The Last Hangman

One of the loveliest parts of book blogging are the days you come home from a long day to be greeted by an unexpected little parcel of books. It was in one such package I received Shashi Warrier's The Last Hangman, which promised to transport me to "the heat and dust of the Indian South". Faced with the miseries of a wet London January, I tucked it into my bag and hoped it would combat the back to work blues.

Janardhanan Pillai was the last hangman of Travancore and his retirement is frequently interrupted by journalists wanting to buy his story. He is persuaded to write a journal of his past by an author and his companion after being suitably intrigued by their relationship. What follows is the story of Pillai's struggles as committing his life to paper awakens ghosts and forces him to seek meaning and answers to the moral questions his religious and educational mentors have never given him.

Warrier creates a very colourful picture of Pillai's world. He also tells the tale of the man first and foremost; although the story is told in the time of independence and great change within India, politics only comes up where it  directly impacts the hangman's life, such as his conversations with his old teacher, or when assessing the morality of hanging in the name of a now defunct king. Rather than politics, the focus is on the hangman's quest for peace and redemption. Was he right to kill in the name of the state, to be slightly outside of society, in exchange for guaranteed food for his family? Duty is a theme which continually crops up and was most interesting for me in the tale of how Pillai's father became the hangman, which was largely due to the neglecting of their duties by wealthier relatives.

The troubled hangman carries the story very well, but I couldn't help feeling there were a few gaps. The writer is a key part of the action, but his role felt very two dimensional. I think too much was unsaid here, and a secondary narrative on his motivations to write the tale would have been interesting. I also think this would have allowed a deeper exploration of the issues raised by Pillai's narrative. But then again, that would've taken the power away from the hangman; perhaps the gaps needed to be there for the reader to feel totally at one with the narrator's perspective.

Overall, this was an interesting read which takes you to a different little corner of the world. While the wind whipped around my train carriage, I couldn't have asked for more from my rush hour read!

(Available from Atlantic Books)

Amity & Sorrow

When an author describes her novel as a tale of "God, sex and farming", it's hard to know what to expect. Having weighed this up against all the buzz that's been surrounding it, I delved in.

I wasn't disappointed.

Amity & Sorrow is an exciting read and instantly you're plunged into the action as mother Amaranth and daughters Amity and Sorrow speed away from all the girls have known. The urgency of their escape is slowly revealed through cleverly interwoven flashbacks to their time as first wife and eldest daughters in a polygamous cult. We follow them as they settle on a farm (some better than others) run by a lonely abandoned husband, living with his adopted son and elderly father, with a mixture of fear and hope that they would be found.

Peggy Riley's characters are brilliantly crafted and immediately credible. Amaranth tries to right the mistakes that has seen her children grow up without knowledge of the world. This ignorance, designed to protect them, has corrupted them in ways that Amaranth could never have foreseen. I loved the characters of both sisters too; Amity, apparently blessed with healing powers and open-minded to a new life, and reluctant Sorrow, stubborn and longing for her old existance with an increasingly terrifying ferocity.

The creation and collapse of Amaranth's idyll is recounted and the consequences seen in the damage done to her daughters. There are parallels with the life of farmer Bradley as he seeks to keep his farm afloat and is alone, and offers the family kindness even in the face of Sorrow's destruction.

Riley's creation is a masterful one. She crafts great villains whilst also offering hope; darkness is never far from light. The novel's themes are powerful and gritty and elements of it are disturbing. Amity & Sorrow isn't a light read, but is all the more rewarding for it. With strong links to the Branch Davidians and frequent references to Waco, this is a cautionary (rather than sensationalist) tale of how power and greed corrupts, as well as a fascinating view of one family's escape from the sinister grip of a polygamous cult.

This was a really enjoyable, thought-provoking book. For me it definitely lived up to the hype and was one that made me groan at the end of my commute when I had to stop reading for a while. I would warn that it's not necessarily for the faint-hearted, but is rewarding nonetheless.

(Available from Amazon)

Life After Life

Life After Life comes with an intriguing premise. A baby is born in a snowy February in 1910. She dies at birth. In the next chapter, she is given another chance and survives; the reader then follows the child, Ursula, as she grows up before, between and during the World Wars, with a unique gift. She can go back and correct her mistakes, dying then starting again.

