Review by Sally Evans of "Upturned Earth" by Karen Jennings

A men’s book written by a woman, this historical novel about late-nineteenth-century mining conditions in a South African township is a thoroughly researched and detailed portrayal of a community of poverty-stricken workers dependent on mine work for a living. It cleverly keeps the workers in view, using a few middle-men with various degrees of conscience to hold the story together. 

Blindly overseeing rough justice, Hull, the new magistrate, deals with fights and spats in the corrupt society. He comes across the boy Noki whose brother has been arrested and disappears. Noki’s search for his brother holds the timeline of the story, until the inevitable mine disaster in which Noki is one of the few to survive. The incompetent Hull faces up to his shortcomings, leaving his amateur natural history studies to warn the sympathetic rich mine owner’s daughter away as she tries to intervene in a workers' strike on behalf of her absent father. Their incipient romance is torn apart as she is sent home with her jars of homemade jam intended to feed the starving. Her father, brought back from the comfort of Johannesburg, sends his daughter back to England and deals with the strike in the only way he knows, with soldiers and a massacre. There are strong male characters among both workers and controllers, but mostly the women come packaged as ‘women and children’ or are otherwise drunk and in despair. 

The acceptance of rough and ready life, dangerous sea transport, lack of education and comforts, poor communications and uncheckced wickedness, give this world a grim reality. We come to believe in the boy Noki, the Cornishman Tregowning, and the motley nature of this mining community. Sympathising with Noki and to some extent with Hull, the reader is drawn into the unfolding disastrous story to make a racy and unusual novel. 

It is always difficult to guess how individuals would respond to historical conditions. What knowledge can we have of people’s feelings in such times?  A novel such as Upturned Earth fills the gaps in historical records with imagination and informed guesswork. We are shown the responses both of the workers caught up this situation and their overseers, as these men rationalise the harsh world they are helping to maintain.

There isn’t room for more women in this book. The kindly but immature Iris – Hull uses her first name but once – is sent back to England. Jam making, and looking after her young privileged son, are all she is fit for. Was it absence of power among women that made those worlds so harsh? Was it an acceptance that mining was necessarily inhuman?

This book enlivens history, the purpose of historical fiction, and looks critically at an actual industry, which is something that can be done better in fiction than in reports. A nicely produced book and a worthwhile read. 

About the reviewer
Sally Evans is a bookseller and poet.Her books include The Bees (2008) and Poetic Adventures in Scotland (2014), both from Diehard publishers. She edited Poetry Scotland for 20 years, and is currently studying for a PhD at Lancaster University. Her novel Wildgoose: A Tale of Two Poets is due out from Red Squirrel's Postbox Press soon.

Review by Paul Jenkins of "The Mirror and the Light" by Hilary Mantel

Anticipation, comparison and expectation are difficult emotive foes to appease. How do bands and singers follow their breakthrough song or album? Few rarely do successfully. How does a writer follow not only best sellers, but two Booker Prizes?  

Eight years had passed since Hilary Mantel's ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ had secured her second Booker Prize. Anticipation, expectation, and comparison had never reached such heights before ‘The Mirror and the Light’ was published in 2020, drawing the life of Thomas Cromwell to a conclusion. It is against these measurements and emotions with which we must contend, to write a fair review of the final novel of this Tudor trilogy. It is exceptionally difficult to do so.

What is without doubt, is that Hilary Mantel continues to write with exceptional knowledge and clarity of Tudor life. It's hard to pinpoint whether the title author or historian suits her more. The detail around Tudor life; food, colours, fashion, and house décor are extraordinary. You are given an unparalleled vivid lesson into the textures and fabrics of everyday Reformation Britain. You can feel and breathe it. The characters are alive as the political noose tightens around the hero. Is he a hero or deserving of his fate? Texts books portray Cromwell as a villain, but Mantel offers a more nuanced perspective.

The Tudor court was all about survival, and Cromwell was better at survival than most – he needed to be. Mantel makes him come alive, and I for one was urging him to navigate the class machinations that ultimately secured his downfall. For me he became a hero and I wanted him to survive. Alas, no, and Mantel’s final words still pain me as his blood spills onto the scaffold. The jury decide that there will be no third Booker Prize, but that does not diminish this final book of the trilogy. For me, the emotive foes have been successfully equalled and that is more than good enough. Take a bow, Hilary Mantel.   

