April reading round up

A month of beautiful spring weather, a week off work and a series of theatre and cinema visits has perked me right up. And there has also been some good reading.

Travelling Light – Ewald Arenz

A recommendation from BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read and this is from indie publisher Orenda Books. Set in Germany, though it’s fairly applicable to any western country, I think, it’s the story of two lonely women and an unlikely friendship. Sally has run away from a clinic treating her for an eating disorder. She stumbles across Liss, who at that moment needs some help with her tractor. Having helped Liss, Sally stays with her at her farm in an attempt to hide from her parents. It’s a book about loneliness and forgiveness and about connecting (or not) with others. Very little happens but I enjoyed it.

Steeple Chasing – Peter Ross

This is a tour of Britain’s churches and other religious buildings, but that sounds quite dry and dull with lots of buttress chat, which this book is not. Ross also wrote A Tomb with a View which was a tour of graveyards and he has a quiet way of writing that brings you with him and right into the community he’s describing. The book is really a history of religious buildings and their place in communities through history, and how that’s changing in a secular country. He doesn’t include churches of immigrant communities, of which there is a growing number, but sticks to ancient parish churches, some of the big hitters (St Paul’s etc) and a few monasteries – essentially Church of England above any other denomination with a few Catholics thrown in for good measure. Along the way we discover all sorts of things I didn’t know before: that bat urine is corrosive, that Nottinghamshire is renowned for not unlocking our church doors for impromptu visitors, and all sorts. There’s history, there’s a few facts but this is primarily about people: interviews with volunteer guides, bellringers, the chap in charge of St Martin in the Fields who helps to care for refugees and the homeless, and more. It offers you a look at what the church does well, for those of us who have no faith but might still want an idea of a larger community meaning. Lovely stuff.

The Trees – Percival Everett

This month’s reading group choice and I bloody loved it. When I told people how much I was racing through the book I was reading and how enjoyable it was, they naturally wanted to know what it was about, so I replied, it’s all about lynching in the Deep South but the book is so entertaining! Which got me a wide berth, understandably. But look, it starts with the bloody murder of a white man, where the beaten body of a black man is found next to the first corpse. The black guy has the mutilated testicles of the other in his hand, so perhaps he’s killed the white guy and then someone else has killed him? A mystery. But then the black body disappears and is found again next to the dead mutilated body of a second white guy. When it turns out the white victims are descendants of the men who killed Emmet Till (a notorious lynching case from the civil rights era) and the black body looks suspiciously similar to Till, the local police force have the case taken off their hands. It is a well written book, with characters you really connect to, which helps the whole thing move on at a cracking pace and it’s more light hearted in tone than you might expect. But it’s obviously making a bigger point about lynching and racial violence, the huge numbers of people involved and the legacy of racial violence. There are so many books out there that try and make a political point but end up hitting you over the head with the point they want to make instead of allowing the storytelling to get the point across, but this is a masterpiece of allowing the entertainment to do the job for you. Late to the party perhaps, but I thought it was terrific.

When Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup – JL Carr

This is a slim volume and very different in tone to his better known book, A Month in the Country, more tongue in cheek, but if you wanted a novelist who portrayed the English through the Twentieth Century, you could do much worse than pick Carr. While A Month in the Country is a study of the legacy of war and the eccentricities of the rural community, Steeple Sinderby explores and gently pokes fun at the British love of the underdog and just how silly some people get when they talk about football. As the title suggests, this is an account of how amateur football team Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup, back in the 1970s when such a thing might just still be possible. It’s a tale of a group of hard working hard playing footballers, and their support from the club chairman to the local reporter to the girls who did the refreshments at the ground, and how they reach the heights of glory.

Birding – Rose Ruane

I’m painfully and slowly writing a book – likely never to be published – about an abandoned seaside town so I’m always interested to read books set in rundown seaside towns and this is a good one. It’s about two women whose lives have not gone the way they want, and how they choose to try and break out. But it’s more about the stories we tell ourselves, how easily we get stuck in a situation and how hard it can be to change anything, no matter how small. I think there is nothing that has horrified me more than the situation Joyce finds her self in – peri-menopausal, living and dressing in identical styles to her mother Betty, stuck in a tiny flat and with little money and old fashioned standards of decency – and the chapters featuring the two of them seemed almost to be set at least half a century ago. The other character is Lydia whose predicament seems much more modern, or at least from the 1990s, and the ongoing fallout of lad culture, #MeToo and more. This has a wide range of characters and just a hint of bawdiness, and was a deserved longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize.

The Women – Kristin Hannah

First up, this is a terrible title. Really, call it something else. Second, it seems to have been written with one eye on a potential Netflix adaptation. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, only it feels very conscious, as if the author is expecting her agent to call with an offer. And it would definitely make a good TV programme, or you could just watch MASH, but focus it more on Major Hoolihan. Because this is what The Women is about, the army nurses in Vietnam (don’t write in – I know MASH was Korea, but I also know it was an allegory for Nam). The story focuses on Frankie McGrath, posh California girl, whose brother is killed in Vietnam, whose father expects the men to be heroes, and who wants to do more than just get married and be decorative. She enlists with the army’s nursing corps and proves herself an excellent combat medic. It’s descriptive of the visceral, appalling conditions but also tries to explore the contradictions of the war: that America lied and tried to forget about it, that they committed acts of atrocity, that soldiers fought and died and gave their all for a country that rejected them and didn’t know what it was all for. There’s blood, mud and fear, stories of bravery and intense friendships, and some love stories too. It’s in two parts, the first part is the combat, the second half is the reaction when Frankie comes home, and her subsequent PTSD and fight for recognition. I guess enough time has gone by that a lot of people won’t know the history here and the book is like a primer. I have a degree in US history, and specialised in the 1960s and Vietnam war protests so it all felt a bit basic to me. However, while it may not be great literature, it rattles along well enough. Seriously Netflix, you could do worse.