I've read several reviews of this now, mulling over how my thoughts compare. I was encouraged to pick this up after seeing adverts and reviews for it everywhere. Now having read it, I think my conclusion is that I liked it, but only loved it in parts.

The story is complex and Kate Atkinson's writing is clever and flowing. Metaphors of darkness and light pervade and a real sense of foreboding exists. Some sections are brilliant, such as when Ursula is battling to prevent the death of her, her brother and her maid from Spanish Flu. The repeating and thwarting of her efforts add an almost comic twist. However, some sections I found slightly laboured, such as Ursula's time with Eva Braun and Hitler as the continent inches towards war.

Overall, I think this was a great mind-twisting journey. Throughout the story you question what is real, and even when the worst happens you have hope that Ursula can reset and have a happier life. Characters die and are then brought to life. I also loved the sense of familial love at the heart of the novel, and it helped add grounding and a sense of reality. The character of Ursula changed and adapted as she subconsciously learnt from her errors in her parallel lives. The result is a character you wish the best for, but also she is not the same person from one segment to another. The constant characters of her siblings and parents help anchor the story and attach Ursula to each of her lives.

I do think this is a book worth reading; I suspect it's not worth reading in the way that I did. As the title of this blog suggests, I do most of my reading on my commute. I don't think this is a book designed for this purpose. I often found myself a bit confused when opening at the beginning of my journey and having to flick back a few pages to remind myself. The sense of deja vu which facilitates the central premise just makes the tale a bit confusing when you are reading at the extremities of your day. Perhaps if I'd read it over a weekend it would've been different. Instead, I often found myself a bit disorientated, and at the end I felt I'd been reading Ursula's saga for a very long time.

This is definitely a clever, interesting read; just perhaps not one for the rush hour.

(Available in hardback or Kindle format from Amazon)

The End of the Affair

After my last read was a little disappointing, I decided to go back and revisit some Graham Greene. One of my favourite authors, The End of the Affair is the work I'd always ranked highest. I've always been a little morbid where books and films are concerned; I'm a sucker for tales of woe. What greater tale of woe can you get than Maurice Bendrix's bitter narration and searing jealousy at the sudden end of his affair with civil servant's wife, Sarah?

Bendrix's love, and hatred, for Sarah is deep and twisted. His hatred stems from his possessive passion for her. He looks back on their wartime affair, which he poisoned with his insecurity, after a chance encounter with her husband. When he meets Henry, whom he had cuckolded, he is unsettled and suspecting Sarah's infidelity. It has been some time since Bendrix saw her and old feelings are awoken. Henry is considering hiring a private eye to get his answers; it's an idea he disregards, but Bendrix cannot. So we follow his present quest to see if Sarah has moved on, while he reflects on what went wrong.

I've always loved this story as a compelling take on the power of jealousy to destroy those things we treasure. Bendrix is a man who believed he had exactly what he wanted in Sarah, but he is forever in limbo while she remains married to Henry. He's aware of previous lovers and cannot disregard these niggling memories to enjoy the present. As he muses, "because I couldn't bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand".

Bendrix's love for Sarah is unhealthy, and eats away at him; "I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all". He takes it as far as wishing "I'd rather be dead or see you dead...than see you with another man", as "anyone who loves is jealous".

One day, after Bendrix's building is bombed while Sarah spends the night with him, he nearly dies; Sarah, apparently disappointed by his survival, leaves, and he does not hear from her again. Bendrix falls apart, and his bile builds. The "end of love" he so dreaded has arrived; he is a broken man and the scars do not heal well.

The second half is where Greene builds on the religious themes of his previous novels. The End of the Affair is considered to be the most Catholic of Greene's works, and as the reasons for Sarah's abandonment become clear, the story focuses more on the exploration of faith and non-belief. Bendrix is as angrily opposed to Sarah's adopted beliefs as he was about whether she loved him enough. He becomes enraged and vindictive towards the priest he encounters and Catholic views of God. Even after Sarah is out of his life for eternity, he continues his vitriol towards the deity while miracles surround those who encountered her.

