Black Swan Green by David Mitchell – A book review

Dear Jason Taylor

Hope you’re doing well.

Yesterday, I chanced upon this big fat green book and realized that it was about you. Thank you for sharing about the thirteenth year of your life – As Madame Crommelynck puts it ‘Ackkk, a wonderful, miserable age. Not a boy, not a teenager. Impatience but timidity too. Emotional incontinence.’

I had never heard of a place called Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. A few pages into your story and I thought, ‘Is this going to be another ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’?’ Have you read it? It’s by Roddy Doyle and is about a boy like you.

I know you stutter but I’m sure you’ll get over it. I know how ugly people can get when they discover that; it’s difficult yeah. I like the way you have interspersed incidents and situations across chapters; they seem like short stories but are yours and are interwoven into that one year. I think that’s super duper. They’re full of discovery and adventure. I understand being a part of the herd is important, else you’re treated like a pariah dog, and a very few can stand against it and in turn handle and survive the bestowed agony but I’m proud of you Jace.

I’m sorry but I have to say this – as I read your accounts, a few of your rambling thoughts and derived wisdom seemed a bit too much or unreal for a thirteen year old but yes, on further pondering over it myself, I felt it’s possible; it all depends on what and how much and when and how you’ve seen things. There is more wisdom packed in your thoughts than in most self-help books I’ve read. I particularly liked this one - Me, I want to kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

You’ve experienced a lot and what I like is the clarity with which you have expressed your thoughts and the happenings; there doesn’t seem to be a clouding between the incidents and their recordings. Friendship, your first smoke, your first kiss, the losing of a priced possession, the near loss of innocence, being bullied to the verge of breaking down, the finally doing the right thing; it’s all there. I liked ‘Solarium’ the best; Madame Crommelynck comes across as a cranky old woman but I’d have loved to meet her; she came across as someone who doesn’t mince words or at least now doesn’t. I read names like Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs in your memoirs, related to Ms. Crommelynck and that reminds me that I’ve read these names before, probably in a book called the ‘Cloud Atlas’. I simply love her thoughts on beauty and poetry –

…‘T.S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art.’ She put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if is themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?’

…‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’

Sometimes relationships are just a name and not what they seem. Just like Black Swan Green – you mentioned there never were any swans there – neither black, nor green, nor white – no swans. Well, sometimes people are also not what they seem. I’m sorry to hear about your parents and particularly about Ross Wilcox; do you think he deserved what he got? Your stories hint a lot of karma; do you believe in it? And sometimes, I hope you agree, we too aren’t what we put on display – the swan surfaces because it’s beautiful and intriguing in the midst of others but it disappears when we’re alone. I’m glad you met the gypsies – our hatred towards them is the same as theirs towards us, only the perspectives are different. And when you heard from them and I from you, it surprised me about the things they said – so true, we were never shown the mirror.

There – you’ve got me contemplating like you. When I started this letter to you, I didn’t know what to write and like always ended up writing a lot. So now, here, I stop. Someday, I’ll read you again. Take care.

Madame Crommelynck talking about herself

‘It is difficult to avoid, yes.’ Madame Crommelynck kept her eyes on Robert Frobisher. ‘This girl wants my forgiveness, before she dies. She begs me, “I was eighteen! Robert’s devotions were just a … a… flattery game for me! How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?” Oh, I pity her. I want to forgive her. But here is the truth.’ (Now she looked at me.) ‘I abhor that girl! I abhorred her all my life and I do not know how to stop to abhor her.’

My rating: 8/10

Image courtesy

Book cover - https://www.kaiandsunny.com/publishing/22_black_swan_green_hb.php

David Mitchell - https://stuttertalk.com/tag/black-swan-green/

The sea, the sea by Iris Murdoch - A book review

I’ve been wondering since I picked up the book; why ‘The sea, the sea’, why not just ‘The sea’? And as I read the last few words, I guess I know now. It’s a call of despair, of longing, of a melancholic meditation where it’s a fruitless, failed attempt of breathing right and keeping your eyes closed and trying to understand and believe and trust things and situations that you don’t want to but probably must; numerous thoughts like wild waves only thrashing you against the abrasive rocks, destroying your meditation, your peace if there is any.

