Category: Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday: The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m reviewing The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw, published in January 2017.

TheThingsWeLearnWhenWereDeadAbout the Book

With elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones, The Things We Learn When We’re Dead shows how small decisions can have profound and unintended consequences, and how sometimes we can get a second chance.

On the way home from a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. When she wakes up she is in what appears to be a hospital – but a hospital in which her nurse looks like a young Sean Connery, she is served wine for supper, and everyone avoids her questions. It soon transpires that she is in Heaven, or on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. She seems to be there by accident… Or does God have a higher purpose after all?

At first Lorna can remember nothing. As her memories return – some good, some bad – she realises that she has decision to make and that maybe she needs to find a way home.

Format: Paperback (501 pp.)       Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 26th January 2017      Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting local UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Things We Learn When We’re Dead on Goodreads

My Review

As Lorna adapts to her new surroundings on the spaceship, random objects she sees – M&S underwear, lamb cutlets, even a hamster – trigger memories from her past life.  At first these are fragmented, incomplete and often confusing.  Some are pleasant memories: childhood holidays, family picnics, games with friends, the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex.  Others are reminders of loss and grief.

Many of Lorna’s memories revolve around exploits with her stylish friend, Suzie, and Lorna’s relationships with men that, it has to be said, have not been entirely successful.   I confess to feeling a pang of sympathy for poor sweet, stolid Austin (described at one point as ‘a rather dull dog with very few tricks’).  As the book progresses, the reader sees that actions do indeed have consequences, even if unintended, and may set in motion a chain of events that can end tragically.

The book blurb describes The Things We Learn When We’re Dead as having ‘elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones’. Personally, I couldn’t detect that much of a connection with The Lovely Bones and only slight allusions to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (I understand these comparisons were the publisher’s decision.) If looking for cultural references, I would say the depiction of the stranded HVN spaceship draws more from Star Trek than anything else with its transporters, holographs and replicators.  I enjoyed Lorna’s pleasure at the small, surprising miracles on the spaceship, like the ability of a chilled glass of wine to stay chilled even when drunk in the bath.

When it comes to The Wizard of Oz, certainly there are characters described as lacking courage and not having much of a brain that remind one of the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow.   However, I think a reader expecting this book to be a straight retelling of The Wizard of Oz may be disappointed.  What they won’t be disappointed in is the quality of the writing, the quirky humour and the authenticity with which Lorna’s memories of her childhood and young adult experiences are described.

I really enjoyed The Things We Learn When We’re Dead.  As someone who reads very little fantasy and science fiction only occasionally (and then more of the dystopian variety), I wasn’t really disappointed that the extra-terrestrial element takes more of a back seat as the book progresses.  The ending left me wishing Lorna well in the future choices she makes.

I received a personally inscribed review copy from the author in return for an honest and unbiased review.   I’d like to thank the author for his patience in waiting for his book to reach the top of my review pile.

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In three words: Quirky, engaging, imaginative

Try something similar…for more space-based fantasy, Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (click here to read my review)

Charlie LaidlawAbout the Author

Charlie Laidlaw is the author of two novels, The Herbal Detective (Ringwood Publishing) and The Things We Learn When We’re Dead (Accent Press).

Charlie writes: ‘I was born in Paisley, central Scotland, which wasn’t my fault. That week, Eddie Calvert with Norrie Paramor and his Orchestra were Top of the Pops, with Oh, Mein Papa, as sung by a young German woman remembering her once-famous clown father. That gives a clue to my age, not my musical taste.  I was brought up in the west of Scotland (quite near Paisley, but thankfully not too close) and graduated from the University of Edinburgh. I still have the scroll, but it’s in Latin, so it could say anything.

I then worked briefly as a street actor, baby photographer, puppeteer and restaurant dogsbody before becoming a journalist. I started in Glasgow and ended up in London, covering news, features and politics. I interviewed motorbike ace Barry Sheene, Noel Edmonds threatened me with legal action and, because of a bureaucratic muddle, I was ordered out of Greece.  I then took a year to travel round the world, visiting 19 countries. Highlights included being threatened by a man with a gun in Dubai, being given an armed bodyguard by the PLO in Beirut (not the same person with a gun), and visiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave in Samoa. What I did for the rest of the year I can’t quite remember.

