The Chapel at the Edge of the World

Synopsis: Emilio and Rosa are childhood sweethearts, engaged to be married. But it is 1942 and the war has taken Emilio far from Italy, to a tiny Orkney island where he is a POW. Rosa must wait for him to return and help her mother run the family hotel on the shores of Lake Como, in Italy. Feeling increasingly frustrated with his situation, Emilio is inspired by the idea of building a chapel on the barren island. The prisoners band together to create an extraordinary building out of little more than salvaged odds and ends and homemade paints. Whilst Emilio's chapel will remain long after the POW camp has been left to the sheep, will his love for Rosa survive the hardships of war and separation? For Rosa is no longer the girl that he left behind. She is being drawn further into the Italian resistance movement and closer to danger, as friendships and allegiances are ever complicated by the war. Human perseverance and resilience are at the heart of this strong debut and the small Italian chapel remains, as it does in reality on the island of Lamb's Holm, as a symbol of these qualities.

Review: This was a bit of a slow burner, in fact I'm not sure it ever caught fire. It took me quite a long time to get the characters fixed in my mind and I don't think I ever understood them completely but then I think that was a reflection of the austere times they were living in, they were quite secretive and introspective. Emilio is sent abroad to Africa to fight for Mussolini during WWII and his fiancé - Rosa - is left behind in Lake Como. Emilio and his fellow soldiers are soon captured and are due to be transported as POW's to India but fearing another hot climate, along with it's attendant flies and disease, he is able to wangle a favour from a British corporal (Emilio is a painter and becomes popular among his captors by painting little portraits of their loved one's from photo's) and secures a place on a ship bound for the Orkney Islands, Scotland (to work on the Churchill Barriers.) Struggling to cope with heat is one thing but the alternative proves to be, if anything, more oppressive. When they land at Orkney they are overwhelmed by the sheer desolation of the place, it's the colour of concrete and the wind, which blows fiercely every day, is like a wall that hits you in the face every time you turn a corner. The sky and sea are a mutinous grey, the temperatures are freezing and the landscape is barren and flat as no trees can survive. It's a million miles away from the beauty and climate of Lake Como.

Rosa meanwhile is at home, both living with and helping out her mother at their hotel. She is a little confused regarding her feelings for Emilio, she thinks about his return and their marriage and feels suffocated by it. Italy is now under German occupation and everyone's movements are watched. The hotel is a favourite haunt of the German officers so caution is needed. Rosa finds a job at a little print shop and there meets a childhood friend of hers and Emilio's - Pietro - with whom she becomes incredibly close and it's through this friendship that she learns of, and becomes involved with, resistance work. Her little errands for the resistance become increasingly risky especially as there is a German officer at the hotel who has taken a shine to her and who always seems to be watching.

Rosa's letters to Emilio become more and more general and less and less personal, letters about the hotel guests and the local flora and fauna. Emilio is depressed and demoralized but a small ray of light occurs when the new CO of the camp announces that they can convert an old Nissan hut into a chapel. Nobody is particularly excited by this but Emilio is inspired when he reads a newspaper article about a girl who made a wedding dress out of seaweed and custard powder. His enthusiasm soon rubs off on the others and they begin work on the transformation. Not only will it give them somewhere to worship it will give them something to do as they wait to be transported back home. By this time they are no longer prisoners in the official sense but, Germany still has occupation of Italy, and there is no knowing how long it will be before they return home. Hopes are raised and dashed continually.

It was a good read, nothing particularly enthralling but quietly compelling in it's own way. I didn't feel there was enough descriptions of how the POW's built the exquisite little chapel, when you look at the pictures of the real chapel it's just breathtaking. That prisoners could create such a beautiful work of art out of nothing but scraps and salvage is amazing and should have been described in more detail. Also I felt some of the sting went out of the tale by having the aged Rosa and Emilio talking at the beginning of the book ... obviously you knew that nothing particularly catastrophic was going to befall them. The book cover however is beautiful, probably my favourite so far.

The Book of Lost Things

Synopsis: 'Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother ...' As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves and monsters, his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things.