Is LOVE a four letter word? Let’s not waste time here - it IS a four letter word. And so is PAIN and HURT. Ask Charles Arrowby, an imperious theatre stalwart, loved and despised equally by the marionettes in his life. And almost always, as he pulls the strings, they remain taut for a long time and don’t really break till they do. And still his so called friends, colleagues, past love interests and James, the only family he has, cling to him - a despot who steers relationships, manipulates them, breaks them with an unflustered detachment.

Charles has moved to ‘Shruff’s end’, a house he’s bought by the sea for his self-imposed retirement from the theatre and all people. He’s decided to peacefully write his memoirs here and spend the rest of his life in solitude. But ‘Iris Murdoch’ won’t leave him alone. She places his life back to him when he thinks he’s already lived it. Charles comes across Hartley, his childhood sweetheart, who’d run away from him without a trace or explanation then. Cupid is cunning and doesn’t see age (Charles is above 60) or a marriage to be a shield for his arrows; he only strikes.

Which one is funnier, the heart or the mind? A drowning man clutches to a straw; Charles clutches to his memories of Hartley, to the play of fate. He now sees why he’s come to this place, of all places, a connection that existed, exists so strong; how can he let go of it now? What unfolds is a tenacious contrivance; Charles plays God, destines his own destiny and that of others, primarily Hartley; his unshaken beliefs and ramblings silencing the shrieking thoughts and woes of others. Does a despot know that s/he’s a despot; does a lunatic undulating between sanity and insanity, know that s/he’s a lunatic? How would they; isn’t it why we relate it to obsession. They’re right because they think they’re right and they think it very strongly and passionately; they aren’t hypocrites, they are believers and it’s only fair that they find it astounding why other’s are so plain, feeble, so dispassionate, tedious and wearisome.

“But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, should it, whatever happened, lose its object? Some loves are not defeated by death, although it is not as easy as we think to love the dead. But there are pains and devices which defeat love more ingeniously. Would I at last absolutely lose Hartley because of a treachery or desertion on her part which should turn my love into hate? Could I begin to see her as cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress? I felt that this could never be, and I felt it as an achievement, almost as a mode of possession. As James said ‘If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.’ My love for Hartley was very nearly an end in itself. Twist and turn as she might, whatever happened she could not escape me now.”

“What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent.”

And entangled in this hullabaloo of affairs, deception and tragic deaths, the others play their parts, they enter and exit, they stay; the ambiance and tune changes – from a gloomy surrender to a maddening rage, from a calm melody to a tumultuous symphony. A silhouette of the spiritual and supernatural also flirts with the reader. Murdoch, like in her other stories presents a range of questions and none of them are really answered. You love and hate the characters, and more so because they manifest reality, their emotions are of this world. You’ll end up justifying the characters for their horrific, loving and/or indifferent acts; like a shrink you’ll try to understand them, you’ll want to make them understand. In the end, you’ll just end up making yourself understand.

How well a story resonates with you depends on when you pick it up and for me it couldn’t be a better time and situation. I felt, in bits and pieces living the emotions of most of the characters; of being obsessed, of hatred due to helplessness, of desire, of pangs of jealousy, of submissiveness, of dominance, of so called pragmatism and more importantly being immersed, deeply immersed in the sea of love.

In Hartley, I saw a resemblance of the female protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’. I was also reminded of John Banville’s ‘The Sea’ when I went through these accounts. The sound of the sea relaxes, calms you down but somehow also has an agonizing effect, goading you to ponder, silencing you in your words but making your thoughts scream. Is that true for others as well?

Sooner or later, the sea throws back all that we put in it. The waves give back to Charles a longing and undesirable loneliness for all of his fastidious plans and rancor. Finally, he attempts to come to terms with it; he realizes that caring, love and desire cannot be in mere words, if it can’t be felt. There’s a very thick line between thinking, believing and doing.

LOVE indeed is a four letter word and yet it’s BEAUTIFUL (that’s nine!) and NECESSARY (nine again).

Can Lizzie’s (a former lover) words in a letter to Charles sum up to an attainment of peace in love?

