Exit, by Belinda Bauer.

 

          Felix Pink is a widower who lives a very quiet life with his rescue dog Mabel in a small Devon town.  He is a retired accountant and his days are orderly and structured – he would never say ‘boring’, but oh, how he wishes that his Margaret were still with him – in her right mind.  For his wife gradually succumbed to dementia, leaving him entirely alone in the world, their beloved son having died many years before from cancer in what should have been the prime of his life.  No-one knows the meaning of the word ‘solitary’ better than Felix, or the terrible, on-going grief he experiences on his weekly visits to the cemetery to replace the flowers on his loved ones’ grave.  He wonders how long it will be before he will join them permanently, but until that longed-for day arrives, he will try to live an upright, decent life, as Margaret would have wanted him to.

            And to that end, he has joined a very discreet society called The Exiteers, a group of dedicated people who help people to end their lives – providing said people meet certain criteria:  they must be terminally ill, leave a Will and/or very clear instructions and be able to administer a dose of a certain gas (provided by the Exiteer) themselves;  the Exiteer will be there purely for moral support, and to ‘clean up’ the scene after death, so that a verdict of suicide is patently obvious in the Coroner’s Report.  Felix has ‘assisted’ at quite a number of deaths, and as the story opens, he is about to assist with a new recruit, a young woman who nervously reveals that this is her first time, and she decided to ‘join up’ because her Nan died a horrible, lingering death and she wants ‘to make amends’. 

            Fair enough.  Except that, unbeknownst to them the house they visit has not one, but two patients who appear to be terminal and, after the young woman botches things irretrievably with # 1, # 2 makes his presence known by querulously demanding from another bedroom ‘Was anyone going to get on with the job?’

            Belinda Bauer has combined high tragedy with low comedy in this ruthless examination of the British version of the Swiss euthanasia clinics;  she examines the ‘system’ from every angle, including the corruption that is rife and so easily flourishes in the most unlikely sections of society – until decent, boring (yes, boring, Felix!) people take a stand.  Great characters, great story, FIVE STARS.      

 

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

  

        Nobel and Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro has brilliantly demonstrated yet again the sad and sick society we live in with his chilling new dystopian novel, ‘Klara and the Sun’.  It is a cautionary tale, surely, the human race would never metamorphose into a society so terminally ill – would it?

            Sometime in the near future we meet Klara.  Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend, a life-size human copy, a machine operating on solar power.  She sits in a shop, expecting eventually to be sold to a family who would purchase her to be a companion for their child.  She is a super-intelligent machine who is capable of expert and intellectual thought, the ideal companion for children whose parents can afford her.  She’s not the latest model, being a B2;  B3s are even more versatile and sophisticated, but she hopes to be sold to a family who will be kind and appreciative of her special gifts – for Klara is special:  she has a treasured relationship with the sun, Giver of all Life, and it warms her heart to see it through the shop window travelling each day across the sky.  She sees other things too, that confuse her about humans:  where are they all going in such a hurry, and why?  And why is there pollution everywhere?

            One day a young, disabled girl stops in front of the shop window, and tells Klara that she’s The One, the one that Josie wants as her companion.  There’s something very wrong with Josie – not in her essence, but physically;  she is enormously intelligent, but her body is failing her and as Klara spends more time with the family it becomes horribly clear that genetic manipulation has occurred (now the norm in this society), but it hasn’t worked for Josie.  She is dying.  The effects on the family have been tragic:  the parents are now divorced and blaming each other for everything;  Josie’s best friend Rick hasn’t been genetically manipulated, he’s physically sound, but won’t have the same opportunities in life for that reason.  Klara’s heart (if she was built with one) aches for them all and, because she believes utterly in the healing power of her God the Sun, she requests Him to let Josie get better, so that she can have a normal, happy life with her friend Rick.

            But what is happiness?  Klara only knows that Rick and Josie long for it, as do their families.  There must be some way that she can help – because that is what she has been programmed to do:  to help.

            And the way Klara helps is the ultimate act of unselfishness, only to be repaid by the caprices of human nature.  Kazuo Ishiguro has demonstrated yet again his enormous skill in portraying society in all its guises – and self-destructiveness. His beautiful Klara will stay with us all long after we have read the last page.  SIX STARS.

 

The Last Bear, by Hannah Gold.             Junior Fiction.

 

    

        Reading this beautiful little book was sheer pleasure, and the icing on the cake was the beautiful monochromatic illustrations by Levi Pinfold.  This story has all the necessary triggers to make us turn the pages feverishly:  a young eleven year old girl whose mother has recently died;  her scientist Dad who is ill-equipped to take up both parental roles for her as he is grieving too, and her Granny Apples (so named  because she smells of apples) is wonderfully consoling, but lives too far away from Dad’s city job to be a help.  And the awful insult to injury is not that her mum died from an illness, but by an idiot drunk driver. 

            It’s hard to get back on an even keel from such a tragedy, and April’s only consolation is the affinity she feels towards the wild animals who visit her overgrown garden.  She has quite a rapport with a family of foxes and various other creatures;  they lessen the ache in her heart a little – her mother had the same gift:  wild things trusted her.  Will life EVER get better?  It doesn’t look like it, until her Dad gets a job on a remote Norwegian Island for six months, measuring weather patterns.

