Breakfast At Libraries: December 2012

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright

One of my earliest memories is coming downstairs one morning and seeing that a large red poster had been Blu-Tacked into the window of our front room. I asked my mum what it was and she said it was Labour poster because we didn't want Margaret Thatcher to win the election. When I asked why - it was 1979 and I would have been three at the time, so do forgive me for my ignorance - she said "Because she's a nasty, evil woman."

I was born in 1976; I was studying for my GCSEs by the time Thatcher resigned and I was a grown woman of 21 by the time I got to see anyone other than the Tories win a general election. Consequently, throughout my childhood and teens I could see nothing but the bleakest of futures for the country, with Thatcher playing the part of the ever-present malevolent force behind the destruction of everything my family believed in - rather like Orwell's vision of 'a boot stamping on a human face forever' in Nineteen Eighty-Four. My memories of watching the news as a child (yes, I was the sort of child who watched the news) are a grim mix of dole queues, picket lines and boarded-up factories interspersed with hunger strikes, nuclear weapons and the Falklands, with Thatcher hovering above it all and pulling the strings like some sort of spectral puppet-master.

Sean Bull, nine years old at the start of Anthony Cartwright’s Black Country-set novel How I Killed Margaret Thatcher, is similarly haunted by Thatcher. The novel begins with his beloved grandfather punching his Uncle Eric for voting for her; fortunately he doesn’t know Sean’s dad secretly cast his ballot for the Tories too. At first, Thatcher appears to Sean almost as a pantomime villain, her hard eyes and mean voice rarely off the television, but gradually, Thatcherism begins to have a real and tragic impact on Sean’s family life. His male role models rendered jobless and emasculated by the closure of the local steelworks, his mother driven to drink as the mortgage goes unpaid, Sean sees Thatcher as an increasingly malevolent force. And after a horribly traumatic experience in his early teens, and knowing that there is a old wartime gun hidden in his grandfather's shed, he realises that he might just have just have the means to stop her.

The novel is narrated entirely by Sean, but Cartwright has him tell the story from both his childhood and adult perspectives, giving us the benefit of that strange mix of uncertain confusion and sharp clarity that tends to come with childhood as well as an adult’s hindsight. It’s hard not to like the younger Sean. He's a bright boy, interested in everything that goes on around him, full of questions and fond of the library, yet at the same time, satisfied with relatively modest comforts: when asked to draw his fantasy ideal home for school, he simply draws his grandparents’ council house in Dudley and adds a football pitch. Far from being praised for what struck me as an endearing and admirable lack of greed, he’s marked down for having low aspirations.

It’s probably fair to say that some of the supporting characters in How I Killed Margaret Thatcher are largely there to represent facets of political opinion or social types. Uncle Johnny, who has left art college under pressure to bring in a wage, is a radical revolutionary socialist with a poster of Bobby Sands; Sean’s grandad, on the other hand, is a conventional Labour traditionalist and the two regularly come to (figurative) blows over their conflicting views. Sean’s father, who works all hours he can to afford to own his own home, is a disillusioned former Labour voter to whom Thatcher's doctrine of self-improvement and ambition appeals. This doesn't however, make the characters unconvincing - far from it, in fact. They are well-realised and three-dimensional, and it's remarkably easy to empathise with them, to understand them, to care about them.

The politics of Anthony Cartwright’s novel aren’t subtle, but then, neither was Thatcherism. I found Sean’s childhood experience of feeling that Margaret Thatcher genuinely and personally hated ‘us’ is convincing and realistic. Before accusations of 'Well, you would say that, wouldn't you' are tossed at me, I'd like to think that even an ardent Tory would at least be able to read this book and come to understand why Sean feels the way he does, even without agreeing with him. Against the political backdrop, a domestic drama is played out as Sean's family's lives, fortunes and relationships change and a close-knit community crumbles. Sometimes funny, sometimes almost unbearably heartbreaking, it's this that gives the novel its real heart.

Sunday, 9 December 2012

Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson

In case you're wondering why I've finished two books in the space of 24 hours, this is because I had to have some dental work done under general anaesthetic on Friday, which necessitated a great deal of waiting around on a hospital trolley and then a great deal of sitting on the sofa feeling sorry for myself with a face resembling that of the Elephant Man, or perhaps a character from Bo' Selecta.

Anyway - before and after my operation, I read Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson, a psychological thriller with a clever but potentially restrictive concept behind it: Christine, the narrator, is suffering from a severe form of memory loss that causes her to wake up each morning with no memory of the day before. Now 47, she can remember nothing past her early 20s. Every day, she awakes horrified to see her middle-aged self in the mirror and to find herself living with Ben, a husband she doesn't recognise, in a house she's never seen.

