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Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent

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This was another of my spontaneous buys. I’m most tempted by books to buy when I’ve a gap in my publishing work or I’m working on a non-fiction book, as I’ve done over the past week. Sometimes I find it difficult to read a novel of choice – one I’ve bought – alongside one I’m editing. When editing, you need to immerse yourself deeply in the story and while I make lots of notes, there are always inconsistencies or questions that pop up as I go along, and much has to be held in one’s head.

I saw Guilty by Definition in my local Waterstones. I recognised the name of the author – even though I don’t watch Countdown on TV – and knew she was a ‘word’ expert. Well, how can a book editor resist a debut novel by a word expert! Especially a book that centres on words: their meaning now and their origins and original meaning.

But this is also, and primarily, a crime story, which is set within the offices of a dictionary – Clarendon English Dictionary (CED) – based in Oxford. The senior editor Martha Thornhill has just returned from living in Berlin. Quite why she’s come back now is one of the mysteries but a far bigger one is the disappearance of her older sister, Charlie (Charlotte), ten years ago.

Martha is living with her father, Gabriel; her mother has recently died. There are all kinds of unspoken tensions between them connected to Charlie’s disappearance. Charlie was the beautiful, exceptionally bright daughter; Martha lived in her shadow. Her mother never gave up believing that Charlie was still alive somewhere and would one day come back.

Into this uneasy situation comes ‘Chorus’. Letters, signed ‘Chorus’, start arriving at the CED offices. The letters are hard to decipher. A knowledge of linguistics, Shakespeare and an aptitude for solving crosswords helps. Then it turns out that there are postcards too, some from years ago, which are being sent to anyone connected to the CED (Charlie briefly worked there), even Safi who is relatively new and was still at school when Charlie disappeared. Dates and information in the letters make it obvious that they are about Charlie and perhaps hold the answer to what happened to her.

Reluctantly, Martha realises she must find out more about her missing sister. She also has the guilty feelings and grief that have haunted her for ten years to contend with, but it soon becomes obvious that more people are connected to Charlie and her disappearance than she’d ever realised. Helped by her colleagues Safi, Alex and Simon, they decipher the message hidden in each of the letters and are soon investigating various leads which they hope will solve mystery.

Martha has always thought the best of Charlie – that she was bright, well-loved and respected. But she quickly has to face the truth of there being a darker side to her sister. Why did A-student Charlie suddenly stop working properly on her PhD? What was the book she said she was writing and where is it? When she was working for a second-hand bookseller, was she really syphoning off the best finds at auctions and selling them herself and not declaring them to her boss?

There are many twists and red herrings and I really didn’t know (as in the best crime books) how it would all resolve until the end. We are caught in a wonderful unravelling of secrets and mysteries as the story unfolds. What happened to Charlie? Was she murdered? Or is she still alive somewhere? And who, crucially, is Chorus? And why are they sending the letters? What do they know?

Each chapter is headed with an old word, e.g.: mathom, noun, (Old English), which means ‘a precious thing; a valuable gift’. Within the text, words and their origins and meanings are also discussed. I liked ‘a tidsoptimist‘ – ‘It’s Swedish. A time optimist.’

At the heart of the story though, is the growing possibility that Charlie discovered a ‘commonplace book’ when she was at an auction, dating as far back as Shakespeare. If she did, and if it was written by who it becomes increasingly likely to have been, it would be a huge find. As big as Tutankhamun we are told. A find you could be murdered for …

I loved all the mystery; I loved the words; I loved the excitement of a huge literary find and what it feels like to be involved in it. But Susie Dent has also created some strong characters who each have their own stories as well as their connection to Charlie, so you really engage with them. I don’t want to give too much away. It’s a great read. The cover quotes Rob Rinder as saying, ‘One of the finest mysteries I have ever read.’ And it’s certainly one of the best I’ve read too … different to the standard crime book and all the more exciting for its originality.

Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These

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There was a touch of serendipity to my coming to read this book. I finished a publishing job at lunchtime, the sun came out, I decided to head down to the high street and take a walk along the Thames. Then I thought, well, it would be nice to grab an afternoon coffee somewhere but I need something to read … so I headed into Waterstone’s and it was Claire Keegan’s book that took my eye from the pile on the table. It looked familiar; maybe I’d read it before? But no, I hadn’t. It was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It’s short – a mere 116 pages – but as we all know, small can be beautiful and this book was so stunningly good that when I finished it last night just before bedtime, I was left in awe of its power and took my thoughts about it to bed with me.

Set in Ireland in 1985 in the run-up to Christmas, the weather is bitter. Keegan’s opening beautifully  evokes the season: ‘In October there were yellow trees. Then … the long November winds came … and stripped the trees bare … the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. The people … unhappily endured the weather.’ 

We meet Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, and it’s his busiest time of year. Bill, we are told, ‘came from nothing’. His mother fell pregnant at the age of 16 and when her family disown her, her employer, a widow Mrs Wilson, keeps her on as a domestic in her large house on the edge of town and gives her and her baby, born in April 1946, a home. Mrs Wilson takes the growing Bill under her wing, teaching him to read and continuing to give him a home when his mother dies while he’s still young. Later, when Bill marries Eileen, Mrs Wilson gives them a generous amount of money to get them started in their life together, and they go on to have five daughters.

The generous, kind and unprejudiced behaviour of Mrs Wilson to Bill and his mother lies at the heart of this story and shapes Bill’s choices. It’s based on the real history of the Magdalene laundries, run by Roman Catholic institutions, where pregnant women, or women seen as promiscuous, were incarcerated for life, made to work for no money and were appallingly treated. They operated from 1922 until – quite shockingly – 1996.

At the beginning of the book, Bill is ‘disinclined to dwell on the past’. He’s attracted to Eileen’s ‘practical, agile mind’ but we soon see that she’s less forgiving of poverty than Bill and scolds him when he gives money or free coal to those in need. When they disagree on things like this, he lies awake at night ‘going over small things like these‘. These ‘small things’ are a seed though and an incident will cause Bill mental turmoil as he struggles with a moral choice and is forced to look at his past. 

When making a delivery to the local convent, which has a laundry, he finds himself in a small chapel and sees girls scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees. One of them begs him to help her escape; she would rather drown herself in the nearby river than stay there. But then he’s distracted by one of the nuns coming and is taken away. However, he can’t forget the experience and it plays on his mind. The next time he finds a girl in the coal shed, obviously left there as a punishment, and takes her to the house. The Mother Superior glosses over it, suggests it was all a mistake and makes a show of being kind to the girl. Bill doesn’t believe it though. He’s now confronted with his own past, the knowledge that if it hadn’t been for Mrs Wilson, then his own mother would have been treated like this girl and what would have happened to him.

The locals hear about the incident and it’s obvious that they won’t accept him challenging the nuns. It’s clear everyone knows what goes on at the laundry but the nuns are generous and no one wants to upset them. Eileen doesn’t want him to do anything. She cruelly reminds him of his background which is seen as shameful and tells him that he risks their girls not getting into the covent’s highly acclaimed school if he upsets the nuns.

Bill is painfully torn between his own life’s history, his distress at what he’s witnessed and his wife’s and the locals’ desires not to upset the nuns. ‘He felt the strain of being alive … It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.’

He’s drawn back to the convent on Christmas Eve, finds another girl in distress in the coal shed … what is he to do? Can he turn his back on what he’s uncovered or must he do something regardless of the consequences? ‘… he found himself asking, was there any point in being alive without helping one another?’

Bill’s story is simply but elegantly told and its power lies not only in the truth of the story of the laundries, but Keegan’s sharp understanding of how life’s experiences shape us and can cause moral turmoil as we question what’s right and where our loyalties lie.

‘The result,’ says the Telegraph, ‘is a truly exquisite, tenderly hopeful Christmas tale in which compassion and altruism triumph over apathy and inertia.’ 

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Please note that the website address for this blog is now: www.kaygaleeditorialservices.wordpress.com

Long Island by Colm Toibin

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So much did I enjoy Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) that I took the rare step of pre-ordering the hardback of its sequel, slightly discounted from Amazon, to arrive on its publication day last week. 

