Size 12 is not Fat: Meg Cabot

A delightfully entertaining and easy read – a chick-lit mystery novel at its best, without pretensions to be anything else. Heather Wells is a former teen pop star fallen on hard times and has decided to go back to college. To earn her keep she takes a job as assistant residence hall director in New York City. A couple of undergrad female students die, supposedly ‘elevator surfing’. Heather decides there must be something else going on, and risks her own life to find out exactly what.

Cabot has an ear for language and gets it right, giving the story and setting an authentic feel. The plot moves along at a good pace and there’s plenty of humour involving all those little problems that women have to put up with: men who cheat, dress manufacturers who mislabel the dress size, and the impossible boss.

Things My Mother Never Told Me: Blake Morrison

I read this book, which for the most part also covers the same period of time, soon after reading To War With Whitaker, so comparison is inevitable. Both books are about strong women, one told in her own voice, this one written by her son, who also uses wartime letters between his parents to help tell the story of their courtship and eventual marriage after the war.

Morrison’s mother comes from a large Irish family – just how large only becomes known to him after his mother’s death. She had kept many details of her early life hidden from her English husband and children due to the discrimination experienced by Irish Catholics in England during her lifetime. She came to England soon after qualifying as a doctor, and worked in a string of hospitals throughout the war. Her work is difficult and demanding, and she’s frequently exhausted, often getting ill. At the same time, the courtship is carried on through letters and infrequent meetings, as Arthur Morrison, also a doctor, is serving overseas for most of the war.

It is Arthur Morrison who comes off least well in this narrative. His letters show him to be stubborn, insensitive, petulant, easily bored, and sexist. It grates that Kim (her real name is Agnes, but he gradually forces her to change it) is doing more interesting and demanding work than he is. He berates her for being a Catholic and refuses to get married in a Catholic church. Eventually he has a long-term relationship with another woman, for which he never apologises; nor does he ever acknowledge the hurt he causes his wife. The author repeatedly steps in, as if he could warn his mother against marrying his father, but I found this device tiresome and it does little to add any interest to the history of his parents’ relationship. In the end, for me, this is the story of a very ordinary man who ruins the life of a woman who might have gone on to achieve a more rewarding life had she grown up in different conditions and at a time when it was more acceptable for a woman to have a career. Directly following the war there was a lot of pressure on women to return to what was considered their proper domain in the home. Blake Morrison also wrote And When Did You Last See Your Father? but following what I’ve learned about his father in this book I feel no urge to read it.

A Natural Curiosity: Margaret Drabble

One of my unspoken complaints when looking for a good book to read is that it seems impossible to find a good novel that reflects my own life in any way. I would like to find a story that I can read with pleasure and identify with the main characters, find something of myself in them, read the questions that I have about life and learn how others in similar situations answer those questions.

In this novel the main characters are three women in their 50s in 1980’s Britain, and I wonder if any women readers were able to identify with these characters. Not me. These women are comfortably sure of themselves and of where they belong, they seem ‘very English’ to me, complacent, most of their questions in life answered. So, not great literature, no really big issues raised, just every day lives of comfortably well-off professional older women.

Is it a good read? The large number of minor characters becomes difficult to follow, but there’s enough going on, enough to keep us wondering what’s going to happen next, with a little bit of mystery thrown in, to keep the reader occupied and interested. Good enough.

To War With Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly 1939-45 : Hermione Ranfurly

A terrific book! This is a different view of life during WWII – the view from the Middle East, and also a woman’s view. Yes, she’s a countess, but when fighting the military bureaucracy that only seems to make things more difficult. She’s young – 25 at the start of the war, and only just married. Her husband (also just 25) is with the Nottinghamshire Sherwood Rangers, and they get posted off to Palestine. Wives are not allowed to follow, but that doesn’t stop Hermione! Thus begin her adventures around the Middle East – Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Aleppo, Algiers, and eventually Italy. Early on the military brass try to get rid of her, and force her to leave on a ship going back to England. She jumps ship in Cape Town (the ship is eventually bombed by the Germans, and her best friend is killed) and manages to get a seat on a plane going back to Cairo by pretending to be a secret service agent.

She has excellent secretarial skills and eventually the powers that be are forced to admit that they really do need her, as there’s a desperate shortage of English-speaking secretaries in Cairo and Jerusalem. Not too long after her return to Cairo, her husband is captured and taken prisoner by the Italians, and she spends much of the war wondering and worrying where, and how, he is. In spite of this, she still meets dozens of fascinating and important people through her work, and writes about them charmingly. She describes the enormous difficulties of wartime life, the uncertainties, the minimal living conditions, lack of bathing facilities, cramped spaces, all in a straightforward manner without complaint. She’s the type that gets on with it, no matter what. The book isn’t really about Whitaker, her husband’s batman (“a soldier assigned as a personal assistant to a commissioned officer”), although he provides a constant reassuring presence.

