Hammer have got off to a really good start by publishing this short novel by Orange Prize winning author Helen Dunmore who was so successful with her novels based around the Siege of Leningrad, The Siege and The Betrayal.

It is 1953 and newly-married Isabel Carey moves to a small Yorkshire town with her husband Philip, a family doctor who has taken up a partnership with another doctor near retirement.  The young couple seem to have a life of quiet prosperity mapped out before them, but for now, they have to lodge in a worn-out ground-floor flat with a hostile land-lady marching about the rooms above them and interfering in their lives whenever she can.

Philip is out for long days of medical practice.   He is very enthusiastic about his new job and Isabel is left to her own devices with no friends or contact in the town and only cleaning and cooking to keep her occupied.  She had lived in France and wants to give French tuition at local schools but Philip seems affronted by the idea that a doctor’s wife should go out to work.  Helen Dunmore captures the stifling nature of a 1950s marriage where the only goal for a woman seems to be to marry and immediately start having babies  in order to relieve her boredom with the stereotyped role she is expected to fulfil.

The little town is a dull and dreary place.  The other women seem to be expert at getting the best produce from the market stalls and shops while Isabel finds that the shopkeepers try to sell her bruised apples and fatty meat.  She feels helpless and insignificant while Philip rapidly becomes a respected doctor among the community of dour farmers and their families.  Helen Dunmore perfectly captures the sense of austerity Britain with its deprivations, its grime and poverty – and its stultifying social structures.   Isabel’s only escape is to take long country walks, often passing an old airfield with ruined huts and broken runways.

It is a bitter winter and the flat is freezing cold – coal is still rationed and the land-lady keeps a her own supply under lock and key.  Isabel eventually finds an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard and commandeers it to provide her with extra warmth at night. She is surprised to find that when she puts this musty old coat up to her nose she notices,

. . . a faint, acrid smell of burning, and then a smell which flooded Isabel with her childhood.  Long grass; sweet hay; the prickle of stalks on the back of her bare legs as she lay and looked up into the vast, polished East Anglian sky.

Readers of ghost stories will know at this point that Isabel is letting the genie out of the bottle.  There is more to this coat than she thinks.

On the next freezing night, Isabel sleeps with the greatcoat on top of her, its heavy weight pressing down on her and keeping her warm.  She is woken by a tapping on the living room  window and thinking that it is her husband Philip returning from a night visit she goes to the window, draws back the curtains and sees an RAF officer.  He gives her a thumbs-up signal as though he knows her and she draws the curtains back over the window in panic.  When she peeps through again, the man is gone.

I am definitely not going to describe any further details of the story.  It is gripping and highly atmospheric and is also moving with its references back to the sufferings of the war years.  The novel is a ghost story rather than a horror story, but has its shocks and its denouements but there is also a gentle calm to it at times which shows Dunmore’s skill as an experienced writer.   I enjoyed it greatly and raced through it during the breaks in a couple of busy days of decorating the living room.  Great cover design too!

I’ll be interested to see how the new Hammer imprint develops but if other books are to be of this quality then we have much to look forward to.

Just a quick mention of a new book blog by Brian Troiano called Babbling Books.  He looks like he reads the same sort of books that I do.  Brian only started writing his blog in January and I know how daunting it is to get started when there are so many other book blogs.

I apologise to anyone who’s commented here in the last week that I’ve not responded.  With childcare of our grand-children and the building and decorating works I’ve not had much time to get interactive.

I struggled through The Brothers Karamazov soon after and then felt I’d had enough of Russian authors for the time being and haven’t returned since.

Hesperus Press have provided me with the perfect way to reacquaint myself with Dostoevsky by publishing Uncle’s Dream, a shorter (150 page) novel which he wrote in 1859, seven years before he wrote Crime and Punishment.   All the qualities of the great author are there – insights into Russian lives with all the insights into hidden motives and the psychological manouverings which underpin so much human behaviour.  And also, in the case of this book at least, a great sense of humour, which at times lead Dostoevsky to set up almost farcical scenes as family members vie for an inheritance.

