reviews supplementary

Reviews Supplementary

Reviews posted here will be of those books that didn't, by reason of their subject matter or manner of telling, belong in the pages of The Journal.

Reviews of the collections below should have been included in future issues of The Journal had increasing costs not caused its production to be temporarily suspended.

Bloom and Guts: Scott McKenzie with illustrations by Chunhui Li Amazon ISBN 9798398209617 120 pages B5 no price given

The opening illo, softly coloured, raised my expectations. Immediately dashed by finding the first poems centre-spaced. There being no acknowledgement of any poems being previously published in magazines or elsewhere I was forced to presume this to be an unedited self-published collection. With every poem carrying the year they were written they came across as a beginner's or a young person's poems, naïve and one-dimensional. Here's his Love -

Love is so many things

but to me it's a vine.

It grows across a lifetime,

overcomes obstacles,

and especially when

we're shaking at the edge,

Sometimes it's all we need

to live.

Written 2018

Telling not showing; and the comma after 'edge' is not my typo, his.

People who haven't read a copy of the Journal often send me poems of this calibre; poems personal, written for one other person but not expanded enough to include the uncommitted reader. And so many editorial no-nos I came across – single words in capitals, double exclamation marks... I wasn't encouraged to read on. A reviewer's duty though... Only to find a variety of fonts being used and that had no bearing whatsoever on the contents.

From the angst I suspect that the author might have suffered some sort of breakdown. The one poem that did draw me in, 5 Minutes, and his rare use of third person singular, told of another person's breakdown. Remainder of the poems though swung between first person singular and a finger-in-the-face second person You. What I did find strange, given the inclusion of some fine illustrations, was the lack of thought given to the overall appearance of the text. All the different fonts had it look a mess.

All the Birds: Mark Totterdell Littoral Press, 15 Harwood Place, Lavenham, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 9SG. littoralpressuk.jimdofree.com ISBN 9781912412495 76 pages A5 £10.00

Such a relief to come to poems that have been through the editorial mill and that straight away drew me in, carried me along. Helps too that the subject matter is a love of the natural world and not the over-examined self. Artistry of the fourth poem in had me utter the word brilliant. Here's the poem, Home Farm -

He lopes past the farm with

its old-fangled brickwork,

its hay and its dung, and

he sets off the sheep in

their crammed metal pens, and

the clamour of ewes and

the mewl of their lambs is

the ringing of bells, and

the silly flock act like

he's someone to follow,

a piper or prophet.

If twine was untied, they

would all trail him home, up

the zigzaggy lane with

its oaks full of tannin,

past fields where the newbuilds

ooze out from the suburbs,

and over the hill, where

the city is crouching,

where fleeces are fashioned

as warm second skins, and

the flesh turns on spits in

the awful big windows.

This is such a lovely collection, taking us from the terror of the abattoir to a blackbird's glissando to an eagle's '...minuscule 'm' / on the open page of the sky...' to a warrior queen peregrine, light-absorbing ravens, bumbarrel longtail tits, archangel avocets and the etymology of cranes. In the tradition of the two Thomases, RS and Edward, and with a touch of the John Clares, this is a celebration of, along with the inevitable worries for, the natural world. Mark Totterdell goes beyond craft to create small works of art – August and The Robin Singing Through the Traffic's Din in particular. Descriptive, informative, enchanting, with a wry humour and a dark whimsy: I really don't know what more I can say to heartily recommend All the Birds. Suffice to say that anyone who loves the '...pink and orange gems of / spindlberry...' has to be alright by me.

The Tall Golden Minute: Linda Saunders Tremaen Press www.186publishing.co.uk ISBN 978-1-7397814-9-1 108 pages A5 £12.00/$15.00

After only the first poem I diagnosed myself prone to Linda Saunders' free form tale-telling. Reminded me of John Freeman's comfortable anecdotes. She is equally adept at the same startling image - '...sun flash on cars...' that grants an immediate and certain recognition of authenticity. One can trust a writer with that ability.

