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It is rare to find a book written in a language which so beautifully conveys its imaginative essence; or one with a title which is so exactly right. O’Malley’s writing is often lyrical and evocative and he can take the reader and his characters to places far removed from the gritty world in which they live.  And he borrows his title,This Magnificent Desolation, from the words Buzz Aldrin spoke from the surface of the moon. This first moon-landing haunts the book, as do the voices of the Apollo astronauts themselves, which ten-year-old Duncan hears through the static on his beloved ancient radio. Duncan believes that the astronauts never managed to get back to earth. He believes, too, that he remembers the moment of his birth, when God spoke to him.

Duncan has no memory of his past. He knows only what Brother Candice has told him about the terrible snow-storm, the stranded train, the deaths and the meteor shower which happened on the night his mother left him at the orphanage run by the Cappucin Grey Brothers of Mercy in northern Minnesota. His present, his life with the Brothers and with his friends Julia and Billy, are all that he knows and, although he is not the narrator of his story, his unemotional, unjudgmental view of the world and his imaginative visions shape this book.

Duncan’s memory of his mother is a dream. So, when she does come to take him from the orphanage, he has no idea how his life will change. He knows that Maggie, his mother, was once a talented singer. Now, her voice over-strained and broken, she works as a nurse and sings, at night, in a run-down bar. Maggie sings to him, cares for him, promises never to leave him again and takes him with her to the Windsor Tap, but her life is clearly hard and is often made bearable by alcohol.

Joshua McGreavey, a Vietnam veteran who is Maggie’s friend, comes and goes from their lives. He works as a tunneler on the San Padre Tunnel project seventy feet beneath San Francisco bay, and when power fails and the crew are left in darkness, not knowing what is going on, or in the interminable, slow decompression rides up in the lifts at the end of each shift, he relives the beauty and the horrors of the Vietnam jungles – but mostly the beauty. Medication dulls his memories, but the sudden death of his work-mates in a flooded tunnel hits him hard. Sometimes he disappears for long, unexplained, periods of time. Sometimes, as Duncan accidentally discovers, he fights in vicious, unregulated, fist-fights in a derelict dockyard.

O’Malley’s writes about the recent past. The world in which Duncan and Maggie and Joshua live is not the fast-moving, high-rise, modern business world, and there is something of Steinbeck in his ability to capture the atmosphere of  lives lived always on the edge of poverty, and surrounded by loss and death . But over the four years of Duncan’s life in O’Malley’s book, the harsh realities are tempered by moments of great imaginative vision. Duncan accepts people at face-value and Joshua becomes like a surrogate father to him, replacing the lost father he often thinks about, but whose identity and character Maggie will not divulge.

Joshua teaches him to ride his old Indian motorbike, and helps him when Maggie’s drinking gets out of hand. Clay, the barman at the Windsor Tap looks out for him. Julie, Billy and the Brothers at the orphanage all recur in Duncan’s dreams. And the Christmas Train, which got fatally stuck in the terrible snow-storm, and from which only Duncan and his mother survived, becomes a recurring and wonderful vision which acts as a metaphor for life. Travelling brightly-lit through the snow, full of  life, joy and beauty it encounters unpredictable disasters and death but there is also survival.

At the end of the book, Duncan, alone, boards another train, in another snow-storm, and travels, like all of us, into an unknown future with only visions and dreams to rely on.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013

Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

Sylvia Plath, Ariel and the Tarot: http://ann.skea.com/Arielindex.html

Granta‘s theme ‘Betrayal’ offers scope for many things, from love to war, from politics to survival, and more. As usual, the pieces included come from authors around the world and their contributions are unexpected, innovative and excellent.

Janine di Giovanni, who has reported on wars for more than twenty years, begins ‘Seven Days in Syria’ with her baby son, whose tiny nails she finds herself unable to cut. She charts this same sense of vulnerability in the lives of the Syrian people as she sees the effects of war gradually seep into their lives. Her account is personal and vivid. “There is no template for war“, she writes,  only the agony, the uncertainty and the fear, which is constant.

