Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "White Road" by Harry Whitehead

 

Harry Whitehead’s White Road is an arresting work of eco-fiction that combines the taut urgency of a thriller with the moral weight of a contemporary fable. The novel interrogates not only the limits of human endurance but also the ethical boundaries of exploitation, survival and responsibility in an age of ecological crisis.

It opens in the Canadian Arctic, a landscape at once magnificent and merciless. Into this environment comes Carrie Essler, a Scottish rescue swimmer, whose skills and resilience are tested almost immediately. A mission goes wrong and leaves her stranded on the ice with two impossible companions: a half-dead stranger and a starving polar bear. With no clear way back to safety, every decision she makes could mean life or death. Beyond Carrie, figures such as Ross, the oil rig owner mired in guilt, and Amaruq, the Inuvialuit worker torn between tradition and modern demands, create a polyphonic exploration of conscience and consequence. These intersecting narratives refuse easy resolution, instead offering a layered meditation on human ambition and fragility. 

Whitehead handles a set of complex topics and themes with a deft touch. He avoids polemic, instead allowing the characters’ experiences to illuminate questions of responsibility and consequence. And the novel is at its strongest when it lingers in ambiguity, where no choice feels wholly right, and survival itself comes at a price. Stylistically, he balances precision with lyricism and the pacing is finely calibrated: moments of breathless intensity are counterbalanced by passages of quiet introspection, allowing the novel’s thematic concerns to resonate without sacrificing narrative momentum. While stranded on the ice, Carrie encounters Bastien, a ghostly presence that delivers a sardonic, mansplaining, yet knowledgeable running commentary on the surrounding environment and Arctic lore. This eerie, sometimes-gallows-humour voice offers both guidance and unsettling commentary as she navigates the brutal landscape. It is through this supernatural element that Whitehead effectively introduces an "Ecogothic" dimension to the narrative, blending environmental consciousness with spectral intervention, and elevates the final sections of the narrative to a whole new level. 

The Arctic itself is brought to life with almost mythic presence. Whitehead’s prose renders the ice, wind and sea as more than backdrop. They emerge as sentient forces, capable of awe and terror in equal measure. The natural world becomes a crucible, exposing the weaknesses and strengths of those who enter it. "Only a vague, ambient light outlined the whitecaps breaking all around her, jagged white lines that appeared behind, ahead, and, terrifyingly, above." Some of the most haunting imagery is of nature reeling from and submitting to the horrors of leaking oil that travels upwards and outwards from the site of the disaster, set on imprinting its dreadful tattoo on the Arctic landscape and unsuspecting wildlife. "She [Carrie] switched on her torch and shone it down. Rainbow glittered back at her … she knew crude." And elsewhere, a polar bear emerges from the icy waters, its fur coated in the same oil: "It swung round, trying to bite its own flanks. Round and round like a dog chasing its tail." 

As a piece of storytelling, White Road is compelling – driven, clear-eyed and cinematic in its set pieces. Yet it can also be highly reflective, encouraging the reader to pause and consider what lies beneath the action: the fragile beauty of the natural world, the limits of human endurance and the moral compromises that underpin modern life. This is a novel that entertains while it unsettles, gripping the reader even as it asks difficult questions. Whitehead has produced a timely and resonant work that stays with you, long after the Arctic ice has closed over its final page.

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer living in Cornwall. His interests include dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic form. His debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press (2022) and fiction titles he has recently worked on as commissioning editor have won multiple regional readers’ and publishers’ awards.

Review by Harry Whitehead of "Syllables of the Briny World" by Georgina Key

Georgina Key’s Syllables of the Briny World offers a poignant and vivid magical realist evocation of Hurricane Ike’s devastating rout of the Texas coastline in 2008. But the book is about more than simply the catastrophe that claimed nearly two hundred lives. It is a novel about relationships. 

Pete is an alcoholic, washed-up fisherman incapable of straightening out for long enough even to spend time with his children, his divorced wife having given up on him long ago. Izzie is eighteen, struggling to come to terms with her queer identity, an unsympathetic mother making her life miserable as she traverses the complexities of her first relationships. Agnes and Earle are retired, upright pillars of religious and moral fortitude. Clementine and her friend Dorie both lost children and are struggling to emerge from grief alongside fallible, if well-meaning, men. And Clementine can see the dead. After her boy, Finn, drowned, she wandered the shoreline trying to reclaim him from the Sea-Mother, hearing his lost voice in the wind and the waves. Now, just as the storm approaches, she sees a ‘Lost Boy’ on the beach, who leads her to her son. No one, least of all her husband, believes her. The Lost Boys, meanwhile, have their own agenda.

