Tag: Read

Throwback Thursday: The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks

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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 Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks, published in April 2017.  It’s one of the thirteen books on the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2018.  I’m attempting to read all the books on the longlist and you can find the complete list here along with links to my reviews of those I’ve read so far.  Some way still to go!

WaltScott_The Clocks In This House All Tell Different TimesAbout the Book

‘An orphan is travelling through the deep, dark woods and discovers that the monsters she encounters are as much tragic as wicked and that the handsome young prince may be ugly inside. The world around her is callous, unjust and horribly scarred by the past. But she brings compassion and even a glimmer of hope.’

Summer 1923. The modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of the old army truck and is whisked off to the woods, where the funny men live. If she can only avoid all the hazards on the path, she may just survive into a bright new tomorrow.

Format: ebook, paperback (384 pp.) Publisher: Salt Publishing
Published: 15th April 2017                  Genre: Historical Fiction

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

Find The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times on Goodreads

My Review

The recent experiences of the so-called ‘funny men’ who 14-year old orphan Lucy and her companions meet on their trips to the woods turn out to have been anything but funny.  In fact, they have been traumatic and life-changing, leaving them excluded from society.  And the Sunday evening trips to the woods, though they involve seemingly innocent games and coveted treats like trifle and ice-cream, turn out to be far from benign.

Tragically, Lucy and her friends are initially too innocent to see how they are being manipulated and used.  Gradually, the true nature of events is revealed – I have to say to the disquiet of this reader.   Lucy comes to suspect that what is taking place is wrong.  After all she and her friend, Winifred, refer to it as ‘The Terrible Unmentionable’, as if not naming it for what it is makes it less real.  However, the trips to the ‘funny men’ also fill a void in Lucy’s life, leaving her conflicted.  ‘And this is why, as long as she lives, she will never completely regret her trips to the forest, in spite of the trouble they cause and the horrors that follow.’

Alongside Lucy’s experiences with the ‘funny men’, the book introduces several other often eccentric, sometimes grotesque, characters and other narrative threads that, initially, seem quite random and disparate.   However, the connection the author makes between these characters and story lines is the long-lasting impact of the First World War on people, livelihoods and places.  One character observes: ‘It is a time of beginnings for those who can make them and this is surely essential; the world must move on.’  But what about those who can’t move on?

The lives of the main characters converge in the second part of the book, set in Grantwood House, the home of aristocrat Rupert Fortnum-Hyde, heir to the Grantwood estate.     In a manner reminiscent of Jay Gatsby, he throws wild drug and alcohol-fuelled parties, gathering around him a group of misfits and outcasts as a kind of human zoo, with his ‘collection’ expected to provide endless novelty and entertainment.   However, events will take a tragic turn with cataclysmic consequences.

I really admired the author’s imaginative writing, in which metaphors morph into others, such as in this description of a performance by the jazz band, The Long Boys.  ‘Aboard the Maplewood stage, the Long Boys take songs that are already unfamiliar and proceed to twist them out of shape, so that a tune that sets forth dressed as one thing changes costumes in the space of a bar, or doubles back on itself, or spins to reveal a set of outlandish music cousins who start to chatter and squabble, each vying for attention.’

The book ends in a way that suggests there may be redemption and repentance for some, and more hopeful times ahead for Lucy and those who care for her.  However, this couldn’t quite wipe out for me the memories of the book’s darker moments.  I’m afraid I found it difficult to get past the problematic nature of Lucy’s encounters with the ‘funny men’.  I appreciate that the men’s wartime experiences had been dreadful leaving them scarred in all sorts of ways, but I couldn’t understand why this would make them want to act as they do with children.

‘When the world has been shattered, nothing makes any sense.’  I regret I did feel a little like this about the book. It has a dreamlike quality at times and at other times is more like the stuff of nightmares.  The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times is a book I admired for the skilful writing and imaginative characters but couldn’t fall completely in love with because of its dark, unsettling themes.

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In three words: Dark, intense, unsettling

Try something similar…Regeneration by Pat Barker or Atonement by Ian McEwan

Xan BrooksAbout the Author

Xan Brooks is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He spent his rude youth as part of the founding editorial team of the Big Issue magazine and his respectable middle period as an associate editor at the Guardian, specialising in film. The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times is his first novel.

Connect with Xan

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

 

 

 

WWW Wednesdays – 11th April ‘18

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

WaltScott_Prussian BluePrussian Blue (Bernie Gunther #12) by Philip Kerr (hardcover)

It’s 1956 and Bernie Gunther is on the run. Ordered by Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, to murder Bernie’s former lover by thallium poisoning, he finds his conscience is stronger than his desire not to be murdered in turn. Now he must stay one step ahead of Mielke’s retribution.

