Review by Peter Raynard of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

Set completely on a space ship, the Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey (her fifth) melds the claustrophobic (as opposed to clashes) with the constant expanse of Earth, as the ship zips around in sixteen orbits. The descriptions of our planet are beautifully done, and you get an understanding of the different terrains, whilst accepting their common home. Inside, the inside lives of the astronauts and cosmonauts (British, Russian, American) are traced against this backdrop. The research that must have been put into the writing is exhausting – but never did the research distract from it being a novel. 

There is the constant paradox of a vessel moving at enormous speed whilst they are cocooned static within it: "They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close up view of a turning planet." 

I would have liked a bit more narrative to the personal story about each naut, but realise this is only a minor frustration, given their static station. But the poetic nature of the earth is brought out in Harvey’s poetic descriptions: "The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself …. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges."

I was surprised to see the book only getting 3.3 out of 5 on Goodreads/Amazon; however. I would agree with some of the criticisms regarding the limits of the inner life of each character but disagree with those who felt it repetitive – it was of course repetitive. They keep on going round the planet, but it is never the same view and that is the point. Our planet keeps coming up with surprises. This will be a novel I will go back to, as there is much to consume in such a small space, one spinning in parallel to the earth’s kaleidoscopic vastness.

About the reviewer
Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan

 

          Red runs through
          like a weeping wound -
          a scab twice picked.

- Tracey Foster

There's a red thread that runs deeply through Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel. From the very first, we are faced with a stubborn blood blister under the nail that preoccupies the protagonist Dorrigo Evans as a small child and diverts his attention away from a critical act that will come back to haunt him as a middle-aged man. The blister can only be resolved by a red-hot kitchen knife that makes a hole in the nail, a blade with 'globules of fat' that will take on much more sinister appearance during Dorrigo's time as POW in Burma. This is a story of one man's life and death and the connections he makes in between.

          A world of dew
          and in every dew drop
          a world of struggle.

- Issa

Flanagan is an expert at fluctuating between different time frames and takes us from youth to old age and any point in between, weaving a tale that is multi-layered and interconnected. Characters talk to us through the third-person narration as we begin to join up the dots. His paramour, Amy, is first seen wearing a red camellia in her hair and this becomes such a potent symbol that in later life Dorrigo has a camellia bush cut down after he moves to a new house with his family.

          A bee
          staggers out
          of the peony.

- Basho

Flanagan has a personal connection to the torturous conditions the POWs suffered during the building of the Burma railway. His own father was a POW at this time and died on the day that he finished writing the novel. These gruesome, gut-wrenching tales can only come from one who has heard of this first hand. We can only hope that these stories bear witness to a dark period of humanity that we shall never see the likes of again.

          Only the monkeys 
          can laugh - in the heat
          of the jungle.

- Tracey Foster

The title of the novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, takes its cue from the Japanese poet Basho's book of the same name. This poet's journeys and poems became the first form of haibun writing, prose interspersed with haiku. Flanagan drops haiku into the text to break up the chapters and add another layer of emotion to the story. After savagely beating a POW to near death, a guard tells Dorrigo,

          A world of pain
          if the cherry blossoms,
          it blossoms.

- Basho

Guards who dispense relentless barbaric punishments on the POW are shown swapping haiku favourites in their quiet moments displaying a discordant relationship between humanity and nature. The haikus act as rest breaks to the violence, diverting and regrouping our emotions before the next chapter. Later on, another guard is asked to reflect on his life in old age and write a traditional death poem, left behind for his loved ones. As we hope and await absolution he recites

          Winter ice
          melts into clear water.
          Clear is my heart.

This novel is a harrowing tale of love, loss, torture, pain and release. As readers, we long for resolution, a glimpse of a happy ending but as Flanagan emphasises, life is just simply not like that. We take what we can and make the best of things. Maybe that is our strength, to endure and leave behind a tale to tell. This is one tale that Flanagan was born to tell. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tionee Joseph of "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo

The first thing one might notice when reading this novel is the breaking of conventional prose style. Its lack of full stops or speech marks and use of enjambment and repetition of single words follows a more poetic style. The structure of the novel is also unconventional; each character’s life is summarised from childhood to adulthood with some of them being loosely connected. 

