More books I have read

‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ by Lionel Shriver

Look, I finally read it, OK.

The novel is set out in the form of a series of letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her husband Franklin, from whom we initially assume she is separated. To reduce things to a nutshell: Eva is a formerly successful businesswoman with a series of published travel guides. Following her son Kevin murdering a bunch of his classmates a few years earlier, followed by a legal case brought against her by one of the classmate’s parents, Eva has fallen on harder times and is now living alone and working a low-level job at a travel agency.

I thought ‘Kevin’ was a very good read, though I did have a few pedantic gripes with it. Good things: Shriver is an excellent writer and doesn’t shy away from treating a difficult topic - the topic being not the school killings but the idea of a mother not engaging with motherhood and indeed the potential for a mother disliking one of her children. For the earlier part of the book, there is a pleasing ambiguity created around Eva and Kevin. To what extent is Kevin’s behaviour towards his mother influenced by his mother’s attitude towards him? We only read Eva’s side of the story. The incident in which she throws Kevin across the room, breaking his arm, is the worst instance of parental violence related in the book; there's another, more minor, incident where she slaps the boy in a restaurant – but were there others beyond these? We’re not to know. What was Eva leaving out? On the other hand, as a reader there’s a level of sympathy for Eva’s frustration – Kevin remains in nappies way beyond the age when he should have done (the arm-breaking incident is provoked by nappy-related frustrations), which could be read either way – Eva clearly feels it’s at least to some extent deliberate, but could it also be a sign of a damaged and disturbed child? I thought this was excellently set up.

However (the gripes largely parallel the good things): although I admire Shriver’s writing I find her excessively verbose. It’s telling that I most enjoy her acerbic Spectator columns, where presumably she’s tightly constrained by word limits. In novels, where presumably she’s less constrained, things can go on a bit. We read The Post-Birthday World in Book Group a few years back – the only other of her novels I’ve read – and I had similar thoughts when reading that. Secondly: the atmosphere built up in the earlier part of the book, as related above, is then, I felt, a bit spoilt by the way the latter part of the book goes. I did feel that the introduction of the second child never quite works: was it intended to demonstrate that Eva is capable of loving a child, just not Kevin? I don’t know, and that device seems a bit simplistic for a writer of Shriver’s quality. Did Eva perhaps not love Celia any more than she loved Kevin, but just found her easier? The story would have been tighter if it had remained centred around Eva and Kevin and the associated ambiguities. The injury that Kevin inflicts on his sister, and his later elaborate murder of his father, sister, classmates and teacher, take Kevin into common-or-garden psycho territory (the glass eye incident is probably the nadir of this) and spoils the earlier ambiguity where we wonder who, him or Eva, is in fact at fault. (Unusually for me, I did guess the twist – that Franklin is in fact dead – about two-thirds of the way through.)

We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. It was voted the UK's favourite Orange prize winner in a Waterstone's poll on the 15th anniversary of the award.

‘The Body: a Guide for Occupants’ by Bill Bryson

Another of Ruth’s books that I’ve ended up reading before she does. I wanted something not-too-heavy-going after reading ‘Kevin’.

The book is divided into chapters each addressing a different function of the body, plus some chapters at the end on disease and medicines. It’s a fascinating read, packed with interesting anecdotes and surprising snippets. How do 3000 people a year in the USA manage to die of food poisoning? How do we have room for 40 feet of alimentary canal? Who knew we had 59 chemical elements within us? (Though these do apparently include things like cadmium, which is toxic and is only there because we absorb it via eating plants, which in turn absorb it from the soil.) And the importance of microbes, which I had never pondered. Both bacteria and viruses are types of microbe, as are protozoa, algae and less well known things like archaea and prions.

Bryson highlights how often significant discoveries seem to have passed unnoticed at the time, and how often the people who made them have not received the credit they deserved. Examples: William Harvey, who in the 17th century theorized that blood circulated around the body from and back to the heart, and was dismissed as ‘crack-brained’; Karl Landsteiner, who discovered that blood came in several types (through noticing which samples clumped and which didn’t), a discovery apparently more or less dismissed at the time, though he was eventually rewarded with a Nobel Prize 30 years later. And the unfortunate Albert Schatz, who discovered streptomycin in the 1940s, but was immediately shafted by his supervisor, who duped Schatz out of his patent rights and took full credit for the discovery, eventually, and gallingly, being awarded a Nobel Prize.

