Review by Omar Sabbagh of "My Hummingbird Father" by Pascale Petit

In the later 1930s Ford Madox Ford was asked by one of his writing students, Robert Lowell, what the one essential need was for an aspiring writer. Ford said: "Memory." Oscar Wilde is famed for averring that life copies art, not the other way round. Both these insights are lived-out and lived-up-to in acclaimed poet Pascale Petit’s first novel, My Hummingbird Father.  

This is the story of the main protagonist, Dominique, a painter, and a story about the value of the imagination and its glorious inheritance. A story about how art redresses and redeems the seemingly insuperable vulnerabilities of being human. Indeed, to start: Chapter 29 of this compelling, moving book is titled "Two Dominiques," and my discussion centres on this doubleness, what Dominique thinks of at one point in the novel as "double exposure." 

In the "Prologue" we start with the "forest of perpetual childhood," "painting animals none have seen." Indeed, Petit as a poet is very well-known as a writer giving life and signifying sentience to the lives of and in the natural world, the rich and feral world of her good, longstanding wilderness. In this book, though we travel, transformatively, between her heroine, Dominique’s self-professed "blank childhood," her thinking of herself as having "died at six," her "forest of sleeping birds," "memories never to be remembered," and her later reconciliation with that fraught past. For she was also the girl through these traumas with "a crayon always in her hand," with a body that as this story fleshes out, "remembers her childhood," bodily (aesthetically), a woman for whom life itself comes through her canvases, "hungry for the truth."  And "hunger" is deeply apposite, in so far as it’s used both literally and figuratively in this novel, a novel replete with a rich and kaleidoscopic array of flora and fauna that act as both vehicles and tenors for how the tale is told. In short, this story is an adventure and a homecoming. A bad wilderness (Dominique’s harsh childhood) is exchanged through the process of daring to love again with a good one: she is loved and loving again in the Amazonian wilderness of the book’s final part, its "Epilogue."    

Architectonic aside, the lifegiving doubleness of this tale is also apparent in its style, a style much like the (mythopoetic) "rites" of passage of the Pemón people she visits in Venezuela, in her visits to the Amazonian wilderness. For instance, "Juan," her Amazonian guide, future lover, and future replacement for her now-dead father, can speak of his people dubbing rain "saliva of the stars," and (one of innumerable examples) Dominique can see her dying, breathless father later in the Amazonian trees, "a forest holding in its breath." The sensibility of the heroine (and/or her narrator) of this tale is oceanic, meaning all the elements of felt life, wild and tame and in between, interpenetrate continuously in its telling. The literal riches of wildlife described and descried also stand for and inhabit different metaphorical levels in the novel. This gesture of (freely) translating at least two levels of world is enacted on nearly every page: the Pemón speak of the "sky-forest" and the plain one, the "spirit world" and the "visible" one (like left and right hands), and via flashbacks and instinctual moves of involuntary memory, Dominique and her guiding narrator shuttlecock between literal, contemporary worlds and mythic and spiritual or imaginative ones, rendering this book in toto a paean to the empowering freedom of the imagination, epiphanic, transformative.  

Though hated by her (now-dead) mother, having a fractious relationship with her sister, Vero, bullied at school, near-suicidal later, Dominique’s primary antagonist is her father, whom she visits in the last few, dying years of his life, a man who had absconded from her childhood.  The "grey" Paris (of her childhood) Dominique visits is soon to be animated with colour, though, as much as the Notre-Dame she visits (which becomes "a new zoo") repeatedly, becomes a parallel of her Venezuelan wilderness. Two poles, again, but two welded in the end as one.