And that was only the first poem. I confidently read on.

So much here I wanted to quote. This from Now in the Dale, '...clarity in the shallows / for the slippery light to invent / substance from shadow...' The insubstantial perfectly captured. And I decide that first comparison was misleading: where John keeps to blocks of broken lines Linda enjoys shaping poems around their subject matter so that one is unsure what is coming next page over. I read on.

She writes of what and where I know, northern moors and the birds there. The coincidence in Swale Time: I too have had watches slip from my wrist in my own hill wanderings. Other recognitions had me wonder about the appeal of certain birds to poets, spotted flycatcher for instance, perch and out, perch and out. Any bird's arrival though will startle us out of or into a reverie, hers never taking me quite where I had anticipated.

Her poems are as long as need be. Possession, her telling of a Northern Brown Argus had me hold my breath. Her tale of a Holly Blue had the same effect. Again in Too Soon to Winter. The same delicacy of observation, attentiveness to detail is, I suspect, what holds one. Possibly her painter's eye for detail, aspects of light. She brings the same attentiveness to sound. I'd love to quote all eleven stanzas of Counterpoint, but will have to content myself with just the first two.

A sound half-heard, too uncertain

to ask definition, but consigned or dismissed

to a frequency that knows its own business

without intruding on yours -

a sub-song, an ice cream chime

muted by distance, or strain of cell-phone jingle,

drifted up from the city's basso profundo,

a ripple or riff of some forgotten theme -

who's listening anyway?...

So very much to delight here, her capturing of oh-so-ordinary moments, as in Everlasting Flower, a generous speculation on two fellow bus passengers. The collection ending with recollections of her childhood, considerations of her parents. All in all a collection to enjoy, to revel in. I have never met Linda Saunders but feel that I know her now, and have been grateful for her company.

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Your Woman is in Pieces: Louise Anne Bulcher www.tearsinthefence.com ISBN 978-1-900020-08-4 80 pages A5 no price given

Being not so much a biography as a collection of self-hating thoughts on her past, Louise Anne Bulcher doesn't confine herself to any one format. At times she splurges a reminiscence, digresses, speculates, considers... While elsewhen the past is tightened into a format, equally effective. I have accepted my mortality, / It just hasn't accepted me. (Confessions of a self-proclaimed suicidal nihilist.)

That comes much later. She daringly opens the collection with a 3 page diatribe on the difficulty of finding a poem to write, which diatribe is in itself a word-rich poem where she wants ...to scoop whole stories into my arms like loaves of warm bread, or ears of corn, or husks of wheat and from my tongue lame and soft in my mouth to unfurl like a tulip turning outside of itself. (Last Word.) Thus begins a life marked out in poems, and more the sense of a life than detailed incidents.

A woman haunted by poetry, by the lives of poets, she here forges her own mythology. I quickly came to love her juxtaposition of senses, sight and smell and suspicion – smells of pain and polyester..., smells of cold and polish. Relishing the romance of suicide she recounts foolishness and horror, the fantastic anchored to what we all know, '...everything English was old and dirty... (Foreign.) My nursing experience readily authenticates her own impressions of ward life, patients gathered together and watched over. Here in the collection however there are no delusions. An eye set on seeing everything a determined honesty is at work here: Words are nothing, even my cunt writes better. (Decade.) And I think I might make her page-long unpunctuated 'States of Being' into a motivational wall poster. we must find ways to speak hard truths with mouths stitched up we must not lie we must fathom the unimaginable we must learn to live in and with disaster we must bruise like ripe fruit on the waste heap we must tolerate the crisis we must oil the latched gate our escapes in silence we must unrape ourselves we must solicit empathy we must bribe the state prosecutor we must laugh at our own calamity... A must read.

