Amelia’s Magazine has been heartily enjoying all the shortlisted books for this year’s Booker Prize, which was announced last week: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall scooped the award but all the books were really strong. The life of Amelia’s Magazine review copy can be seen in snapshot above.
Winner Wolf Hall was genuinely enjoyable read – unlike certain contemporary books, you never feel like you’re ploughing through something for your own good rather than for fun. The book covers the period when Henry VIIIth was attempting to divorce his first wife to marry Anne Boleyn; the main character Thomas Cromwell becomes deeply entwined in the politics, especially when his master Cardinal Wolsey falls from royal favour.
History novels are often a lot of fun but this is a lot more than a bodice-ripper: each character, plucked from history, feels real, from choirboy to King of England. The language manages to walk the fine line between being comprehensible to our modern ears and slipping into anachronism. The style is a joy to read but it’s easy to get lost as no concessions are made to slow brains: quite who is talking or what a reference might mean are often left unanswered in the text. But this is history after all, and each corner of Tudor London and every minor character edging onto the page enriches your understanding of the time. If that isn’t enough, you can always Google the person in question. Just don’t look up Thomas Cromwell on Wikipedia before you finish the book!
Looking back, history can see pre-ordained but Wolf Hall shows us the intricacies of living under a king, whose whims can be the difference between life and death for his subjects. At the same time, however, we see how his power was limited by social factors and how shocking it was to all of Europe when he took his marriage issues into his own hands.
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer focuses on the Second World War and the mass movements of people that occurred before and during it. A wealthy young couple commission a beautiful modernist house featuring the eponymous glass room, an innovative architectural feat that becomes a reflection of the changing social conventions of the time and the impending doom of its occupants.
The reader’s knowledge of history creates most of the large-scale plot tension, whilst Mawer concentrates on the tiny, secret relations between people living self-consciously “modern” lives. In the background an oppressive fear builds up and people are divided into those who look the changing times in the face and those who live in denial. The clear, unforgiving walls of the Glass Room reflect these faultlines. We know from the beginning that the special house survives the destructive power of Hitler but we have to wait to find out which characters do, and whose is the true love story of the book.
Summertime by JM Coetzee was an uncomfortable but interesting read. It is set between the years 1972 and 1977, the years in which Coetzee returned to South Africa from America under a cloud of suspicion (mainly from his family, who sneer at his chosen profession). The book is uncomfortable because it does not shy away from the writer’s apparently prickly persona, his callousness past and present that appears to colour his relationship with his father, and his difficulty with women. Set in the years when Coetzee was finding his feet as a writer, it feels as if the memoir is exploring the potential candidates for characters to feature in his later writing.
Rather than writing a straightforward memoir, Coetzee has opted to write from beyond the grave and to cast as protagonist not himself but a fictional biographer who explores these particular years. The book is split into five chapters, each of which is donated to a particular person the biographer has deemed worthy of interview, from a raiding of the now dead (I mentioned it was an uncomfortable interesting read) Coetzee’s notebooks. These five characters are two women with whom the writer has had failed relationships, his favourite cousin, a work colleague and a woman who appears to despise him from first sight.
The book is a brilliant insight into the writer’s power to bend and embellish everyday life into evocative fiction and the format highlights the unreliable nature of narration. Throughout the memoir the running theme appears not only to be the perception of Coetzee failing both as a man and an Afrikaaner, but the failure of South Africa at that time to deal with its past, present or future. For myself the most poignant aspect of the book was the constant invisible barrier of the apartheid that seeped into all aspects of everyday life, and how we misunderstand each other through personal dogmas about what constitutes a man, a writer, or a person.
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds is a tale of thwarted lives. The story concerns itself with articulate musing on the subtle lines between sanity and insanity. The book finds its setting in High Beech Asylum under the control of Dr Matthew Allen, who figures as a clear illustration of the aforementioned dividing line. The plot revolves around the shared time the poets John Clare and Lord Tennyson spent convalescing there, without ever really meeting.
John Clare is constantly referred to as the peasant poet, a lover of nature whose dramatic psychotic break appears to be the result of the Enclosures Act, which forbade the free wandering of the poor across previously open fields. As the book progresses, Clare dissolves completely into multiple personalities, with the only constant remaining his love of nature. In contrast Tennyson arrives at the asylum with his brother, both slipping into the morose depths that surrounded the family blood. Tennyson is drawn to the energetic Dr Allen and is soon embroiled in his half-baked schemes, which eventually (true to life) led to Tennyson’s family bankruptcy.
The book is a damning portrayal of the easily distracted doctor, who in his absence leaves the running of the asylum to his right-hand-man Stockdale, who uses the patients’ mania to hide his acts of rape and physical violence and an easily abused care system.
The Children’s Book by AS Byatt and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters sound fantastic but sadly seem to have gotten lost in the post. Your dedicated Amelia’s interns work pretty much 7 days a week so we haven’t had time to go to the library to check out these no doubt exceptional books. Therefore we encourage you to review them in the comments for us.
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