In Uncle’s Dream, an amibitious mother (Maria Alexandrovna Moskalyova – and I won’t write that again) seeks to marry off her twenty-three year old daughter Zina to the senile Prince K, a distant relative who is passing through the town in which the family live.  After all, a 23 year old daughter, however beautiful and talented is starting to become a bit of a liability particularly when she had a proud nature prone to setting herself above the common society.

The prince is decidedly doddery, a frail old man, prone to forgetfulness and unlikely to last for more than a couple of years.  The mother is going to have a difficult job persuading her daughter to commit to this travesty of a marriage even if the ultimate goal is a title and a fortune, but she makes a valiant attempt,

There’s no dishonour in marrying an old man and a cripple, its in marrying someone you can’t stand, and at the same time truly being his wife!  Whereas you won’t be a real wife to the Prince.  Its not even a marriage is it?  It’s simply a domestic contract!  I mean, there’ll be a benefit for him, the fool – the fool, he’ll be given such inestimable happiness!  Ah, what a beauty you are today Zinochka!  Not a beauty but a super-beauty!  If I were a man I’d give you half a kingdom if you wanted it.

Eventually the daughter agrees to go along with this ridiculous scheme and when eventually the mother is able to present to the Prince the goal of marriage to her daughter, the old man is flattered and beguiled by the thought of acquiring such a rare beauty for his very own.  But due to senility, he keeps forgetting what is on offer and is easily beguiled by other grasping relatives with schemes of their own.

As I read this, I was reminded of how vividly Dostoevsky writes.  The story unfolds as though in a theatre, with each scene arriving with a swoosh of the curtains and a new set as the character re-emerge from the wings.  The novella length suits the story very well for it enables Doestoeveky to present snapshots and cameos without the need for a lengthy character development.  The characters are in any case slightly familiar types – the ageing relative only respected because of his wealth, the grasping mother, rival aunts and cousins determined to undermine their relation’s schemes , the imperious daughter, the slighted younger suitor who watches from afar.   These are all people we have met before, but Dostoevsky assembles his cast so skilfully that his readers are drawn into the plot and gaze on as the disreputable thoughts of men and women are revealed.

Alongside this book, Hesperus have published a short biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Anthony Briggs in their Brief Lives series.

I’d forgotten how troubled Dostoevky’s life was as he struggled with poverty, imprisonment and addiction.  The book is not only a short biography but also a critical introduction to the Dostoevsky’s works.

In reading again about Crime and Punishment, I am reminded of what a great book it is.  As Briggs writes, “It is for these penetratingly original perceptions of human mentality and subconscious prompting that Dostoevsky has been credited with anticipating the broader and deeper work of prominent psychologists in the 20th century, who have acknowledged him as an important forebear”.  A book to re-read perhaps.

I am going through a busy period of my life at the moment with building works in progress on the house.  I’d forgotten how involving it is having builders on site. A friend of mine remarked on how embarrassed he feels when builders work so hard while he just sits at a computer all day.  I agree – I almost feel I have to look busy rather than sitting around reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.  I’ve started repainting the woodwork in several rooms now in order to reduce my sense of being a slacker.

Agnès Desarthe has written a complex story here which works on several levels.  We read of the disruption to Jerome’s well-ordered life as he confronts deep issues from his childhood.  The book reflects on the intense emotions of a teenager and their ability to bring chaos to themselves and those around them.  But also, this is a story of how random events can bring powerful change into a seemingly settled life, launching it in unexpected new directions.

Jerome has a complex biography.  He is a foundling – the police found him wandering in the woods in 1956 when he was a little boy.  He seemed to be a forest child, adapted to life among wild things.  Many years ago his adopted mother told him,

I remember the light so clearly, dappled sunlight everywhere, peeping through green leaves, line in a fairy tale. . . then when we were just comoing out of the woods, the sound of twigs grew louder, but I didn’t turn around.  And then the exact moment we stepped out of the woods, I felt a little hand in mine. In my left hand I was holding your father’s hand and in my right, the hand of my little woodland darling.