Karen Russell, too, writes of the effects of war but she weaves a sort of magic into her fictional story. Beverly, a professional masseuse, begins therapeutic massage on an Iraqi war veteran whose body tattoo is a “skin mural” of the war-landscape on the day his friend was killed. “Healing is a magical art” said a pamphlet which attracted Beverly to her career, and her ability to empathise with a customer and to use her massage skills to feel and relax the tensions expressed in the physical body is remarkable. But her expert physical work with this particular customer has inexplicable results, the tattoo does strange things, and there are unexpected psychological effects for both of them.

As well as reportage and stories, Granta includes photography and poetry. Darcy Padilla’s photographs of ‘Julie’ chart a life affected by poverty, abuse and AIDS but they show happiness, partnerships and children as part of her struggle to survive. And John Burnside’s poem, ‘Postscript’, echoes some of Robert Frost’s well-known lines and offers a modern perspective on an evening in snowy woods. It tells of a passing moment in which a search for a mobile phone signal prompts musings on the ephemeral nature of beauty, a cup of tea, a welcoming home and “no promises to keep“. And the only path is the one back to the car.

Mohsin Hamid tells of a young boy’s text-message based love affair with a local girl who has the ambition, it is suggested, of sleeping her way to a better life. Samantha Harvey’s small-scale apocalypse-survival scenario set on a fictional island could well be a true story. André Aciman documents an editor’s experience with a young woman writer with whom he begins a strangely satisfying relationship. Neither of them seem fully able to commit themselves but perhaps it is just his reading of the situation, or perhaps he is just a man who cannot make big decisions. The result? I will not spoil the story by revealing it.

Colin Robinson learns about group loyalty and Paddleball. Ben Marcus imagines a dystopia in which group and family loyalties are tested. Lauren Wilkinson writes of the fatal attraction of guns. And Jennifer Vanderbes writes of a lone woman fire-mapper in the forests of New Mexico whose isolated life is briefly disrupted by a male forestry worker  with whom she shares friendship and memories. Both, it turns out, have reasons for choosing to work with fire.

Callan Wink’s ‘One More Last Stand’, introduces us to a man who participates in historical re-enactments of General Custer’s last stand but who is inclined to tell tall tales to tourists and to fraternize with the ‘enemy’. It can also be read on the Granta web site at http://www.granta.com/ , along with other material not included in this quarter’s magazine.

Granta 122: Betrayal  is excellent reading and a fine addition to Granta’s long tradition of fostering new writing.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/
Sylvia Plath, Ariel and the Tarot: http://ann.skea.com/Arielindex.html

So, begins the opening statement of Schroder, and it is prefaced by the E.E.Cummings poem “here is the deepest secret nobody knows“. This sounds tantalizing, especially when you know from the cover blurb that Meadow is the narrator’s six-year-old daughter and that he has abducted her. As far as he is concerned this is not a premeditated abduction, not really, he just decided on a “spontaneous trip“,  and failed to return Meadow to his estranged wife after a parental visit. Now that the law has caught up with him, he has been persuaded to write down everything that happened.

Yet, the first thing he tells us is how, as a child, he lied about his own life in order to win a major competition, and, in the process, he gave himself a false identity which he then chose to keep. By his own account, Eric Schroder, alias Kennedy, is a liar and a fraud, a man who neglects his elderly father, has forged qualifications for his c.v., has deceived his wife and her family for years and, now, has run off with his child. He is also researching ‘pauses’ and he adds footnotes to his document in order, one assumes, to impress us with his essential seriousness and intelligence.

With his glib account of his failings, his protestations of love for his estranges wife, and his hints of childhood trauma documented in interspersed fragments describing a childhood escape, with his father, from Communist East Germany, Eric Kennedy comes across as a self-serving sociopath. Whether this is what the author, Amity Gaige, intended, I don’t know, but I quickly began to lose patience with her narrator.

So why did I go on reading? I don’t know. But that’s what sociopaths do – they draw you in, tell you just enough to make their actions sound plausible and justified, and play on your emotions to keep you hooked.