Surprisingly, I was approached by a government agency to work in intelligence, which just shows how shoddy government recruitment was back then. However, it turned out to be very boring and I don’t like vodka martini.  Craving excitement and adventure, I ended up as a PR consultant, which is the fate of all journalists who haven’t won a Pulitzer Prize, and I’ve still to listen to Oh, Mein Papa.

I am married with two grown-up children and live in East Lothian.’

Connect with Charlie

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

 

 

Throwback Thursday: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m reviewing Memento Mori by Muriel Spark, a book from my Classics Club list, first published in 1959. The lovely Ali at Heavenali is running a year long reading event to mark the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth.  You can find out more information here.

Memento MoriAbout the Book

“Remember you must die,” said the voice on the telephone.

Dame Lettie Colson is the first of her circle to receive these anonymous calls, and she does not wish to be reminded.  Nor do her friends and family – though they are constantly looking out for signs of decline in others, and change their wills on a weekly basis.

As the caller’s activities become more widespread, soon a witch-hunt is in full cry, exposing past and present duplicities, self-deception and blackmail.  Nobody is above suspicion.  Only a few, blessed with a sense of humour and the gift of faith, can guess at the caller’s identity.

Format: Paperback (226 pp.)                         Publisher: Virago
Published: 4th February 2010 [1959]           Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting local bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Memento Mori on Goodreads

My Review

My only previous experience of Muriel Spark’s writing is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  So I was expecting elegant writing, wit and acute observation but what I wasn’t expecting was the dark satire of Memento Mori and its unflinching portrait of old age, petty foibles and self-deception.  And the author isn’t afraid to deliver some quite breathtakingly sudden reverses for some of the characters. As I was reading the book, I wasn’t sure I liked it that much but, having now finished and reflected on it, I feel rather differently and have come to admire it.

Spark is good at identifying the way in which the elderly are regarded and the indignities that often come with old age.  There is a lot of truth in the depiction of the ‘Grannies’ and their loss of identity.  They are not in fact all grandmothers but referred to in that way by the nurses who care for them.  She’s equally good at pointing out traits which we’ve probably noticed in older relatives ourselves.  For example, frequently telling each other (and possibly reminding themselves) of their age and dwelling on their infirmities.  I’m not sure however that people spend quite as much time changing their wills as they do in Memento Mori.

While I didn’t find the humour in the book to be of the laugh out loud variety, I enjoyed some of the acerbic comments on domestic life.  ‘There was altogether too much candour in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce…’. 

My favourite character was Charmian, a successful novelist in the past, whose books are now being rediscovered by a new generation (and who does that remind you of?).  At the beginning of the book, she appears increasingly absent-minded, if not in the early stages of dementia, but she turns out to be much sharper than people give her credit for. Some of the other characters are downright unlikeable, such as the dreadful and manipulative Mrs Pettigrew, adept at finding out secrets and using that knowledge to her advantage.  However, likeable or not, all the characters come alive on the page.  There’s Alec Warner with his compulsion for collecting facts about ageing and comparing the infirmities he observes in others with his own situation.  Or Charmian’s husband, Godfrey, with his odd peccadilloes and obsession with people’s loss (or otherwise) of their faculties.

Each of the characters who receive the cryptic message from the anonymous caller reacts differently – with outrage, with determination to find out the caller’s identity, with fear, with an academic interest about their own reaction to it, and in some cases, with acceptance.  The latter is the case with retired Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer, who made me think of the Inspector in J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls, as he tries to encourage the other recipients of the message to engage with its meaning, its inevitable truth, rather than focus on a search for the identity of the caller.   He greets the message with equanimity himself: “Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise.  It should be part of the full expectancy of life.  Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid.”  I guess that is the real message of the book.

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In three words: Dark, macabre, satirical

Muriel SparkAbout the Author

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.  Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for “a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature”. In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver’s Seat.

Muriel Spark died in 2006.