'Memorial Days' by Geraldine Brooks

 

From the BLURB: 

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

I have loved Geraldine Brooks for the longest time. 'The Year of Wonders' is one of my favourite books (read the summer I graduated high school, so I also can't think of that story without if being a demarcation of my life too). I read everything she writes with a hunger and particular pride in her being Australian ... 'Memorial Days,' about events following the sudden death of her husband (author, journalist and historian Tony Horwitz) and the grief she needed to meet on Flinders Island in Tasmania some years later, is no different.

This is also a book about creativity - since both Brooks and her husband were writers. In musing on his death, Brooks is also wondering at the person (the artist) she would have been, had she not followed her husband to America and instead stayed in Tasmania, to become a fully Australian writer (Brooks' work has instead been marked by interesting tales she's seemingly collected in her travels; the plague village of Eyam in England for 'Wonders', and FanFiction borne from Louisa May Alcott's very New England 'Little Women' in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 'March). 'Memorial Days' is a tale of a few deaths in this way; 'Sliding Doors' wonderings at who she would have been, and the death of an idea to write about Jane Franklin (a British explorer to Tasmania ... I admit a curiosity about this story, but also a thorough disgust when Brooks reveals things she did to an adopted daughter.)

In this respect, I was reminded of another memoir by an Australian writer about the death of her playwright husband; the extraordinary 'Love, Death & Other Scenes' by Nova Weetman which came out last year, and I also *adored* (and ugly-cried my way through). The deaths are markedly different; Tony Horwitz dropped suddenly on the street from a cardiac event, in the middle of his book-tour. Playwright Aidan Fennessy died a long and painful death from cancer at the heigh of Covid in Melbourne lockdown. But both of these books also examine the audacities of bureaucracy in death; for Brooks it's navigating a callous and needlessly cruel American healthcare (and health insurance) system. For Nova Weetman, it was the aforementioned Covid adding layers of delay and complication to their memorials and grieving. In both I found connection to the writings of Caitlin Doughty, an American mortician and author who is a passionate advocate for things like green burial, but also for a more personal relationship with death and dying that the West seems uniquely inadequate at - for the ways medical and healthcare systems insist on distance and sanitising what should be a deeply personal and close experience, should loved ones require it.

Brooks' writing goes down like a robust glass of red in the reading ... her descriptions of the Flinders Island landscape are particularly delicious, cast against her unstable tripping towards some kind of marker for the other side of grief.

I was so deeply moved by this, as many will be, for thinking of people I've lost in my own life too - and how true Brooks' recommendations are, to aid the chores of death (little things like people making lists of all they do; what their passwords are, where the number for the plumber is kept, etc.) She is correct that death and dying bind all of us, and so I think everyone will find something to hurt or heal in this remarkable book.

And much like Brooks, I find it cruelly ironic that America is entering into this new wave of Trumpism fascism and Tony Horwitz - a journalist uniquely situated to report and comment on it! - isn't here to do so. I really do want to go and read his books 'Confederates in the Attic' and 'Spying on the South' now, and I think that's a gift Brooks has also given to readers and his legacy.

5/5

'The Silver Metal Lover' by Tanith Lee

 

From the BLURB: 

For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane's life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion. Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city's violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see - not even the robot or his creators A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete

I don't quite know how I stumbled across this book (first published in 1981) I think I was led here by wanting to read more science-fiction with romantic elements (to try and read more sci-fi generally) coupled with a reminder of the hilariously prophetic old article from The Sun REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025 and also thinking about AI encroachment on artistic spaces.

Enter; Tanith Lee (whom I'd never read before) and 'The Silver Metal Lover' about a 16-year-old girl narrating the story of how she fell in love with the humanoid musician robot S.I.L.V.E.R. (which stands for 'Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot').

I really loved this, even as it broke my heart. And for a novel written in 1981 it made so many prescient points, particularly about the wisdom of letting young people have "artificial" relationships in lieu of real experiences (not that I think Tanith Lee villainises this most modern of ways to experience love, mind you! She makes a lot of swipes at other artifices we encourage in society to do with beauty-standards, and it makes you question where the line on "real" really lands).