“My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’ Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me Charles, love me enough.”

My rating – 9/10

Images courtesy:

Iris Murdoch picture - https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/iris-murdoch

Book cover - https://electricliterature.com/my-year-in-re-reading-after-40-5-the-sea-the-sea-by-iris-murdoch/

 

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle - A book review

Patrick Clarke is a boy of ten. From Barrytown in Dublin. A growing boy with a lot to discover. A brat at times, a caring child at other times. A quick learner, an interested and curious student.

The book is his ramblings about what he sees around him, the way he behaves, and the way others around him do. At times, you feel ‘I’m happy I’m not neighbors with him’.

Literal translations of his thoughts, gibberish, heartlessness, care, fear, dare, adventures, and childish analysis fill the pages of this book. And his friends are as grown up as he is and as child-like as he is; their thoughts and actions only complement his.

We have heard it like a million times that a child’s upbringing, what he sees and does at home, what he sees his parents doing and talking about has a strong influence on and manifests his/her personality and attitude.

And still there is shouting and abusing in their presence, hidden in the shrouds of normal behavior. A smack heard in the kitchen – did something fall, oh! It was the table. They aren’t fighting! They are! No, they’re just talking; grown-ups do that all the time.

We don’t need mentally strong children now, do we? Not altered in this way. We don’t need them to say ‘I understand’ and really understand the forced brutalities of life. We’d rather let them worry about that unsharpened pencil than the sobs of a parent. We need to let them be what they are – children.

Easier said than done! Grownups have their lives too and let’s be practical, incidents happen; you make mistakes, you realize your mistakes, sometimes you let go, sometimes it’s awfully difficult. But never let it escape you that you’re being watched. By innocent eyes. And what you’re doing is taking away that innocence little by little; a permanent uncontrollable damage that probably will be presented to a shrink to analyze and comment on, later in life.

Parents who think that their behavior doesn’t affect children - read this book please.

Grownups, who think they can hide their emotions, keep things secret, fight and abuse when no-one is looking, think again! – read the book please.

The book reminded me of ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time’ by Mark Haddon.

Roddy Doyle is Paddy Clarke. Paddy Clarke is Roddy Doyle. And I enjoyed their story. 

I only wish I had penned down all my experiences as a child; then I would’ve shown Paddy Clarke what an obstreperous child I was, more than him; probably given him the Chinese torture and a dead leg!

Obstreperous 
Obstreperous
Obstreperous obstreperous obstreperous

My rating: 7/10

Book cover: https://www.amazon.in/Paddy-Clarke-Ha-Booker-Winner/dp/0749397357

Roddy Doyle: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2017/0901/900835-reviewed-smile-by-roddy-doyle/

Unexploded by Alison Macleod – A book review

A melancholic song is playing in the background. It seeps into the aural sense. It affects but surprisingly I don’t want it to end. And it doesn’t; it goes on.

What is war? A conflict carried on by force of arms between nations or between parties within a nation. Force there is, arms there are – fire from the skies, fear there is, and war there is. And then there are other conflicts, within; there are wars in the head, in relationships; a sense of betrayal, there is hatred dripping, there is a tacit shelling of unspoken words, of feelings.

‘There is no invasion as fearful as love, no havoc like desire. Its fuse trembles in the human heart and runs through to the core of the world. What are our defences to it?’

It’s World War II, Germany is planning to invade Britain. George Beaumont is a bank manager but the war has voluntarily turned him into Superintendent of the infirmary. Evelyn is his wife, happy with him and their son Phillip. The war has bought a tremble in her life like everyone else’s. George’s decision to take up an assignment away from them, for the country, has imbibed a sense of betrayal in her that she can’t free herself of.

A feeling of abandonment engulfs her; George hasn’t left yet but the thought of him being able to leave them; her and her son, is killing her, is straining their normalcy. And the green pills of death lying there below the spade in their garden, kept by him, is an evidence of his torture; a death before dying. 

When relationships have been lived long and though the strands are strong, there is an inevitable abrasion due to circumstances. That is when the transparency turns to translucency, a slightly opaque layer shrouds and suddenly it becomes unimportant to reveal things. You ask and answer for yourself, ‘what difference will it make?’ – the first signs of a strain.

