The descendant of ancient emperors, Leda Nérac has finally come into her birthright: the wealthy northern city of Dal Reniac. Yet, power brings new responsibilities and dangers. After the Emperor dies, his nephew Castor claims the imperial throne, instigating a reign of terror. Will Leda survive the bitter conflict which ensures? Find out at https://www.wattpad.com/story/337622158-leda
This story is also available on this blog as a PDF: https://katecudahy.wordpress.com/leda/
Sometime back in 2019, I just seemed to stop writing fiction. Simply put, life got in the way – and I’m sure we were all in a similar place with the pandemic going on and life changes to deal with. Increasingly, though, I’ve felt that something was missing – and now I know what it is.
Hal started life as a novel on Wattpad. The great thing about that platform is the way it enables dialogue between writers and readers. That, I realised, was the missing element – the interaction. For this reason, I’ve decided that Hal, Meracad, Leda and all the other characters in these stories are going back there, and I’ll also be publishing the novels on my blog. It gives me the creative freedom to change and (hopefully) improve them. And it also enables me to exchange ideas with other readers and writers.
The full version of The Duellist Trilogy along with other works like The Firefarer will be available here, for free, on WordPress. I’ll be posting new chapters of each book once a week on Wattpad, with the intention of responding to readers’ suggestions. It’ll be experimental, it’ll be fun and above all else, I sincerely hope that you enjoy the books. At the end of the day, that’s my only goal.
Kate X
Review – Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The one thing I kept asking myself while reading this book was, ‘how did I miss this?’ And ‘why haven’t I read anything by Bernardine Evaristo before’? I mean Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker in 2019 for God’s sake. But it probably says everything that Evaristo was then forced to share the prize – a rule-breaking decision on the part of the judges – with Margaret Atwood. And that she was later referred to by Shaun Ley of the BBC, reporting on the award, as just ‘another author’:
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50658750 .
Another author who just happened to have won the most prestigious literary prize the UK has to offer. No disrespect to Atwood – I love her work and I have yet to read The Testaments. But if this shameful incident proves anything, it’s that we need more books like Girl, Woman, Other. Because it’s a novel which brings to the fore the stories – and in some cases the hidden histories – of women of colour. It forces the reader to rethink over a century of British history; it challenges the very notion that there was no space for black women in post-war England, or that their stories are in some way not valid or of interest.
There’s no obvious underlying plot to Girl, Woman, Other. Instead, we encounter a chorus of voices; it’s fundamentally more polyphony than melody. But what rises out of that complex web of harmonies is a refusal to be silenced. A refusal to accept the kind of cultural erasure which has seen British history white-washed for so long. There are, for example, the lesbian political activists Amma and Dominique – their fight against establishment England ironically ending up in Amma’s dramatic production for the National Theatre. There is trans activist Morgan, discovering their identity in their lack of gender, and Hattie – Morgan’s great grandmother – Yorkshire farmer and proud of her mixed race identity. It is a glorious revelling in the lives of people who never get their stories told, and Evaristo has the ability to get so deep inside each of her character’s conscious that you almost feel as if you were journeying with them. Ultimately, it’s a book which demands a new way of looking at the world; of acknowledging the people around us, about thinking of them in a new way. It’s probably one of the most important novels ever to have won the Booker.
So, yeah, BBC. Well done.
Well, it’s been a while! Over six months since my last post, in fact. I kind of underestimated how much time certain changes in my working life might consume. And to be honest much of my reading has also been work related – I think the ship’s probably sailed for reviews of Paradise Lost. So all in all, while 2019 was a productive year it wasn’t all that successful so far as reviewing was concerned – not to mention my own creative writing.
On that front, I’ve been struggling with the final chapter of my latest novel – The Fresco and the Fountain – for what seems like months. However, I can say that it would take sudden death/apocalypse/loss of limb/act of God to stop me from publishing it this year. So expect preview material from that soon.
On to the review, then. As my last post on here concerned Madeleine Miller’s beautiful Odyssey rewrite Circe, I thought I’d pick up where I left off by examining another mythic rewrite – Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.
It’s not generally the case that I feel the need to read one book in order to prepare for reading the next. But I felt that I perhaps wouldn’t understand where Barker was coming from if I hadn’t first taken a look at The Iliad. Obviously, it’s not necessary to do this as The Silence of the Girls is very much its own story. But it does become apparent, having read that first great instalment in the history of European literature, that every narrative breeds new stories. Reading the Iliad, one can’t fail to wonder about all those characters who don’t get a voice – who only come alive in order to fall victim to Achilles’ sword, or to be enslaved by the Greeks. And so this is how Barker, like Miller, approaches the issue of myth. The unsung, repressed or forgotten – those elements of minor narrative obscured by the major narrative – suddenly take centre stage.
If I were being flippant, I’d suggest a good subtitle for Barker’s novel might be “…or how toxic masculinity has always f*cked things up for women.” But that would be doing a massive disservice to this very complex book. Yes, Achilles is initially regarded by Briseis (the book’s chief narrator) as a monster – a man who has slaughtered her brothers and husband and who regards her as mere spoils of war. But then Achilles is, as Briseis comes to realise, far more of a liminal figure than he initially appears: a man trapped by his own legend as the ultimate warrior, who never quite fits into the testosterone-saturated world of the Greek camp. And in that respect, such liminality is also evident in the Iliad itself – in Achilles’ all-consuming passion for Patroclus, and his childish penchant for a good sulk “…furious (690) over fair-cheeked Briseis, the girl he had won from Lyrnessus by the sweat of his brow when he sacked Lyrnessus itself…” (The Iliad Penguin loc. 1794).