Following the generations through this kind of structure lends itself well to the telling of family history, and lineage is an important theme of this novel. It reminded me of the television series Roots which begins with the African slave Kunta Kinte and follows the journeys of his sucesssive children, grandchildren and so forth into modern day Afro-America.  

I read The Lonely Londoners just before reading this but was disappointed by the lack of female voices in the narrative. I was glad that Girl, Woman, Other was addressing this gap in the diaspora. It was even more enjoyable for me as a British Caribbean woman to be able to relate to this novel. 

I haven’t read much around the novel’s creation as I wanted to read it without any preconceptions. I wonder how many of these characters are based on real people and which parts have been fictionalized. I felt like Evaristo was using the expanse of the story to address every trope and stereotype rather than creating authentic characters. Nevertheless, she successfully creates emotional nuance; I found a few of the stories really heartbreaking.

I’m glad that this sort of writing is receiving acclaim and I hope it facilitates more modern and diverse writers to have an impact on our canon. 


About the reviewer
Tionee Joseph is completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She has a blog where she writes about writing and gives lifestyle advice, which you can read here. Her articles on film, TV and adaptations have been published. She is currently working on her first thriller novel and writing her first album.

Review by Lerah Mae Barcenilla of "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. Completed in 1996, the book took four years to write and won the Booker Prize in 1997.

Set in Kerala, India during the late 1960s where Communism, religion and the caste-system ruled people’s hearts, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol – the cousin of our two protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. We are introduced to the loneliness of their mother, Ammu, who fled an abusive marriage, returning to an unwelcome town to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi. There’s uncle Chacko, a Rhodes scholar with his reading-aloud voice and words of wisdom, Baby Kochamma, enemy and grandaunt to the twins and Velutha, whose caste is plagued with tragedy from the start, the Untouchable beloved by Ammu and the twins.

‘It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for much longer than the memory of the life that it is purloined,’ the narrator muses. In a narrative that slips seamlessly between time and space Roy slowly unravels the web of stories  behind the night of Sophie’s death drowned beneath a background of local politics, social taboos and the wave of history. The stories move from the twins’ childhood in 1969 –  where reality blurs with the plots of A Tale of Two Cities and Macbeth, and where people read backwards and sunglasses makes the world angry-coloured –  to their present as adults, where Rahel returns home 23 years after the tragic events that separated her from Estha, the present where one is Empty and another Quiet. You wonder how the words that used to mirror innocence and child-like curiosity faded, disappeared and are now as empty and hollow as the emptiness in Rahel’s heart, the silence in Estha’s voice.

With a whimsical, almost dreamlike lyrical prose, Roy captures the children’s candid observations imbued with sad wisdom, juxtaposed by the adult’s complexity and frailties in subtle ways. The shift between time and place leaves you aching with desperation to know more, waiting anxiously for the story to unfold. The sense of tragedy plagues the words and sentences of early chapters, and Roy gives snippets, a mere glimpse at the keyhole of a door that hides a sad story. We’re drawn in by the innocent way in which the twins see the world, full of wonder and awe and magic – only to walk into the hollow cave submerged by silence and a familiar smell, ‘Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.’
Past and present blend together the way you sometimes get lost in thoughts and memory and you read on in dread as the past slowly unravels, revealing roads crossed and words spoken that led to this very moment – some that began way before our two protagonists were even born. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things will lead you to a maze of narratives and a web of characters filled with tragedy, beautiful imagery and innocent little wisdoms – the funny thing is, you willingly follow.

‘The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again… In great stories you know who lives, who dies who finds love who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again,’ Roy writes, and The God of Small Things is surely one of the books you will want to read again.

About the reviewer
Lerah Mae Barcenilla is a nineteen year old who has an unhealthy obsession with books, coffee, mythology, cherry blossoms and post-it notes. She is currently a second year English student at the University of Leicester.