The fox, the whale & the wardrobe: Dónall Dempsey Vole Books dempseyandwindle.com ISBN 978-1-913329-83-9 A5 122pages 10.99

Free verse, short lines in 2-3 line stanzas, page after page. Very soon became apparent that there's an over-explained sentimentality at work here. '...I always / nostalgic / for the future // as if it were / only the past / happening again...' (Time Ever). Heaven gets several mentions, anthropomorphism too – talking/thinking creatures, buildings, things – and he tells fondly of relations large in his past. He sets off on whimsical journeys, tells of his children's growing awareness. Some tales I could sympathise with; as poetry though it failed to excite, said/did nothing new. So much could as easily have been written as prose. I suspect, though, that delivered confidently/confidingly, some may go down well at readings.

Learning Springsteen on my language app: Sarah Salway www.indigodreamspublishing.com ISBN 978-1-912876-76-1 A5 52 pages £9.50

I delayed reading this as I only ever saw Springsteen the once, from outside a tent during the Maryport festival. My glimpse saw him through a tent flap wearing a hat on stage. And that was all that I knew of him. First couple of poems here however made me wish that I'd picked up the book sooner. These poems are, in the best sense, allusive and provocative. Provocative in the sense that they send my mind whirling off in other directions, the kind of poems that draw one in and the deeper one goes the greater the rewards.

Being old and not knowing Springsteen, or apps, still I got the title poem, his lyrics awkwardly intruding into her thinking/creative processes, almost like stops, barriers to be overcome. Other poems challenge the accepted, move the mind sideways, and if whimsy has a purpose here, it is not just the repeating of pretty notions.

...Every day outside my window

the world's longest picnic table

is taking shape and from my cowslip garden

I hear strangers share secrets

and lost wishes...

In fields of dandelion clocks

In case I have created the impression that all here are word-based games, they're not. Some, like Cryptic, plumb the emotions. And some, from out of their confusion of images and notions just one will leap out, grab the mind. Her Rambling for instance, the final stanzas sent me off to Frances Cornford's From the Windows of a Train. Which had me realise that I know more of poems and very little of pop music and therefore of Springsteen. Does he always wear a hat on stage?

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Martin Booth — Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong childhood Doubleday, Transworld Publishers, 6-63 Uxbridge Road, London, W5 5SA hardback ISBN 0385607768

I knew Martin Booth briefly, all too briefly, in the 1990s — when I lived in Somerset and when he was about to get Booker shortlisted for his Hong Kong based novel, The Industry of Souls.

Lionel Phillips, the art collector and backer of a few artists at the tricky beginnings of their careers, started what we believed was the first UK Arts e-magazine, ixion. I was to help out with the poetry, Martin with the prose. I think we managed to reach issue 3, where all doomed periodicals fail. Or, in ixion’s case, fizzle out. To be generous to ourselves I think Lionel’s concept was a little ahead of the software then available, especially with regard undistorted reproduction of the artwork.

I moved from Somerset, but heard that Martin had been diagnosed with a rare brain tumour. What I hadn’t known was that that diagnosis had inspired him to use the last 2 years of his life penning this memoir of his Hong Kong boyhood. Which memoir I picked up this year on a bric’a brac stall at Chailey village fete in Sussex. (Dates slip by me, but it must have been around about 2004 that Lionel too died.)

To the book. Gweilo is Chinese (Cantonese) slang for a European male, and the book opens with this 7 year old gweilo setting sail from Portsmouth, the prose such that we straightaway know that we are in safe hands. Like many writers Martin was not one for casual chatter, so most of his childhood was new to me. And being one who can’t remember dates and chronology, I was therefore most impressed by his memory for detail, even down to where he stored his teddy on board the ship taking his 7 year old self to Hong Kong. Once arrived I continued to be impressed.

Aside from Martin’s powers of recollection what shines through this memoir is Martin’s love of humanity, his delight in people, in the tales they have to tell. Also his love of the place. The initial cultural misunderstandings had me giggling; and he earned my sympathy as he went native, his blond hair — a touch of it believed to bring good luck to the superstitious Chinese — being his passport into all the city’s quarters, even into Kowloon’s walled city, getting himself adopted by street traders and even by Triad gangsters.

