All the way through Michael Stewart’s collection of short stories the everyday is peeled back far enough for the reader to register the absurdities of existence. ‘The Naked Man’ reads like a paean to Stephen Gough the nude eccentric rambler who refuses to wear clothes and is continually imprisoned for his acts of conscience. Stewart confronts our conformity and our conditioning and our prejudices and begs a question. The tension he creates politically unsettles and challenges the reader. Stewart’s crafted text certainly leaves an after-burn. All his stories’ pay-offs linger. His minimalist style and economy reminds me of Raymond Carver and the dirty-realism school of writing. I like the absence of quotation marks and the absence of the word said after direct speech, which work to create an impact on the reader. His existential musings in the title story ‘Mr Jolly’ reminds one of how lonely life’s journey can become. How loneliness encroaches on us all, eventually. It made me think about people’s electronic lives. How alienating life is nowadays. A scarecrow performs the same function in this absurd tale until our protagonist tires of it and it’s sacrificed on a fire: burnt-out like its maker. In ‘Mann,’ the human biological machine comes under scrutiny, as time, routine, speed and stress impact on a commute to work. What seems important swamps Mann’s survival mechanism: split second decisions destroy. Rushing against the clock blinds his common sense. Mann’s conditioning makes him a slave to routine and punctuality. What a waste. His spiritual epiphany comes too late to dynamite his life. The story forces the reader to take stock. Bravo! Stewart confronts life’s truths and painful problems with economy and thoughtfulness. But what really lifts this collection are Stewart’s quirky insights that inhabit these cracking tales. An undercurrent of unease concerning our modern lives is realised within this text, which is refreshingly raw and new. The everyday is always unusual and different, if we only stepped back to see. Michael Stewart steps back and he does see and he cares ̶ and this is what really makes this collection fizz. About the reviewer Laurie Cusack is scraping at the underbelly of Irish Diaspora through a collection of short stories for his Creating Writing PhD at Leicester University. His writing influences include: John McGahern, Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, Claire Keegan and Colin Barrett.
Ford Madox Ford was a close friend of Ezra Pound, and part of a remarkable literary Modernism sustained in Britain, and specifically London, between the first meeting of the Café Tour d’Eiffel poets (later the Imagists) in 1909 and the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Ford wrote a considerable amount of poetry, but was even more committed to prose, and the tetralogy — a sequence of four novels — of Parade’s End constitutes, undoubtedly, a great Modernist work of art. Published between 1924 and 1928, they augmented the Modernist project in Britain. The first novel Some Do Not… is set immediately before the First World War; the middle two, No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up, are centred on the Western Front; and the final one, The Last Post, takes place in the war’s aftermath. Although written in the third person, there are, as befits Modernism, shifting points of view, and the most impressive writing is the way Ford conjures stream of consciousness monologues from different characters. Nevertheless, there is a central character: Christopher Tietjens. A member of the Yorkshire gentry, he is variously described as “The Last Tory,” an “Anglican Saint,” and someone who would have been more at home in the eighteenth century. He moves to his own beat and with measures of idealism: his refusal to take family money results in a continuous argument with Mark, his even stuffier older brother. Fortunately, Christopher is balanced by Valentine Wannop, the love of his life, who is a suffragette and pacifist. The triangle made with Christopher’s wife, Sylvia, an adulterer and vindictive in her ways of maligning Christopher, is a constant in the four novels. Ford had been an officer in the trenches, but those looking for blood and guts battle scenes will be disappointed. While death and physical pain are not ignored, Ford prioritises the psychological and spiritual suffering endured by those at the front. This continues for soldiers, like Christopher, who survive, and the final novel has Christopher and Valentine seeking the peace of a rural life in Sussex. There are many literary Modernisms — Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway etc.— and surely Ford is up there with the best of them. He has become the subject of academic study and conferences, and, inevitably, the Ford Madox Ford Society is tweeting as @FordMadoxFordie. Adding to this growing interest, Parade’s End was, in 2012, serialised for television: scripted by Tom Stoppard and with Benedict Cumberbatch as Christopher. Parade’s End shows a ruling class defined by a set of people from the same aristocratic and upper class background who all consequently know each other: a world largely dismantled by the upheavals of two world wars. Or was it? Despite significant social movements and changes — think, as examples, of women’s liberation, gay marriage, and the ascendancy of popular culture — we have a current prime minister who was at Eton and Oxford with the very person now vying to replace him. I do not think I am alone in finding that depressing. Parade’s End is a brilliant achievement, though somewhat daunting to approach, but I would encourage you to strap on the crampons and enjoy climbing these Modernist heights.