I remember being disappointed by the film Broolyn‘s ending, feeling it wasn’t quite faithful to the book. Once I started reading its sequel, I thought I should have reread it as, fifteen years on, my memory of exactly what happened and how it ended was a little vague. However, I remembered enough and was soon caught up in Eilis Fiorello’s (née Lacey) story once again.

Twenty years on from Brooklyn (and now the 1970s), Eilis is living with her husband Tony and their two teenage children, Larry and Rosella in Long Island. It’s no spoiler to tell you that right at the beginning of the story, a man appears on Eilis’s doorstep to tell her that his wife is expecting Tony’s child and there is no way he will allow it to live in his house, so he will bring it to her. Tony is a plumber and has been having an affair with one of his clients.

How Eilis handles and processes this devastating shock, is the focus of the book. We see a more confident, independent Eilis than in Brooklyn, but a woman suffocated by her husband’s Italian family who all live close together and treat her as an outsider, despite her really being no more of an outsider in New York than them. It’s 20 years since she left Ireland and she considers herself American.

Eilis doesn’t confront Tony immediately and there is a kind of uncomfortable ‘dance’ between them as their life goes on ‘as normal’, and even when Tony knows Eilis has been told what’s happened, they don’t really talk about it in any depth. All Eilis says is that she will not have the baby in the house and she doesn’t want her mother-in-law – who lives opposite – to take the baby in (Francesca has said she will). Eilis says and asks surprisingly little, and never seems to question whether she’ll stay with Tony. I found it a little frustrating.

Finally, she decides to go back to Ireland, her hometown of Enniscorthy, for a while, both for distance to think and decide what she wants to do, and to join in the celebrations of her mother’s 80th birthday. It’s the first time she’s returned in 20 years and her children will join her a couple of weeks later, meeting their Irish grandmother and family for the first time.

Eilis’s mother gives her a spiky reception. She’s never acknowledged the photos Eilis has sent over the years of her children; she criticises her Americanisms. Nancy, Eilis’s former best friend has mixed feelings. She’s pleased Eilis will be home for the wedding of one of her daughters, but wary as she’s secretly having an affair with Jim Farrell, who runs the local pub, and they plan to announce their engagement after her daughter’s wedding.

Famously in the town, when Eilis returned home twenty years before, she and Jim had an affair that everyone expected to end in marriage. What no one knew was that Eilis was already married to Tony. When she returned to New York, she left Jim not knowing why she’d suddenly left, although he soon learned through gossip that she was already married. He has not forgotten her and he’s never married. But he’s lonely, and Nancy – a widow – promises to rescue him from the loneliness of middle age. 

Eilis’s return to Enniscorthy brings inevitable confusions and jealousies and uncertainties. How will it all play out? Eilis and Jim discover they still love each other but will Eilis stay or return to New York? She has not only herself to think of, but her children. And what of Nancy who is secretly planning her wedding to Jim, who says nothing to halt her when he starts secretly meeting up with Eilis?

I was quickly caught up in Tóibín’s writing again: his stylish prose that reads so beautifully; his apparently easy understanding of relationships and how people think. Yet, as the novel went on, I became a little frustrated. I had to remind myself it is set in the 1970s when leaving a husband and children, divorcing, even when the husband has made another woman pregnant, was not so common or easy. 

I felt there was a weakness in the characters, not just Tony who is a rather pathetic man, but Eilis and Jim seemingly unwilling to commit to a decision. And the end was amazingly abrupt and frustrating. It’s clear there will be a part three to this series and I guess I will want to read it, but I have to say that Long Island was in the end a bit of a disappointing sequel for me – although it’s been collecting many wonderful reviews, describing it as a masterpiece.

The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir

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My daughter Nicola bought me a couple of books for Christmas, one of which was a novella by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), The Inseparables. Described as a ‘newly discovered novel’ from the great French writer and written in 1954, it inevitably makes one wonder if a book that has remained unpublished for so long is any good. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that it’s a book I found wonderful: moving, passionate, tragic and beautifully written, having been well translated by Lauren Elkin. It was published in 2021.