The family dynamic however comes across as more than a little skewed. Martin adored his spirited and unprejudiced mother, while his contempt for his Pooter-like father grows page by page: ‘He never praised but only criticised or admonished. . . .’ A bully at work and a bully at home, he threw telephones at his Chinese staff and used belt or slipper on Martin for the tiniest infringement of his suburban proprieties. But as the family moves quarters around Hong Kong the father becomes outflanked by his more intelligent wife and his Cantonese-speaking son. However the family being in Hong Kong by virtue of the father’s employment at the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's base, mother and boy, who both love their life there, have to tread a fine line between outright rebellion and covert manipulation. Self-esteem though comes to Martin through his ability to speak street-Cantonese. So does he learn that his father’s Chinese office subordinates’ share his opinion of the tyrant. (I doubt that it was Martin’s intent, but by the end of the book I was actually beginning to feel sorry for his unimaginative father faced with this lively duo.)

As I am sure many readers have, I saw aspects of myself in Martin’s memories. His wanderings through what to begin with was an alien culture reminded me of my own in Bombay, getting lost to see what I could find. And of peculiar interest to me was that I almost, on leaving the Merchant Navy, joined the Hong Kong police. What stopped me was that I hadn’t fancied again being a superior, an Inspector, only by virtue of my nationality. Nonetheless the Hong Police inspectors here did acquit themselves, if not with valour, then with decency.

Where I haven’t been able to come close to identifying with Martin is in his powers of recollection. Only 2 years older than me I simply don’t have his memory for detail, or for events. But then, when I was a nurse, writing up notes straight after an incident, I was never any good at the antecedents.

For anyone interested in China Gweilo has to be essential reading. For anyone else Gweilo is worth getting hold of for its life-affirming outlook. And don’t wait to chance upon it on a bric’a brac stall. First-hand copies are still available.

Sam Smith © 19th July 2010

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Pat Boran : The Invisible Prison The Dedalus Press, 13 Moyclare Road, Baldoyle, Dublin 13, Ireland. www.dedaluspress.com ISBN 978-1-906614-15-7

I unreservedly enjoyed this book. I have to say however that had it been published in England it would probably have got done under the Trades Description Act. The cover, largely grey to black, shows an apprehensive short-trousered boy, daffodil in hand, standing before the bent bars of a cage. Given all the recent hullabaloo over Irish Bishops covering up for paederast priests, given the title (The Invisible Prison smacks of an abused self shut away), add in the gloomy cover and, believing that it was going to be a painful read, I put the book to one side. When I did steel myself to open its pages it took me no time at all to realise that The Invisible Prison is the very antithesis of a misery memoir.

This biography is no linear narrative. As piecemeal as memory it is a series of vignettes each hooked on an incident, an individual, a place, on things — bikes, various shops, plastic planes — on family trips . . . . A prison does figure, and it’s a real prison, Portlaoise, with the town built around it. Much like Shepton Mallet or Princetown in England. And for the townies the prison is so obvious, so taken-for-granted, an absence in its centre, that it is invisible. What we are left with is a fond family history.

A third of the way in I was still finding it strange to be reading an autobiography by a living author that wasn’t a disclosure of abuse, but rather a celebration of the lives that made his. Some of the local knowledge was lost on me, but Pat Boran’s eye for detail, ear for nuance and his prodigious memory make him a born raconteur, and I was more than happy to go with the flow.

This is such a celebration of childhood — universal, timeless — it felt as if at times he could be telling of mine. Then a mention of something current, an item of news or more likely a popsong, had me realising that I was at that time the age of his parents. Yet still the general tenor of the book could have one believing that he is telling of a childhood, so innocent, so lacking in resentment, that it belongs to another age altogether.