There's also just some *amazing* lines in here. And again, for a pre-smart phone and social media 1981 novel a line like; “… she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.” seriously slays!

While reading this, it also struck me that a parallel for AI and robots that Lee was exploring here was the tale of Djinn and genies - subservient to human masters, human-but-not, inciting paranoia for trickster behaviour ... and humans constantly questioning their autonomy and the ethics of ordering them around. Brilliant!

This is still an 80's not-quite-YA-but-YA-according-to-the-80's novel so it's sometimes a little too flourish-y. Purple prose-y? The protagonist - Jane - is sometimes soooooo over-the-top and soap-opera dramatic, it felt like a very 80's perspective that teens are a little bratty and tragic and hormonal. To the point of high annoyance, which is unfortunate.

But overall I thought this was a very beautiful sci-fi fairytale, and it did exactly what I hoped it would which was get me thinking about the aspects of modernity and society I'd like to further explore in more science-fiction narratives.

4/5

'Small Things Like These' by Claire Keegan

 

Claire Keegan's 'Small Things Like These' is a powerful novel of 110-pages, about to be stretched into a movie adaptation starring Cillian Murphy.

I got this book for myself in lockdown - some time in 2021 - but didn't crack it open until today, to help pull myself out of a reading slump and concentration-shortage. Keegan helped me on both fronts; but she also sharpened my senses reading this one, giving me a bone-deep pleasure that comes from a perfect book that nuzzles itself into your side, at just the right time.

Ostensibly this is the story of an Irish coalman in his early 40s in 1985, as Christmas day approaches and he catches himself pondering deep thoughts and idly imagining a different life for himself ... amidst memories of his long-dead teenage mother, his unknown father, and the world of men that await his five young daughters.

Whilst this is happening, he goes to the Convent on three separate occasions to deliver coal, and encounters "fallen women" - girls - who beg him for escape. His wife warns him to stay on the right side of people, and a local businesswoman reminds him that "they" - the Church - have a hand in everything.

And yet. Furlong keeps thinking about them, and his own life - how different it would have been, had his mother ended up in a place like that with him, or without.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

This is Keegan writing about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, and the long arm of Roman Catholic orders ... though; for all of Furlong's deepening thoughts about the point and purpose of life, and what it takes to be a good person, you can read many a substitute in Keegan's novel, for the abuse of women.

Keegan's is at once a scathing critique of the vast network of church-and-state institutions that perpetuated violence and brutality in Ireland, and even without going into the mechanics, she makes clear how the Catholic church kept a colonial hand in Ireland's formation. But this story is also a meditation on what we do with our time; how we spend a life.

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn't come back around. And wasn't it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

Furlong is contrasted against his wife; a woman who grew up with both her parents and wants to keep a similar order in her own world now, and for their own five girls in the future. Furlong's musings about what goes on at the convent, and the girls he has encountered there, turn her into a Lady Macbeth-type, bemoaning a damned spot of thought.

'Where does thinking get us?' she said. 'All thinking does is bring you down.' She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. 'If you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.'

That Furlong is a colaman conjures the Dickensian character of Ebenezer Scrooge, who permits his clerk - Bob Cratchit - one coal for a fire. Furlong's persistent memories too, of a childhood raised in a stately home where his teenage mother was servant but also permitted to raise her child out of wedlock, have a touch of the 1946 classic 'It's a Wonderful Life' for how George Bailey looks backwards and forwards on his life and all its turning points. Nothing Keegan does is by accident; her sentences are sharp, the thoughts cutting, and her decision to set this as a Christmas tale is especially clever ... after all; what better time of year to contemplate the good and bad of people, to reach for our higher-selves?

This novel was extraordinary. Keegan does more with a mere 110-pages than some authors will in their lifetime, and you cannot help but feel you are in the presence of greatness with every page-turn.

5/5

'Slow Dance' by Rainbow Rowell

 

Received from the publisher is return for an honest review 

From the BLURB: 

Everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together – everybody but Shiloh and Cary.

