Monthly Archives: July 2021

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Invisible Man’ by @MargaretAtwood #poetry

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At Christmas I was given Dearly, the slim hardback book of Margaret Atwood’s poems. I’ve never thought of her as a poet but Dearly is a revelation. As with her novels, Atwood crystalises those intense emotional moments of life, the ones that stay with us, and sets them into everyday context. This is a wonderful collection about growing old, rememberings, endings and beginnings, passing by and moving on. Dedicated to her partner it is a personal collection, and very touching.

Margaret Atwood

[photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo – Alamy Stock Photo]

The poem I have chosen is ‘Invisible Man’. A short poem of five verses, full of how it feels to lose your lifelong partner. The absence at the table, on a walk, like an invisible man in comic books, still there but seen only by the one left behind, remembering

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions so here’s the first verse as a taster. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Invisible Man’
It was a problem in comic books:
drawing an invisible man.
They’d solve it with a dotted line
that no one but us could see’

Margaret AtwoodBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Tulips’ by Wendy Cope
‘Serious’ by James Fenton
‘Sounds of the Day’ by Norman MacCaig

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Invisible Man’ by @MargaretAtwood https://wp.me/p5gEM4-590 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Dangerous Women’ by Hope Adams @adelegeras #Rajah

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Like Adèle Geras, who as Hope Adams wrote Dangerous Women, I saw the Rajah quilt at an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2009. What a fascinating piece of history, and what a twisty fictional story Geras has written using the quilt as inspiration. Hope AdamsDangerous Women is set in 1841 aboard the transport ship Rajah as it sails from Woolwich, England bearing 180 female convicts to Van Dieman’s Land [today’s Tasmania]. What a fascinating piece of history this is. Geras takes the true story of the ship – some of her characters are real, including matron Kezia Hayter – and tells a tale of troubled, sometimes wronged and abused women, confined together on a ship for three months. Miss Hayter is the only free woman on board and, at the behest of the British Ladies Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners, organises a team of 18 women who can sew. Every day they stitch patchwork, creating the now famous quilt, but also stitching together the truth of their own lives, their crimes and hopes for a new beginning in a strange country. Miss Hayter is a young well-meaning woman, perhaps naïve, but with a strong belief in what is right.
The story of the voyage is told through three viewpoints – Miss Hayter and two prisoners, Hattie Matthews and Clara Shaw – and at two points on the timeline of the voyage, ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. The alternating passages of each women are quite short, telling chunks of back story. These slipped by too quickly and I would have welcomed longer sections. There were also so many peripheral characters that I got them mixed up, a female love triangle and various women with torrid pasts and mental health issues.
We learn early on that Clara should not be on board and is masquerading as someone else. She has been violent in the past, so should we believe anything she says? This matters because Dangerous Women is not just a glimpse of history, it is also a murder mystery. And this is where I ran into difficulties. When one of the women is stabbed on deck, Miss Hayter is appointed to the on-board committee, also including the captain, doctor and minister, to solve the mystery and find the attacker. The number of female convicts plus the sailors means the list of potential criminals is long and the lack of strong characterisation meant I confused Marion with Joan, Becky with Rose… and some of the admittedly low-level tension was lost.
The pace is slow for a locked room murder mystery, despite the suggestive title. But Dangerous Women creates a snapshot of an unfamiliar piece of history; the standards on the ship, and the stories behind the convictions of many of the women, are startling. This is a gentle story about a brutal, difficult subject, told through the eyes of the gentle, well-meaning Miss Hayter.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Almanack’ by Martine Bailey [#1 Tabitha Hart]
‘The Miniaturist’ by Jessie Burton
‘Gone Are the Leaves’ by Anne Donovan

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DANGEROUS WOMEN by Hope Adams @adelegeras https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5hN via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ by William Boyd #WW1 #spy

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Determined to deal with my overflowing to-read shelf, I picked up Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd. Thoughtful with a twisty plot, we follow actor Lysander Rief from Vienna to the trenches as he tries to identify a traitor passing war secrets to the enemy. William BoydIt is Vienna 1913. Actor Lysander Rief has gone to Vienna seeking help for an intimate problem. In the waiting room he encounters two people who will determine the course of Rief’s life in the forthcoming Great War. Rief falls head over heels in lust with Hettie Bull but when Rief is thrown into prison charged with rape, he feels abandoned. He is extricated from Austria thanks to the help of a shadowy British government officer and Rief’s own ingenuity. But he owes a debt and is drawn into the shadowy world of wartime spies. Someone is sending coded messages about essential infrastructure, supply and troop movements to the enemy, and Rief is charged with hunting down the traitor.
Boyd is one of my favourite writers, his writing flows and there are multiple layers to consider long after finishing the book. All concocted with a skilful touch of humour in the right place. It all starts in the consulting room of Dr Bensimon who suggests that Rief’s delicate problem, based on an unfortunate but funny episode in his youth, can be solved not by drugs or hypnosis but by his own theory of Parallelism. Rief must revisit his memory of the incident and reconstruct the story of what happened so that today his dreams are about the changed story and his little problem stops happening. Smoke and mirrors. Rief, as an actor, is adept at pretending to be what he is not and there are countless characters he meets who do the same. He is good at spotting some people who are acting, but misses others. But unlike on stage, missing the clues can lead to hurt, separation and death. And at stake in the bigger picture of the war are the lives of allied soldiers.
This is a book about deception; lies to others, lies told to oneself. Small lies told for convenience. Big lies told to disguise treason. Along the way, people get hurt.
So much more than a conventional spy thriller from a master author. 4* for me rather than 5* because of the slow beginning. It pays to be patient.

Here are my reviews of other books by William Boyd:-
ANY HUMAN HEART
LOVE IS BLIND
NAT TATE: AN AMERICAN ARTIST 1928-1960
ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS
SWEET CARESS
THE BLUE AFTERNOON
THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH
TRIO
… and try the first paragraph of ARMADILLO.

If you like this, try:-
‘Wake’ by Anna Hope
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore
‘Corpus’ by Rory Clements #1TOMWILDE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WAITING FOR SUNRISE by William Boyd‪ https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5hB via @SandraDanby