The man Mielke has sent to hunt him is an ex-Kripo colleague, and as Bernie pushes towards Germany he recalls their last case together. In 1939, Bernie was summoned by Reinhard Heydrich to the Berghof: Hitler’s mountain home in Obersalzberg. A low-level German bureaucrat had been murdered, and the Reichstag deputy Martin Bormann, in charge of overseeing renovations to the Berghof, wants the case solved quickly. If the Fuhrer were ever to find out that his own house had been the scene of a recent murder – the consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about.

And so begins perhaps the strangest of Bernie Gunther’s adventures, for although several countries and seventeen years separate the murder at the Berghof from his current predicament, Bernie will find there is some unfinished business awaiting him in Germany.

TheGoodFatherThe Good Father by S. R. Wilsher (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author)

In 1994, nine year old Effie and her twelve year old brother Ajan, endure the horrors of life in the besieged city of Sarajevo after the loss of their parents. Desperate to help preserve their city, Ajan becomes involved with a criminal gang among the makeshift defenders. When Effie is forced to flee alone, she must survive long enough to reach those outside of the city who have come to help. But the influence of those pursuing her is such that not even the soldiers of the UN might be able to save her. Any hope of a future for Effie eventually lies with only one man, Captain Nathan Lane.

It is 2017, and an attempt is made on the life of Foreign Secretary, Caroline Hardy. As the Security Services hunt for her attacker, the reality she is only a bit part player in the affair doesn’t occur to anyone. Not until her daughter, Mia goes missing and is implicated in the disappearance of a well-connected lawyer. As the focus switches to Mia, a secret that Caroline has kept hidden for a long time threatens them both, until there becomes only one place she can turn, to the man who shares her secret.

Recently finished (click on title for review)

A Mother's SacrificeA Mother’s Sacrifice by Gemma Metcalfe (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author and Neverland Book Tours)

God ensured she crossed my path. And that is why I chose her.

The day Louisa and James bring their newborn son home from the hospital marks a new beginning for all of them. To hold their child in their arms, makes all the stress and trauma of fertility treatment worth it. Little Cory is theirs and theirs alone. Or so they think…

After her mother’s suicide when she was a child, Louisa’s life took an even darker turn. But meeting James changed everything. She can trust him to protect her, and to never leave her. Even if deep down, she worries that she has never told him the full truth about her past, or the truth about their baby.

But someone knows all her secrets – and that person is watching and waiting, with a twisted game that will try to take everything Louisa holds dear.

WaltScott_The Clocks In This House All Tell Different TimesThe Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks (paperback)

‘An orphan is travelling through the deep, dark woods and discovers that the monsters she encounters are as much tragic as wicked and that the handsome young prince may be ugly inside. The world around her is callous, unjust and horribly scarred by the past. But she brings compassion and even a glimmer of hope.’

Summer 1923. The modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of the old army truck and is whisked off to the woods, where the funny men live. If she can only avoid all the hazards on the path, she may just survive into a bright new tomorrow. (Review to follow)

Lady Helena InvestigatesLady Helena Investigates by Jane Steen (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author and Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours)

1881, Sussex. Lady Helena Scott-De Quincy’s marriage to Sir Justin Whitcombe, three years before, gave new purpose to a life almost destroyed by the death of Lady Helena’s first love. After all, shouldn’t the preoccupations of a wife and hostess be sufficient to fulfill any aristocratic female’s dreams? Such a shame their union wasn’t blessed by children…but Lady Helena is content with her quiet country life until Sir Justin is found dead in the river overlooked by their grand baroque mansion.

The intrusion of attractive, mysterious French physician Armand Fortier, with his meddling theory of murder, into Lady Helena’s first weeks of mourning is bad enough. But with her initial ineffective efforts at investigation and her attempts to revive her long-abandoned interest in herbalism comes the realization that she may have been mistaken about her own family’s past. Every family has its secrets—but as this absorbing series will reveal, the Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.

Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings’ assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier—who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl’s daughter—play in her investigations?

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Black EarthThe Black Earth by Philip Kazan (Uncorrected proof copy, courtesy of Allison and Busby)

1922 – When the Turkish Army occupies Smyrna, Zoë Haggitiris escapes with her family, only to lose everything. Alone in a sea of desperate strangers, her life is touched, for a moment, by a young English boy, Tom Collyer, also lost, before the compassion of a stranger leads her into a new life.

Years later when war breaks out, Tom finds himself in Greece and in the chaos of the British retreat, fate will lead him back to Zoë. But he will discover that the war will not end so easily for either of them.

 

White HousesWhite Houses by Amy Bloom (eARC, courtesy of NetGalley and Granta Books)

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok – Hick to friends – a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives.

Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick’s hidden love, and of Hick’s unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.