‘She had to look away. Sometimes, it was still an effort: to hate him so she would not love him. He’d always been such a good father.’

Otto Gottlieb, a prisoner of war, a Jew, an artist, finds himself in Geoffrey’s infirmary. But he’d been disowned even before he reached the infirmary, by the Germans. He’s an outcast; do we not know why.

Evelyn has decided to read at the infirmary to the prisoners; there are only two; the dying Italian and Otto. What starts as an indifference towards the confined Jew, unknowingly develops into love - time, situation, betrayal and most importantly, an imposed loneliness in the head play their roles. Can one infidelity justify another?

‘Life would hobble on. Indeed, perhaps it was only by accepting the inevitable failures of intimacy that one’s married life moved forward and passed into the muted successes upon which anniversary parties, retirement dinners and obituaries ultimately depended.’

According to the biblical narrative, Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, was summoned by King David, who had seen her bathing and lusted after her. David had Uriah himself carry the message to be placed on the front lines of the battle that led to his death.

This disturbing piece of Bathsheba’s story has an apparent influence on ‘Unexploded’s’ central theme, both literally and otherwise. As the story unfolds, the writer unveils the characters to the yearning reader as they wince and gasp in anticipation. 

‘Yes’, he (Otto) told the young critic, ‘I think that is fair to say. One is always, also, painting oneself. It’s inevitable, though one’s focus is necessarily trained upon the subject. I suppose all of life, whether off the canvas or on it, is made from’ – he’d allowed himself to smile carelessly for the first time that opening night – ‘the intercourse of two things.’

Through Ms. Macleod’s chisel arises another grotesque effigy of hatred which represents the thoughts of children in war; their perspective. A nation is probably already dead when its children fall prey to hatred, when their minds are polluted, when their innocence is no more the innocence of harmless sport but becomes a criminalized innocence; the innocence remains but is veneered in pure hatred. 

What is more disturbing - the everyday anticipation of war or the war itself? Which is more tiring?

‘She wanted life, she wanted it badly. She needed the world to burst open. To go up in smoke. She wanted the enemy to invade the shore and be done with it. Fear was exhausting, but nothing tired a body like hope.’

‘Then, as if in reply to some reckless act of the collective will or an unspeakable communal wish, something in the atmosphere gave way that July night. Squalls and showers blew in from the west. The lid of summer came off. And in a moment that was, after so many months of waiting, as much longed for (secretly, ashamedly) as it was dreaded, the first bomb was tipped into the early morning of the new day: a fifty-kilogram falling star, gravid, lethal and indifferent.'

When you see a plane firing bullets in the distance, a character says in one of the paragraphs, never run away from it; run towards it if you want a chance to survive. And run towards disaster is what every character in this story does but does anyone survive?

It’s a well crafted, intelligently written story; I loved the simplicity of the narrative. It struck a chord and it’ll stay with me for a long time. The melancholic tune still resonates as Evelyn visits Otto’s representation of Bathsheba in his painting on the church dome. 

And as a tear finally falls, I am there to witness it.

My rating - 8/10

Picture courtesy:

Alison Macleod - https://www.penguin.co.nz/authors/alison-macleod

‘Unexploded’ book cover - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18212386-unexploded

A fairly honourable defeat by Iris Murdoch - A book review

Goodness is a virtue. And Iris Murdoch seems to be possessed with it. Be it this particular book or ‘The Nice and the Good’, she seems to be amazed and possibly irritated by the varieties of it. Her characters drip of this disparateness as her brush strokes the story. But goodness cannot exist by itself, it inevitably co-exists; with love, friendship, innocence, sacrifice and more importantly power.

There’s a strong connection between goodness and power and most of the times we don’t realize we’re donning this invisible cloak. We, in all our nonchalance, make ourselves believe in the goodness in us but conveniently ignore the power demon lurking behind the veil. But do we make ourselves believe at all? Or is it an inane innate defect of humanity. Murdoch cruelly makes us chant, pushing each bead of nicety, love, friendship, relationship, deceit, anxiety, despair and many others against the disturbing string of dominance.