About the reviewer Robert Richardson is a visual artist and writer. His work is included in Artists’ Postcards: A Compendium (edited by Jeremy Cooper, published by Reaktion Books, London). He is also the co-editor, with William Pratt, of Homage to Imagism (AMS Press, New York). www.bobzlenz.com
You can read Robert Richardson's review of the BBC adaptation of Parade's End here.
At one point in her remarkable poetry collection, A Brief History of Time, Shaindel Beers remarks that 'perhaps / Derrida was right - that the center is not the center, / but is perhaps the center of something else / whether we are speaking of time, language, the universe.' The whole collection might be seen as an empirical testing-out of this philosophical hypothesis: to put it another way, in Beers's poetry - in the words of Blaise Pascal - time, language, the universe are spheres in which the 'centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.' No doubt Stephen Hawking - as well as Pascal, Derrida and Einstein - would understand. The poems themselves understand and test out these ideas, particularly as regards notions of time. In many of the poems, the present - what should be the 'centre' - cannot hold; the poems' present is always unstable, volatile, always prone to slip backwards of forwards, into present and future. The title poem, for example, starts with the word 'Now' - the 'Now' of a present love affair - but quickly moves backwards to the Elizabethans, the Greeks, the poet's own past, and forwards via insurance policies to a loveless future ('though I'll [still] love mountains as only a flatlander can'). The present is always ready to collapse into past and future: in 'Sleeping Man and Woman, Circa 2000, C.E.,' contemporary lovers are viewed like museum exhibits from the distant future; in 'Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping,' the dominant present tense encompasses both the start of a stripper's career, and its horrific end in violence and pornography; in the wonderful final poem, 'How Time Betrays Us,' the present of the writer ('Right now, I am 27 in human years. / My cat is 83') might be very different to the 'present' of the reader, which is also necessarily very different to the multiple presents of everyone else around the reader - as, indeed, Jacques Derrida himself might have predicted: In the time it will take you to read this, somewhere in America, a woman was raped. 171,233 animals were slaughtered for human consumption. 32 children worldwide died of starvation. I may have already died, but you are reading this, thinking I am 27 and very much in love. Clearly, there is an implication here that written language survives us to be read in the future; and the same implication pertains in the poem 'I Give You Words': 'Because the body is so ephemeral and corrupt, / what is beautiful today may not be so ten years hence. / I give you words.' In this sense, words can reach out to the future; but they are also marked by the past: 'I try to use old words, inherited from generation / after generation, and try to make them say new things.' At the end of the poem, though, Beers admits that she has 'failed ... / to say the thing anew.' Always reaching out to the future, words - marked as they by 'generation / after generation' - also collapse into the past, and 'newness' is almost an impossibility. The only real escape from the flux of time - from the overwhelming co-existence of past, present and future - in Beers's poetry seems to be death. Only in a 'dying man's house' (for example) is the 'bathroom clock / ... stopped at thirteen 'til two.' Only in this house are 'the weeds ... certain as death.' Death, in this sense, is like 'hiding under covers' - hiding from future and past. Still, in the poem 'Overview of the Carbon Cycle,' whilst is it true that 'it took death to wrench us apart for good,' at the same time, the narrator imagines a future in which 'someday ... / our carbon bases [might] combine ... / to burst forth the head of the same daffodil.' So, even in death, there are encoded possible futures which reconfigure the past. Not that the interpenetration of past, present and future is all negative; time doesn't always 'betray us': after all, a transient love affair reconstituted in a daffodil is a beautiful possible future, and in the superb and disturbing poem 'HA!,' one man's cruelty towards a cancer victim is answered by a possible karmic future. About the reviewer Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy is a story about many worlds, the worlds within them, and even the secret worlds of the characters. They find themselves in Jarmuli, Roy’s fictionalized religious capital of India; however, each of them appear humanly irreligious in their own way at this tourist attraction. Badal wrestles with his unrequited love for Raghu, a young man who works in a tea shop by the sea under the all too watchful eye of Johnny Toppo. The snippets of folk songs and poetry in the novel are all sung by this tea shop owner: ‘Wary as a thief is that watching egret, White in the emerald paddy. And the rain came again and again that night, Soaked all the emerald paddy.’ Yet perhaps these words allude to the scars he keeps tucked under his neck scarf and is more than what he says he is. Nomi is the protagonist of the novel, an orphan originally from India who grew up with her foster mother in Norway, and who now returns to the fractured world of her past. Suraj is her unwilling and ominously hot-blooded colleague, never seen without a cigarette in his mouth, who has been tasked with helping her research the temples for a TV show. Roy’s beautiful turns of phrase never cease: ‘A bulb,’ to Nomi, ‘was a secret between the soil and me,’ and when the sexual abuse and violence of her past is revealed, Roy really achieves the art of breaking a reader’s heart. The story is punctuated with the ramblings of three old biddies, Latika, Gouri and Vidya, who have escaped from the city and their family troubles to enjoy Jarmuli. Their aches, pains and Gouri’s encroaching memory loss are rather endearing and their holiday has an air of being the last rebellious fling of their lives. Just like the characters, all of us in some way are sleeping on Jupiter, either meditating on our past or imagining a different world for our future. Roy captures this dual experience of suffering and yearning quite perfectly in the world she has created and shows us the struggle of Nomi to liberate herself from the consuming world of her past. About the reviewer Alisia Nelson-Smith is a just finishing her BA in English at the University of Leicester and is hoping to go on to do an MA in Modern Literature and Creative Writing. In her spare time she enjoys swimming, hiking, playing her Dalmatian Thomas and travelling. If she’s not doing these things she’s probably dreaming about them.
In Kerry Hadley-Pryce's disturbing and remarkable novel, The Black Country, everything is relative: all facts, all actions, all truths are relative to their observers. Everything is in the conditional tense, in quotation marks; and all the overlapping and conflicting narratives are no more than subjective testimonies, a matter of "he says" or "she says." All the characters are telling their own truths and half-truths and lies: when Maddie tries to tell her husband Harry about the past "it might have sounded true," even though there were "some bits she'd edit out"; and when Harry tries in turn to tell Maddie about his crime, "he'd got it, all of it, all the words he was ready to reveal, to uncloak. Some to hide, some to reveal." Words, explanations, narratives hide and reveal at the same time, making the novel a mass of semi-revelations and competing explanations, none of which quite explain, none of which quite uncloak the "whole" truth. All the characters involved are themselves, in a sense, pseudo-novelists, editing, reshaping, and failing to tell their stories. Ultimately, The Black Country asks what "all this explanation on top of explanation" amounts to: "Do we really believe them?," asks the first-person narrator towards the end. Do we really believe any of them - including the mysterious first-person narrator himself? The Black Country's answer is profound and unsettling; what the novel uncloaks above all is the terrifying darkness at the heart of relativism: layer after layer of provisional narratives are brought into question, peeled away, discarded, to reveal a still-darker narrative layer beneath. At the heart of it all this provisionality, this conditionality, this contingency is not the absolute truth that we might expect of a first-person narrator who seems to command all the other perspectives - but something terrifying, something very black indeed. About the reviewer Jonathan Taylor is author of the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015), and Entertaining Strangers, and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
This book is very cool. It is full of adventure. In this book, Lara the Spy Dog, who is also called GM451, sets out on a journey to stop Mr. Big from stealing the Millennium Diamond. Lara is helped out by Sophie, Ben and Ollie. By the end, no one is sure who has the real diamond and who has the fake one. There is also a naughty dog who looks like Lara, but who is owned by Mr. Big. You can tell she is different because she doesn't have the bullet-hole in her ear. This is a very exciting story. About the reviewer Rosalind Taylor is seven years old. She has a twin sister called Miranda Taylor. She hopes you enjoy the book!