The novel gently charts the resilience of the people who inhabit the thin strips of land along the Gulf of (yes!) Mexico, land destined ultimately to be reclaimed by the sea. An environmental novel, then, certainly. But its green credentials are ever-so-delicately woven through the gripping interplay of the various characters' lives. We witness both tragedy and hope unfold amid the ferocious drama of the real events of Hurricane Ike. Highly recommended.

About the reviewer
Harry Whitehead is a novelist and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester where he directs the annual free literature festival, Literary Leicester. His new environmental thriller, White Road, is out in September from Claret Press.

Review by Harry Whitehead of "Merchant" by Alexandra Grunberg

 

 

Grunberg’s promising debut paints a dark picture of a far future, climate-broken, quasi-fantasy Earth where the few survivors of "The Flood" eke out meagre lives on mountain tops above lethal seas. Jessica, a half-Jewish girl and the "merchant" of the title, lives in a Venice relocated to the slopes of K2 in the Himalayas. Cem is a Venetian boy slowly falling into the mindless "hiss" of the Feral who haunt the darker caves. Shinobu is a scribe to the Empress of Fuji, whose people provide algae-block food for the world’s few human survivors with their still-functioning tech.

Jessica has memorized all of Shakespeare’s plays and regularly performs them in the segregated streets of Venice. But when she pushes a Fujian sailor into the sea to be devoured by the ever-present eels, she sets off a riot that results in many of the other Fujian sailors’ deaths and the algae blocks stop. Now Jessica must travel to Fuji to persuade the empress to forgive the Venetians and not to let them starve. And Shakespeare will have final word.

There’s certainly much to enjoy in the novel, with unusual settings, and folding Shakespeare’s words intrinsically into a dystopian, fantastic world, as well as loosely using The Merchant of Venice as a story model. Some of the writing is truly unsettling and often beautifully rendered. Broken statues "wore their pain plainly, told it clearly, even in their resolute silence." Less clearly carved at times – forgivably in this the first novel by the author – is the narrative direction, the central crisis and its direct connection to the actions of the protagonists. Jessica helps inaugurate the journey to Fuji (and, of course, pushes the sailor to his death, though we do not directly see this vital inciting action). Yet then Jessica becomes often almost invisible through the novel’s second half. She is a bit-part player, a pawn for others – the Empress, the antagonist (if there is one) Dario from the cannibalistic city-state, Les Alpes. The story meanders, rather, through the second half, towards – for this reader – a somewhat abrupt conclusion.

But I don’t want overly to critique an often potently imagined fantasy eco-fiction by a debut novelist. The book is professionally produced by Goldsmiths Press (although the non-indented, double-spaced paragraphs look more like a philosophical tract of aphorisms and, at first, had me trying to read more meaning than there was into a paragraph. The work’s genre and style do not suggest such a layout). Overall, Grunberg has written a deeply imagined and passionate novel and I look forward to seeing how her work evolves.

About the reviewer
Harry Whitehead a novelist, academic and researcher on climate change and the arts at the University of Leicester, UK, where he directs the Centre for New Writing.

A Book That Changed Me, by Harry Whitehead: "Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience," by Gitta Sereny

For her ninetieth birthday, we took my granny to visit Auschwitz. I guess that’s as far as I’ll ever invoke humour about such a subject, but the poor thing was also promised a visit to Venice. So we set off on what proved an epic driving tour. Berkshire to Krakow to Venice and home. On the journey, I read Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce to try to comprehend the camps. I struggled for years after to get a handle on what I learned about humanity’s dark potential. Two things kept coming back to me: first, the freezing silence of Auschwitz Birkenau, the ‘extermination camp,’ until a fish leapt and plopped in the small lake that held the ashes of a million people; its banality seemed an abomination. Second, there was a town close by. What of its population? What of conscience? 

And so I came to Sereny’s celebrated work. Into That Darkness relates her series of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl was captured in the 1960s and given a long prison term. Granted access by Stangl and his wife, Sereny interrogates his conscience, but gently and with empathy, always seeing beyond the monster to the man. The book interviews the few survivors of Treblinka as well, many of whom speak of Stangl as just a functionary, not cruel per se. Yet here was someone who oversaw the murder of more than a million people. And, indeed, he proves a disturbingly ordinary individual, though one incapable of recognizing the enormity of his guilt. Over and over, Stangl describes his conscience as being clear, within the boundaries of the world in which he existed. He was protecting his own family; it would have meant their death to have resisted; there was no escape from the closed Nazi society. 