Paradoxically, the Briseis of Barker’s novel attains a form of autonomy through acknowledging herself a slave: “A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.” (38) While the Briseis of the Iliad is never fully heard, here she articulates her situation at every turn: no longer a status symbol to be passed between Agamemnon and Achilles. And if The Silence of the Girls says anything, it is of how women’s bodies are constantly appropriated to serve a purpose – be it Agamemnon’s justification for war in the figure of Helen, or Briseis as symbol of rivalry amongst the leaders of the Greek army. As she asserts: “Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men. In Achilles’ compound, the message had been: Look at her. My prize awarded by the army, proof that I am what I’ve always claimed to be: the greatest of the Greeks. Here, in Agamemnon’s compound, it was: Look at her, Achilles’ prize. I took her away from him just as I can take your prize away from you. I can take everything you have.” (120)
The Silence of the Girls is a novel which is not trying to right any historical (or mythic) wrongs. Effectively, it is a meditation on the way in which people’s lives are used to tell a story in a given way. The Iliad, it turns out, is not just about the destruction of Troy. It is more than Hector defending the city’s gates; Priam’s grief or Agamemnon’s wrath. It is an infinite number of other tales waiting to be told.
“Whatever you say, say nothing,” Seamus Heaney famously wrote. That, surely, is also part of the message of Anna Burn’s Booker winning novel Milkman, in which nameless people constantly talk around everything but the truth. Told from the perspective of eighteen year-old “middle-daughter”, Milkman recreates the world in which the unmentionable troubles of 1970s Northern Ireland took place. This is a world in which a single misplaced word or misunderstanding can result in a whole level of community conspiracy: a kind of fantasy shared by people whose every thought and action seems to be governed by a specific set of sectarian values.
Thus, the narrator is assumed to be the lover of a high-ranking ‘renouncer’ or republican paramilitary known locally as Milkman, when in fact she is being stalked and intimidated by him. As local narratives do not appear to authorise any alternative to the idea that she might be his lover, she is both hounded and feared, becoming as much a part of local political mythology as Milkman himself.
What I think is really important about this book is the way it suggests that, amid the very public horrors of events like The Troubles, more private horrors are ignored or even denied. And that merging of the private with the public or political is part of this problem. Women’s lives are policed, and anything which appears to violate borders or the unwritten code of sectarianism proves threatening.
The other surprising aspect of this book, given what I’ve just written is how funny it is. Written with more than a few nods to the digressive style of earlier Irish writers such as Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift, this is a novel which seethes with inventive language. And which proves how language can be used to obfuscate or even annihilate truth.
I will admit to not actually wanting to like this book, purely because I really thought Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under deserved to win the Booker in 2018. And part of me still feels that. But I have never really read a book which is so relentlessly obsessed with its own linguistic medium, and which uses that self-referentiality to interrogate how we use language for political ends. A hard read but a mind-blowing one.
I like kind of drifting into and across books. Sometimes finding a new author is like being involved in a massive paper chase, in which one good read leads to the next. The reason, for example, why I picked up (or rather downloaded) Daisy Johnson’s novel Everything Under was because it was recommended by Fiona Mosley, whose novel Elmet I greatly enjoyed. And I read Elmet due to a fascination with the concept of the Celtic/English hinterland of Elmet presented by Nicola Griffith in her work of historical fiction, Hild.
Indeed, there are a lot of points of comparison or overlap between Everything Under and Elmet. Both stories concern people who live on the peripheries of society. Both explore the relationship between gender and identity. And both use myths, history or legend as a base point for exploring contemporary British culture. Thus, the myth of Oedipus leaks into the lives of Johnson’s characters, steering them inexorably towards tragedy.
Gretel is a lexicographer, whose lonely existence is shored up by a fascination with language and semantics. She embarks on a journey in search of her mother, Sarah, who abandoned Gretel when she was just thirteen years old. But it now emerges that Sarah is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and her fading grip on language means a loss of the past itself; her story delivered up in half-remembered fragments.
Through this confused web of time and memory, Gretel gradually pieces together the story of how the almost idyll of her childhood – spent amongst the ‘river people,’ drifting physically and metaphorically along the fringes of society – was splintered and destroyed by the arrival of a boy named Marcus. And of how Marcus may in fact have once been a girl – Margot.
There are so many strands to this complex and disturbing narrative that one reading doesn’t do the book justice. Johnson reveals the way in which we become trapped or ensnared by language or stories in so many different ways. Both Gretel and Sarah are haunted, for example, by the idea of the Bonak – a water creature hunting the river banks. Yet the border between genuine danger and self-imposed fear is a fluid one, and the Bonak turns out to be a term coined by Sarah herself, as she and Gretel share a private language.
In a sense, language in Everything Under takes on the role of fate in Oedipus Rex. It condemns people to relive the same, inescapable narratives; unable to veer course from self-imposed systems of semantics and association. “Again and again,” says Gretel, “I go back to the idea that our thoughts and actions are determined by the language that lives in our minds. That perhaps nothing could have happened except that which did.” Only with the disintegration of language, ultimately, can release from the past be found.
Everything Under has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a novel which reads like a river, meandering, free flowing, and at times sucking the reader into dangerous and disturbing depths. And ultimately, it reminds us of why myths like Oedipus still carry resonance in our fractured, fragmented times. Highly recommended.
Kate Cudahy 