The writing is clear and unfussy, the style that of a man taking me into his confidence, giving me tale by tale the incidental histories that go to make up his life. And with many an entertaining digression, but none of the drawn-out tedious length of a Tristram Shandy. A hundred and sixty pages in Boran himself gives us the credo for the writing of the book: ‘. . . . we do not after all experience history sequentially, but in clusters of thinly-connected events spread out over days and months and years.’

So, as well as being told of his wheeler-dealer father, patient dependable mother, a cast of siblings, schoolfriends and neighbours; as well as being invited out into the playground of his father’s sheds and makeshift storehouses, the imaginary worlds therein; we are there too when general history does come washing by. When the prisoners’ allies come clamouring to town demanding for the Portlaoise’s prisoners political status, and leaving blood on a shopfront.

This though is a life on the edge of a nation’s history. There are teachers to tell of, fads to relate, bog-cutting to be done. Where Boran is exceptional as a contemporary memoirist is in his acceptance of the adult world and all of its — even with hindsight — odd values and behaviours.

Poet that he is there are many lovely lines and some pitch-perfect descriptions. Of his parents coming up to retirement: ‘He and his wife would be a late middle-aged couple growing old in patterns they had built around themselves.’ But please, please don’t take the mention of ‘poet’ here for what is usually inferred by ‘poetic’ in a review, which is the use of self-regarding flowery language. As I said before Pat Boran’s prose is clear and unfussy.

Towards the end of this universal boyhood the tale does briefly become peculiarly that of an Irish Catholic boyhood. But even that Pat Boran had this curmudgeonly old atheist reading with sympathy.

SamSmith © 18th June 2010

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Grownup War: John Daniel Pennycomequick Press, Weir View, Weirfields, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 5JS ISBN 978-0-9504253-1-3 £8.50

With the same enviable lightness of touch in his prose as in his poetry John Daniel’s semi-jocular approach to his memoir reminded me initially of Spike Milligan’s ‘Hitler, my part in his downfall’. Although here it is the minutiae and local topography of childhood that is being recalled, most often fondly, along with the mysterious values and preoccupations of grownups.

‘Grownup War’ could as easily have been subtitled ‘When War Came to Ruislip’ Except that the memoir opens with the likelihood of war being discussed by fathers in their deckchairs while the author is building a sandcastle, with World War 2 subsequently becoming the accepted growing up norm. Newsreels and newspaper headlines form the background to the wonderful illogic of boyhood that sees John through scout troops, Sunday schools, marbles and stamp collecting, through being a non-Jew with a Jewish name, his parents’ rise in the world, new suburban rituals, an acceptance of wartime liaisons ... His interest throughout is in the near-by, tales of, interleafed throughout with war’s statistics of gore, and an occasional black and white photograph, pace WG Sebald, gracing the text.

My being just a few years younger than John I can happily vouchsafe the artefacts and practices in use then, and not so happily corroborate many of the attitudes, this being the fag-end of ‘service’ with its peculiar loyalties and resentments. Certainly a memoir to be enjoyed as much for the memories it provokes as for those John Daniel recalls.

SamSmith © 20th April 2012

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Conan Doyle: Micah Clarke Nelson’s Library, T. Nelson & Sons, London & Edinburgh Over the years I have been drawn to bookshops, mostly secondhand, and have rarely left without at least one book freshly bagged. Consequence is I have, literally, stacks of unread books. Occasionally reproached by these silent heaps I will pick a book at random, have it speak.

Unable to recall the impulse that had me buy it, or where I bought the book, if the first few pages don’t invite my attention, off to the charity shop it goes. Not Conan Doyle’s ‘Micah Clarke’.

Its depiction of religious intolerance and the murderous and sacrificial zeal of fanatics, the uses made of such by those seeking power, render this tale of Monmouth’s rebellion remarkably apposite — pace Hindu and Muslim fanatics, the US Christian and Israel’s religious right. Sect agin sect, we haven’t 4 centuries on moved a whit, and that in itself is a cause for depression. But Conan Doyle’s use of language. . . .