Characters in this story are few but intense; the intensity lies in their strength and for a few in their timidity and weaknesses. Morgan, an eccentric, shallow and hopelessly callous person shelters herself at her sister Hilda’s house. She’s running away from relationships, she wants to find herself she says. She doesn’t want to let go of Tallis, her haunting husband, who she hasn’t met for two years because she’s been in an illicit relationship with Julius King and now she’s left Julius too. Hilda and her husband Rupert, the epitome of goodness and morality, don’t know what they are getting into as they harbor the wild mare into their stable; their lives are about to change because of her frivolity. Axel and Simon are the other two essential parts. Simon, Rupert’s brother is gay and madly in love with the guileless Axel.

Murdoch improvises on the proverb ‘What you give, you get back’, the reader experiences strong renderings of ‘What you get, you give back’. The deranged Morgan is treated like dirt as she tries to go back to Julius. She amuses herself in the most lowering and disgusting manner to Julius’s apathy. And then she becomes Julius with her husband Tallis, she treats him like a well tamed animal showing that offence is the best defense while sulking and playing the victim all along; how cute!

As Morgan displays her histrionics by introducing the unique concept of ‘loving innocently’ and making herself and others gulp this potion, Julius King, to challenge her nonsense and expose the fragility of relationships, plays Shakespeare and writes and directs the screenplay for an horrendous act. But should we blame Julius, or Murdoch for that matter? Murdoch’s eloquence portrays the strongest of characters crumbling to the feeblest of cunningness and it sounds so believable that one wonders – are all relationships in such a latent and decrepit state that a single blow can shatter the opaque glass of misrepresented conscience. Do we humour ourselves by believing in what we are; are we that, or are we the magician’s rabbit that pops out of the intricate and unsettling mesh of the brain and the heart each time, every time?

Murdoch plays around with the power that holds and with the powerlessness that yields. Her characters like most of us are so full of themselves, though in different ways. She shows how easy it is to pull a single strand of doubt or suspicion to create a mess of relationships, how easy it is to fall, to get lost in the meandering light of a new pleasing and refreshing something. She reinforces the effortlessness of inducing fear where the heart is timid; she mocks at the vulnerability of what we call the strength of love, of belief and trust. The plot shows how ugly people can get or probably are deep inside, beyond the ostentatious façade of goodness. She probes into the cause of goodness and derides its fragility.

It’ll be wrong to end without putting Murdoch’s characters on a pedestal for their amazing mental strength; or is it hard heartedness! Even in the wiliest of infidelity, or a treacherous contrivance, they are large hearted enough to understand, to let go and at times to find innocence in the act; a fairly honourable defeat indeed. Wow! I wish I meet more of this kind in real life, the forgiving ones. This book did make me think of the so called goodness of many people, and analyze them, it; such an ugly thing to do, isn’t it!

Loved the book, loved the mockery.

My rating: 8/10

Picture courtesy:

Book cover: https://www.jasonbooks.co.nz/p/literary-fiction-a-fairly-honourable-defeat

Irisi Murdoch image: https://www.newstatesman.com/iris-murdoch-novels-reissued-criticism-biography-100-years

Silas Marner by George Eliot – A book review

Silas Marner is a weaver. And so is George Eliot. 

As Marner relentlessly, dedicatedly and dolefully weaves for the village folk, so does not Eliot; she pauses every now and then, she smells the blossom, she listens to the gossip of the multitude, she gives in to the blind faith of the rustic brethren, she runs her hand lovingly over the simplicity of neighbours, through her needle she looks into the cunningness and heartlessness of the affluently powerful and while doing so, infuses in the pages, one after the other, a warmth the reader isn’t ready to forsake.

Stabbed in the back by one considered closest, Marner takes his craft to the village of Raveloe where he lives a life of solitude. In the village, where being neighbourly isn’t an option, Marner has made himself an outcast; the village folk leave him alone. At intervals, incidents happen that not only change the course of his life but also the way he lives it and the way people change their thoughts about him. From losing his money to theft - the sole happiness in his life then, to the finding, keeping and making of Eppie his daughter, Marner’s life transcends his misfortune.

Silas Marner is pure in his thoughts. And so is George Eliot with her characters.