Bryson is great at making this sort of stuff engaging. I’ll probably re-read it at some point.

‘Shipyard Girls at War’ by Nancy Revell

One I picked up at a National Trust secondhand bookshop recently, thinking it looked a bit of a hoot. The ‘Shipyard Girls are Rosie, Polly, Gloria, Dorothy, Angie, Hannah and Martha, who are all working at Thompson’s shipyard in Sunderland in the early 1940s.

Despite the title, the bulk of the story centres on the Elliot household, where shipyard girl Polly lives with her mother Agnes, her brother Joe (discharged from the frontline in North Africa following a leg injury), her sister-in-law Bel and Bel’s two-year-old daughter Lucille. Bel’s husband – the other Elliot son, Teddy, Joe’s twin brother – has recently been killed in action. Within this context, Bel and Joe are the lead players and the book follows their struggles to cope – Bel with the death of her husband, Joe with finding worthwhile activity for himself now that he is unable to return to active duty.

Secondary storylines follow shipyard girls Rosie, the head welder, and Gloria, older than the others and pregnant. Gloria has a number of problems: she is trying to conceal her pregnancy from her bosses at the shipyard and she’s being visited by her violent estranged husband Vinnie, who has found out about the pregnancy and, assuming it’s his, wants to move back in. The father of Gloria’s baby is in fact not Vinnie but the yard manager Jack Crawford, temporarily away in America – which causes more complications. Rosie has a colourful life: she has permanent facial scarring following a ruckus with her late uncle Raymond, a convicted rapist, and she has a second job as part-owner/manager of a brothel. She’s being courted by a Detective Sergeant Miller, whom she likes but is wary of getting too close to in case he finds out about her after-hours work.

This was a fun romp. The Bel-Joe story works out happily and predictably. Gloria succeeds in working to full-term, thanks to Rosie’s machinations, and in fact ends up having the baby in the shipyard painter’s shed. It’s a bit bittersweet as the girls have learned that the ship carrying Jack back to the UK has been bombed and sunk by the Germans, and it’s not yet clear whether he’s among the survivors. I wanted things to work out for Rosie and DS Miller, but this is left annoyingly hanging – she’s given him the brush off, even though she likes him, as she feels It Can Never Work, but he’s determined to win her round.

‘Shipyard Girls at War’ was published in 2017. It’s the second in a series of ten books about the Shipyard Girls, with an eleventh due later this year according to Penguin. Revell has been busy.

‘Girl, Woman, Other’ by Bernardine Evaristo

This won the Booker prize in 2019, jointly with Margaret Attwood’s ‘The Testaments’. The joint thing seemed a bit of a cop-out to me. I mean, make a bloody decision. Presumably every year the judges have the whole “it was a very difficult decision” thing. See Sam Leith’s piece ‘The Booker Prize judges had one job’.

Girl, Woman, Other devotes a chapter each to one of twelve different women, whose lives are intertwined in various different ways. Playwright Amma, Amma’s daughter Yazz and Amma’s friend Dominique. Banker Carole, Carole’s mother Bummi and Carole’s schoolfriend LaTisha. Schoolteacher Shirley (former teacher of Carole, and old schoolfriend of Amma), Shirley’s mother Winsome, and retired schoolteacher Penelope (former colleague of Shirley and former employer of Bummi). Social media influencer Megan/Morgan; Morgan’s great-grandmother Hattie; Hattie’s mother Grace.

The women’s lives span from the late 19th century, when the oldest, Grace, was born, to the present day and 19-year-old Yazz. The book covers issues of race, class, generational differences. With the exception of Penelope – and we learn something interesting about her towards the end – the characters are all black or mixed race. Most were born in the UK but Bummi and Winsome are first generation immigrants. It’s a very engaging read and surprisingly comprehensible for a Booker winner. I did have to do a bit of looking back to link up a name with somewhere I thought I’d seen it before in the book – but not too arduous really. I’d be interested to read some of Evaristo’s other novels.