Yes, by the time I got to the end of Eric’s story I did feel sorry for the things which happened to him in his childhood. I did think that maybe they might explain why he had chosen a different identity and had made up a different childhood for himself. And I did understand how he came to live a lie. I also understood how he loved Meadow and how he justified his own actions once he and Meadow were evading the law.. But I couldn’t forgive him for never phoning Meadow’s mother – the wife he said he loved so much – to let her know that their child was safe and well. And I couldn’t forgive his self-indulgence or his casual parenting, which ultimately put Meadow’s life in danger. Given his lifelong skill at weaving stories and convincing people of his essential.honesty, I wouldn’t trust this narrative to be completely true, either. And  I  certainly would never advise his wife to take him back.

In Shroeder, Amity Gaig has created a character who is so persuasive and convincing that you begin to believe in him, although you know you shouldn’t. Bit in the end it is her skill at evoking tender emotions, the complexity of family relationships,  the joys and the worries of parenthood, and the thrill and danger of unexpected  adventures, which makes his narrative compelling.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/
Sylvia Plath, Ariel and the Tarot: http://ann.skea.com/Arielindex.html

Kate Summerscale’s book is more than just the story of a Victorian wife’s romantic indiscretions and a scandalous divorce case. It is a glimpse of a changing society. One in which a  woman’s sexuality could be discussed in terms of hysteria and insanity caused by disorders of the womb. One in which gynaecology and psychology were new medical disciplines and homeopathy, phrenology and hydropathy were accepted and resorted to by such eminent figures as the Brontes, George Eliot (Mary Evans), Darwin,  Dickens and even members of the Royal family. And one in which the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes was established, making divorce easier and less expensive to obtain on the grounds of adultery and (for women petitioners) one additional “matrimonial offence” (i.e. desertion, cruelty, bigamy, rape, sodomy or bestiality). The law was beginning to recognize a married woman’s rights and the need to protect her  property, but a husband could still claim custody of his children and, as in the Robinsons’ case, ownership of all his wife’s papers.

Isabella Robinson was an intelligent, well-read and imaginative woman. In 1844, as a thirty-one-year -old widow with one child, she married Henry Robinson, a successful civil engineer whose business building steam-ships and sugar-cane mills often took him overseas. Henry already had a mistress and two illegitimate children, and he proved to be, in Isabella’s words, an “uncongenial partner…uneducated, narrow-minded, harsh-tempered, selfish, proud“. He also persuaded her to hand him control of the money which had been settled on her by her father.

Isabella’s real misfortune was that like many lonely, romantically inclined women of her day, she was fatally inclined to foster romantic obsessions and to confide her most secret thoughts to her “secret friend” – her diary. How much of what she wrote there about her “wretchedest and wickedest hours” was romantic fiction, modeled on such books as Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, we will never know, but when her husband discovered the diary and read it he was incensed and determined to ruin the man Isabella had set her heart on. A Divorce Court judge, too, deemed it convincing enough to consider Henry’s petition for divorce for three months before pronouncing judgement.

The case was a public sensation and poor Isabella had to endure parts of her diary being read out in court and published in the newspapers. Fictional diaries were popular reading at the time but Isabella’s was, apparently, shocking fact. She was deemed by one newspaper editor to be either “as foul and abandoned a creature as ever wore woman’s shape” or to be a madwoman. And insanity was one plea open to Isabella in her own defence.

Summerscale’s research for this book sits lightly on a scandalous story but her endnotes show the care she has taken.  Like the well-known sequence of paintings ‘Past and Present’ by Leopold Egg, which depict the discovery and the sad results of a wife’s indiscretions, divorce was still a disaster for women and, too often, for their children as well. And although I never really warmed to Isabella in spite of her plight and the prolonged ordeal she underwent, Summerscale kept me reading to the end, when the result of the court case and the outcome for all those involved is revealed. I will not spoil the suspense by revealing what it was.

