“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

 “She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

When trying to recommend Chandler it feels like your own words will never do him justice, you have no choice but to quote some of the slick, sublime descriptions. Evidently as a female character in the world of private detective Philip Marlowe you can go one of two ways, but women often end up being the key to the story – not in the typical damsel in distress way, more the conniving vixen out to destroy everyone around her.

I was drawn to this as the second Marlowe novel, and I had read the supremely cool The Big Sleep at A-Level, where I have to say, my teacher read it brilliantly. I was engrossed by the seedy, dark, corrupt, mysterious worlds Marlowe operated in, and the ending was captivating to the point that despite being regarded as a classic, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall could not do it justice in the film adaptation.

I’d argue Marlowe is the greatest literary detective, and yes, I’m including Sherlock Holmes in that one. Marlowe operates as a lone wolf, is a womaniser and in Farewell, My Lovely he takes on jobs for the sheer thrill of the ride.

The story of Farewell, My Lovely is thrown at the reader from the start; Marlowe observes Moose Malloy, a physically intriguing character, he has – oh what’s the point? I’ll quote Chandler again:

“He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck…Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food.”

Malloy is out of prison after a stitch-up and is on the lookout for Velma, his former fiancée. Marlowe tries to find Velma, and uncover the framing of Malloy, but to say he gets more than he bargained for doesn’t really cut it. Marlowe witnesses robberies, murders and is on the receiving end of some tough treatment himself.

Marlowe as a detective is completely relentless, and there is a perpetual sense of peril that his intrigue will be his downfall, and that’s what makes this so exciting. There are so many threads of the plot, and you know that they will come together at the end, but the endless contemplation of how that will happen is a real treat.

If you’re a fan of The Great Gatsby read Farewell, My Lovely or The Big Sleep. In my opinion you will soon realise that when it comes down to it, the supposed literary king of American cool does not hold up to the descriptive delights of Raymond Chandler.

Oh, go on then, have another quote:

 “You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at politicians, but there are a lot of nice people just the same. Take the guy that left that half bottle of whisky there. He had a heart as big as one of Mae West’s hips.”

Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler, Penguin (1940/2005)

When my friend passed this 624-page novel to me, starting it honestly felt like a bit of an epic endeavour: I am, admittedly, a very slow reader. It also didn’t help that it was set in, and describes, a period of political history in a country that I at that point had never visited and knew nothing about: 1970s India. However, I was also incredibly curious because the aforesaid friend had been reading the book for the past three weeks of our travels together, and I had been forced to sit next to her on trains, planes, buses and boats as she gasped with horror, laughed out loud and, eventually, finished the book with her hand clasped against her mouth with tears running down her face. Sworn to secrecy so as not to spoil it for me, she hadn’t breathed a word about the plot: but had thoroughly convinced me that this was a book I needed to read. Also, when she finally passed it to me, we were 2 hours into a 42-hour bus ride in Africa. So time was something I wasn’t short of…

I can honestly say that reading this novel was one of the most intense experiences I have had with a book. You are literally tossed between extremes of emotion, thrown back and forward through time, and transported into new worlds: both bewitching and unspeakably cruel. The story centres around four unlikely characters who are thrown together as a result of the tumultuous political and social circumstances in the present-day of the novel. However, as Mistry skilfully reveals the very different, and often very sad, back-stories that have led each of the characters to where they are now, the relationships formed between the four become all the more moving…

And yes, at the end, I cried. (It took me somewhat longer than the 42 hours of the bus journey…not least because the bus had no lights, and my head torch had packed-up). But the tears weren’t just because of the events that take place at the book’s conclusion. They were because suddenly, at that final moment, the whole of the book was brought crashing back into my head all at once: I remembered all of the terrible things that meant, it couldn’t have ended any other way; I remembered the parts that made me smile and laugh and forget about all the enormous, ugly, impossible things the characters are pitted against. It was overwhelming, to say the least…. my friend had to hold my hand.

If you have ever wanted to know anything about India, or contemporary history, or raw human survival and connection: READ THIS. I dare you.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, Faber and Faber (2010)

Two nights ago I woke up after having a terrifying dream. I was sitting down in a hall surrounded by large open fields, the hall looked like an old school hall, and there were a panel of people sitting down some distance from myself. I knew these people were there to judge my sanity in some way but felt powerless to have any input on how they judged or viewed me. I just had to sit and wait and in the process felt extremely vulnerable and frightened. As you would expect,  I woke up feeling rather disorientated but also found myself recalling the name of Randle McMurphy, one of the central protagonists from Ken Kesey’s classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel which I had only just finished reading for the first time a few days before.

My memory of McMurphy’s highly disturbing experience of a psychiatric institution during the 1960s and his relentless commitment to challenging the ‘all-powerful Combine’ in which he finds himself trapped no doubt had contributed to my nightmare but also helped me to refocus and get up out of bed that day. 