His adopted parents proved to be loving and kindly people, but nobody ever got to the bottom of why Jerome was in the woods and who had left him there.  The past however is about to catch up with him when he meets a retired policeman who is doing some freelance investigation of his own into the accident that killed Marina’s boyfriend Armand.

Jerome finds himself as much affected by Armand’s death as is Marina.  Agnes Desarthe writes of how grief comes upon the small household of father and daughter as they move through the rituals of being comforted by friends and family.  Marina’s mother Paula comes to stay for a few days, causing considerable anguish to Jerome – she left him a few years ago, leaving a level of emotional pain in his heart that he has failed to come to terms with.  Although Jerome has looked after his daughter since Paula left, as is so often the case, the absent parent becomes a comforting reference point for the stricken child and soon the female companionship leads to a betrayal of Jerome which he finds impossible to deal with.  The author captures Jerome’s frustration

He feels powerless and completely disorientated.  Sentences come to him about how difficult it is living with women, the fight it entails, the feeling you keep showing, the pathetic little games of seduction and then afterwards: the dolls’ house, making babies.  Making them, yes, fine, it’s all fireworks, pride and superpowers, but after that you feel knocked back, slowed down by all those endless, boring, repetitive tasks.  The way you talk to each other as if to a colleague, to a nurse, to a dog.

The book is not all emotional pain and the experience of loss however.  Jerome is an estate agent, and one of his customers provides some light relief throughout the book, leading him around the countryside and eventually settling into an old dilapidated piggery.  The slightly wild personality of this woman acts as a useful counter to Jerome’s introspection and it is interesting to see how the author brings these two together to provide a touch of humour in her novel.

This is a complex novel, but not difficult to read.  Although it a rather Gallic intensity surrounds the main theme of grief and loss, the investigations into Jerome’s background and the dealings with the estate agency do anchor the novel in the real world of tangible affairs.  This balancing is rather skilfully done, granting the book a level of interest which it would not have had had is focused only on the events surrounding the death of a young man.

The Foundling deserves to be successful – certainly I am grateful to the excellent Portobello Books for introducing English speaking readers to this fine French writer.  I am not qualified to offer technical comments on the translation (by Adriana Hunter), but I will say that the book reads elegantly and seamlessly with no clues that it might have originated in a language other than English.

Oatley has been quoted in the magazine Scientific American Mind (article Fiction Hones Social Skills) as saying, Reading “can hone your social brain, so that when you put your book  down you may be better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, even love.”

Most readers know how deeply they can be affected by the books they read.  What they didn’t know before is that when they get involved with a fictional character, they tend to follow their actions as though they were participating in them and develop a deep empathy with their motives and feelings.  Oatley suggests that reading is a form of mind-training – a course in how humans behave and react to each other.  Readers tend to have better social skills because they are better aquainted with the way other people think and they are more familiar with the huge variety of human behaviour than non-readers.

As I read this I thought of just one example. I  remember reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali,  about the experience of a Bangladeshi woman who moved to Tower Hamlets in London to marry an older man – not usually the sort of book which interests me.  As I read it however, I was drawn into the story and by the end of the book I found tremendous sympathy with Nazeem and her husband Chanu.  I became engrossed on the story of how the initially isolated Nazeem was changed by the people she met in London and by the end of the book my understanding of Bangladeshi immigrant culture was so greatly enhanced that I felt real understanding of the pressures faced by immigrants who don’t even speak the language of their host nation.

Oatley’s book is based on experimental research such as setting groups of people to read a novel and then testing their social abilities before and after.  But in the longer term, Oatley found that people who read were better at judging the emotional state of others and also making judgements about social relationships.  Reading fiction trains people in understanding other human beings just in the same way that reading a work of non-fiction can train you in science or engineering.