            Granny Apples is horrified that April is going too, but the deed is done;  They are off to Bear Island in the Arctic Circle, where the ice-melt is already causing huge problems for the remainder of the once-flourishing wildlife – including polar bears, those magnificent, ferocious beasts who once held sway in the region;  now most of them are starving as they can’t trek across the ice to hunt seals:  the ice has melted.

            And a bear – the last bear – is trapped on the island, starving, wounded by the horrible plastic rubbish the human race is shamefully responsible for all over our beautiful, nurturing planet:  even the Arctic Circle cannot escape our garbage.  Until April meets the huge creature, and unlikely as it sounds, forms a firm and wonderful friendship with him when she wins his trust.

            ‘The Last Bear’ should be a must-read for all children today, for they are the conservators of tomorrow:  they have to repair the damage their forebears have visited upon the world.  Hannah Gold has crafted a beautiful story of a friendship that ends on a very necessary message of hope;  the places and people she writes of are all based on sound factual research, which makes her story even better.  This precious little book should rightly become a children’s classic.  SIX STARS!! 

 

The Abstainer, by Ian McGuire.

 

 

           English author Ian McGuire has constructed a novel so justly weighted against the country of his birth that it would be easy to mistake him as being from the Emerald Isle;  his fictionalised account of the infamous hanging in November 1867 of three innocent Irishmen wrongly accused of the murder of a Manchester policeman weeks before is the precursor to the monumental battle that follows:  the retaliation by the Fenian Brotherhood’s efforts to take revenge against authority figures in Manchester, that filthy, teeming city that is home and slave work in the mills to a large and dirt-poor population of Irish, there because their own country cannot feed them.  Thanks to the English.  Manchester is the battleground for what is to come, a war to the death between two men, representing each side.

            James O’Connor has been sent from Ireland to ‘advise’ the Manchester Police Force on the Fenians.  He had a career as a constable in Dublin until tragedy robbed him of his family and he took to the drink;  now, he is on his last warning and has become an Abstainer – and an Outsider with the Manchester constables, who treat him with ignore, or contempt.  Never friendliness.  Nevertheless, he has built up a good network of informers and learns that an assassin is coming over from New York to commit a retaliatory crime big enough to stop the English in their murdering, bombastic tracks.

            Enter Stephen Doyle, a soldier who survived the American Civil War and found that the strategies, battles – and killing – is what he is good at:  warfare is his speciality and he does not expect to return to New York having failed at his mission.  But he reckons without the complication of James O’Connor being added to the equation, especially when Doyle dispatches one of the informers, O’Connor’s nephew.

            What started as a routine assassination for Doyle, with various unfortunates being disposed of along the way, becomes a titanic struggle to the last breath against O’Connor, who has enough weights on his conscience without adding more family members to the list:  he needs to atone for his nephew’s brutal death.

            Ian McGuire has written a singular historical novel that reads partly as a thriller, nailing us to every page, and a tragedy Shakespearian in its proportions.  His spare, beautiful prose makes one sentence do the work of ten.  ‘The Abstainer’ is a truly Great Read.  SIX STARS.

 

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, by Marianne Cronin.

 

   

       Lenni Eklund is seventeen years old and has a terminal disease.  She is a patient until her eventual death in a Glasgow hospital, and she’s not particularly happy about spending the remainder of her life there, or the lack of answers to the Big Questions, as in ‘Why am I dying?’, a question she poses to the resident hospital chaplain, Father Arthur.  He doesn’t have a Godly answer, but she likes the way his name rhymes with his occupation:  he, in turn, is flummoxed by Lenni:  ‘Because you are’ is not satisfactory, he knows this, but apart from sharing his sandwiches with her and eventually, his steadfast friendship in the too short time till his retirement, he can think of nothing else.

            Until Lenni joins an Art class for people with long-term conditions and meets Margot, a tiny eighty-three year old Scottish lady with loads of artistic talent and a fascinating life story to tell – and who better to tell it to than Lenni, starved for life experiences that she will never enjoy or endure, but the ideal repository for all secrets and confidences – not because she will die soon and take the secrets to the grave, but because she is the best listener imaginable, remembering every detail, and frequently bringing her own  hilarious take on Margot’s life experiences, good and bad.  A great friendship is born and nurtured, and between them they produce a painting for each year of their lives, which add up to One Hundred Years, a whole century!  And for each painting they tell each other the story behind the painting and, tragic as some of the stories are,  they are made luminous and unforgettable by the deep and enduring affection Lenni and Margot have for each other, and their perfect understanding of what they have together.

            This lovely story was always going to end in tears – how could it not, with the certain death of at least one of the unforgettable protagonists, but there’s no bathos or syrupy background violin music as Lenni eventually departs for pastures new;  thanks to Margot, Father Arthur and various other new-found friends from the Art class she has packed a century of life into her seventeen years.  She has lived.