The strengths of this book for me were its exploration of jealousy, and how love can be a destructive force. The religious elements were of interest, but I'd forgotten since I last read this how major a part they played.

I've read some critiques of the character of Sarah, and how underdeveloped she appears; however, I felt this to be crucial to forming some kind of understanding of Bendrix's perceptions. Arguably, he never truly knew Sarah, not deeply; he was so blinded by his passion and desire for her, he lost sight of who she was and how she felt for him. It's this tunnel vision which forms his angry, bitter voice which gives this novel its power.

I enjoyed re-reading this, and I'd always recommend Graham Greene to anyone. Immensely readable, this story is a great tap into those deep, dark emotions which rarely appear in works about love and heartbreak. It's also allegedly based on a real-life affair Greene himself had, so there's interest too in imagining the parallels with Bendrix's author character. In general, it's a reliable rush hour read which I never fail to enjoy.

(Available in hardback, paperback, Kindle and audio from Amazon)

The Lighthouse

This is a brilliantly strange little book. What starts off as a seemingly ordinary story of a recently-separated, middle aged man going on a walking holiday gradually becomes an unsettling, ominous tale which slowly and subtly grips you.

The pace is initially ambling, as one could expect of a walking holiday. However, you soon begin to realise that all is not as it seems. Our main character Futh's first encounter on his holiday is Carl, a fellow traveller; Futh offers him a lift to his mother's house. "Do you ever get a bad feeling about something? A bad feeling about something that's going to happen?", Carl asks, sowing the seeds of discomfort in the reader's mind. This sense of unease pervades in both Futh and Ester's (a hotel landlady and fellow main character) segments, and increases to a gripping level in the final, dark chapters. Ester's dangerous dalliances with her husband in close quarters feel even more dicey as you learn their history and the kind of man Bernard is. As her story unfurls, Ester emerges as a troubled risk-seeker, craving love and attention. Similarly, as we get to know Futh, an individual deeply damaged by his mother leaving him emerges.

Although not much actually happens, I loved how this book played out. The main characters are lonely, lost souls and I empathised as they looked back on their lives. Futh's reoccurring reflection on the moment of his parents' marital collapse brilliantly captured how this has haunted him throughout his life. His relationship with his wife, meanwhile, was both sinister (she shares a name with Futh's mother, and frequently needs to remind him, "I'm not your mother") and sad. Alison Moore fleshed out his character through using details which made sense while we are in Futh's head, but make him look odd to anyone on the outside (spilling food and blood on himself, retiring to bed early on in his wedding reception, hitchhiking rather than learning to drive...). This was subtle, and I loved it.

Overall, I warmed more to Futh's character than Ester; Futh is portrayed as pathetic, ill-adjusted and forgettable among those who meet him (including Ester, as their paths only briefly cross). However, he's fundamentally well-meaning, simply weighed down by the baggage of his childhood. I wanted things to work out for him. Ester's story circles around revenge, which sets the reader's mind racing at the unresolved ending to this tale.

Alison Moore's novel is one of the most perfectly planned I've had the pleasure of reading. Every motif has its place and serves to link the disparate elements of the book together. I've seen The Lighthouse described as a story of smells. Futh works as a creator of synthetic scents, whilst Ester dreamt of being a perfumier; the eponymous lighthouse (or, at least, one of them) is an empty perfume bottle. Odours of violets, oranges, coffee and camphor reoccur regularly, linking Futh and Ester's memories together and into the present. As our senses play a powerful part in memory, I thought the frequent fragrance references fitted nicely.

As you can tell from the length of this review, there's a lot packed into The Lighthouse's limited pages. I was captivated, but I'm definitely going to have to reread as I'm certain I missed parts. Although you do need to concentrate to not miss subtle moments, Moore's words drew me into the mind of her characters; I was alongside the Rhine with Futh, right down to feeling the blistered feet and burning skin. So, for the reason that it lifted me away from the humdrum and into a different place, I'd definitely recommend this as a rush hour read.

(Image taken from http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781907773174. Available in paperback. Kindle edition - http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Lighthouse-ebook/dp/B008PD6K8K/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1359068001&sr=8-1)