On and on it went, until at last, one day, he ran out of words. And Sereny, too, said nothing now, no longer offering him any help. Finally, Stangl spoke the phrase, ‘My guilt.’ He uttered a few more hesitant lines – ‘… only now, in these talks …’ Then, he said, ‘My guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt.’

Nineteen hours later, Stangl died of a heart attack. 

Into That Darkness made me believe in the absolute justice of truth.

About the reviewer

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Before becoming an academic, he worked for many years in film and TV commercials production. 

Favourite Reads of 2017

At the end of 2017, we asked readers to nominate a favourite read of the year, and write a one-sentence review of their chosen book. The book could be from any time or genre - the only qualification was that it had to be a book the reader found particularly memorable, striking or enjoyable during the last twelve months. Here are the responses we received. Wishing everyone a happy new year of reading and books!


Barbara Cooke 

The Bees by Laline Paull: "1984 in a hive, with more eco-criticism, and a happier ending."

Laurie Cusack

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack: "It made me shiver with joy; should’ve won the Booker by a country mile!"

Sharon Eckman

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman: "long-awaited, every bit as wonderful as hoped for ... Glorious."

Peter Flack 

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell: "Life and love on a one track train line that eventually passes everywhere."

Simon King

The Little Demon by Fyodor Sologub: "Early twentieth-century Russian writing of the cruel and satirical kind, this tale of a sadistic and insecure provincial schoolmaster is as black as a diseased lung."

Kevan Manwaring 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: "Boldly genre-bending, defiantly imaginative, and beautifully-crafted, it seems eerily resonant - a novel about an alternative past that is really about now." 

Alexandros Plasatis

The Complete Short Stories by James Purdy: "A sensitive observer, his prose is gentle and, when needed, fierce."

Robert Richardson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: "The magnificent 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner has a setting of the terrifying aftermath of environmental disaster while still affirming humanity."

Jonathan Taylor

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: "a masterpiece of storytelling. You feel like you're there, on the boat, with the old man."

Maria Taylor 

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: "I have nothing more to say than I loved reading this book." 

Miranda Taylor (aged 9)

Toto the Ninja Cat by Dermot O'Leary: "because it's fun and silly. It was fun to read and it took me only two days."

Rosalind Taylor (aged 9)

Rabbityness by Jo Empson "because it's my favourite book of all time."

Paul Taylor-McCartney 

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: "A heart-rending and life-affirming journey into that purgatorial space between knowable historical fact and extreme creative invention."  

Harry Whitehead

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: "for making me see that industrial farming is the 'greatest crime in history' - now what the hell am I to do?"

Review by Figen Gungor of the "Telling Our Stories" event at the Donkey Pub, Leicester

The Donkey Pub

Telling Our Stories – Everybody’s Reading Event

Wednesday 30th September – 7:30pm

KGB Jazz, Harry Whitehead, Mellow Baku ft Marcus Joseph

Entering the pub at around 8:40pm, I walked in on KGB Jazz’s performance. A four man (well two being female) jazz band – their attitude lively and their music filled with even more life. The band members had great chemistry with one another and this was reflected through their music filled with mellow harmonies. The lead singer sported some rather joyous footwork.


Next on stage was Dr Harry Whitehead, who was the main focus of the Everybody’s Reading event and the main reason for my trek down to the small but cosy The Donkey Pub. He announced that his short story may put a downer on the previous spectacle. His short story was a comedic-but-grim-at-times gripping tale about fatherhood and the idea of family with hilarious pop culture references. A Father that had abandoned his family left behind a mangled mess of confusion and hurt brewing within the mind of his son. A son still looking for validation from his Father who has given up on any sort of connection causes awkward and forced conversations and a feeling of humorous empathy within the audience.

To brighten the mood Mellow Baku entered the stage, a beautifully charming character with a beautiful voice sang songs entailing many controversial topics such as police brutality, racism and the idea of one being free. She called upon stage Marcus Joseph, a Jazz musician who she had collaborated with on his latest album. Together they were a wonderfully delightful duo to listen to.

Overall the night was spectacular.

About the reviewer
Figen Gungor is currently a first year undergraduate student studying English at the University of Leicester at the late age of 21. When she isn’t busy studying she enjoys drinking tea at cute local cafes with a not so cute horror novel. She is currently working on finishing a transgressive fiction novel.