The Inseparables is based on a real life friendship that de Beauvoir had as a child, from the age of nine, with a girl in her school class, Elisabeth Lacoin, known as Zaza. In the book Simone becomes ‘Sylvie’ while Zaza is ‘Andrée’. My instinct as I began reading was to immediately think of Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend that also follows the close friendship of two girls. I’ve never got on with Ferrante’s novels; she seems to be, as we say in UK, a ‘Marmite’ person – you love her or hate her. Maybe ‘hate’ is a bit strong but I’ve never enjoyed her writing. Happily, this first connection made in my head was soon dispelled and I was almost immediately drawn into this intimate portrait of a friendship and de Beauvoir’s glorious writing. It’s one of those books where there are such beautifully crafted sentences, you want to sometimes stop and savour them.

Sylvie comes from a bourgeois family whose circumstances become very challenged when her father loses his job as a result of the fallout from the First World War. Andrée’s family, however, is very well off. These financial differences are almost outside the girls’ friendship but what they signify is what each can expect in life and from their families. Andrée, who has recently recovered from a terrible accident, is intellectually very bright and amusing but the prospect of using her intelligence is limited by her family’s expectations that she will either make a suitable marriage or enter a convent. Sylvie, however, also very clever, looks to finding a career and earning a living. A big bond between the girls is their conversations: ‘We could lose ourselves for hours in discussions of property, justice and equality.’ But Sylvie also feels inferior in some way; boring in comparison. Her feeling for Andrée is a kind of love; at one stage she says she couldn’t live without her. The feeling isn’t so much sexual but a more a kind of awe that she doesn’t expect to be reciprocated in the same way.

At the beginning, both girls are religious but then Sylvie loses her faith. During a confession she suddenly realises: ‘I don’t believe in God!’ And rather than any feelings of guilt, Sylvie becomes rebellious but also begins to recognise how Andrée’s deep faith is a form of torture to her and limits her being true to herself.

At the beginning, Sylvie was jealous of Andrée’s close relationship with her mother – who doesn’t approve of Sylvie. But as the girls grow older, she sees that her mother’s control and demands are suffocating Andrée. Andrée starts to do dangerous, even self-destructive, things to avoid family situations she doesn’t want to take part in. One time she stabs her foot with an axe so she can’t go to stay with a family she dislikes. As more ‘social duties’ are imposed on her friend, Sylvie worries more and more about her troubled mental state: ‘She did not belong to herself. She had no private time … She was stifled.’

The girls eventually go to the Sorbonne to study. Here love enters Andrée’s life. There had been a fairly innocent love with a cousin early on, and then a friend of Sylvie’s at the Sorbonne, Pascal, with whom Andrée falls deeply in love. The interference and demands of Andrée’s family, particularly her mother’s, lead to tragedy. And it is apparently this tragedy that leads de Beauvoir to carry guilt throughout her life, partly answering the question of why this novella wasn’t published earlier.

It is a very short book with interesting and enlightening introductions by novelist Deborah Levy, the translator Lauren Elkin and an Afterword by de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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I’ve been going through a phase of reading crime novels. Like many phases that come and go, it’s one I inhabited many years ago when I was hooked on the novels of PD James and Robert Goddard’s thrillers, but in recent years I’ve mainly only read crime as part of my work as a freelance book editor, apart from a few of Donna Leon’s books, chosen primarily for the Venice setting. However, after reading Leon’s latest recently and the Tom Benjamin I reviewed here (click here), I pondered over Richard Osman’s offerings as I considered more crime reading. I wasn’t sure. A crime novel set in a retirement village in Kent didn’t hold quite the same attraction as those in Venice and Bologna. Even the cover speaks of something a little cosy, slightly old-fashioned and perhaps not quite my thing?