There’s an excellent obituary of Hermione, with more details of the book here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1322321/Hermione-Countess-of-Ranfurly.html

Verity Red’s Diary – A Story of Surviving M.E.: Maria Mann

I only really got into this when she was given three kittens, Paddy, Murphy, and Mary, and began describing their antics. Having ME is rather boring – nothing happens, and improvement is so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable. Every person with ME has a different collection of symptoms to differing degrees, so I found it difficult to identify with Mann, whose condition is much worse than mine. She also suffered from the ignorance and prejudice of the medical world and family members, all of whom appeared to be quite sceptical and unsympathetic about her illness. This can be one of the most difficult aspects of ME, and quite why people suffering from this condition should be subject to such prejudice is difficult to understand. Anyone doubting the existence of this prejudice (coming from doctors and lay-persons alike) only needs to read relevant entries on the now infamous blog of the so-called “Dr Crippen”, a practising NHS doctor in the UK, and comments that readers have added on the topic.

Aside from all this, Mann has a whimsical and creative style which includes her quirky and funny poems, imaginary parties with pixies and dwarves, and odd-ball names for friends and local drinking establishments where her boyfriend disappears to on Friday nights. She has managed to find the humour in ME, in spite of it all, and this is what makes her story an enjoyable read. Her life, constrained by moderately severe ME, is described in every detail, sometimes minute by minute, as she struggles to wash a plate or get dressed. Her weekly visits to the osteopath and exchange of letters with friends provide an external view of her ordeal. If you have ME or know someone who has it, and enjoy this style of writing, then this would be an interesting book. If you’re looking for a traditional novel with gripping action and in-depth characters, then I’d look elsewhere.

Miss Garnet’s Angel: Salley Vickers

Several reviewers quoted on the front and back covers of this book describe it as ‘subtle’. I agree. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, come across this novel anywhere else until a friend gave it to me to read. At first I wasn’t greatly taken with it, finding the main character, Julia Garnet, somewhat boring and unsympathetic. I was prepared for some soppy tale of how she finds a guardian angel and true love in Venice, despite her age.

The story did not proceed as expected. It turned into a fascinating historical novel going back to the ancient Jewish tale of Tobias, which almost certainly had its roots in an even older tale coming from the Zoroastrians of Persia. Some of the tale of Tobias takes place in Nineveh, present day Iraq, and it’s saddening to note that Christian communities which have existed for many centuries in that region of the world (they pre-date the Muslims by a very long time) are now being forced out of their ancient homelands.

The ancient story is balanced with a modern-day parallel, and there is a pleasantly happy ending (of the kind that I might choose for myself) that doesn’t involve anything quite as unrealistic as the main character falling in love.

The Kindness of Strangers – The Autobiography: Kate Adie

I have to object to the subtitle of this book – I do not consider this an autobiography. It’s a fascinating collection of stories from the front line of reporting in war zones, with a couple of chapters about how Adie got started in the business. However, the truly personal side of events is missing. I kept comparing it to Aiden Hartley’s “The Zanzibar Chest” which I read last year. Hartley was a war reporter working for Reuters predominantly in African countries; his career ended when his father died and he had a nervous breakdown. His book is compelling, each chapter a more gruelling war, in which he is fully engaged. His accounts from the working front line are balanced with accounts of the social life of reporters and photographers living on the edge, and he doesn’t spare the seedier details of alcohol and drug abuse, and includes enough information about his romantic life to give us greater insight to his character and personality. Adie, on the other hand, manages to maintain a professional distance and only once or twice in the book she admits to breaking down and crying over the horrors that she’s witnessed. Her private life is curiously and frustratingly absent. By the end of the book I felt like I knew very little about Adie the person. Reading one anecdote after another about one war after another became a chore lacking the crucial element of a more personal view.

Having made my complaints, I must admit that there were some interesting titbits such as when she made her views on religion plain visiting the Vatican and describes: “the peculiar maleness everywhere – fussy young priests skittering around and fat cardinals with jewellery gliding like Daleks over the marble.” (p.132) And the odd time or two when she loses her patience and thumps someone! (Unfortunately I forgot to make a note of those references – sorry!).

The chapter on the war in Northern Ireland is interesting, not least because it’s so ignored by the majority of the English. I think any African familiar with war would find much that is familiar in her account of this conflict. For example, while we are currently horror-struck over the recent cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, did you know about the cholera outbreak in Belfast?
“…the Divis Flats in central Belfast. The Divis were notorious, never mind for being a bastion of republican sympathy, but also for being the only place in Europe to have experienced an outbreak of cholera in the late twentieth century.” (p. 163)

There is also plenty of humour. When under heavy fire in Beirut, she gets stuck in a shop for several hours:

“Thus I found myself stuck – and in heaven – in Beirut’s largest shoe shop. Three full hours of battle raged outside while I went through every pair of shoes in the basement. Finally, when the coast was clear, I staggered back to the hotel with three boxes of elegant shoes. The other journalists looked up from the bar enquiringly: ‘Front line,’ I said, heavy retail action.”

There were a couple of major omissions; she includes a photograph from Rwanda, but writes nothing about it; and there are a couple of photographs with members of her birth family, but writes nothing at all about how she was reunited with them (she had been adopted as a baby).

Still a fascinating book. Still well worth reading. And still pretty amazing for anyone to have done all that she’s done and risked her life so often, and to have survived – apparently – mentally and physically intact.