The richness of the language is a rumbustical delight. Putting aside, of course, seventeenth century occasional usage which would now be deemed racist. But to take belated offence at those few mentions and not at the wanton killing and tyranny of a corrupt monarchy? Rather I overlooked that as being thoughtlessly of its time and rejoiced in the rest of the fulsome vocabulary, in the many words now marked (obs.) in my Chambers. ‘. . . .supple-backed courtiers, and strutting nobles, and hussies with their shoulders bare, who should for all their high birth have been sent to Bridewell as readily as any poor girl who ever walked at the cart’s tail. . . .’

The mouth-shaping writing aside — and I have to say that I much prefer Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlock Holmes books, ‘Rodney Stone’ for instance — what gave me as much pleasure in ‘Micah Clarke’ was my so intimately knowing the terrain, the Somerset where I spent 20+ years of my life. I swear I even recognised some of the characters.

Scour library skips and secondhand bookshops for a copy. Enjoy!

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Anxious Moments Before The Next Big Event: A. C. Drainville Skrev Press, 41 Manor Drive, Hebden Bridge, HX7 8DW, UK. www.skrev-press.com ISBN 978-1-904646-46-4 £9.99 $18.99 €18.99

Title is the synopsis: fifty year old Canadian professor considers leaving his wife for his student lover. Style, manner of telling — William Faulkner love-softened by Lawrence Durrell, the prose so image-rich, allusive, so unlinear, metaphors expanded and explored, it is as if poetry. Told in sections from imagined POVs, characters’ sections within can segue from 1st to 3rd to 2nd person singular.

Central character, principal narrator, is Édouard — angry, guilt-ridden, accusing, trapped. A word-game-player, pricker of Canadian pomposities, he tells of the beginnings of his academic career, the conning of academe by intellectual sleight-of-hand, pick’n mix cut’n paste assemblages, readily accepted so long as they had footnotes. His is the hectic pace of a need-to-tell confessional, a going over every detail of the affair and its antecedents — Selma being the student he did finally have the courage to seduce. Now, unable to bear her distance from him, there is in this telling self-vilification for his lover’s little tricks, a self-berating for the betrayals, a hint of boastfulness too . . . . From what little he knows he imagines the past and current lives of all the other characters — Selma possibly abused as a child by a friend of the family and with the passive connivance of her parents; his father self-sedated into retirement; his one-living sibling; his mother choosing stasis, not to live; his wife choosing not to suspect . . . .

A wistful cynicism pervades throughout: ‘Not all of what I lived happened, but all of it is true.’ On life seen lived: ‘. . . . the subordinate will be told to be more grateful, he will learn a lesson in obedience.’ On Berkely: ‘Death by learning, too many carcasses picked over for too long.’ (The piecemeal dialogue in that section is a faultless rendition of professorial gatherings.)

As Édouard wants to leave his wife so too does he want to throw up his whole way of life. Throughout his career he has advertised ‘Vote for Sale’ nihilistic verses in the local paper, an occasional cock-a-snoop to college authorities, but never going far enough to get himself the sack. Anger at his own weakness is matched by his anger at the world: ‘I know nothing, but live still by borrowed horror, seeking revenge.’ An observant, intelligent and articulate tale of contemporary hopelessness which does, in its articulation and telling, nonetheless give one hope.

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Michael McIrvin : The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time BeWrite Books, 32 Bryn Road South, Wigan, Lancashire, WN4 8QR www.bewrite.net ISBN 978-1-906609-34-4 £7.99

If you’ve ever wondered why the most heavily fortified embassies throughout the world belong to the USA this tale will give you the answer. Here we are presented with the beyond-Machiavellian antics of the CIA, those covert/overt representatives of a USA that we from elsewhere, and patently many within the USA - Michael McIrvin is a norteño - have come to know and hate. (Loathe is too passive a verb.)

