factor this in from the start - or negotiate as many opportunities as possible to work from home.

Image of Didcot Power Station courtesy of the BBC.