More books I have read recently

Hey, we’re not technically locked down any more (well, us lucky people in the south-east aren't, or not at the moment), but I’ll carry this on.

'The Wild Other' by Clover Stroud

Clover Stroud’s mother suffered a catastrophic head injury in a riding accident in 1991, which resulted in permanent brain damage albeit that she lived on (mainly in nursing homes) for 22 years afterwards. Clover was sixteen at the time of the accident. This is her memoir of how she navigated the 20 or so years following the accident.

Stroud is an exceptional writer; her writing style has a sensuous vividness that made reading this a real pleasure, in spite of the tragedy of her mother’s accident and my being simultaneously admiring of and aghast at Clover’s wildness and adventurous spirit. After leaving school, she moves to Ireland where she initially works as a waitress before shacking up on a New Age travellers’ camp near Galway with two people she’s literally just met in the pub, before joining up with a horse-drawn traveller called Brad, with whom she spends a number of months travelling around, initially in Ireland but then back in England, where she relates an arresting snippet of galloping a horse across the Downs at night, naked. After this spell, she takes up a place at Oxford University to study English. After graduation, her father buys her a plane ticket to New York, from where she eventually makes her way to Texas and gets a job working with cowboys on a ranch. She returns to England and acquires a boyfriend, Dan (who, amusingly, pretends to be Irish but actually comes from Hereford – he’s obliged to ‘fess up when he realizes that Clover will meet his family, sans Irish accents, at their upcoming wedding) and starts working as a writer, while also having her first two of eventually five children.

The next bit of wild adventure is when Clover falls for Zour, a member of a Cossack troop performing with her sister Nell’s circus (Nell died of cancer late in 2019 and Clover had a recent piece published in You magazine about her sister’s death). In a move possibly getting a bit away from adventurousness and more towards the recklessly irresponsible, she flies to Moscow to meet up with Zour and travels with him down to his home in Ossetia, against the advice both of her family and the Foreign Office. She makes a number of trips to Ossetia over the next couple of years, before realizing that they’re leading nowhere good. On her return from the final trip, she begins therapy.

Stroud repeatedly anchors the book to White Horse Hill and to the White Horse of Uffington. In the course of the book she mentions her move from Oxford to the village of Baulking, partly to be near the White Horse, as well as to recreate for her own children the country setup she evidently enjoyed in her childhood. Horses are also a repeated theme, as they evidently have been throughout Stroud’s life. Stroud closes the book by relating how, encouraged by her husband to start riding again, she has started working at a racing stables and describes vividly her interaction with the racehorse she is exercising as he canters towards the gallops: ‘Bally jumps forward at the bottom of the gallop and new life is flickering inside me before the ground rushes forward and we’re galloping, we’re flying, we’re going home’.

'The Wild Other' was published in 2017. Stroud has since had a second book published, 'My Wild and Sleepless Nights', about her experience of motherhood.

‘The Amazons of Somelon’ by Raymond Kaminski

What a hoot this was. Well, apart from all the violence. I picked it up some years ago in a secondhand bookshop (or possibly in a ‘just take these away’ bin outside a secondhand bookshop), probably thinking the cover and title made it sound like a bit of fun.

The Somelons are a race of Amazonian female warriors. The book’s heroine, incongruously named Sheryl, is a seven-foot tall blonde beauty of raw strength and power. She has recently taken as a lover the sculptor Kio, who’s previously been living a quiet life in the walled city of Centropolis. Sheryl and Kio are travelling with a Teutite caravan when it’s set on by the uncivilised and violent Horla tribe. Lots of people are killed unpleasantly, Kio is kidnapped and Sheryl is temporarily incapacitated by a club to the head, rendering her incapable of defending Kio or the Teutites.

The rest of the story is taken up with Sheryl’s quest to rescue Kio, interspersed with Kio’s experience of being kept captive by the Horla queen Allukah, who uses him as a sexual plaything in between violently smacking him around. Sheryl eventually locates Kio and carries him, sobbing, out of the Horlas’ Great Hut after slaughtering most of its occupants. After this, she places him safely under a tree to recover himself while she carries out some vicious vengeance-style torture and murder on a couple of those who have mistreated him.

The book’s dénouement takes place in the caves underneath the Anhatan Mounds, where Sheryl finally hunts Allukah to earth. In what has to be the book’s most splendid sequence, she comes upon Allukah riding the mummified dead body of a man. Outraged, Sheryl pushes Allukah off, lops off the dead body’s penis and bats it over to Allukah with her sword – before taking a better look at the dead man and realizing it’s HER OWN FATHER. Sheryl is, understandably, briefly distracted by the discovery that she’s just lopped off her old man’s cock and this enables Allukah to knock her out and shackle her to a stone slab. Kio re-establishes his manhood by coming to Sheryl’s rescue and killing Allukah with a blow to the head, following which he has sex with Sheryl, right there on the slab. Subsequent events then reveal to Sheryl that Allukah was HER OWN MOTHER. That’s one hell of a day.