The author refers to research in which students were asked to read either a novel about the plight of an Algerian woman or an essay about Algerian women’s rights.  Researchers found that the readers of the novel had far more concern about the Algerian women’s rights than those who read the more newsy, third-party report.

But its the internalisation of what people read which was never quite understood before.  Readers personalities are subtly changed by what they read and they become better at relating to other people, particularly those who are very different to themselves.

I can relate to this in my own reading.  Books have taught me so much – how “good” people can be driven to commit a murder (Crime and Punishment – Fyodr Dostoevsky), what its like to be autistic (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon), how its best to be reconciled to those who do us harm (The Railway Man – Eric Lomax) and countless other books which stay in my mind like icons on the wall of a cathedral.

Keith Oatley has more books in the pipeline and if Such Stuff as Dreams is anything to go by then we will be learning more about the transformative power of fiction and how those of us who sit in a corner with a book may be preparing ourselves far more for interaction with the real world than those who think reading is a waste of time.

Of course, in choosing Greece as his subject, the question facing any potential reader is, Will the author be able to get behind the swathes of tourist gloss to find the authentic Greece?  I am pleased to say that while Harry does not try to make out that his travels were wholly in isolated villages or mountain paths, on the whole, he does manage to present a picture of a land where the old ways still run in parallel with the coastal strips and tourist destinations.

Harry’s aim was simple – “a dream of a journey through the scattered islands of the Ionian and the Aegean spanning centuries of exotic history and all the time travelling on a hotchpotch assortment of ships trailing the azure seas”.  He states at the start of his book that no-one knows how may islands go to make up the Greek Archipelago – perhaps 1000 to 6000 (it all depends on the size of rock to be counted as an “island”!).  In the end Harry classified the islands into seven groups – The Ionian, The Dodecanse, The Cyclades, The Argo-Saronic, The Sporades, The North Eastern Aegean Islands, and Crete.

Perhaps more than most Mediterranean nations, Greece presents an incredibly layered history, with the ancient cults of Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon etc overlain with centuries of Orthodox Christianity – a powerful force even to this day with many monasteries and devotional centres scattered throughout the islands, most notably of course on Mount Athos.  Harry is informative enough about the ancient Greek religions without baffling his readers with their mind-numbing intricacies.

Holy Trinity Monastery, Meteora, Greece

He is at his best when describing the Christian history of the island, perhaps because of the living faith exhibited by worshippers as they bow before icons and kneel in dingy but atmospheric churches.  He managed to get an audience with an Abbot, a peculiarly stressed individual with a desk drowning in papers and visibly struggling with his daily “audience in the round”.  On Mount Athos his guest room was a bare cell, with only flea-ridden blankets available to help him through the bitter cold.  But the spirituality of the Greek monks is vast and of course the privations of the life are all part of the calling.

In contrast to the aesthetic life of the monks, Harry encountered the usual demented crowds of drunken English revelers at the dreaded resort of Faliraki – in true travel-writing fashion, forcing himself to enter the Forty-Eight Hour Bar to talk with the nineteen year olds who seemed to be suitably out of their heads.  The Greeks however know where their income comes from and tolerate the excesses of the young Brits, knowing that when they return to England, the euros they have spent in Greece will tide many families over the winter.

Harry can be quite intrepid at times and doesn’t shirk the more difficult terrain, having one nasty cliff fall which left him recovering for a couple of days. The most striking expedition to me was his accompanied swim around a headland on Antikythira and deep into a cave system -

We swam under a granite arch that would be the envy of any Roman architect – we became inconsequential beings in its shadow, our every word echoing off the sides of the natural nave as Paddy indicated a small darkened triangle at the rear of the gaping entrance, intermittently obscured by the rist and fall of the sea . . . feeling our way with our hands along the polished ceiling, we dived in under the water until mercifully, up we came into an inner chamber, icy cold and black like oil, the sea beating the walls  with thick syrupy thwacks.

Myrtos Beach, Cephallonia

In other islands Harry is keen to discover literary roots – not least Lawrence Durrell in Rhodes, where Harry discovers the villa in which he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, now sadly empty with an overgrown garden.  I confess to some disappointment that when visiting Cephallonia, Harry does not mention Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – surely one of the most evocative Greek-based novels of our time.