Review: This is the sort of book I really enjoy, one where you can let your imagination take flight. The story is set during WWII and centralises around David, a young boy who is struggling to come to terms with his mother's death and his father's re-marriage to Rose. He has a new little brother too - Georgie - to whom he feels jealous and resentful. His feelings are all muddled, he feels rejected and ignored and nearly everything he loved has become lost to him. Just when he might have been able to have his father all to himself along have come Rose and Georgie. David begins to have attacks .. black-outs which leave him hearing strange sounds and amongst these is the voice of his mother calling .. his books have begun to whisper too. David and his father have moved out of London to escape the bombing and into Rose's house so all familiarity has gone, his new bedroom is a little attic room filled with strange books which also murmur and grumble as they rub shoulders with David's own books... the fairy tales in these richly illustrated books intrigue David ... they seem more sinister than the tales he is used to and he is visited in his dreams by the Crooked Man who says 'we are waiting - welcome your majesty - all hail the new King.'

Following an argument with Rose, a particularly hurt and resentful David follows the sound of his mothers calls outside to the garden where he sees a German bomber hurtling towards him as it falls stricken from the sky. In order to escape a collision David dives, Alice style, through a gap in the garden wall to emerge in a land where the fairy tales in the books he's been reading have come to life. And the Crooked Man (an even more malevolent version of Rumpelstiltskin who can travel between worlds), is waiting for him there.

This is a typical boy to man journey but told in a unique way. It's easy to see the parallels between David's real life troubles and this perilous quest to rescue his mother (or keep her memory alive in another sense.) There are problems and riddles to be solved and a lot of lessons to learn and growing up to be done. Along his journey David encounters some well known fairytale figures, but they're slightly skewed and sinister versions of the tales we love .. we're more in the realm of Angela Carter and Grimm here than Disney. There are wolves, loups (half human/half wolves .. Little Red Riding Hood enjoyed the company of wolves much more than we were led to believe apparently), harpies, trolls, the animal mutilating huntress and witches who have a fondness for the flesh of children but there's also the odd comical tale .. like the one featuring Snow White who is as un-Disneyesque as can be .. in fact she's an obese harridan who is plaguing the life out of the dwarves .. and also characters that want to help David like the Woodsman and the Knight. And all the while as David makes his way towards the Fortress of Thorns where he feels sure his mother is, the Crooked Man is following, keeping David in view, is some cases keeping him from harm, for he has a darker much more treacherous purpose for him.

I am at my happiest engrossed in adult fairy stories, and this was another nice chunk of escapism, it's easy to read but that's because it's so engaging. It's not for children .. unless they are quite robust as there's a fair amount of violence and gore, although I suppose it does still read very much like a childrens book, just a very dark one. It doesn't quite go as far in originality and twisted storytelling as Neil Gaiman but it's very much in that vein.

Mudbound

Synopsis: When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

Review: I really enjoyed this one, great storytelling and a good cast of characters. From the first paragraph I was hooked.

'Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep. Any shallower and the corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood: 'Howdy boys! Remember me?' The thought of it kept us digging even after the blisters on our palms had burst, re-formed and burst again. Every shovelful was agony - the old man, getting in his last licks. Still, I was glad of the pain. It shoved away thought and memory.'

The story is told from the viewpoint of six characters - Jamie, Laura, Ronsel, Florence, Henry and Hap and they each have their own alternate chapters. It starts with the burial and then we go back to find out what happened to bring them to this point. Laura is city born and bred, at 31 she thought she was on the shelf forever, 'a spinster well on my way to petrifaction' but then she meets Henry McAllan. They marry and have two children but Henry's love of rural life soon leads him to buy a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta and Laura is given two weeks to prepare for their new life. Unfortunately, it won't just be the four of them, Henry's Pappy is to join them there. Pappy is the most snide, sly, malicious, hate filled old man that you could ever be saddled with as a father in law. They christen the farm Mudbound ... 'When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of my house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.'

Whilst Henry is nothing like as bad as his Pappy, he does share some of his unphilanthropic views. Henry's younger brother Jamie however is entirely different, he's charming, handsome and just that little bit wild and unpredictable. Despite the differences in their temperament Henry idolises his brother and Laura too finds herself attracted to him. Jamie's been away fighting in WW2 and has only lately joined Henry, Pappy and Laura at Mudbound. Hap and Florence are sharecroppers on Henry's farm, their son Ronsel has also been away fighting in WW2 but when he comes back home to Mississippi he finds nothing has changed. He finds black folk are still picking cotton, begging white folk's pardon and riding in the backs of buses. This is at odds with the relative freedom he has become used to in Europe, people were curious there because they were not used to seeing black people but once they became accustomed to him he was treated as an equal.