            It’s hard to believe that this singular book is Marianne Cronin’s debut novel;  her writing is wonderfully assured – who would have thought that the story of a terminally-ill teenager could be so enormously entertaining and funny, but it is a tribute to Ms Cronin’s writing talent and the strength of her characterisations that Lenni and Margot will stay with us for many years to come.  SIX STARS.  

 

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn.

   

         Best-selling American author Kate Quinn tries her hand here at a very British story:  the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War, that  dedicated band of talented and special people who saved countless lives with their skill at cracking ciphers and codes and by so doing, shortened the race to victory by at least two years.

            Ms Quinn stumbles occasionally over everyday idiom – the British drive Motor cars, not automobiles; regardless, she still recreates very skilfully the everyday stress and fear that all had to endure daily, especially when the bombing started:  there is no respite from the terrible and ruinous tragedies suffered by Ms Quinn's excellent characters, all based on real people.

            At the war’s beginning, three young women are recruited to work at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.  They all have different reasons for working there:  Osla is a wealthy Canadian debutante who, thanks to her finishing school education, has an excellent command of the German language;  Mab (short for Mabel, but she doesn’t want anyone to know that; she wants to forget her East End origins) is nearly six feet tall and has nimble fingers.  She will be an excellent operator of the huge Bombe machines that spit out unintelligible data to be broken down by Enigma machines, used by the brilliant code-breakers, one of whom is a girl they recruited themselves – their overbearing landlady’s daughter, mousy, bullied Beth.  Beth has never been encouraged to believe that she will have any other kind of life except as her mother’s ‘little helper’.  Bletchley Park is her salvation, not least because of her genius for unravelling codes that she sees as rose petals, intricately layered until they are peeled back the right way.

            A further complication arises in Osla’s life:  she is in love with Philip, Prince of Greece, but is informed by MI5 that because of his German connections (his beloved sisters are married to German nobility) and the oath of secrecy she has signed, she must cease contact.  Which she does, and it breaks her heart, especially when his engagement to Princess Elizabeth is eventually announced.  Mab meets the love of her life, only to lose him again in a bombing raid, and Beth is horribly betrayed by a traitor and incarcerated in an asylum.  Ms Quinn ramps up the pace to heart-stopping suspense here, dragging us by the nose through Mab’s tragedy and Beth’s efforts to escape her fate.  The three friends must depend entirely on each other to survive.

            Ms Quinn’s exhaustively researched novel  expertly recreates the life and times of those heroes who stopped the German War Machine without leaving Bletchley Park.  It is a fitting tribute to their dedication.  FOUR STARS.         

 

Ash Mountain, by Helen Fitzgerald.

  

          The tragic and terrible toll of the recent Australian Bush fires on the environment and population has never been more graphically depicted than in Helen Fitzgerald’s ‘Ash Mountain’, a deceptively slim volume telling a giant story that resonates unforgettably with all its readers.

            The small inland town of Ash Mountain isn’t far from Melbourne, but Fran thought she had escaped it and its painful memories forever – until her beloved dad suffers a serious stoke and requires her return.  Her 16 year-old daughter Vonnie, whose father was Fran’s best friend (and everyone knows that sex with besties seldom works out) comes too – not because she wants to, but because she’s going through a rebellious stage, and she likes to ruffle as many town feathers as she can, starting with Australia Day.  Ha!  Everyone knows it’s really Invasion Day.  (Vonnie’s dad has aboriginal blood).

            Fran has a much older son, Dante, product of Fran’s first sexual encounter at the age of 15;  he is currently residing as a Happy Hippy in Ash Mountain.  Raised by Fran’s dad, Dante is thrilled that his mum and little sister are having a stint in the old home town, even though the eventual outcome will be very sad, because Gramps is not expected to hang on for much longer.  Still, it’s great that everyone is back together again, even if it’s not permanent – why would it?  Fran is not surprised to see that nothing has changed – the Catholic church and its boarding school still holds sway;  each mass on Sunday is well-attended, thanks to the popularity of Father Frank (quickly imported to replace that Paedo Father Alfonso – what a scandal, say nothing and it’ll go away!);  her ex-schoolmates are still living in the same houses, still as vicious and catty as ever, even though they are now ‘respectable’ married women.  Yep, nothing has changed.  Fran doesn’t want her beloved dad to die, but the quicker he declines, the quicker she can leave, for the longer she stays, the more distressing secrets begin to reveal themselves, secrets she is not interested in and of which she is afraid.

On the plus side, there’s a whiff of romance in the air:  another neighbouring returnee, a widower with three daughters, has changed from being a teenage dickhead into a lovely man she would like to know better – until the bush fire starts.

Ms Fitzgerald’s stark, terrible prose flings us all into the fire:  there’s no escape for many of the town’s inhabitants who make the wrong decisions, gambling on outrunning the flames in their cars, or staying behind like Father Frank – not to help, but to try to destroy incriminating evidence.  (That was a spoiler, wasn’t it!).  But throughout the terrible suspense of who survives – and how – runs a priceless and necessary vein of humour to relieve the horror:  Fran is a champion at upsetting Father Frank;  she even steals a dollar from the collection plate and tells him in Confession – take that, you old hypocrite!  This is a stand-out book.  SIX STARS.