I have Life Stuff to contend with this week so am just going to drop my reviews and run - will be back as soon as I can for the chat :) I have hit the magic 5-0 this week.
48. Our Lady of Everything, Susan Finlay
Modern-day-ish (Iraq war), multi-narrator story set in Nottingham. Somewhere at the centre is Kathy (Katarzyna), the clever daughter of Polish immigrants, who is waiting for her soldier fiance, in Basra, to reply to her emails. Other chapters belong to Kathy's father (who worked in the shipyards in Gdansk and remembers Walesa), Eoin's elderly Irish grandmother, Kathy's colleague Meg (trying to complete her PhD), Meg's friend David (who works at Games Workshop selling orc figurines but is a Professor of religious studies and is experimenting with a strange alternative religion). On one level this is a recognisable and humane portrait of modern, multi-cultural, messy modern Britain, with some decent jokes. However, the magik/religion element was a turn-off for me (it starts with a jokey incantation based on an equal opportunities form) as I think it's supposed to be funny but fell flat, and there's too much of it too ignore unfortunately.
49. The Bell, Iris Murdoch
My second Murdoch after being put off years and years ago by The Sea, The Sea. I enjoyed this much more than I expected. In a similar vein to the previous book, we have a cast of characters and a theme exploring the role of religion and belief. The story opens with Dora who is sympathetic but irritating - she has married an unpleasant man, left him then decided she will go back: Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.. Paul, an art historian and academic, is living and working within a small religious community in rural Oxfordshire - there is an abbey containing a closed order of nuns and a lay community of worthy and committed misfits living in the big house attached to the abbey.
What drew me in was the account that Murdoch gives of Dora catching the train to join Paul on a hot day. The train is crowded and she gets one of the last seats. An old lady comes to stand near her and she spends some minutes arguing with herself over whether she should give up her seat - in the end she does. Sorry for the long quote but I do think this is good:
Dora stopped listening because a dreadful thought had struck her. She ought to give up her seat. She rejected the thought, but it came back. There was no doubt about it. The elderly lady who was standing looked very frail indeed, and it was only proper that Dora, who was young and healthy should give her seat to the lady who could then sit next to her friend. Dora felt the blood rushing to her face. She sat still and considered the matter. There was no point in being hasty. It was possible of course that while clearly admitting that she ought to give up her seat she might nevertheless simply not do so out of pure selfishness. This would in some ways be a better situation than what would have been the case if it had simply not occurred to her at all that she ought to give up her seat. On the other side of the seated lady a man was sitting. He was reading his newspaper and did not seem to be thinking about his duty. Perhaps if Dora waited it would occur to the man to give up his seat to the other lady? Unlikely. Dora examined the other inhabitants of the carriage. None of them looked in the least uneasy. Their faces, if not already buried in books, reflected the selfish glee which had probably been on her own a moment since as she watched the crowd in the corridor. There was another aspect to the matter. She had taken the trouble to arrive early, and surely ought to be rewarded for this. Though perhaps the two ladies had arrived as early as they could? There was no knowing. But in any case there was an elementary justice in the first comers having the seats. The old lady would be perfectly all right in the corridor. The corridor was full of old ladies anyway, and no one else seemed bothered by this, least of all the old ladies themselves! Dora hated pointless sacrifices. She was tired after her recent emotions and deserved a rest. Besides, it would never do to arrive at her destination exhausted. She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to give up her seat.
She got up and said to the standing lady ‘Do sit down here, please. I’m not going very far, and I’d much rather stand anyway.’
The book is slow to get going, with an overfull cast of characters, but it's worth ploughing through the patchy first half as the second half is terrific page-turning stuff. The book examines good and evil but has a shifting, uncertain morality at its centre and you're not quite sure what a happy ending could look like. The setting with the hot English summer and the overgrown gardens surrounding the house, is wonderfully drawn.
50. Once Upon a River, Diane Setterfield
Setterfield is a great storyteller, and while I am not usually a fan of supernatural-ish, magic-y historic fiction, this has a great story which pulled me in. On the shortest night of the year, the regulars of the Swan, a pub by the River Thames in Oxfordshire, have gathered to tell stories when the door opens to admit an injured man carrying a drowned child. A few hours later, the child, observed to be dead by the local nurse, starts to breathe again. Three local people, each with their own story of loss, recognise the child as being "theirs" - but who is she?
The rather stagey, storytelling voice was a bit grating ("Later, none of the regulars would be able to remember who had first seen the girl open her eyes" - you know the sort of thing) but as I say, the story is good, and I like the way that Setterfield plays with the boundary between belief in magic and knowledge of science - this book is cleverer than it pretends to be.