Deadly Present

 

Dolly

Susan Hill

(Vintage)

 

Quiet Edward and headstrong Leonora are sent to spend the Summer at the home of their eccentric Aunt Kestrel in the English fenland. During the time they are there they encounter something unearthly that will reach its cold dead hand far into their adult lives.

This could be the set-up for a children’s story, or the sort of potboiler bought to read on the beach by people who avoid bookshops outside of holidays and Christmas. In the hands of Susan Hill, it is something altogether more disturbing.

Drawing on the tradition of M R James she delivers a tale of unsettling events in a remote and atmospheric place. One that is shaped by a morality that is as harsh as it is inescapable.

All this in just 152 pages, less space than it takes for writers with more burnished literary reputations to clear their throats.

It is possible to read this book in a couple of hours, the story it contains is sure to stay with you for far longer. When it comes to producing that most English of literary forms, the ghost story, Susan Hill has the chops to stand comfortably alongside the greats of the genre.

Good Reads 23^rd July 2024

 

Escaping From The Echo Chamber

 

Silo

Hugh Howey

(Penguin)

The silo is the whole world and the only things outside it are desolation, chaos, and death. At least that’s what the people who have grown up within its curved walls have been led to believe, most of them anyway. A few brave souls have dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy and usually paid a heavy price for doing so. Raised as an engineer in the ‘Down Deep’, the mechanical heart of the silo, Jules is the latest and maybe the most resourceful iconoclast willing to risk it all to uncover the truth.

Silo, and I say this from the perspective of someone who isn’t by nature a fan, is the sort of novel that gives fantasy a good name. One that reminds its readers that the best books in the genre are always about the here and now as much as somewhere on the far edge of Never-Neverland.

Hugh Howey draws on an impressive range of influences to create a world that is entirely believable in its physical and intellectual claustrophobia. These include Plato’s cave and E.M Forster’s seminal novella The Machine Stops, both of which suggest a world in which the inhabitants are starved of accurate information about what exists outside their confined surroundings, and so have filled the resulting vacuum with distorted imaginings.

The silo itself could be seen as a metaphor for our highly stratified society, with the blue-collar mechanicals of the Down Deep separated physically and culturally from the more white-collar upper levels. Authority, such as it is, is compromised by a technocratic elite operating by their own rules to achieve their own ends. It would be hard to read this without thinking of America in the age of culture wars, rampant inequality and a dream turned sour.

The above could make Silo sound like a dry and didactic read, it is anything but that. Hugh Howey is a practiced hand at delivering fantasy novels that excite, engage, and have the capacity to make his readers think. In Jules he has created a central character who appealingly combines courage, resourcefulness, and a fierce determination to live by her own high moral standards in an often painfully compromised world.

Silo is the first in a trilogy of novels and develops its ideas and storyline in a way that makes the other two installments worth looking out for.

 

 

 

Deadly Secrets

 

The Ghost Orchid

Jonathan Kellerman

(Century, 2024)

 

The dead bodies of the heir to a business empire and his even richer married neighbour are found by the pool of a property in Bel Air. First impression is that an illicit affair has come to a violent end, but there is no sign of forced entry and the killer left behind no forensic evidence. Just the sort of case that is the stock in trade of homicide detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware.

Jonathan Kellerman has been writing novels featuring Alex Delaware for close to forty years, which is a remarkable achievement. Even more so since each new book is as fresh and enjoyable as the last.

The same is true with The Ghost Orchid, Kellerman takes Sturgis and Delaware into the darker recesses of American life, in town like LA where regular reinvention is almost mandatory some secrets cannot be buried. Not permanently anyway, sooner or later they will float back to the surface, sometimes with deadly consequences.

As ever the psychological insights into what drives people to commit unspeakable acts are scalpel sharp and the setting in a golden state where success and squalor rub shoulders brilliantly realized. In Delaware and Sturgis Jonathan Kellerman has created not just a pair of returning characters with massive readers appeal, he has also given us the picture of an enduring friendship between two men with minds supremely attuned to their chosen profession.

The Alex Delaware novels have been bestsellers for decades, as Kellerman and his two most enduring characters move into their fifth decade, they are well on the way to becoming classics of the genre too.

 

 

 

Charity offers local people the opportunity to improve their reading skills.

 

Reading is a vital part of everyday life and something that many people take for granted, yet it is something with which 2.4million adults in England have difficulty [1].

Read Easy North Staffs, the local branch of a national charity helping adults improve their literacy skills and their lives have added 8 new coaches to their team and are now able to support more people.

The new coaches will join a team of volunteers offering one-to-one support to readers in venues around the city including libraries and community centres. All the sessions delivered by Read Easy North Staffs are provided free of charge.