Buy the book here…

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013

Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

The first third of this book is about sex: love and sex; sex and love. In the first five chapters, Sarita remembers how she fell in love with Karun and the details of  her increasingly adventurous attempts to get him to consummate their marriage. The next five chapters deal with Jaz’s homosexual seduction of Karun, his gradual falling in love with him and their subsequent parting. The sex is imaginative but leaves little to the imagination. Now, however, Karun has disappeared and Sarita and Jaz are trying to find him.

All this is set in a dystopian world in which Pakistan is at war with India and has set a date for a nuclear attack on Mumbai (where the novel is set); dirty bombs have exploded in Zurich, New York, London and other world cities; all communication networks have broken down; Hindu and Muslim extremist groups have taken over parts of the city and are undertaking murderous religious persecution; and SuperDevi, a Bollywood/Hollywood epic has captured popular imagination and fostered a cult which is being used by the power-hungry Bhim, leader of the extremist, right-wing, Hindu Rashtriya Manch, to further his own interests. Oh, and Sarita is taking Karun a pomegranate!

It would be easy to parody the events which make up the rest of this book. The miraculous escapes, the Bollywood style Devi celebrations, Jaz’s camp cousin ‘Aunty’ Rahim who helps them escape the Muslim Limbus thugs, the final sexual consummation which almost qualifies for nomination for the Bad Sex Award, and the predictable ending, all these are the stuff of Bond movies. And Sarita’s ability to be relatively unaffected by the horrors she witnesses and the personal dramas she experiences, keeps her character shallow and undeveloped.

However, Manil Suri writes well and he knows how create interesting characters, how to structure and tell a good story, how to describe the horrors of war, and how to capture the variety, flavour, excesses and beauty of Indian life.

An advertising puff on the back cover of the book quotes the Independent as saying that “Manil Suri has been likened to Narayan, Coetzee, Naipaul, Chekhov and Flaubert”. One wonders who made that comparison. It is nonsense. Perhaps if publishers exaggerated less, I would be less judgmental. Suri has certainly “developed a voice of his own” but a little less sex, a bit more realism in the plot, and some development of the serious issues touched on in the book, might make this book less of a romantic thriller and more like the “huge novel” that the advertising claims.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

The Columbian folk-tale figure of the Robber of Memories haunts this book in many different ways. Michael Jacobs’ journey to the source of the Magdalena River in Columbia is a record of his travels but it is also about memory and loss – about history, conflict, disappeared people, and about personal experiences of loss.  Jacobs’ father died of Alzheimer’s’ and his Italian-born mother is suffering from severe memory loss and dementia. “I needed to believe”, Jacobs writes, “that certain thoughts and memories would always remain, strong enough to counteract any sense of emptiness ahead…as you continue travelling upriver, towards an enigmatic source”.

Jacobs’ journey through Columbia from the mouth of the river to its source is full of memorable moments, full of excitement, ennui, pleasure, fear, and full, too, of the people he meets and sometimes travels with. Inspired by a chance meeting with Gabriel Garcia Márquez at a literary festival in the Columbian coastal town of Cartagena, Jacobs began a journey which had long been his dream. Fluent in Spanish, and with many literary connections, he managed to travel from the mouth of the River – The Mouth of Ashes – to its source in the “moorland landscape of bogs, boulders and bare peaks” of  the Páramo de Las Papas (the Moorland of the Potatoes) – a name which Jacobs deems “wholly inappropriate to the otherworldly scenery”.

He travels by various means: on a tug captained by the exuberant, pessimistic and possibly unstable Diomidio; by launch and a tiny tug to the turbulent river mouth; by car to various towns which have particular memories for him – historical and literary; and by passenger-service chalupa (“like a covered metal coffin”). Ultimately, half-falling from a horse along treacherous, slippery paths, and then on foot, he reaches his goal, but the events which occur on this final stage of his journey are frightening and worrying.