If this sounds rather limiting, don't worry. Watson gets round the issue of Christine's short term memory by having her write a journal every day at the suggestion of the mysterious Dr Nash, who calls her daily to remind her where it's hidden, and it's this journal that makes up a large portion of the novel and which Christine uses to piece together what's been happening to her over the previous days. And written on the first page, in large capital letters, are the words 'DON'T TRUST BEN'.

Before I Go To Sleep is a tense, claustrophobic read with a heroine in an almost unbearably vulnerable position, trying to piece together decades of her own life from scraps of conflicting information from people who, despite their claims to know her, might just as well be strangers. To make matters worse, Christine knows she's suffered from paranoia in the past along with her memory loss, and may not be an objective judge of other's motives. But despite Christine's necessary vulnerability, she makes a strong and complex heroine and certainly one who is not without flaws. Watson manages to build enough interest into her character to prevent her from becoming merely a damsel in distress.

The central mystery is whether Ben is withholding certain facts from his wife for some sinister reason, or whether he is desperately trying to protect her from reliving past traumas - and if so, what those traumas might be. Ben himself is largely presented by necessity as an average Joe trying to make the best of a difficult situation; he's neither pantomime villain nor saintly carer. There's also Ed Nash, Christine's doctor, who seems keen to encourage Christine to keep secrets, and we find ourselves questioning his motives too. Unfortunately, Dr Nash isn't a particularly well-drawn character and his blandness does nothing to add to the potential intrigue. This struck me as rather a wasted opportunity.

Although Before I Go To Sleep kept me turning the pages with increasing nervous tension right to the end, this really is a novel where you have to suspend disbelief. There are far too many convenient coincidences and the way certain red herrings are explained away at the end is irritatingly lazy; it's easy to pick holes in the plot, particularly as the story comes to its end. I'm also not sure how much of a 'twist' I think the ending really is, although whether this really matters is debatable.

Overall, though, Before I Go To Sleep is a cleverly-structured thriller with a convincing protagonist - I found it surprisingly easy to imagine myself in Christine's shoes, although there are times when it's hard to approve of some of the choices she makes. If you're prepared to put aside misgivings about the realism of certain aspects of the story and you're looking for a page-turner, you could certainly do worse than this one.

Saturday, 8 December 2012

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Back in July I reviewed, all the way from a tiny holiday apartment on a blustery hill two miles from Lerwick, a thriller by SJ Bolton called Sacrifice, set in Shetland. I was vastly disappointed by it, not least because the Shetland of Sacrifice seemed to bear almost no relation to the Shetland I was visiting at the time, and I remarked that I was planning to read Ann Cleeves' Shetland Quartet instead (a television adaptation of which was being filmed on the islands while we were there).

Yesterday, while hunched patiently on a hospital trolley waiting for an operation to remove a troublesome wisdom tooth, I finished Raven Black, the first book in the series, and thoroughly entertaining it was too. Raven Black is a thoughtful, atmospheric crime novel with a measured pace and solid, believable characters and a setting brought convincingly to life without sentimentality or lazy assumptions about Shetland life.

When precocious teenager Catherine Ross is found murdered, the prime suspect is Magnus Tait, whom the islanders have long suspected of being involved in the death of another girl many years previously; his social and intellectual difficulties make him an easy target. However, Jimmy Perez, a detective from the tiny, isolated island of Fair Isle*, has reason to believe that Magnus may not be the culprit, and as the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that in the small, tight-knit community of Shetland there are plenty of others who might have had a motive for killing Catherine.

The story benefits from the author's decision to tell it not just from Perez' own point of view, but from the perspectives of several different characters, including Magnus Tait himself, schoolgirl Sally Henry and incomer Fran Hunter. Each character is well-rounded and credible, and each lends something different to the narrative. However, Perez himself is an engaging lead, trying to make decisions about his own future and his relationship with Shetland and Fair Isle as he attempts to unravel not only the mystery of Catherine Ross's murder but also the 'cold case' of Catriona Bruce, who, like Catherine, disappeared shortly after a visit to Magnus Tait's croft.

Something that particularly interested me about Perez is that he seems to be the very opposite of the traditionally rational, driven, detached detective. He admits himself that he 'leaks unsuitable affection' with his 'almost overwhelming pity for Magnus Tait, whether he was a murderer or not' and his sudden urge to protect Fran Hunter, his former best friend's ex-wife, even though she could reasonably be a suspect too; his tiny, damp house was bought 'on a romantic whim'. Perez' quietly introspective nature and the bleak, chilly isolation of the Shetland setting, simultaneously lonely and claustrophobic for the novel's characters, gives Raven Black the feel of a Nordic crime novel as much as a British one.

The final revelation of who killed Catherine Ross is at once startling and yet simultaneously completely believable: exactly what I look for at the end of a crime novel. I'll definitely be reading the other three books in the quartet.