I was sufficiently tickled by this book to read out snippets from it to Ruth, whose disparaging view was that it sounded like the author’s sexual fantasy and expressed outrage that I was even reading it. She bet me £50 that Allukah and Sheryl would end by getting it on – which doesn’t happen, though Allukah does look lasciviously at Sheryl’s chemise while Sheryl is incapacitated on the stone slab. When I revealed the twist relating to Sheryl’s parentage, I got a “Damn. I should have seen that one coming.”

‘The Amazons of Somelon’ was published by Stoneshire Books in 1981. The internet doesn’t reveal much about Raymond Kaminski, nor can I find he ever wrote anything else. I did find an obituary for a Raymond Kaminski, ex of the US Air Force, but no telling whether it’s the same one – if it is, the obit doesn’t mention his literary accomplishments.

'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' by Jack Finney

Ray borrowed this from my sister some while back and gave it to me to convey back to her. As it’s not the sort of thing I’d have picked up otherwise, I thought I’d read it. It’s a good story, and dead scary. Stay away from the big seed pods.

Brief plot synopsis: small-town doctor Miles Bennell is visited at his offices by an old high school sweetheart, Becky Driscoll, who is worried about a cousin of hers who has become convinced that her uncle isn’t really her uncle. Miles duly talks to the woman, Wilma, and convinces her to see a psychiatrist. Over the course of the next week or so, several other townspeople come to see him, similarly convinced that people close to them are not who they appear to be. A local couple, the Belicecs, then enlist Miles’ help as they appear to have found a dead body in their basement – except it isn’t exactly a dead body. It’s more a blank, unused body. And it doesn’t have any fingerprints. But, coincidentally, it’s just the same height and weight as Jack Belicec. Things get quite a lot worse but thankfully, the main characters’ pluck and tenacity help them win through (kind of) at the end.

The novel was first published in 1955. From some internet research, it was evidently originally published in serial form as just ‘The Body Snatchers’, and renamed for later publications. The edition I read is a 1999 edition published by Prion, which takes its cover art from the poster for the release of the 1956 film.

'Moranthology' by Caitlin Moran

Collection of Moran’s Times columns, interviews and ‘Celebrity Watch’ pieces. I do find Moran’s writing entertaining (albeit I don’t always agree with her opinion) so I enjoyed this. She does sound frankly a bit of a pain to live with though, if those conversations with her husband were actually real.

Moran won the Observer’s ‘Young Reporter of the Year’ competition when she was 15 and seems to have written sporadic pieces for national broadsheets throughout her teens. In fairness, she does take the piss out of her teenage writings, referring to one trying-hard-to-be-deep piece she wrote for the Observer as ‘a symphonic piece of bullshit’.

I have similar memories to Moran of the prominence given in the 70s and 80s on shows such as John Craven’s Newsround and Blue Peter to the seemingly intractable problem of how to get pairs of pandas to successfully mate and rear young; as Moran says, ‘the success of pandas breeding in captivity was presented as one of the primary concerns of the age’. It’s a wonder the wretched species aren’t extinct. I’m sure I remember thinking that they really didn’t help themselves.

‘Moranthology’ was published in 2012; I acquired my copy a few years ago but have only just got around to reading it. I read her earlier ‘How to Be a Woman’ in 2013. She's written two more recent books, ‘How to Build a Girl’ and ‘How to be Famous’.

'The Gooseberry' by Joan Lingard

A piece of what would now be termed Young Adult fiction. Another of Ruth’s books that I found in the attic at the house – in fact it’s a signed copy, as Lingard evidently once paid a visit to Ruth’s school.

Fourteen-year-old Ellie lives with her single mother in a flat on the top floor of an Edinburgh tenement. Even though she last saw him when she was three, Ellie has built up her long-departed father into a hero, keeping his piano in her bedroom and talking to his photograph. She’s sick of hanging around her best friend Isadora and Isadora’s boyfriends – Ellie is five feet eleven and thinks she’ll never get a boyfriend as she towers over all the boys she knows. Ellie’s mother Rose drops a bomb into Ellie’s life when she announces that she’s remarrying, selling their flat and taking Ellie to live in her new husband’s bungalow way out in the suburbs.

Lovely story, well written. I always admire authors who don’t waste words and Lingard conveys all she needs to in just 150 pages. Albeit Ellie and her mother are in conflict for much of the time, both are made into sympathetic characters – you can see Ellie’s mother’s point at the same time as understanding Ellie’s feelings. It also doesn’t include any far-fetched scenarios whereby Ellie eventually triumphs over parental will and manages to keep them living in the city – of course she has to go where her mother goes, and learn to accept it – but her mother is prevailed on to soften her attitude on a couple of more minor issues, which is satisfying and realistically low-key.

‘The Gooseberry’ was published in 1978. Lingard is evidently from Edinburgh herself, but spent a number of years living in Belfast and wrote a series of other YA books about young people across the sectarian divide. I read ‘The Twelfth Day of July’ as a child (or possibly early teenager) and remember it as being a good book – its striking opening about ‘King Billy’ still stands out and was the first I’d heard about anything related to the Ulster Protestant community and the Orange order. She seems to have been pretty prolific, writing for both young people and adults. This British Council page has a critical perspective on her.