Team Leader Sue Bell said, “Read Easy North Staffs is so fortunate that so many valued volunteers are able to offer a few hours a week to help someone less fortunate than themselves to develop their reading skills.”

Adding that she urged “any adult struggling with reading to come and join one of our friendly and supportive reading pairs”.

Having difficulty reading is something 1 in 10 adults in Stoke-on-Trent experience, speaking to the Sentinel in 2022 Neil Ginnis, a reading coach for Read Easy North Staffs said that “simple things” like shopping or filling out forms can be problematic if you struggle to read, and that these problems are compounded by essential services increasingly moving online [2].

People who struggle with literacy can experience a range of challenges, including being more likely to be unemployed or in low paid work, and feeling disempowered and socially isolated [3].

Read Easy is a registered charity providing a volunteer led reading coaching scheme for adults in communities across the UK. Readers and coaches meet for two half hour sessions a week and work through phonics-based reading course Turning Pages together.

Speaking about their experiences, readers described how learning to read opened up new opportunities and improved their self-esteem.

Peter said learning to read had been “the best thing” he had ever done and that he now enjoyed writing his own stories and poems [5].

Sarah said she was now able to read bedtime stories to her children and that was “the best feeling in the world” [6].

For media requests please contact:

Adam Colclough

Press officer Read Easy North Staffs

Mobile: 07776432636

Email: colclougha@aol.com

Anyone who wishes to contact Read Easy North Staffs either to join a reading pair or for further information can contact them using the following:

Andrew 07391 962 565

Janice 07437 163034,

or email nsadmin@readeasy.org.uk

[1] https://readeasy.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/

[2] https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/one-10-adults-struggle-read-7677503

[3] https://alt.org.uk/impact-of-illiteracy/

[4] https://readeasy.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/

[5] https://readeasy.org.uk/success-stories/peters-story/

[6] https://readeasy.org.uk/success-stories/sarahs-story/

 

 

State of the Nation

 

The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

Darren McGarvey

(Penguin)

 

It would be possible to fill the library of a small university with books outlining the problems besetting twenty-first century Britain. Most are written by journalists, academics, or politicians, all of whom occupy a space that is at one remove from issues at hand.

Darren McGarvey provides a diagnosis of our multiple ills from the yawning inequality gap and the trauma induced by contact with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the welfare state, to political disengagement and social isolation that is as cogent as it is shocking. The difference between his book and that of other would-be social commentators is that he does so from a basis of proximity, painful lived experience of being outside the charmed circle of middle-class life.

Proximity and its importance to understanding where we are and how we got there is central to the argument he makes. It is something the ‘political class’, ‘metropolitan liberals’, the ‘establishment’, or any other catch all definition lack. They inhabit a world of privilege and comfort that makes it near impossible for them to imagine let alone empathize with the challenges facing many working people.

He lays out just how overwhelming those challenges are in forensic detail, detailing amongst other things the hoops benefits claimants are forced to jump through and the prejudices inherent within the education system. In doing so he raises the critical and often malign influence of something that other commentators fight shy of mentioning in the drawing room of current political discourse, class.

Behind the problems we face now and the bigger ones waiting just around the bend is a concerted and decades long assault on the working class by those at the top of the pile. It has infected every corner of national life from the high table of politics through a corrupt and debased media to the legions of petty bureaucrats bustling around our town halls.

This is not though an internet rant extended to book length, McGarvey, rightly savages the Tories for inflicting harmful austerity policies on the most vulnerable people whilst feathering the nests of bankers and corporate raiders. He also turns his fire on the Left, both the mainstream version represented by the Labour Party, which after winning a landslide majority under Blair in 1997 squandered the chance to bring about real change, and the radical Left for preferring arcane internal disputes and intellectual posturing to doing anything genuinely revolutionary.

Refreshingly McGarvey does all this not from the lofty heights of personal certainty, he writes with painful awareness about the compromises and not infrequent faux pas he has made as someone from ‘humble origins’ trying to make his way in a social landscape dominated by middle class sensibilities. If only other pundits were willing to show as much vulnerability and humility our public discourse would be a lot less fraught.

McGarvey has been likened to George Orwell and it is a comparison I am sure he is flattered by; however, he would likely point out one massively important difference. Orwell was educated at a public school, for all his compassion for the suffering of working people his voice, both spoken and on the page is the RP one of an insider, so despite his best efforts was his mindset.

Darren McGarvey represents something else entirely, something that is shamingly almost unique in the babble of political commentary, the authentic voice of the person on the street. Sometimes bluntly to the point of being rude, often hauntingly eloquent, and always painfully honest. That is what makes what he has to say worth listening to.