Mona of the Manor – Armistead Maupin

While I found the last few books to be disappointing, I love the Tales of the City characters enough to give them another chance and this one is set in England, which makes it different enough to be a better read. Mona Ramsey has married Lord Roughton, to give him a green card to live in San Francisco but now that he has died, she has inherited his English country house and has adopted Wilfrid, aboriginal heritage and all. The two of them are running the house as a hotel for overpaying Americans, and when a couple stay with them, Mona and Wilfrid soon discover a dark secret between them. When Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal come to stay for a while, the family is reunited. I confess, this reads as a very modern book – issues are mentioned that I’m sure wouldn’t have the same terminology in the early 1980s – but Maupin is trying to make valid points about transphobia and domestic violence and this is charming enough that I’ll overlook it. But I did have to keep reminding myself of the period it was supposed to be covering.

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

I’ve been slow reading this as part of Wolf Crawl, run on Substack by Simon Haissel, and we have taken a few months to go through this with supplementary historical notes, pictures and maps, which have added context and interest to the text. It is such a good book and somehow I found it much easier to read this time round. There is still so much that it has to say about our society: about power hungry men and who gets pushed aside in the rush to appease them; about women’s agency and women’s bodies; about politics across Europe and religion and how we can look to bring people with us and try to ensure a legacy. Mantel got a huge amount of flack a few years back with her essay Royal Bodies, but when she wrote about the same issues – women’s lack of bodily autonomy – in these books, the acclaim rolled in. It appears we can only manage self examination as a country when there’s a 500-year distance.

The Friend – Sigrid Nunez

This has just been made into a film – my daughter loves dog stories but it’s a 15 so I bought the book instead. It’s about a woman, a writing academic, whose long time friend kills himself and she is left his dog, a Great Dane called Apollo. Her apartment in New York is not allowed dogs, but she is grieving and realises that the dog is too. It’s a novel but it reads like creative non-fiction, a meditation on the nature of grief and sub-essays on literature and the meanings discussed in certain pieces. One of the books she discusses is My Dog Tulip, which I read earlier this year, but she discusses many others too. The book is written as if she is addressing the dead friend in a letter, and she spends quite some time talking about the dead friend and their relationship. If I’m honest, considering the depths of her grief, she still manages to make him sound like a real arsehole. (In the film, he’s played by Bill Murray, who’s good at sleazeballs.) It’s not as engaging as a conventional novel, but I enjoyed reading it.

Fair Stood the Wind for France – HE Bates

I came across this on our shelves while looking for something else and I’d not read it before. It’s a quiet tale of John Franklin, Frankie, an English pilot during the Second World War whose plane develops mechanical difficulties during a flight home over France and who has to crash land. He and his crew take shelter in a local farm and the family they stay with help them escape. Frankie is injured in the crash and must stay longer. What happens next is told in matter of fact tones, spare but insightful prose, and it’s a classic of British war literature.

Anything is Possible – Elizabeth Strout

I really enjoy Strout’s Olive Kitteridge books but struggled with Lucy Barton, which I suspect may have had something to do with me reading it at the wrong time, rather than an issue with the book. Anyway, persevering because Strout’s latest book brings both women together and I heard her speak about the book last year, I’d like to catch up on the books in between. This is like the Olive books in that it’s a series of linked short stories, which Strout does so well, where Lucy Barton features directly only in one and peripherally in the rest. There’s some dark plot turns and some humour in here, it’s an enjoyable read.

Moments of Pleasure

A week off work and a chance to visit friends and family, walk for miles, visit art exhibitions and London town. I particularly enjoyed Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tirzah Garwood exhibition, a proper look at her entire career which has often been overshadowed by her more famous husband Eric Ravilious. But she was very talented and worked in all kinds of media; I especially liked how she incorporated her children into her art, using them for inspiration and imagination, and trying all sorts of new things. When it seems that so many artists have to separate their personal lives from their work, it’s refreshing to see someone use their personal life as a part of themselves worth examining, as worthy of art, and not making it twee or domestic but a bit weird and wonderful.

This month I also got to a work conference in London early and popped over to what remains of Austin Friars (just the name, tbh) to pay homage to Thomas Cromwell. Wander the streets of Central London, I could feel how delightfully quiet and car free it was in many places. It wasn’t too long ago – for another conference – where I had an appalling allergic reaction to the pollution and it feels such an achievement to have those days in the past. Recent research suggests ULEZ has brought in a 18.5% drop in respiratory absence from work, but beyond the productivity is just a sense that cities should not be for cars, they should be for people. Now to translate that elsewhere.

A week later, I was back in London to buy fresh bagels at Borough Market (visited the crumble stall that’s apparently a Tik Tok thing – great crumble, have some at weird times to avoid the queues) and stopped in to see Mark Rothko at Tate Modern. I’ve not looked at the Seagram paintings before and rather liked their gloomy intensity, though I doubt I’d have wanted them on the wall of a restaurant. Incidentally, the maps and online guides at Tate Modern are rubbish – if you need to know where anything is, ask a person.

I’ve also been to the theatre three times and the cinema once, which seems a bit much. A performance of Animal Farm to support my daughter’s English curriculum and then two musicals to lighten the mood. And I reviewed The Penguin Lessons for Left Lion magazine – which you can read here.