Tag: literary fiction

Blog Tour/Book Review: From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

From A Low And Quiet Sea Blog Tour Poster

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan and to bring you my review of this powerful novel.  From a Low and Quiet Sea is described as Donal Ryan’s most expansive book to date, set partially in Syria and partially in the familiar territory of rural Ireland.

From A Low And Quiet Sea CoverAbout the Book

‘Can you imagine how that would be? If a tree is starving, its neighbours will send it food. No one really knows how this can be, but it is. Nutrients will travel in the tunnel made of fungus from the roots of a healthy tree to its starving neighbour, even one of a different species. Trees live, like you and me, long lives, and they know things.  They know the rule, the only one that’s real and must be kept. What’s the rule? You know. I’ve told you lots of times before. Be kind.’

Farouk’s country has been torn apart by war.
Lampy’s heart has been laid waste by Chloe.
John’s past torments him as he nears his end.

The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways.

Praise for From a Low and Quiet Sea

‘A magus of a writer’ Sebastian Barry
‘The product of a life-enhancing talent’ Guardian
‘Among the great contemporary chroniclers’ Independent
‘It’s furious, it’s moving, it’s darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut’ New York Times ‘Dazzling’ Mariella Frostrup, BBC Radio 4

Format: ebook, hardcover (192 pp.) Publisher: Transworld Digital/Doubleday Published: 22nd March 2018               Genre: Literary Fiction

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

Find From a Low and Quiet Sea on Goodreads

My Review

Convergence and interconnectedness seem to have been a theme of several books I’ve read recently.  For example, Entanglement by Katy Mahood (my ‘try something similar’ recommendation below) and Oliver Loving by Stefan Merrill Block (click here to read my review).  Of course, knowing that disparate storylines will converge at some point in a book can mean the reader spends the whole time anticipating that convergence or looking out for subtle clues as to how it will come about.   Can I just say, don’t bother with this book, because the author achieves the bringing together of the different strands in an unexpected and quite unsettling way.  In addition, to think about it too much would, to my mind, mar the enjoyment of the journey and the wonderful writing.

The prose with its long, flowing sentences gives the reader the sense they are inside the heads of the characters, experiencing their thought processes, impressions and feelings as they occur.   The author creates some imaginative metaphors, often incorporating the sea, water or tidal forces.

‘He knew the rhythms of the house and the two people below him, the syncopated beats of them, the tides that flowed and ebbed with no regularity but with a strange and comforting predictability’.

‘…he’d imagine the panic that rose inside him to be rising water against a lock gate, and he’d picture the wheel of the lock gate being turned, and he’d imagine the flow through the lock, the downward easing, the levelling.’

The foolishness that swept through him, more every day, it was like a rogue current below a flat, still surface, a deadly undertow that could drag you down to perdition.’

I also loved this description of how a rumour with no truth to it can spread if set in motion by skilled but unscrupulous hands.

‘My story, my something out of nothing, replicated itself like a monster virus, mutating to strengthen itself, rearranging the component parts and properties to better survive each retelling and gain in size and virulence; it leaped the border into Kerry; it travelled back the road into Limerick City; it forded the estuary to Clare.’  

The sections told from the point of view of Lampy and John, with their use of vernacular and colloquialisms, perfectly capture the rhythm and lilt of an Irish accent.  Can I mention at this point the wonderful character that is Lampy’s grandfather?  His telling of tall stories and slightly embarrassing jokes (that are meant to seem spontaneous but have actually been well rehearsed), don’t help Lampy’s low self-esteem.  However, they actually disguise his grandfather’s inability to express the affection he really feels for his grandson.

Although their life paths initially appear to have no prospect of overlapping, each of the three men – Farouk, Lampy and John – share the experience of loss and betrayal.   However, their psychological and emotional reactions to what they have experienced will be very different.  In two, their response will probably earn the reader’s sympathy and understanding.   In the third, the response may be, like my own, rather different.

At the end of the book there is retribution but brought about unwittingly in a way that one suspects will cause further psychological scars.  However, there is one small spark of hope for the future. I am so grateful to have been introduced to the assured, beautiful writing of Donal Ryan.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of publishers, Transworld/Doubleday, and Anne Cater at Random Things Through My Letterbox, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Compelling, powerful, lyrical

Try something similar…Entanglement by Katy Mahood (click here to read my review)

Donal RyanAbout the Author

Donal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first three novels, The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and All We Shall Know, and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun, have all been published to major acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was recently voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, will be published in March 2018. A former civil servant, Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.  He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.

Connect with Donal

Amazon Author Page ǀ Goodreads

 

 

Book Review: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

whatcathyreadnext5 Comments

The BellAbout the Book

A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.

Format: Paperback (352 pp.)             Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2nd August 1999 [1958]   Genre: Literary 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 Bell on Goodreads

My Review

“Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.” In many ways, The Bell is a book about actions and unintended consequences.

Imber Court is described as ‘a buffer state between the Abbey and the world’ and it does seem that many of its occupants are in transition.   The most obvious is Catherine, who is spending her last few weeks before entering the Abbey as a nun.  However, as the Abbess sagely observes, “Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”

Dora is dissatisfied with and feels trapped in her marriage to Paul, but can see no alternative.  ‘That was marriage, thought Dora, to be enclosed in the aims of another.’  Having broken free once, she now feels compelled to return to Paul and Imber Court is the scene of their reunion.  I have to confess I found Dora irritatingly passive about her situation for a lot of the book.  I tended to sympathise with her friend’s advice that ‘You must either knuckle under completely or else fight him.’ My view did change once she and one of the young visitors to Imber Court, Toby, embark on an enterprise together.  ‘It was as if, for her, this was to be magical act of shattering significance, a sort of rite of power and liberation.’

Dora’s husband, Paul, remains a rather peripheral figure.  He comes across as moralistic, cold and possessive and I rather struggled to understand what could have been attractive about him to Dora.   However, he’s clearly deeply hurt by Dora’s desertion but unable to forgive her, to articulate his feelings or to show any warmth towards her that might provide hope of a full reconciliation.

And there’s Michael, always struggling to do the right thing but not always succeeding.  I found him the most empathetic character.  Betrayed in the past, he still feels guilty about his part in the circumstances that led to it and struggles with what he sees as a conflict between his sexuality and his faith.  An instinctive and momentary expression of his feelings threatens to bring to light his past actions and sets in motion a chain of events that will culminate in tragedy.

During one of the regular community meetings, one character says: “A bell is made to speak out.  What would be the value of a bell which was never rung?  It rings out clearly, it bears witness. It cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons.” In fact, as events unfold, it becomes clear that confession can sometimes be dangerous self-indulgence or disguised retribution against another.  ‘There are moments when one wants to tell the truth, when one wants to shout it around, however much damage it does.’

Murdoch’s skill is to really let you see inside the minds of the characters so that the reader witnesses their (sometimes illogical) thought processes, their moral conflicts and their attempts at self-justification.  It doesn’t make them necessarily likeable but it makes them feel credible.

The Bell forms part of my Classics Club list.  To see the other books on my list, click here.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Elegant, insightful, intimate

Try something similar…Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Iris MurdochAbout the Author

Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland in 1919.  A university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. In 1956 Murdoch married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and Professor of English at Oxford University.

Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease. Her novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. In 1987 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died in 1999.  Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001), based on Bayley’s memories of his wife.