I don’t know why remembering McMurphy’s experience should have helped to steady my nerves that morning.  The book is a terrifying read and McMurphy both undergoes and witnesses some horrendous treatment while he is at the asylum. McMurphy is also a morally dubious character himself, having supposedly faked insanity to escape serving time in a state penitentiary for being convicted on a charge of rape. I think however McMurphy comes to encapsulate a massive challenge to the system during the novel and champions the cause of many of the vulnerable men also staying on the ward and I think this is why I found myself trying to remember his name after the dream and, shortly after his, the name of Chief Bromden, the narrator of the story who rediscovers his voice quite literally through his relationship with McMurphy. The book taps into that deep-seated fear which I’m assuming lurks within many a soul at any one point in their lives – the fear of losing one’s sanity in life, and in that sense the book, however harrowing, provides a language and a narrative through this darkness. The reader sees McMurphy not only challenge the psychiatric system, but also help to reawaken the hearts and minds of the other male inmates – most of whom, he discovers to his shock, are voluntary patients of the hospital, frightened to live in the world outside.

So if you can withstand and get through some of the more harrowing passages in the book, it is certainly worth reading. Reading this book will take courage, but the experience will stay with you forever and as well as remembering the pain in the novel, you will never be able to forget how McMurphy makes men laugh again, men who for a long time have been too frightened to laugh. The novel is about therefore the possibility of reawakening back into life as much as it also follows the tragic loss of life.  It is a shame Kesey didn’t write some more.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , Ken Kesey, Penguin Classics (1962)

I chose What Becomes for its title – it’s so tantalising – and for its author, A.L. Kennedy, whose Costa Prize winning novel Day I had fallen in love with. When I bought it, I didn’t even know it was a short story collection. These are stories about people in crisis. Whether it’s a grieving woman who picks up a stranger in a hotel bar or a young soldier and his mates struggling to accept what their war has done to them, you are made to care deeply about these characters over only ten or so pages.

If you’re like me, and don’t have much time for leisure reading right now, I’d recommend this book. Who can’t find twenty minutes to sit down and get immersed in the lives of The Broken Hearted?

What Becomes, A .L. Kennedy, Jonathan Cape (2009).

In this issue, Jeanette Winterson talks with Jane Davis about her recently published memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,  (Jonathan Cape, October 2011)  a title which is taken from the question Jeanette’s stepmother asked her when as a teenager she decided to leave home so as to live with the woman she loved. In this searching interview she talks movingly about the book’s main subject matter, her suicidal breakdown and the search for her birth mother that followed on from it. Extracts from the book are interspersed throughout making a dazzling introduction to the book and a valuable insight into this author.

We have fine poetry from Peter Robinson and Julie-Ann Rowell, and Kate Miller is the latest to take us behind the scenes of her poetry in ‘Poet on her Work’.

In fiction, Gabriel Josipovici gives us a Christmas story with a twist, while in ‘Shine’, B. J. Epstein writes a modern Cinderella story. Keeping up the festive spirit Ian McMillan takes us back to his early Christmases. To help parents and our readers with young friends, we recommend seasonal books for children of all ages. Who could resist this face?

We have a diverse assortment of subjects in our essays, with Brigid Lowe Crawford talking about taking time out from work to raise her family and the objections she meets from disapproving (mostly male) former colleagues. Malcolm Bennett writes on ear wax and Alan Wall continues his series on the oddities of language.

Click here to buy a copy for yourself and one as the perfect Christmas present for the literature-lover in your life…   

Few male authors can come close to Thomas Hardy in creating such defining, enduring and well-loved female literary heroines. Though controversial discussions could rumble on for some time debating whether or not Hardy could be classified as a feminist champion of women in a deeply patriarchal time or if the misfortunes that often befall his leading ladies said otherwise, the fact that three of his most famous novels are sculpted around incredibly memorable, entrancing female characters surely speaks volumes. Of course, there is the eponymous and ubiquitous (in literary terms, at least) Tess and Sue Bridehead of Jude The Obscure, but completing the trilogy is the ‘beautiful, impulsive and spirited’ Bathsheba Everdene; the central character of Far From The Madding Crowd, Hardy’s fourth novel which was also his breakthrough into major mainstream literary success.

Bathsheba is most definitely a striking and captivating presence, not only in appearance but in character too – she appears the most outwardly strong and confident of all Hardy’s heroines, with her wilful and fiercely independent nature coupled with a certain degree of vanity making her a woman who could not be easily ignored.  Indeed, Hardy’s description of her in the latter stages of the novel is quite revealing:

 “She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.”

While there is much to admire about Bathsheba, she is far from flawless – there are a few instances in which her attitude and conduct appear questionable. Yet such complexity is precisely what makes Hardy’s characters so appealing and in the end it is hard not to be affected by Bathsheba’s journey from free-spirited farm-girl to farm-mistress, shouldering her various professional and personal burdens along the way and undergoing a quite remarkable transformation from strength to weakness, finally to a shadowy stability.