In spite of the ever present danger of being a British traveller in a country where kidnapping of foreigners is still a very real threat, Jacobs’ persistent worry was his mother. Intermittently in touch with her carers by Columbian cellphone, he expected at any time to be called back to Britain. The pull of family prompts memories of his mother’s younger days, and he remembers extracts from the diaries he inherited after his father’s death, which fill out the story of his parents’ wartime meeting and marriage. Memories, too, of the novels of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and of the symptoms of memory-loss which he recognized in him when they met, intrude on his travels. But for a thoughtful writer who once studied at London’s Warburg Institute, over the entrance to which is inscribed the word Mnemosyne (the Goddess of Memory) this involvement with memories is perhaps to be expected.

Altogether, this is an unusual travel book in which the river, the country and its delights and horrors, history and adventure are interwoven with Jacobs’ personal worries and his discoveries, delights and pleasures in a moving and thought-provoking way.

Buy the book here…

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

Futh is in his forties, newly separated from his wife, and taking a walking holiday in Germany. He hasn’t been doing much walking recently but he plans on doing fifteen miles a day and coming home fit and tanned. And he remembers walking with his mother and father as a child and, especially, a sunny day on the cliff tops just before his mother left them both to disappear in the USA. He was twelve when that happened, and his father  became unpredictably violent, so he would keep out of his way much of the time.

Futh is, above all, ordinary. He is unassertive, has rather limited social skills, and always inspects the escape routes from his hotel rooms in case of fire. His talisman, which he always keeps with him, is a silver lighthouse which once housed a bottle of his mother’s violet-scented perfume. But lighthouses, as the books’ epigram tells us, not only send out kindly light, they also wan of the rocks beneath. Futh’s life seems always to have more rocks than most.

Alison Moore’s book is deceptively simple. We come to understand Futh through countless ordinary details of his life and through his fragmented memories. Between the chapters about Futh, there are others about Ester, the wife of the hotel-keeper at whose hotel Futh starts and ends his journey. Esther craves attention from her violently possessive husband Bernard, who mostly ignores her. She compensates for this by taking casual lovers. Futh is not one of them but he becomes involved, all unknowingly, and the results are disastrous.

Esther life, like Futh’s is little different to that of most people. And it is this ordinariness and the small details of the characters’ day-to-day behavior which, at the end of the book, prompt questions about the accidents of life. Are our personalities shaped by nature or nurture (or lack of nurture)? Is the pattern of your lives determined by Fate? Does the appearance of Venus fly-traps at various parts of this story suggest that we are just like flies in the biological struggle for survival?

Nothing about Alison Moore’s story is as obvious as these questions but her smooth and subtle control of the reader’s mood and emotions has, in the end, enormous impact.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

A body in the swimming pool is always a good start. But this is no ordinary mystery story. And Kitty Finch is no ordinary body.

Her appearance at the tourist villa which the Jacobs have rented disturbs everyone – Joe, Isabel and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, and their friends Mitchell and Laura. Jurgen, the German hippy caretaker, and their neighbour, Madeleine Sheridan, also feel the impact of her presence.

Kitty herself is an enigma. She is a copper-haired botanist with green fingernails; a poet; an attractive young woman who favours walking around naked; and a disturbed and disturbing presence.

Deborah Levy’s book is strange and unusual in its structure and its style. Her chapters are short, and their titles enigmatic: ‘Walls that open and close’, ‘Body Electric’, ‘Money is Hard’. We follow the events of each day of one week after the appearance of Kitty,  and Levy conveys the moods and thoughts of her characters through seemingly random remarks and actions. Each has their own problems and secrets, their own view of the world, and their own fears, desires and confusions. Each has their own particular response to Kitty. But nothing is spelled out and the tension mounts. The week begins and ends with a body in the swimming pool but the final chapter of the book is given to Nina – her memories and her dreaming conversations with her father.