Still, I do like Richard Osman. Or at least I like him as much as we can like anyone we ‘know’ only via TV and the media. And he studied Politics & Sociology at Cambridge so he did seem like a celebrity who could probably write well without the need of a ghost-writer. I decided it would even be a good bit of research for my work; that I ought to know what Richard Osman’s books are like, given his name and his books’ success.

The Thursday Murder Club, published in 2020, is the first of three books in the series to date, so it seemed the best place to start. 

The setting is the fairly exclusive retirement village of Coopers Chase in Kent and the Thursday Murder Club comprises a group of friends who meet every Thursday to investigate unsolved murders. The club was begun by Penny, a former policewoman who feels she missed out on the best action because she was a woman and that she wasn’t promoted to the level she deserved. Now was her chance to solve some difficult murders. By the time our story begins in the novel, however, Penny is lying in a vegetative state in the hospice part of the village. Nevertheless the club continues with the four remaining friends: the formidable Elizabeth, who is clearly in charge and we soon realise was once a spy; Joyce was a nurse, only able to live in the village because her lawyer daughter funds it; Ibrahim, is a retired psychiatrist; and Ron a bolshie former trade unionist who is pretty much channelling Arthur Scargill much of the time. They seem an unlikely bunch of friends – all in their 70s and 80s – but an interest in murder and a desire use their brains and keep sharp, lead to them forming a close bond.

The light, almost game-like nature of their Thursday investigations takes a dramatic turn when a real murder lands on their doorstep; or more literally at the gate of the village’s cemetery. A murder that took place during the day, with lots of people around, yet no obvious perpetrator. The victim is the unpleasant and greedy owner of Coopers Chase, Ian Ventham, who plans to bulldoze through the cemetery to build more homes. Many of the inhabitants of the village are angry and form a blockade so workmen can’t get in. But despite all the anger with and dislike of Ventham, who would go as far as to kill him and why? The method of killing is soon known: an injection during a brawl with a lethal poison. But one that would need someone with medical knowledge to inject in just the right place. So that narrows things down … but far from solves the mystery.

As the story develops, many more characters appear, each with their own stories, many with reasons to want Ventham dead and long ago crimes of murder and drugs are uncovered, not to mention love, revenge and gang warfare. But strangest of all, just before Ventham was murdered, a man working for him started digging up one of the graves and discovered a skeleton on top of the buried coffin … an extra and newer skeleton. Another murder?

The book has often been described as a ‘cosy crime novel’ and that seems a good description in many ways. Osman uses a nice conversational style and creates a cast of likeable, if occasionally mysterious, characters but, to be honest, despite the early murder it was all quite tame at the start. Was it going to be a disappointment. I felt the older people were presented in a rather clichéd way: uncertain of modern technology, struggling with texts, constantly drinking, even sherry; not altogether keeping up with the times. I’m not as old as the people in this book but old enough to get a bit prickly about how older people are presented.

I’m glad I kept going though (I do give up on disappointments sometimes). The storyline line gets more complex; the range of characters with such different backgrounds and stories is engaging; and the four main characters become rounder and more interesting as we get to know them more. Osman tells us of some of their and other characters’ tragedies with great sensitivity: Elizabeth’s coping with her much loved husband’s dementia; Joyce’s longing to win her daughter’s approval; and there’s a story of tragic young love and brutal gang relationships. There’s even a quick trip to Cyprus. 

Many have described the book as ‘very’ funny; I’d say Osman displays a nice, gentle wit that is pleasingly amusing. I did feel as it went on with its many twists that some of them felt a little contrived; I might even say it all became a little too complex with seemingly endless revelations in the last sprint to the end. But more importantly, I became more and more attached to the story and characters; I became quite hooked, even, and was very glad I’d read it.

Osman has been quoted as saying he doesn’t like the ‘cosy’ description, but, sorry, Richard, I do feel that it’s fair. And really, you might say Miss Marple was ‘cosy’ too in her way. I think what’s meant is that it’s very British. It’s set in contemporary time but it could just as easily be a few decades ago – though I’m not sure when exclusive retirement villages arrived and of course there wouldn’t have been the mobile phones.   

The book is being turned into a film, which I imagine is going to be very entertaining.