The cause of Bathsheba’s descent has much to do with her romantic entanglements – the main focus of the story. Hardy generates not a love triangle but a love rectangle, if you will, as Bathsheba attracts the attentions of three men; Gabriel Oak (through whose eyes we are first introduced to the enchanting Miss Everdene), Farmer William Boldwood and Sergeant Francis Troy. In Bathsheba’s relationships with each of her three potential suitors, I suspect that many readers would be able to find templates for identifiable romantic encounters in their own lives: the tempestuous whirlwind that is not realised to be wrong until too late; the passion that burns heavily for one lover but not the other; the dependable friendship which deepens. The novel has its fair share of melodramatic moments, certainly, but Hardy prevents things from going overboard using several techniques – the chaos surrounding the central characters is nicely tempered by the more down-to-earth goings-on of the farm workers, whose personalities are fleshed out just as much as the protagonists, and the descriptions of the landscape of Weatherbury are just wonderful.  Hardy’s quite remarkable descriptive ability is always a highlight in any of his works, but is particularly noticeable and affecting in Far From The Madding Crowd; it is quite astounding how he can make the most ordinary of observations burst with energy and emotion, producing in a mere sentence an idea utterly profound, as in the following:

 “She was in a state of mental gutta serena; her mind was for the minute totally deprived of light at the same time that no obscuration was apparent from without.”

 Not to mention that deliciously ironical title; a fine example of a true master of language at work.

What does lie on the ‘other side of silence’?

In Prentisstown, The Noise inside men’s heads is something that other people can hear roaring in the outside world. Todd has an opportunity to escape and the novel is a fast-paced chase to try and find a new way, and place, to live. He suffers so much – physically and emotionally – that the growing pains of the likes of Adrian Mole pale into complete insignificance. Todd’s journey is about having to face up to some of those deep, dark things inside him – to learn things about himself he didn’t even know he had to learn – and continue, no matter what, to keep running forward.

Doing what’s right should be easy. It shouldn’t be another big mess like everything else.

As a ‘grown up’ reading this, I’ve been wondering whether these growing pains ever stop. Aren’t we all learning all the time? And aren’t some of those lessons really painful? That’s why I don’t think this is a book just for young adults but for any of us that are still learning how to live in the world, still making mistakes and still finding out about ourselves.

A frightening, sensitive, and utterly gripping novel.

Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go, Walker (2008).

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

The bruise was deep, deep, deep … the bruise of the false inhuman war

D. H. Lawrence’s final novel, like T. S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land, was written between the wars, and shares with Eliot’s work a deep pessimism about the future. The previous social order is crumbling away, soon to be replaced by something terrible and unknown; Lawrence describes the painful bursting forth of an inhumanly mechanised and industrialised society, which is having a damaging effect on human feeling and consciousness.

Against this backdrop, Connie Chatterley begins a sensuous affair with her gamekeeper Mellors, and their need for physical and mental intimacy is described in opposition to the heartless industrial world around them which is hostile to these feelings. Lawrence’s occasional tendency to give precedence to his social and philosophical arguments over the development of story and character can sometimes make his novels feel abstract or dry; he is, however, greatly concerned with the human need to find fulfilment and make ‘connexions’ with others, something in which novels themselves have an important part to play – they can ‘lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness’ and allows us to ‘hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy.’ How far England’s sympathy extends to Lady Chatterley and Mellors, we shall see.

I have just finished reading The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett. Part of my role at The Reader Organisation involves running one-to-one and group reading sessions with children and young people, and so I always have one adult book and one children’s book on the go. I often find that I get a lot of pleasure out of reading books that are written for young people, and some of the children’s books I read I enjoy just as much as adult books – this book was one of those.

There is something magical about The Midnight Zoo from its opening pages – the book begins in a Roma traveller camp somewhere in Eastern Europe and follows the story of two young boys and their baby sister who are trying to survive in the midst of World War Two. What is special and different about this book is that the subject of WW2 becomes almost irrelevant in the story, and it doesn’t matter which conflict the children are in the middle of because this is a story about freedom not about war.

The children are forced to leave their camp, their family and friends behind, and after many days of wandering they stumble upon a zoo which is still standing despite the town around it being destroyed by bombing. The animals, still in their cages, have been forgotten.

What follows made me think deeply about the subject of freedom, what we mean by it, and whether any of us are truly free. The story resonated with me particularly because of the work I do: many of the children that I read with feel that they have had aspects of their freedom taken away from them through no fault of their own; they are in the care system and for many of them their fate is often decided by a court. This feeling of not having control of your own life and not being allowed to make your own decisions can be very hard to bear. I’m not writing this to make any kind of judgement on the care system only to say that I thought of the young people I work with when I read this book and I will read it with some of them and see what they think.

Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo, Walker (2010).

Disgrace is about a university lecturer who is having or perhaps has always been having a mid-life crisis, never able to commit or indeed seem able to mature mentally and accept his advancing years with any dignity. The story covers David’s time spent with a prostitute, his satisfaction with one session per week with this women with no need on his part for anything more intimate.

This is ruined by a chance encounter on a regular shopping trip and David decides to move his attentions over to a student of his; this in turn leads to him resigning from the university and moving in with his daughter who lives in a small-town, rural community which initially he despises. I am really enjoying this book, it’s very charming in its own way although really quite crude at times. I can’t wait to read on and understand the character of David a little more!

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, Vintage (2000).