‘Slow Dance’ follows these star-crossed best friends from their inseparable teen years on the wrong side of the tracks to their far-flung adulthoods – through her marriage and motherhood and his time in the Navy – as they try to work out what they’re actually supposed to be to each other.

🪩

I was up until midnight finishing this; laughing, crying, and just having the best reading experience. I have always loved Rainbow Rowell’s adult fiction - ‘Attachments’ has been my No. 1 fave … but ‘Slow Dance’ maybe just knocked it down to No. 2.

I remember in ‘Attachments’ there was a lot of love for the 1977 movie ‘The Goodbye Girl’ - which is arguably all about another chance of romance when you think you’re down and out and nobody could possibly want you any more … and I feel like ‘Slow Dance’ is a bit of a homage to that time in life. Where so few romance novels choose to expand; Rainbow Rowell dares to tread. 

For anyone who just discovered David Nicholl’s ‘One Day’ via the new adaptation (and now you need to mend what he beautifully broke) - Slow Dance will be right up your alley. Swap out University of Edinburgh for Omaha, Nebraska - and meet Cary & Shiloh bouncing between 1991 and 2006. Where so few romance novels choose to expand on the missed loves and those that remained unrequited for so long, Rainbow Rowell bursts open this idea of approaching your mid-30s and being full of regret and “what if’s?” and choosing to explore new (old) love anyway.

And she does it with her usual Rainbow Rowell sparkling repartee and dialogue … and the most impressive ability to make characters you’ve just met feel so beloved and lived-in.

I adored ‘Slow Dance’ … it is a slow burn - that’s kinda the whole point and plot - and I feel like some people won’t appreciate how lovely it is to have a book like this. It has the hard edges of life amongst a really tender romance. But I thought it was spectacular. One of my favourite reads from Rowell and for the year.

‘Do you think that makes us strangers?’
‘No,’ Shiloh said. ‘But also, yes? Like - cells get replaced in the human body every seven years so that’s two full iterations since 1992. You don’t have any cells left that remember me.’
‘I’m pretty sure my cells remember you, Shiloh.’

5/5 

'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper' by Hallie Rubenhold

 

From the BLURB: 

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met.

They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. 

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. 

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women. 

Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories. 

⦾

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold, read on audiobook by Louise Brealey. 

“Poor women were expendable …”

I listened to the audiobook of this, via my library's BorrowBox app - even though I've also owned the B-format paperback since about 2020, I could just never bring myself (or my heart) to pick it  up and read it of my own volition, but on audiobook I tore through it. And under the talent of Brealey's narration, who could bring out various regional accents to really help things along - it was superb. 

This was such a tough listen but I’m really really glad that I finished this book and I found it to be an extraordinary non-fiction work and by far one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. 

I was completely upended, however to discover that this book has pissed off so many people and specifically “Ripperologists” to the point that Hallie Rubenhold has been horribly abused and harassed because she did to research into the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper - and put fourth credible evidence that not all of them were prostitutes as the sick lore of this madman murdering spree dictated for so long. 

Her book is a gracious and human examination of what it meant to be a woman in the 1880s and the impossible position that they were put in to either be Madonna or whore. She digs into the Victorian mindset of the time that insisted that their murders had to somehow be prescriptive to the wider public and so they were painted as Scarlet women. Their stories absolutely broke my heart and patterns did emerge in all of them — domestic violence, alcoholism (if only to have some alleviation from the drudgery of being a woman at the time) …  the way people were kept impoverished and women in particular who had to bear the burden of childbirth and child rearing. Lack of education being the lightning rod overarching issue for so many people of this time. Just an incredible historical examination of everything never said about these women that I found to be so touching and crucial.

As I was reading, I was repeatedly struck by the realisation of how true it is now - just as it was in 1888 - that all it takes is a bad bout of luck, illness or injury for any one of us to experience houselessness and our fate to be completely undone. I thought that about each of these women at so many points in their life as Hallie unpicked them for us ... and my god, did my heart go out to them - across space and time. 