I think this is a really good book. It is written by Daisy Meadows, who is actually a lot of different people put together. I like this book because the fairy has my name. In the story, the goblins try and steal Miranda the Beauty Fairy’s magical lipstick. Rachel and Kirsty, who are girls from the real world and friends with the fairies, stop them. I like the character of Kirsty a lot because she is adventurous and not shy. But I still like all the characters in the book, except the baddies and Jack Frost. I especially enjoyed the end of the book the most because then everything goes back to normal. I would give this book five stars out of five. I love Rainbow Magic books. Author the reviewer Miranda Taylor is seven years old and she has a twin sister called Rosie. She hopes you like her review.
I have a very vague memory of writing this in a barely legible scrawl during House of Verse, Leicester’s eclectic variety-style performance event which brings together poets, musicians, artists, comedians and anyone else who cares to join. New collaborative project Mythym had encouraged us to write down what came to mind as they played, and though they conjured many flickering sensations in me, this was what dim light and limited powers of articulation allowed. I had been struck by Mythym’s wordless exchange of ideas as duo Hibword and Carise kept calm eyes resting on each other while they wrapped themselves and the audience up in creeping tendrils of musical persuasion. It was just one of the many contented and slightly scattered thoughts I managed to scribble down.
Jenny ‘Hibword’ Hibberd and Carise as Mythym
Here’s another:
‘I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like to dance’ – An epiphany had during Velvet Exit.
In the clear cold light of day I think perhaps this is a little unfair, though it should be stated that I value willing far more than skill or even any clearly defined sense of rhythm. It’s more of a reflection on the euphoria I felt inserting myself into the group of loose-ligamented roisterers and more demure loiterers, a feeling which is often hard to come by.
It was, however, in abundance during musician and composer Jim Ghedi’s set. His sound is as accessible as it is intricate but don’t think it is anything but extraordinary. Musicians in the room glaze over as he plays and his introspective intensity is irresistible. He had us, completely, and we all arced forwards in our seats towards him.
Jim Ghedi ‘Forgive me for what I possess’
There was no break for the spell-bound as Frank Sparrow and Hibword leant into atmosphere and held us tight for a little while longer. In a way, they are antidote to Jim’s complexity without slipping from charm and joy. We were invited to ‘colour them in’ and I think in that moment we were all desperate to try; to find the brightest pieces of ourselves and offer them to others to help fill in the gaps. If that’s not why we’re all there, I don’t have much of a better explanation to offer.
Hibword and Frank Sparrow
To be taken from here to what followed encapsulates what this evening is all about. Energy flowed and transformed as naturally as our breathlessness was inspired and we were stirred back to revelry by master crowd-manipulator Mr Shay. #GBH was embraced as anthemic if somewhat unnecessary as negative vibes or dead energy were not to be found here in the face of his boundless enthusiasm.