The book is beautifully produced with a beautifully designed cover, very useful maps throughout and some lovely quotations beneath the chapter headings.   I can’t help but wonder how different the book would be  if Harry did the same journey in 2011 with its street protests, the climate of austerity and the decline in tourist euros?

What is the purpose of travel-writing?  I think its to do with carrying the reader along to obscure places or on means of transport which he or she wouldn’t normally use, in order to give a mind-picture of the places visited.  Travel-writing can inspire you to visit places or even sometimes put you off.  At its best, it can be a sort of substitute for making the journey yourself.  I think Harry’s book fulfils all the goals of good travel writing, leaving me with images of a warm, colourful country with masses of history and culture.  I recommend it for its content, its production values and mostly for the quality of the writing.

I was drawn to read The Unit because I was intrigued to see what Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist would make of the organ donation theme.  After all, Sweden has an unpleasant history of eugenics having sterilised more mentally ill and deviant people than even Nazi Germany, in a programme that was brought to an end in 1975.

I have to say, I thought The Unit was rather good.  It is unlike Never Let Me Go in many ways, not least that in the Ishiguro book it is children who donate their organs while in The Unit it is the older generation who contribute their bits and pieces for the good of others.

The Unit takes place at an unspecified time in the future.  The world looks similar to ours but society has moved on.  The population is shrinking and priority is given to those who can bear children.  Childless, single or gay people are classified as “dispensable” and at the age of 50 for women or 60 for men (men produce viable sperm for longer than women produce viable eggs) they give up their homes and every aspect of their lives and go to live in The Unit where they spend the rest of their days – a place which has all the features of a luxury spa hotel, while going through a series of medical experiments and organ donations which will eventually kill them (via their “final donation”).

It is the matter of fact way in which this happens which shows how far this society has travelled.  There is no protest on the part of the donors – they accept that this is how things are, and while they lament the loss of their previous lives, they seem content with their lot, forming a mutually supportive society to help them get through their final two to four years (nobody last longer than this).

The book opens with Dorrit, a single 50 year old woman waiting outside her house to be picked up by a dark window’d four wheel drive to be taken away to the Second Reserve Bank.  She has had a hard time of it lately.  Her lover won’t leave his wife for her, commissions for her free-lance writing have dried up, and she can’t afford to maintain her house.  There is nothing left for her other than to respond to the letter that arrived a few weeks ago telling her to tidy up her life as best she can and prepare for her final journey to The Unit.  She has nobody to say goodbye to other than neighbours and she has arranged for her much loved dog “Jock” to go and live with a family who promise to look after him.  A poignant moment indeed!

I couldn’t reach the outside from now on, not by mail, e-mail, text messages or telephone calls. From now on the telephone existed for me only in the form of a fixed internal line, and as for the Internet, I was allowed to surf only under supervision, which meant an orderly or another member of staff sitting beside me, and I was not allowed to join chat forums, contribute to blogs, create or respond to advertisements, or vote in opinion polls.

She finds The Unit to be a sort of glorified Holiday Inn.  There are gymnasiums and swimming pools, pleasant atrium café areas, walks in quiet gardens set under an artificial roof which mirrors the changing seasons by clever lighting.  There is a better social life than most of the dispensables experienced in the outside world and every facility is provided for their amusement – from art galleries and libraries to theatres and massage clinics.

Dorrit soon makes close friends but of course, these people have a habit of disappearing for a couple of days while they donate a kidney or a cornea, returning just a little diminished in some way, but somehow taking it all in their stride for after all this is a well understood destiny to which they have been conditions for many years.

Dorrit takes part in medical experiments herself, finding these exhausting, but at least filling her days and giving her a sense of purpose.   She returns to her room to write her novel, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras located in every part of her apartment, even the bathroom.