The very final chapter in the book is the Author listing all of the items found on four of the victims upon their death; in one of their pockets was one red mitten — and that visual is just touching and heartbreaking, as was the entire book.

5/5

'The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley

 

From the BLURB: 

A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END. ENGLAND IS FOREVER. ENGLAND MUST FALL. 

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel. 

Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' - Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. 

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

'The Ministry of Time' is the debut novel from British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London, Kaliane Bradley. 

So, this may well be my favourite book of 2024. WOW-ee. What an enjoyable read, especially for a low-science fiction girly whose particular proclivity is time-travel tales (those are always my fave 'Doctor Who' episodes, the back-in-time ones). So, some random observations; 

⦿ I am very fond of 2005 YA novel 'The White Darkness' by Geraldine McCaughrean, which is about a teenage girl who is genuinely in love with (the long-dead) Captain Lawrence 'Titus' Oates from the doomed Terra Nova Expedition. So when I read the blurb for 'The Ministry of Time' about Britain having harnessed time-travel and successfully bought six travellers from various eras to the modern-day, including Commander Graham Gore from the doomed Franklin expedition - I was all in. *Especially* when the blurb hinted that Gore's present-day "bridge" - the protagonist of the novel who is tasked with helping him acclimatise and who maybe starts to develop feelings - I was *ALL IN*. 

⦿ Time-travel has always been my bag. Modern-day women falling for out-of-time men is my particular favourite sub-genre ... I know exactly when this started; 'Playing Beatie Bow' by Ruth Park, and the time-travelling Abigail falling for Judah in the 1800's. This was particularly cemented when I read 'Outlander' by Diana Gabaldon as an 18-year-old; WWII army-nurse Claire passing through the stones to Jamie Fraser in the 18th century. No doubt there's some Marty McFly 'Back to the Future' Michael J. Fox appreciation thrown in there too. But this sub-genre of sci-fi and time-travel is my jamboree. And 'The Ministry of Time' gave it to me in HEAPINGS of timey-wimey goodness. The romance is slow-burn but makes up for it because our protagonist (whose name we don't know, but we get an intimate first-person account from) crushes HARD on Gore and that amps up the burn. But I was also very sucked into the mechanics and politics of the time-travel itself, so it wasn't like I was ever cooling my heels and checking my watch for the low sci-fi to get good ... it was ALL good. 

⦿ The politics of time-travel in this book reminded me of the Norwegian sci-fi series 'Beforeigners', about people from different time-periods suddenly randomly appearing in Oslo, becoming refugees of time that the Norwegian government has to deal with. It's also a little bit like the (brilliant) Aussie TV series 'Glitch' set in a small outback town where; 'Seven people from different time-periods return from the dead with no memory and attempt to unveil what brought them to the grave in the first place.' I like this connection in particular because there's a shady organisation linked to the raising of the dead, a big-pharma laboratory called "Noregard" (best in-universe name for a corporation, ever.) It's also a wee bit like the 2001 rom-com starring Hugh Jackman and Meg Ryan, 'Kate & Leopold' about an English Duke from 1876 falling for a modern-day New Yorker when he's unceremoniously dragged into the future. If any/all of those recs are your picnic; this book is for you. 

⦿ He filled the room like a horizon ... the writing was sumptuous, and gorgeous at times. Sometimes Bradley had a turn-of-phrase of description that made me go "ohhhhh." When something changes you constitutionally, you say: ‘the earth moved,’ but the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts. 

⦿ I actually first heard about this book, in a Guardian round-up of British debuts to look out for, and the description of Kaliane Bradley's idea made my spine sizzle and then I Googled her even more and found that she partly wrote the idea for 'The Ministry of Time' during Covid and lockdowns and because she kinda fell in love with the only photograph of Graham Gore. No, really. 'Kaliane Bradley Fell in Love With a Dead Man. The Result Is The Ministry of Time' ... if that's not an *amazing* sales-pitch I don't know what is. 