An ex-CIA operative wakes up in an alley naked and blue. Blue all over. He wasn’t blue before he fell asleep, except for his one-time code name. Sickened by CIA-authored atrocities in Guatemala, drawn to Mayan folk tales, taunted by a shaman, he fled, has spent the last 20 years on the run from the CIA, the last year shacked up with two sisters, switching - with their blessing - between the pair.

Chandler’s mean streets lead to D H Lawrence’s Plumed Serpent, Crime and Punishment meets wholly amoral Truth and Death. For this is an extended meditation on Death, its centrality both to Mayan and, yes, to Western culture, our news primarily concerned with killings, calamity deaths, wars, the importance of events measured by the number or status of the dead. X-Box killing games, murder mysteries. . . . Snuff movies?

How exactly to define this tale? A spy-thriller? Once he has been found, and turned blue, our narrator knows that the CIA have found him and that they mean to kill him. Or is assassination not their intent? Do they mean to re-recruit him? The Guatemalan shaman reappears .....and there are flashbacks to CIA-inspired mayhem and torture methods. Ideology of sorts plays its part, so too the making of myth.

Told in the first person with many a digression, I couldn’t make up my mind whether to describe his blueness as an extended metaphor or his return to the killing lands as a taut allegory. Suffice to say it has its Hamlet-type ponderings, a consideration of Life through the many lens of Death, although at a far less leisurely pace than that employed by the graveside Prince of Denmark. And deeper than this, ". . . .a pose of thought by an automaton who plots and plans but does not think in the truest sense of the word . . . ." We are given plenty to think on here, not least the superficiality and inherent destructiveness of our Western way of life.

Comes a senseless killing. Or a killing whose only motive was to intimidate. Our narrator/hero goes looking for revenge, the plot thickens . . . . and all hell breaks loose.

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Dave Pelzer: A Child Called It Orion ISBN 0-75283-750-8

Another one from the stacks, put off from those years that I was daily dealing with the results of the book’s subject matter.

‘A Child Called It’ is more a detailed testimony than an attempt at literature. Written for those with no experience of child abuse, here towards the end it is couched in winning-over sentimental terms, which sentimentality always makes me suspicious. I see such sentimentality as the other side of the abuse coin. When not physically abusing her scapegoated son, for instance, for the benefit of others Pelzer’s mother cooed over him in sentimental terms.

Public awareness of abuse began here in the UK in the mid 80s with the furore over the Cleveland Report, the sentimental public not wanting to believe that parents could do such physical damage to their children, nor make such sexual use of them. ‘A Child Called It’ was published in the US in 1988.

As a case study written from a child’s point of view it is worth reading. That it is written doesn’t, however, make the author a writer. A writer has a love of language, language almost before content. Here content, and the need to convince, is paramount. A writer, writing for its own sake, wouldn’t have let much of the vocabulary and sentence construction pass, especially when purporting to come from a seven to eleven year old boy.

This is not to detract from the document. This was a sorry tale that needed to be told. I’m only sorry that it had to be told. Sorry too that the author saw fit to give it a motivational, uplifting ending. I can see that as a person his overcoming such a cruel beginning he wants to tell of his victory. But as a book the ending comes across as a tad schmaltzy.

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Peter G Mackie: The Madhouse of Love

The Madhouse of Love: a teenager’s own story: Peter G Mackie

chipmunkapublishing, P O Box 6872, Brentwood, Essex, CM13 1ZT ISBN 9781849912372 £10.00

http://www.chipmunkapublishing.com

This is no conventional narrative, delivery far from smooth. Its disjointedness, disjunction however could be taken as representative of a piecemeal way of thinking. Left-justified paragraph follows left-justified paragraph often with no obvious connection.

Peter G Mackie calls it his ‘piano mind’. At least I take it he’s the true narrator. Feels so very much novel as fictional memoir that I had difficulty throughout separating author Peter G Mackie from fictional narrator ‘Tony’.