This is a curious novel, full of psychological insight, but Tom MacCarthy’s ‘Afterword’, with its mention of Deborah Levy’s reading in Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, Duras, Stein and Ballard risks making it seem like a dry academic exercise. His assessment of what he calls the “kaleidoscopic narrative” in this book adds more name-dropping confusion and is superfluous unless its readers are bent on deconstructing the text rather than enjoying a stimulating and interesting book.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

This book of poems is described in the press release as “A personal journey through the works of poets that most influenced Kinsella’s work“. Kinsella himself describes it as “creating responses, translations, versions, distractions, takes, adaptations and interpolations“. He goes on to say that “the poems are ‘my’ poems in so far as my own biography and experiences necessarily inform their references, conceits and dynamic responses“. The book is, he says, “an attempt to bring the work of poets from other languages I admire into the language I speak and think with most days“.

Sadly, this turns out to be a book for specialists. If you can understand the Latin titles and fragments of Latin text; if you are very familiar with the stories told by Virgil and Ovid and with the background in which Apollinaire and Tristan Tzara wrote their poems; and if you are happy to look up translations of the works of less well-known poets from Classical times to the 20th Century (most of which are easily available on the Internet), then this book may be for you. If not, you are likely to feel, at best, baffled; at worst, excluded from some elitist intellectual club where such things are considered to be the norm.

Some of the poems do stand alone with no need for recourse to the work which inspired them or to the mythologies or poetic ‘fashions’ , times or cultures in which the originals were written. Those poems which work best and show Kinsella’s own poetic style best, are his versions of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, where he transposes the story of Aeneas’s journey through the underworld to the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, via the Nullabor, the Great Australian Bight and Mount Magnet. Two of these poems, in particular, reflect Kinsella’s usual ecological concerns and are fine original poems: ‘On the devastating fallout of the war waged by humans around the earth as witnessed in the Chittering Valley’, (which has a dedication ‘for Cate Blanchett’); and ‘Two gates of sleep: Death of trees in catchment’.

At the opposite extreme to these poems, Kinsella’s ‘Approximation: Extracted Ode to Tzara’ is as meaningless to me as any other Dadaist random compilation of words. And his ‘Zone (Echidna): A Take on Apollinaire’ is certainly ‘Surrealist’ but unlike Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ it has no coherent meaning that I can divine. As to Kinsella’s excursion into Villon’s ‘Jargon Poems’, which he tells us were described by the London ‘Daily News’ in 1895 as being as obscure to the ordinary reader of French “as if the language was Coptic or Romany, Basque or Gaelic”, I was equally lost by Kinsella’s English ‘translations’.

The Jaguar’s Dream is an attractive title. Unusually for me, page after page of my review copy of the book now had scribbled comments in the margins: question marks; exact translations of Latin and French phrases (which I had to look up); fragments of mythology (which I also had to look up); expressions of  puzzlement, exclamation marks and underlining when I was lost to understanding the meaning or the syntax. I am no stranger to complex poetry and I am always ready to discover something new. I began the book hoping that Kinsella’s stated aim of introducing the reader to some lesser-known poets would lead me to some inspiring new work but I was disappointed.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

Craig Taylor is Canadian, but after living for several years in London and growing attached to the place he began to ask “What is a Londoner?”. It seems that there are almost as many answers to that question as there are people living in London but my favourite is that ” a real Londoner would never, ever,ever eat at one of those bloody Angus bloody Steak Houses in the West End”. I like it, firstly, because I grew up in London before there ever was an Angus Steak House in the West End; and secondly, because I have never, ever, ever eaten in one. However, I am sure there must be some Londoners who have.

In search of an answer, Craig Taylor interviewed some 200 people all over London and even some who had left London to live elsewhere. He interviewed anyone and everyone, from those in high places (and not just workers in the office towers at Canary Wharf but also high office holders like the Under-Sheriff and Secondary of London), to a street sweeper, a manicurist, and, of course, one or two taxi drivers. Tourists, immigrants, those who love London and those who hate it; teacher, squatter, Wiccan priestess, hedge-fund manager, currency trader, a couple who live in the Tower of London (try ordering a take-away Pizza from that address!), people in the arts, market traders, nurses, all have a voice in this book. We hear their language, their opinions, their likes and dislikes.

