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 "The Testaments" by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood won me as a fan after I read the classic The Handmaid’s Tale. I also really enjoyed another one of her dystopias: Oryx and Crake which is very different to the aforementioned, but I was impressed by her world building, characters and execution of plot.  

Although The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t have the fastest moving plot, it was still enjoyable to read. I felt I was with Offred during her monotonous life, patiently waiting for change that unfolded in a way that fitted with the pace of the novel. The Testaments’s three plots are so separate and different in pace, they could have been three volumes of a series. On the other hand, broadening the scope of the novel could translate well to screen, as The Handmaid’s Tale did so successfully. The Testaments gives an insight into the lives of women raised in Gilead, women who knew of life pre-dystopia and women like us who are viewing Gilead from the outside and can see all of its hypocrisies.  

I appreciate Atwood perhaps trying to attract a wider audience and avoiding replicating The Handmaid’s Tale. But what made The Handmaid’s Tale so good, such as the tension between the central characters, is missing from The Testaments.

Atwood’s writing style is beautiful as ever; her use of language, imagery and metaphors are strong as usual. The best parts of the novel are when Aunt Lydia describes her transition from lawyer to Aunt and all the horrific treatment she faces and witnesses.

The Testaments’s strength lies in its message. The themes it deals with are still important and it shows the progress or lack thereof of women’s rights between the 1980s and now. This new generation of readers are conscious of the relevance and problematic consequences of a patriarchal dystopia.  
  

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 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 Eliot John of "The Mars Room" by Rachel Kushner

The Mars Room is Rachel Kushner’s third novel, short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. It centres on Romy Hall, her experiences in the American prison system and the lives of women who are also prisoners. 

In the first chapter, Romy’s narration describes a man from her past who "didn’t understand about people who grew up in the city, the nihilism, the inability to go to college or join the straight world, get a regular job or believe in the future." The people that she describes are those at the centre of Kushner’s novel. The Mars Room is not an easy read, and I refrain from saying that it’s not an enjoyable read because I found that I couldn’t put it down once I had started. The tone of the novel is nihilistic and delivers a bleak and realistic depiction of life in an American prison.

The women are treated as uneducated “imbeciles” although we see that they are anything but. They manage to make "home meals" out of creamer, stolen items from the dining hall and Raman’s that you couldn’t imagine. Conan (a transvestite) starts a dildo-business, forging the phallic-objects out of wood whenever the guard turns a blind eye. The flush system on the toilet turns into their version of The Royal Mail. It both highlights the desperation of these women, and lack of amenities, whilst also channelling a dark and bizarre humour.

In recent years, Orange is the New Black has made prison life exciting and almost glamorous, yet The Mars Room buries itself in the political jeopardy that prisoners actually face. Betty LaFrance, an infamous inmate on death row and former model, brags about her life before prison and the evidence for her conviction, "a photo of her lying nude under a pile of money." However, after the postal-toilet flushes up the actual photo, Romy and Sammy are left speechless, staring at a corpse-like body buried under stacks of dollars. 

Sporadically the narration shifts to follow the guard, Gordon Hauser. The focus of these chapters drifts to the land around his cabin and the general destruction of American land due to oil farming: "Machines shook the almond trees in synchronous violence." You can’t help but compare this trope to the women we learn so much about. Is the mechanical American prison system nothing more than a destructive force? Kushner encourages readers to fight for a reform of the system through realistic stories and experiences. 

The Mars Room begins on "Chain Night," the evening that Romy and sixty other inmates are shuffled into prison like cattle – and you will feel like you are one of them.


About the reviewer
Eliot John is an MA Creative Writing student who specialises in flash fiction and monologues. She is currently writing her first novel on feminism and rape culture. Recurring themes explored in her work include loss of identity, sexuality, ethics, and the vices of modern culture.