The tale entire reads like a collection of occasional jottings strung together in an order that probably means something to the author, but leaves the reader new to the subject to puzzle out what and where he is and who is saying what. The tale though more or less covers his admission to a children’s mental health unit, and the characters met there. A new member of staff - I think, it really is hard at times to tell who’s who - said that he is here "...with people all mixed up whose minds are a load of blobs."

That it is hard to tell here who’s who is not necessarily a criticism of the novel. It wasn’t always too clear to me when I worked in such places who were the patients and who the staff: psychiatry atracts oddballs. As to the novel I swung between trying to decide if the prose was meant to be descriptive or if its mode of delivery was a representation of the narrator’s mental state. About half way in I decided that it was both.

The delivery is certainly representative of his mind’s chaos, thoughts drawn in from elsewhere, associations not apparent, adapting psychobabble into his developing intellect, all mixed in with his adolescent embarrassments, angst, misreadings and mumbo-jumbo spirituality; as well as finding undue significance in something worn that day, something casually said, a mundane detail with no apparent relevance to the anecdote being related.

One readily understands the narrator’s confusion. Contact being mostly with his fellow patients, troubles of their own, certainties were hard to come by. Add into other patients’ morbid preoccupations and impulsive behaviours his own mental and physical exuberance of youth, awakening sexuality (theories of) and emotional extremes, where every outburst or behaviour was examined as a symptom and the poor lad stood no chance... Hard there to even decide what love was, let alone how to enact it.

The further one gets into the tale the larger and more cohesive the paragraphs become. But still stilted. Names still get thrown in with no introduction, other details with no apparent relevance. Although these non-sequitors do deliver up some delicious moments of [unintentional?] humour. Come the end, while our hero’s behaviours are still impulsive, his antics and his seeking to make some kind of sense of his confusing world do impress.

If one wants insights into such institutions, and they still exist, then this is a book well worth the getting.

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Glen Lyon: Kenneth Steven Birlinn Limited, West Newington House, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh, EH9 1QS ISBN 978--78027-177-4 151 pages £7.99

When Kenneth recently stayed with me for his workshop stint at the Maryport LitFest we swopped our latest books, my Marraton for his Glen Lyon. I don't think I'm indulging in false modesty when I say that I may have got the better deal.

Written during Kenneth's stay in Iceland and opening in almost saga style, lyrical distance of legend, nature dominant, Glen Lyon is transparently a tale written by a man who walks the wild places, has that unarguable veracity. '....to be out in the hills and lochs and the wildness of it all. It had breathed in him; he felt the blood of the land and he heard it under his feet.'

Such as it is the plot is this - a man with an axe, a simple man but not a simpleton, arrives in the wilds of Scotland, builds himself a house in the woods, meets and marries a girl from the nearby village; but with his own past all the while nipping at his heels, and getting in the way of his present. But a bigger present than his own, a present that the whole past has never left, that lies under and behind every fresh act. Myth, love and ancient beliefs as important as bus timetables.

Bracketed by uncertainty, our hero's escaping of a troubled past, the struggle not to become as his own parents, and a seeking to fulfill his guessed-at destiny, descriptive power alone carries the tale along. Because as with the wandering of wild places this book is full of beautiful moments, places where I hung a step, paused for a breath, beheld a view, a description so perfect....

Glen Lyon is a book whose hero I readily identified with. Ah, I hear a reader of this review say, but you and Kenneth are of like mind, like experience, of like aspirations. You both know as writers how success is of a moment and how failure drags along, how little control you have over that not under your own hands.

I am confident though that Glen Lyon isn't a book solely for writers. Anyone who has escaped a troubling past, who has tried to make something other of their lives will have fellow feeling with the characters here.

For all its topicality Glen Lyon is a work of art. A work of art I recommend be read - indulge me - to the accompaniment of Peter Maxwell Davis's Orkney compositions.