Even as a Londoner, I learned things I didn’t know before and had glimpses of life in London which I hardly knew existed. I learned, for example, that around the back of the Planetarium, just off Baker Street, there is a block of flats with a whole set of train parts stuck into the top of the building. And I learned that according to Mistress Absolute, a dominatrix, London is one of the kinkiest cities in the world. I was fascinated by the funeral director’s account of the changes in his profession which immigrants to his local area have caused; and by the career change which brought London its only black, dread-locked, female plumber. I was also intrigued to hear from fast-talking, fashion conscious “Smartie”, an East-Ender who conned his way onto the bank’s market trading floor by making up his c.v. and who reckons that half the traders in the futures market (the best ones, of course) were originally barrow boys who “came from market stalls…were rough and ready…edgy…streetwise, and “who could add up numbers easily”.

There is such variety and so much interest in the eighty accounts in this book that it is hard to pick out favourites. It is, in fact, just like London: full of life and spirit, full of the varied people who generate energy and excitement, and full of ordinary people who keep the whole city running. The sub-title of the book says it all: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long For It – Londoners.

Buy the book here…

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

Some will know of the Irishman, Roger Casement, because of the infamous ‘Black Diaries’ in which he reputedly detailed his homosexual relationships, and which were published in the British press at the time of his imprisonment in Pentonville Prison in 1916. Some will also know that he was stripped of his Knighthood and hanged as a traitor for collaborating with the Germans against England during the First World War.

Some will know of him from William Butler Yeats’s poem, which begins: “I say that Roger Casement/ Did what he had to do/ He died upon the gallows,/ But that is nothing new”. Yeats saw him as an Irish patriot but that view was controversial, even in Ireland, and only recently has he been widely recognized as a hero of the Irish struggle for independence.

Few will know of his work in the Congo and in Amazonia, where he documented the atrocities perpetrated on the native population by colonizing powers for the sake of those valuable commodities – rubber and ivory. In both places, the reports he wrote for the British Foreign Office were instrumental in bringing about changes, and in 1911 King George V knighted him for exemplary service to the United Kingdom.

Few men rise so high: and few sink so low as to be tried for treason and end their lives on the gallows.

Mario Vargas Llosa begins his novel in Casement’s cell in Pentonville Prison, where he awaits news of his appeal against the death sentence. But the bulk of the novel is made up of his memories. First of his years in Africa, then in Brazil and Peru, and finally in Ireland.

Casement was born in Kingstown, Co. Dublin, and grew up in an Anglican family, although his mother, who died when he was nine, had been a Catholic and had secretly had him baptized as a Catholic on a holiday trip to Wales. At the age of fifteen, he joined the Elder Dempster shipping line in Liverpool as an apprentice and, in the four years that he worked for them, he made three trips to West Africa and liked it so much that he gave up his job and moved there. In 1884, he joined an expedition into the Congo led by the famous Welsh explorer, Henry Morton Stanley. This was his first experience of the mixed intentions of Europeans in the Congo: “on one hand sowing desolation and death…and on the other opening routes to commerce and evangelization”, but for the next two years he travelled extensively as an agent for the Sanford Exploring Expedition, which was developing trade throughout the Upper Congo for King Leopold II of Belgium.

During these years, Casement became increasingly disillusioned with the idealistic vision of being able “to emancipate backward and ignorant people through Christianity and Western enlightenment”. By the time he met Konrad Korzeniowski, who was newly arrived in the Congo, he was able to share with him the horrors he had seen perpetrated by Belgian government agents and by the military Force Publique employed by them to enforce order. He prepared him for the terrible experiences which Conrad would eventually write into his novel, Heart of Darkness.

In 1888, Casement resigned from his job in disgust and went to work at a Baptist Mission as a book-keeper for three months before returning to England. Already, he was arguing vehemently against the exploitation, violence and moral corruption he had seen perpetrated in the Belgian Congo Free State in the name of commerce.

In Britain, reports of atrocities in the Belgian Congo were causing public outrage. Casement had a great deal of experience in Africa and a facility for languages which allowed him to talk with some of the native peoples in the Congo. His views about the situation there were also becoming more widely known. So, in 1892, he w