The book raises many questions, perhaps the most significant one being what happens when a dispensable become non-dispensable by meeting and falling in love with another dispensable and forming a viable unit of their own.  The result is not good although Dorrit seems to find some sort of satisfaction in the outcome.

I though this book was rather good.  OK, so it seems similar in some ways to Never Let Me Go, but I don’t actually believe that Ninni Holmqvist meant it this way.  The Unit has all the hallmarks of wholly original thinking and I’d rather see it as an independent take on the dystopian society genre of books which describe a world of “repressive social control systems and various forms of active and passive coercion” (Wikipedia).

Its a compelling read that kept me turning the pages (well, pressing the next button on my Kindle) and I’d overall I’d score it

7/10 – well written, good story, many good ideas, entertaining in a rather gruesome sort of way

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dimitri Verhulst was came from a broken home “and spent his childhood in foster homes and institutes”.  The publicity for the book says that it is semi-autobiographical – a book where the author has taken his life as a starting point and then embellished the bare bones of his life to make it more entertaining and readable.  The reader never knows where reality ends and fiction begins but as the boy in The Misfortunates is called “Dimmy” there is obviously enough reality in the book that the author can say, “This was my life”.

The Misfortunates is a collection of vividly described episodes from the childhood and youth of a boy living in a family which is so dysfunctional that its difficult to see how a child could survive it.  This is a world of drinking, violence and poverty so severe that it is not surprising that Dimmy ends up being taken into care.  The book reminded me a little of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in that it doesn’t try to tell the whole life story of the boy but describes various episodes in his life.

Dimitri Verhulst was born in 1972 and apparently Belgium still had homes like this in the 1970s:

I spent my first years with my parents in Kanton Street on a tiny courtyard with a communal water pump and a communistic toilet – a hole in a plank, directly above the septic tank.  Water ran down the inside of the living room walls and we stuffed balls of newspaper into the worm-eaten window-frames to keep out the wind.  When we moved to Mere Street, it was only to be worse off.  Our new toilet was a hole in a plank as well, but this house had the advantage of a leaking roof. Our kitchen floor was covered with buckets that caught the drops from the ceiling . . . we refilled the little bowls of rat-poison daily.

When an aunt visits from Brussels, Dimmy goes on to describe how,

we were ashamed of the pounds of raw mince we ate because it was cheap and easy, and we were ashamed of the way we stuck our fingers into the mince to grab a handful to stuff into our mouths before washing it down with cold coffee that had been left standing in a mug from yesterday.  We were ashamed of the worms we got from the mince and didn’t do anything about.

With a background like that its not surprising that the episodes which Dimmy goes onto describe are going to be pretty distasteful.  The family’s life revolves around the pubs of the locality including The Liars’ Haven, which hosts a drinking competition based on the Tour de France, in which each stage consisted of drinking monumental amounts of beer.

On another occasion a bailiff comes to the house to claim recompense for the family’s debts only to find that the furniture is so broken and battered that its not worth taking.  Eventually taking the television with him, the family are left having to find somewhere to watch that night’s Roy Orbison concert.  They con their way into the home of a local immigrant couple, bringing a case of beer with them and show the couple “the true face of Belgium” by hurling cushions at the ceiling and dancing on the table.

One riotous episode follows another.  Social workers pass through, sessions in drying-out clinics are wasted away with extravagant, beer-soaked, home-coming celebrations.  Eventually Dimmy grows up and away from his dreadful family – a man apart, driven by an internal search for something better.

I haven’t been one of them for a long time and the proof is that they’ve started talking to me in something that’s supposed to pass for standard Dutch, the same wat they speak to my son. Even though I know how stuck-up they find it. I no longer speak my own dialect.

I tend to think of Belgium as a fairly cultured European nation and was surprised at the level of debauchery apparently found in Dimitri Verhulst’s Aresendegem.  However, the book is humorous throughout and despite the crudeness of the events described, the author frequently launches off into lyrical prose which adds a layer of unexpected beauty onto this terrible world.

The Misfortunates has been turned into a film, available with English subtitles.