About the reviewer
Paul Jenkins is 56 years old, with wide ranging interests in history, hill walking and the arts.

Review by Gus Gresham of "Poppy Flowers at the Front" by Jon Wilkins

This is a poignant, compelling story of love and desolation amid the sterling work of ambulance women during the 1914-18 World War.

As any good reader or writer knows, it is the detail that convinces and transports us to the virtual landscape of a story. Like all great novels set in the First World War (All Quiet On The Western Front; A Farewell To Arms …), Jon Wilkins’s excellent novel, Poppy Flowers At The Front, airlifts us directly into the sights and smells and sounds and mud and blood and horror and senseless waste of the trenches.

We are in safe hands, though (we hope), with the engaging narrator Poppy Loveday, who guides us through her story as surely as her ambulance negotiates the muddy rutted tracks between the field hospital and the Front, with shells exploding around her. She is diligent in her selfless efforts, but is consumed daily by the suffering of "young boys in pain, a pain they did not deserve. Boys who screamed in terror, far from home and their mothers."

Yet, amid it all, there is light-hearted relief, humour and sensitivity, especially in the jaunts to Paris, rural France and rural England. And on a visit home, there is a beautifully understated exchange as Poppy’s father quizzes her about how hard life really is on the Western Front: "'Now tell me all about France, the truth mind…' So, I did and he was very quiet and very shocked."

The main counterpoint to the horrors of trench-warfare is embodied in a wonderfully handled and sensitive love story. The reader turns the pages in anticipation of something dreadful happening to the heroine or her lover at any time … and … (no spoilers!). Recommended.


About the reviewer
Gus Gresham is an avid reader and writer. He has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and has worked variously as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, community activist for Greenpeace, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal and communication skills facilitator, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines Brittle Star and Under The Radar, and his recently published novel, EARTHRISE, is available on Amazon. You can read a review of it here. 

Review by Elle Morgan of "Birdcage Walk" by Helen Dunmore

How many of us read historical novels, wondering how the events of the past can help us interpret those of today? Helen Dunmore blends the post-modern with the nineteenth-century: “a man doing t’ai chi” is perched next to “skeletal” Georgian architecture. Birdcage Walk opens in the twenty-first century, and then delves into old documents from the time of the French Revolution.

“I touched the paper as if the heat of their lives might come off on my fingers”: we are introduced to the period by a contemplative man who stumbles across the past while walking his dog; Dunmore used a real place in Bristol to concretise the present. Timothy Jones snapped the black-and-white photograph on the front cover “using a Nikon D300, in between a walkway in Clifton Cemetery.” Noir-like and ethereal, it suits the genre perfectly. 

Helen uses one close psychological portrait of a family to encapsulate a broader landscape, one of the revolutionary wars happening across the Channel. In the novel, the effects of the French battles are widespread, and divide British households into anti-Royalists, and the upper-class bourgeoisie. Lizzie’s household is no different. The author asks, why do we love the people we do, even in spite of our political differences? 

Before Helen Dunmore passed away, Oliver Hurst, a Bath-based illustrator, was commissioned to paint a piece for The Financial Times, that would highlight her novel’s themes. He painted the main female protagonist, Lizzie, in a cage. She is turned away from the eighteenth-century houses, presumably from her Royalist-supporting husband’s doomed enterprise, and I wanted to know what she was looking at. Upon being contacted for interview, Hurst said he’d painted her husband smaller and insignificant, and “all that was left to do was ‘hang’ Lizzie’s cage in Georgian Bristol.” Being based locally, like Dunmore and Jones, he did not have to do much research into the historical setting. But what was Lizzie looking at?

It's a compelling novel, which channels modern themes and feminist complexities with political undertones. Dunmore was an excellent researcher, and reading this will add to any knowledge on the treatment of women in the nineteenth century. Lizzie’s mother is a typically radical, freedom-supporting character who wants the working masses in France to win; Lizzie’s husband is the opposite, with a business to think of. He becomes more and more domineering as the novel goes on, and Lizzie’s sense of liberty is compromised.

Where is Lizzie looking? Towards freedom, perhaps. 

About the reviewer

Elle Morgan is a Creative and Critical MA student at the University of Sussex, who loves reading and reviewing, particularly 1920's Jazz Age fiction. Her website is www.ellemorganreads.wordpress.com.