Mr Shay #GBH
The titillation continued with not one but two poems about genitals from Daniel Webber then Leanne Moden. I’ve seen Leanne perform before and was gleefully anticipating watching the unsuspecting crowd’s jaws drop as her vitriolic vagina verse burst forth from her otherwise diminutive stature. She was in good company with the night’s other performative poetry-makers. Brian Sin sounds like honey sliding over gravel and Poetman gave us a digital rendition of 21st century wage slavery through accomplished use of a loop pedal. Rich But Not Famous dropped a dizzying display verbatim, grandmaster gabbling through a whirlwind of words. He either has vertiginous memory wizardry or rhyme and rhythm just fall out of him like teeth fall out of children.
Leanne Moden and Rich But Not Famous
Perhaps he’s a distant sound-cousin of Shuter whose beatboxes are tightly packed in the store cupboard of cacophony. He drew House of Band into an electrifying freestyle which was more collaboratory than competitive; each irresistible increase in tempo and tightness felt like a helping hand being swapped back and forth between them.
Compelling cooperation carried on with our last performers of the night Hayche Griiim & Kiron Hanna who invited House of Band and Ex & Wye to join in creating an elated hip hop, tripping mosh of bouncing bodies to be delivered straight into the waiting spin-hands of our House DJs for the rest of night.
Collective magic from Hayche Griiim, Kiron Hanna, Ex and Wye
With the end not yet in sight, I wrote in my notebook:
‘I’m only cynical about the sinister’
House of Verse makes many things melt away. Such an energised and supportive place to perform and absorb could only have you leave any negativity at the door. By doing so, we unravel some of those cool, distant, protective layers and instead open ourselves to beauty, inspiration and friendship. Don’t you want a piece of that?
About the reviewer Jodie Hannis chases after words at every opportunity. If you have some, chances are, she’d like to hear them. She also occasionally runs away from ones she puts out into the world herself: http://notsoftly.tumblr.com/
(This review was first published on Our Book Reviews Online here). When Faith Sunderly's father moves his family to the island of Vane, he gives out that the reason is to help in some ongoing excavations - he is after all a renowned natural scientist and an expert on fossils - but he's actually running from a scandal about to break over his faking of finds. The island feels dark and sinister to begin with and Faith's father's strange behaviour adds to the air of secrecy and menace. Among his collection of prized specimens, all carefully transported to their new home, is a very curious plant which he's taking extra care of - it feeds on lies and having grown bears a fruit that imparts special knowledge and understanding on its eater. Within a few days of the family's arrival, the whole island is aware of the allegations against Faith's father, so when his dead body is found in strange circumstances the obvious assumption is that he committed suicide to avoid disgrace - Faith though believes he was murdered and sets out to prove it and track down the murderer. To this end she begins to feed the Lie Tree with untruths, but to get more information out of it she must invent bigger, more preposterous lies and spread them far and wide throughout the island community.... How to start to describe The Lie Tree? It's a murder mystery, with gothic horror overtones, a morality tale, historical fiction.. it's very difficult to pin down! The important thing is that it's an excellent read. It's darkly atmospheric, filled with quietly brooding menace, with the lie tree itself oozing evil and corrupting those who engage with it; it captures the feel of Victorian times when Darwin's new theories about evolution were altering how people saw the world and man's place in it, scientific concepts were being proved false, and religious beliefs challenged; and the murder mystery has red herrings and plot twists galore. In addition, it has a 14 year old heroine not happy to take the quiet role assigned to her by Victorian standards. Faith has inherited all her father's curiosity about the natural world but finding her interest in science blocked, has turned her inquisitiveness to more personal matters - eaves-dropping on others' conversations, riffling through private papers. Not the behaviour of a nice Victorian young lady! This willingness to snoop on others proves useful though, as she tries to discover motive and culprit for her father's death. All in all, a book that should appeal across a wide range of ages and tastes, and one that I'd personally be tempted to re-read. About the reviewer Mary Mayfield is an avid reader and blogger from Notts, now living in Derby. She loves everything from War and Peace to the Shopaholic series, by way of Virginia Woolf. Claim to fame? Grandma grew up next door to DH Lawrence! See Our Book Reviews Online.