Her father is her hummingbird father. Another doubleness symbolizes here, too: the hummingbirds, we read, "pierce time itself." There are the cared-for hummingbirds (37 of them, Dominique’s age) of the ornithologist Augusto Ruschi and the deadened, heartless ones she finds among her father’s remains. Her father (abused in childhood, as Dominique was herself) represents the dead-end of temporality, a vicious cycle and re-cycling of immanent abuse – Dominique’s father averring at one point (ashamed) that one cannot change the past. The better hummingbirds represent the way that art and imagination can use the past as an opportunity for the future, redressing the beeline of mortality.

The overall imaginative vision behind this rich and compelling tale is both a concrete journey of transformation and, through the riches of its lucid, dramatic, highly evocative telling, an allegory about what art is for. The wilderness of our wounds and suffering can be transcended by the loving care of the imagination – not as escape, but as the distiller and giver of the essence of flourishing human well-being.

About the reviewer
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic.  His latest books are Y Knots: Short Fictions and For Echo (Cinnamon Press 2023 & 2024). Currently he teaches at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father by Pascale Petit on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

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.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Ormering Tide" by Kathryn Williams

Mercury music prize nominee Kathryn Wiliams is a successful singer / songwriter who has tuned her musical ear and channelled her creative flow into creating this first novel. The sea ebbs and flows through this coming-of-age story and just as the abalones are uncovered with the low spring tide, so too secrets and truths are gradually revealed to the tight-knit island community. 'Ormers, also known as ear shells, are abalones that can only be accessed to harvest on big spring tides. You may catch ormers on the day of the new moon, and two days after that.'

Rozel lives with her parents and triplet brothers in a small cottage in a bay on one of the Channel Islands. The small community that lives there go out on the shores at the ormering tide to collect the shells and work together to harvest the bounty. The events following her eldest brother’s accident leave the community fractured and rumours begin to break their bonds. Rozel uncovers the truth of the accident by piecing together fragments of conversations overheard as she wanders the island and spends time with her elderly neighbour - collecting memories like picking shells off the beach.

Williams laces the narrative with echoes of menace and weaves an undercurrent of threat that keeps the reader guessing who the perpetrator is. The claustrophobic setting of her family life holds us close to the narration and we eavesdrop on snippets that help us come to our own conclusions. ‘My life was like a bowl, filled each new day. The sloshing around of the same faces, the same concave world, filling in and tipping out.’

Sounds play an integral part of the aural experience within this novel. Williams cleverly uses the sounds of the sea, wind, grasses, stones on the beach to frame her settings. This roots us in the landscape but also whispers at us from the side-lines as if suggesting other conversations: 'The shell sounds of oceans, whistling around and up. Twisting inside like an ear to the ground.'

After the accident, her brother is unable to speak and she becomes his voice, translating the incomprehensible babble that streams from his mouth. This raises her from the bottom of the order of hierarchy in the house, as she becomes essential in communicating his thoughts to the nurses and his parents. This link between ears and shells, listening and retaining sounds within, plays well with the theme of the novel. Her best friend Bunny also has a speech impediment that echoes the sound of the sea that surround them: ‘The whispering licks of the wind in dry grass, the circling of dry sand in swirls. The wind at the top of the cliffs rushing past the holes in my ears, all had the same lisp.’

Readers will be swept along with the narration and stung with some uncomfortable truths - similar to how Rozel says ‘the sand would whip up with the wind and hit our legs like little pins.’

As well as a successful musical career, Williams has worked with other poets at writing retreats and has collaborated with Carol Ann Duffy to produce a piece about the Waterloo massacre. She was given a New Writing North commission and was the poet in residence at Alnwick Garden. The Ormering Tide is her debut novel, and she continues to produce music on her own record label, CAW records.

About the reviewer

As a teacher of Art and Design for over thirty years, Tracey Foster has channelled her imagination into getting the best creative output out of others. She is now hoping to restore her create mojo and has enrolled on the Creative Writing MA course at Leicester University. Last year, she completed the Comma Press short story course with Rebecca Burns and collectively published Tales from Garden Street. She has had her first poem published by the Poetry Bus magazine and is currently working on a poetry collection.