Good Reads, Thursday 18^th January 2024

 

 

Only The Lonely

 

 

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

(Cannongate)

 

“I want to be alone”, is the line that made Greta Garbo legendary rather than just famous, and it gives her a walk on part in Olivia Laing’s fascinating study of loneliness, something we all experience, but don’t fully understand.

She appears as a sort of living urban myth clad in a fur coat and men’s shoes wandering the streets of New York still looking for the solitude that she professed to want so badly. Decades after the cameras stopped turning, she was still being hunted by people keen to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous recluse.

Laing describes in this sensitive and learned book the conundrum at the centre being alone, that it is a both a spiritual and physical experience. You can be surrounded by people and feel utterly disconnected from life.

Drawing on a wide range of references including social science, psychology, and the arts, as well as her personal experience of solitude, Laing explores this curious state and the impact it has had on individuals and wider culture.

Touching in the process on the paintings of Edward Hopper and the multi-media adventures of Andy Warhol, both of whom fashioned careers that brought them critical approbation and lasting fame from art that was rooted in their deep personal loneliness. She also draws on the New York subculture of the sixties through to the nineties that provided a place of acceptance for a disparate community of artists, musicians, and party animals until first AIDS and then gentrification swept it away.

Loneliness, as the truism goes, is something that anyone can feel, but it cuts deepest into the lives of those who have already been pushed to the outside by the narrow constraints of mainstream society. Some may be able to parlay the dislocation into creativity; many more end up trying and failing to self-medicate against it through unwise personal choices.

In an age when the devices that supposedly connect us seem to be actively working to drive us apart, we are all starting to feel a bit like Hopper’s Nighthawks. If you’re sat at a diner counter looking for the meaning of your existential angst in the dregs of your coffee, The Lonely City might help to explain your situation.

 

 

Film screening highlights the threat posed by climate change.

 

Local climate campaigners are joining with the YMCA to show a film made to highlight the threat of climate change.

The free screening will take place in the in the charity’s iconic Sky Room on Tuesday 12^th December and will coincide with the COP 28 summit.

Of Walking on Thin Ice (Camino to Cop) is a 55-minute film directed by Ben Wrigley following the story of climate activists who walked across England and Scotland to attend the COP 26 summit in November 2021.

The COP 28 (Conference of the Parties) summit will take place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between 30^th November and 12^th December. Convened by the United Nations (UN) it brings governments who signed up to the original UN climate agreement in 1992 together to discuss how to limit and prepare for future climate change [2].

In a joint statement issued in early November Chief COP 28 Negotiator and COP 28 President Designate Dr Sultan Al Jaber said the summit must ‘accelerate practical action on mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and climate finance and build a fully inclusive COP28 that leaves no one behind’ [3].

Concerns have been expressed about locating the summit in one of the world’s top 10 oil producing nations and appointing as its president the chief executive of the UAE’s state-owned oil company.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, speaking at a youth protest during the COP 26 summit in Glasgow in 2021 said world leaders had held 26 summits, producing “decades of blah, blah, blah, and where has that got us? [4]”

Of Walking on Thin Ice suggests one way by which individuals and communities can change that narrative.

More than a thousand people shared part of the journey with the activists and the film, which has been described as an ‘immersive and poetic’ experience, has been shown at venues around the country [1].

On the evening there will also be music, a clothes swap, and stalls from local environmental organisations in the YMCA café, refreshments will be available provided by Newcastle-under-Lyme Fairtrade group.

Local arts group B-Arts will also be there offering people the opportunity to make their own pledge cards based on environmentally friendly actions they plan to take in the year ahead.

The Radical Art Collective will also be holding a Greed Actually evening at The Block in Longton in partnership with the North Staffs Climate Coalition on Thursday 14^th December.

They will be giving people to make and send cards to the greediest CEO’ s to thank them for their contribution to consumerism and climate change.

In September NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York published data showing that the summer of 2023 was the hottest since records began in 1880. The months of June, July, and August combined were warmer than any other recorded summer.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the record temperatures would result in “dire real-world consequences”, including increasingly extreme weather that would “threaten lives and livelihoods around the world” [5].

The film show will take place at Hanley YMCA, Harding Road, Hanley, ST1 3AE, on Tuesday 12^th December, doors open at 7pm with the screening starting at 8pm.

The Radical Art Collective Greed Actually event will take place at The Block, Unit 6, Longton Exchange, on 14^th December between 7pm and 9pm.

 

[1] https://www.improntafilms.com/camino-to-cop26---of-walking-on-thin-ice.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67143989

[3] https://www.cop28.com/en/joint-statement

[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49918719

[5] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3282/nasa-announces-summer-2023-hottest-on-record/