Eliot effortlessly contrasts beliefs of the poor and the rich, of the simple and the powerful. Is it naivety, ignorance or goodness in Mrs.Winthrop, one of Marner’s uneducated neighbors to declare that she hardly understands anything that the priest preaches in church but has the thought that it definitely has to be good? In fact, she goads Marner to go to church, to listen, to be accepted, for Eppie to be accepted.

On the other hand, the design of thoughts of the elite Casses are so hurtful but deemed pragmatic by them. How easily the frivolous Dunsey Cass starts thinking about Marner’s money, to beguile him out of it and starts anticipating what he’ll do with it even when it’s not his. What gives him the right to think and decide for others? And how different is Godfrey Cass, the sensible son, who reprimands himself for lying, believes he has a conscience but lays his entire life on deceit? And he too attacks Marner; this time unlike his brother, the imposition is for much more than money. Eliot unveils the rich class to show how money brings in complacency, an inevitable confidence and an ego which ridicules their thoughts and carries them away from being sensible.

I found a strange purity, simplicity and calmness in Eliot’s writing. The reader is never kept in suspense, though the characters are. It’s there and you know it but still keep reading for the joy of it, to feel, to laugh, to shame, to feel sorry, to despise and ultimately, to rejoice in the plainness of Marner’s life.

The edition I read has an introduction by Q. D.Leavis which is equally interesting and full of thoughts on the lives in and around the times of the story and the author.

My rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10

Pictures courtesy of:

George Eliot picture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot

Book cover - https://www.pinterest.com/pin/480900066436057124/

'The woman who walked into doors' by Roddy Doyle – A book review

A lady on a swing, a full smile, a happy one. Night time for sure, a disappearing tinge of blue in the black. Probably the moonlight, probably not. There’s something eerie about the cover. And it makes me wonder, walk into or walk through; is it to do with the supernatural? And then I read praises written on the back cover and they put my mind to rest and I venture on.

‘Walk into’ it is! Bang! Again. And again. And again. Battered, bruised, shattered, broken, bleeding, hurt – inside and out, dead – almost – inside, not out. But unnoticed. No veil, yet unnoticed. Invisible.

How did you get that? – I walked into a door. So sad. Ha ha ha.

Paula was born an O’Leary, had to fall in love to be a Spencer. Married at 18 to Charlo, this the story of Paula’s married life. If it can be called one. Married - yeah, life – not very sure. Set up in a suburb of Dublin where girls were either sluts or not, and boys were either a good ride or not.

Paula is a good ride, thinks Charlo. Charlo is a good ride, thinks Paula.

And one day Paula is there on the floor. And the next day too. And as Paula lies curled up, whimpering on the floor almost every day, or night, or the times in between, the author writes on. He takes you there; in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. You look and that’s all you can do. All you can do is nod grievously as the bottle takes over her.

Roddy Doyle’s brilliance is evident in Paula’s humoring herself and her life. Please don’t tell me she actually believed love still existed; till the very end. Did it, Mr. Doyle? Or is it that unseen, empowering shit called positive thinking where you train your mind to believe things. “He loves me. He can’t live without me. He said that.”

The gory violence is only subdued by her relentless pursuit for normalcy, a hope that negates despair. And in the end it is the mother in her that fights back; the wife is merely a believer, the mother thankfully treads the path beyond the realm of belief. The beast is finally put in place.

Roddy Doyle is a powerful writer. He’s drilled a hole into Paula’s mind. He’s managed to connect the wires to a giant screen and he sees and he writes. There is no tarnishing, there are no blemishes as he captures the ramblings. Paula talks to you; she does. And more often than once you want to scream, ‘Get up bitch, get a life. Wake up, wash your face, lose your pain, lose him’. And you do. Compelling!

And I look at the cover again. Is that a toothless smile I see? Is that a black eye hidden by a shadow? Let’s see, no, can’t be a broken finger curling on to the chains. Or is it?

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * (9/10)

Cover image - https://blankbooks.co.za/obz/20182-the-woman-who-walked-into-doors.html

Roddy Doyle image - https://www.rte.ie/culture/2017/0901/900835-reviewed-smile-by-roddy-doyle/