Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

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Elizabeth FinchAbout the Book

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration.

Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth’s astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present.

But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil’s view of the world forever.

Format: Paperback (192 pages)              Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 23rd February 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

This was a book club pick and I’ll be honest, based on the lukewarm reviews, it’s one I probably wouldn’t have prioritised to read despite the fact I enjoyed the author’s earlier book, The Sense of an Ending.

The first part of the book introduces us to the rather intimidating, intellectually rigorous Elizabeth Finch. As she states to her students, ‘I am not employed to help you… I am here to assist you to think and argue and develop minds of your own’.  Her credo can perhaps be summed up as ‘question everything’. Her heroes, if she would ever have such a thing, are those willing to challenge established beliefs.  ‘Apostates are the representatives of doubt, and doubt – vivid doubt – is the sign of an active intelligence.’

Intellectually, Neil is in awe of Elizabeth and he retains his admiration for her even after she is no longer his teacher. They start to meet regularly for lunch, always arranged with Elizabeth’s trademark precision. He is eager to please her and rejoices when their discussions over lunch leave him feeling cleverer: ‘I knew more, I was more cogent’.

The book’s second section consists of a lengthy essay on the life of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome. Is the choice of subject matter, I wondered, evidence of the author’s own interest in this historical figure, a mere coincidence that they share a first name or something intended to have more significance? Written by Neil, the essay is based on Elizabeth’s notebooks and other papers which he has inherited following her death. In doing so, he believes he’s carrying out her wishes, that gifting him her library and a reading list was ‘the clearest of signals’.  It’s also perhaps his way of demonstrating that, having drifted from job to job and had a number of failed relationships, he is not after all ‘King of the Unfinished Projects’ as he has been dubbed by one of his daughters. However, in constructing the essay based on Elizabeth’s notes, does Neil end up writing a simulacrum rather than something original based on his own ideas and sources. Surely even Elizabeth’s ideas should be questioned?

Neil remains curious, almost obsessively so, about Elizabeth’s life. Although referencing lines from one of C. P. Cavafy’s poems – ‘From what I did and what I said, Let them not seek to find who I was’ – in fact that’s effectively what Neil sets out to do.  He questions Elizabeth’s brother, Christopher, about her childhood and her relationship with their parents, whilst at the same time persisting in declaring he is not writing her biography. Anna, one of his former classmates, has her own theory about the reasons for his curiosity. Tantalisingly, Neil never gets to the bottom of several mysteries about Elizabeth’s life but very likely she would have hated it if he’d done so. And perhaps we can never really know another person.

Elizabeth Finch is a novel of ideas rather than plot but the more I reflected on it the more I appreciated its subtleties.

In three words: Thoughtful, nuanced, philosophical

JulianBarnesAbout the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.

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#BookReview #Ad Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

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Old God's TimeAbout the Book

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe.

But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.

Format: eARC (272 pages)                  Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 2nd March 2023 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

Sebastian Barry is the author of a book that has stayed with me ever since I read it back in 2017, the wonderful Days Without End. (I wasn’t alone in loving it because it went on to win the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction that year.) He’s done it again with Old God’s Time which is just as wonderful and unforgettable.

Written in close third person, the author takes us inside the mind of retired policeman, Tom Kettle.  And what an unsettling and disordered place it is to be as past and present intermingle. Tom remembers some things like they were yesterday. On the other hand, events and conversations that appear to be occurring in the present day turn out to be the product of his imagination or echoes of things that happened long ago.  Some of these moments, especially those concerning his family are truly heartbreaking.

As Tom looks back on his marriage to June, we are witness to an intensely moving love story. Tom may get confused about other things but he can remember the day he met June with perfect clarity, even the dress she wore. And as the story unfolds, we learn that. as children. they both experienced horrific cruelty at the hands of Catholic priests. The details are harrowing and difficult to read but it feels necessary to do so to bear witness to the people who experienced this in real life and to understand the devastating and lasting impact it had on them. Also shocking is, if not actual complicity, then a failure to act by other institutions including the Garda, the police service of Ireland in which Tom himself served.

It’s such a failure that had dreadful consequences for Tom and June, setting off a chain of tragic events.  His resilience in the face of tragedy is humbling. ‘Things happened to people, and some people were required to lift great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed, and rose again the following morn…’

There are mesmerising descriptions of the sea, the changing light and weather that Tom observes through the picture window of his flat as he sits in his favourite, ‘sun-faded’ wicker chair smoking a cigarillo. There are also touches of wry humour.

My first thought on finishing the book was, Oh Tom, I wish I could give you a hug; my second was, what a truly brilliant piece of writing. Old God’s Time is the kind of book that, on turning the last page, you want to read all over again. It’s also further proof that a novel doesn’t have to be big to deliver a powerful punch. Old God’s Time is definitely the best book I’ve read so far this year.

You can read an extract from Old God’s Time here. I can also recommend this Waterstones podcast in which Sebastian Barry talks about the book and his approach to writing.

I received a review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via NetGalley.

In three words: Lyrical, tender, heartbreaking

Try something similar: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

SebastianBarryAbout the Author

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The current Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008) – and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow. (Photo: Publisher author page)