⦿ I just loved this. It's extremely cinematic and I wouldn't be surprised to find it is being developed into a movie or limited-TV series. It both feels appropriately head-nodding to plenty of other fabulous low-sci-fi time-travel that will make aficionados happy, but also sparkly-unique enough to keep adding to the conversation about the space-time continuum. Even if I guessed the small twist that comes, I did so because I know this sub-genre so well and expected certain markers along the way and Bradley did not disappoint. I loved this so much, I was only one-chapter in when I knew it'd give me the best bookish hangover and be hard book to follow-up, probably throwing me into a reading-rut.

5/5

'Love, Death & Other Scenes' by Nova Weetman

 

From the BLURB: 

Nova Weetman’s unforgettable memoir reflects on experiences of love and loss from throughout her life, including: losing her beloved partner, playwright Aidan Fennessy, during the 2020 Covid lockdown; the death of her mother ten years earlier; her daughter turning eighteen and finishing school; and her own physical ageing. Using these events as a lens, Nova considers how various kinds of losses – and the complicated love they represent – change us and can become the catalysts for letting go.

This is a moving, honest account of farewelling a partner of twenty-five years, parenting teenagers through grief, buying property for the first time at the age of fifty, watching Aidan live on through his plays, and learning to appreciate spending hours alone with only the household cat for company. Warm and wise – and often joyful – Love, Death & Other Scenes ultimately focuses on the living we do after losses and what we learn from them.

At one point while reading Nova Weetman's memoir, I said out loud to the empty room; "Geez, you're good Nova."

Such was the power and force of certain sentences, ideas, inflections and offerings throughout. "As writers, we are stealers of other peoples memories, bowerbirds of story," she writes at one point - and then puts that ability to collect on full display throughout as she recounts the life she built with her partner, playwright Aidan Fennessy, who battled and then died from prostate cancer in 2020 during Melbourne's numerous lockdowns and waves of Covid.

I know Nova as a colleague, a fellow middle-grade author and someone I greatly admire, and whose books I truly - hand on heart - believe helped me in tapping into my own voice for this age group. I think it's a little odd that I feel like I know-her, *know* her now after reading 'Love, Death & Other Scenes,' though. And especially because I have a tangential understanding of the loss she and her two children experienced in 2020. My uncle died after his third bout of cancer - having beat the other two, it was pancreatic in the end, third time unlucky - and unlike Nova's partner who had the option but didn't use it; my uncle chose Voluntary Assisted Dying and went out on his own terms, at home, December 2020. We were all there. I'm both surprised and not at all by how much reading Nova's perspective of a death like that during Covid - which I watched my aunt and cousin go through, one of the helpers minding children and looking for ways to ease their pain - I needed to reexamine and feel.

But I'm also surprised at how beautifully romantic this book was too, as Nova writes about how she and Aidan first met - how she fell first, and pursued ... how so much of their relationship felt like it needed balancing, especially in their creative exchange; ‘He introduced me to albums I’d never heard, to singers dead before my time, and the way that songs stain your memories giving them meaning they don’t have in silence.'

In this too, I feel weirdly intimate to the story because Nova writes about Aidan's final play he ever wrote - 'The Heartbreak Choir' - finally being staged, but only after his death. His final work he never got to see fully-realised. It's because I know Nova and am a fan of hers, that I was aware through social media what she was going through - and when tickets became available for 'The Heartbreak Choir' debut performance in Melbourne, I snapped them up for both myself, my mum, and my aunt - also knowing that she in particular may find some comfort in both the story, and its background. And she did - we all did. I saw 'The Heartbreak Choir' in May 2022 and loved it! A play my Aunt still talks about, has triggered her love of theatre to the point that she and my mum will now spontaneously ask me to check out what's on and what's coming up, book something for us all.

'Love, Death & Other Scenes' feels like another chapter to that play, in a way. How apt, that Nova muses towards the end of her memoir; ‘And it is in words that I can find him,' and it's in both her words and his that I feel something being unlocked, and another story I want to share with my family. That I want to press this book into their hands and say; 'It's us, a little bit.' We're not so alone, I think.

5/5