As well as racism of the dirtiest and most bigoted kind there is also polite racism, Laura comes to like and respect Florence but there are limits ... 'This is not to say that I thought of Florence and her family as equal to me and mine. I called her Florence and she called me Miz McAllan. She and Lilly May didn't use our outhouse, but did their business in the bushes out back. And when we sat down to the noon meal, the two of them ate outside on the porch.' ... The racial tension builds and builds in a land where the Klan are still very much in operation. Because of their shared wartime experiences Jamie and Ronsel become friends but this ultimately put's them, Ronsel especially, in great danger.

The ending is shocking and unsettling but you really do feel it coming and so it's not entirely unexpected. The author really breathes life into her characters and places, I felt like I knew the people well (all of those that narrated anyway) and could envisage Mudbound in all it's mud soaked, storm battered, soul sucking glory. A difficult read because of the subject matter but a totally engrossing one.

Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Synopsis: 'An astonishing feat' - "The Times". A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive - a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.

Review: You're either going to love this book or hate it, there's no middle ground. It's a book essentially about the holocaust but approached from an unusual angle.There are lots of main characters but the two that you are mainly focused on are a young American writer called Jonathan Safran Foer (which was odd .. this caught me out straight away, because of course it's the name of the author and I kept trying to get my head around that) and Alex Perchova, a young man from the Ukraine. Jonathan is travelling through the Ukraine on a journey to find out what happened to his Ukranian ancestors during the German occupation. In particular he is looking for a woman called Augustine, who he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazi's.

Alex, is to act as Jonathan's guide and translator, along with his crusty old grandfather who, despite claiming to be blind, drives the vehicle across the Ukraine cursing and swearing at the Jew (Jonathan) and refusing to believe that his dog ... Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior .. is named after a Jew. Alex never entirely passes on his grandfather's outrageous comments to Jonathan, he tries to pass them off as something else. Alex has his own problems with the English language, frankly he murders it (think Borat) .. 'I am not first rate with English. In Russian my ideas are asserted abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium'. Alex is fantastic, I loved his character, he's like an eager to please, overly enthusiastic, puppy dog, but one who is suffering ill treatment at home despite all his bravura and crassness. Later on in the book, as Alex learns more about life and his own ancestors, we see a different side to him, the side he's been covering up with brashness and boasting but to begin with he has all the enthusiasm of youth and hopeful expectations. He thinks that the world's greatest documentary is 'The making of Thriller' and claims to have had many lovers. He has also 'given abnormally many thoughts to altering residences to America when I am more aged' in order to train as an accountant. He keeps mentioning how his grandfather is 'retarded', only it turns out he means retired. And he absolutely adores his little brother who he calls 'little Igor'.

The story takes on many different forms and bounces back and forth between eras. Firstly there is the road trip mentioned above, secondly, and quite separate, Jonathan is narrating a fictional history of his ancestors from Trachimbrod stretching right back to the 1700's. This part has a touch of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez's about it, it's very lyrical and surreal (one of the chapters is called 'The Book of Recurrent Dreams 1791'. The congregation of 'The Slouching Synagogue' or 'slouchers' as they were called, are now on volume IV of the book of recurrent dreams and adding to it all the time .. during this meeting they add the following ...

4: 512 The dream of sex without pain
4: 513 The dream of angels dreaming of men
4: 514 The dream of, as silly as it sounds, flight
4: 515 The dream of the waltz of feast, famine and feast
4: 516 The dream of disembodied birds
4: 517 The dream of falling in love, marriage and death
4: 518 The dream of perpetual motion
4: 519 The dream of low windows
4: 520 The dream of safety and peace
4: 521 The dream of disembodied birds (again)
4: 522 The dream of meeting your younger self
4: 523 The dream of animals two by two
4: 524 The dream of I won't be ashamed
4: 525 The dream that we are our fathers

... some of these dreams, in fact most of them, are elaborated upon.) Thirdly are the letters that pass between Alex and Jonathan which are perhaps amongst the funniest parts of the book, though they become more poignant with time. It's not necessarily written chronologically, you sometimes read letter's referring to events that happened on the road trip before you have actually read about that part of the road trip and also Alex's letters refer to Jonathan's novel, Alex reads the pieces as we do and then comments on them. For bears of very small brain it can be confusing and I did find myself re-reading parts on a regular basis.

I enjoyed it immensely and would recommend it to those who like something a little bit different. Not everyone is going to enjoy it, it's hard going in parts and some people may feel that it's a touch pretentious or overly ambitious. Also it contains lots of graphic content, but overall I thought it was well worth the effort.