Review: Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman is the story of a farm house built in the outermost reaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1778. Beginning with its construction and taking us right up until the present day, each chapter contains the story of another generation of inhabitants who live at the farm house. The writing style often reads like a fairytale or fable with interconnected short stories that manage to convey much meaning.

At the beginning of each chapter we meet the next generation of occupants, quite often related or connected to the previous character/s. For instance Violet - a greedy and self-described ugly young girl who reads books as though she were eating apples, core and all - from the previous story becomes the mother in the next one and so on.

The reader notices the shifting times, with events like the first automobile to arrive in town in 1908. The driver was honking the horn so loudly that sea fowl and hunting dogs took up the racket, apples tumbled from the trees and milkweed was blown off its stalks.

I enjoyed the stories of how each of the incumbents found the house, and many of them felt like destiny or fate:

"People buy houses for all sorts of reasons, for shelter, for solace, for love, for investment. Katherine and Sam bought their summer house because they were drowning, and this was the first solid ground they thought they might be able to hold on to." Page 187

The author's description of the farm added to the narrative, and I could easily imagine the turnips, sweet peas, peach trees and summer raspberries growing on the farm; although I had to strain to imagine the red pear tree but won't forget it in a hurry.

Blackbirds - and a white one in particular - keep cropping up throughout the book and they take on different meanings for different characters. For Maya they were bad luck:

"Everyone knows a white blackbird is nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of what it ought to be." Page 154

The ramshackle farm is a welcome refuge for some, but takes on a darker meaning for the locals who believed it's haunted; and maybe it is. The house has witnessed births and tragedies over the generations and some years it even sits vacant. But eventually new owners and occupants arrive who overlook the outdoor toilet and leaking roof and decide to put down roots and establish a home there.

Set over a span of more than 200 years, Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman is surprisingly short at only 225 pages, but highly recommended for readers of historical fiction who enjoy feel good stories where the house is the main character. The overarching narrative explores themes of love and loss while also acknowledging the passage of time.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale

At its core, The Peepshow - The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale is about the crimes John Reginald Christie committed in the 1940s-1950s in London. Christie was a rapist and a serial killer found guilty of killing at least eight people at his home at 10 Rillington Place and was executed in 1953 by hanging.

Tragically, his neighbour Timothy Evans falsely confessed to murdering his wife Beryl Evans (the first body discovered) but despite recanting his confession and pleading his innocence a number of times afterwards, he was later hanged. 'Reg' Christie was a key prosecution witness in the case against his neighbour Timothy Evans, although it's now recognised Evans was innocent all along with Christie being responsible for the murders of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter.

In fact, that was my key takeaway from this book, that in 1969, the Labour Government finally abolished the death penalty for murder.

"The Rillington Place murders had helped bring an end to capital punishment in Britain, making Reg Christie the last serial killer to be put to death by the state." Chapter 16 Dust and Rubble

Kate Summerscale is a seasoned author, previous Booker Prize Judge and journalist for The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, and I was expecting her to provide an interesting overview of this case. Instead, The Peepshow was a disjointed account of a complicated true crime case with many moving parts.

Harry Procter was a prominent journalist at the time of the murders and was investigating the case, although in my opinion there was way too much information provided on his career and involvement that I found extraneous and boring.

The living conditions at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill were covered in detail with multiple families living in the three-storey terraced house all sharing the one bathroom. Racism was unfortunately commonplace at the time and seemed to take the author off on a tangent quite frequently, along with other topics like abortions, loose women, the Queen's Coronation and even the Great Fog in 1952.

Christie buried bodies in their shared garden, behind a wallpaper covered kitchen alcove and beneath the floorboards in his ground floor flat. However the author posits whether his service in WWI and the fact he was injured in a mustard gas attack led to his vicious crimes, including gassing, raping and then strangling his victims. There's no excuse for savagery and Summerscale didn't make me care enough to understand any possible motive behind Christie's crimes.

Jumping forwards and backwards in time, this audiobook was narrated well by Nicola Walker, but it seemed to lack an overarching structure or purpose. Was Timothy Evans' innocence the focus? Or was it trying to understand the driver behind these crimes? Or was it the importance of journalism in reporting true crime?

In the past, true crime has been accused of giving too much air time to the perpetrators and overlooking the victims; rectified in books like The Five - The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. Yet here the information about the victims seemed patchy and an afterthought and I never really got a sense of them or the impact of their murders.

This case caused a tabloid frenzy at the time, but if you're interested in the case and prefer a linear approach to true crime, I'd recommend checking out the Wikipedia page instead.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is the most harrowing novel I've ever read. It's the story of Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans who grew up in rural Tasmania and after a passionate love affair during his Army training, signed up to fight in WWII. Captured and forced to work in a Japanese labour camp along the Thai-Burma Railway, the living conditions and violence Dorrigo and his fellow POWs experienced was nothing short of horrific.

"They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet." Page 41

Before the war Dorrigo had an ardent love affair - despite being engaged to another woman - and he draws on those memories during his captivity. However, the narrative moves back and forth in time (before/during/after the war) without any obvious structure or chapter indications of timeframes and I found it quite disorienting. Adding to the confusion was the lack of punctuation for dialogue which very few authors manage to accomplish without upsetting the flow on the page.

Having said all of that, the writing and lyrical prose was absolutely sublime and often intensely intimate and emotive. Dorrigo loves reading and poetry and I enjoyed his reverence for books in this excerpt:

"He had placed it on the darkwood bedside table next to his pillow, aligning it carefully with his head. He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book." Page 29

Slowly the narrative expands to include the first person perspective of other characters in Dorrigo's life, including love interest Amy and several Japanese soldiers from the camp which was surprising. These first person perspectives of the Japanese soldiers was deeply disturbing, as were their innermost thoughts about their mission, conduct, the lack of supplies and their individual contributions to the war effort. Reading their 'side of the story' so to speak felt like a significant betrayal, and I believe this demonstrated real courage from the author.

"It's not just about the railway, Colonel Kota said, though the railway must be built. Or even the war, though the war must be won. It's about the Europeans learning that they are not the superior race, Nakamura said. And us learning that we are, Colonel Kota said." Page 129

Having spent so much time with the Australian prisoners of war tasked with building the Burma Death Railway and reading in detail about the tropical diseases, malnutrition, starvation, beatings, exhaustion and despair they endured - in addition to the countless deaths - I was deeply disappointed that the author chose not to include their release and recovery. Flanagan highlights some of the struggles faced by those returning home - Australian and Japanese - even going so far as taking the reader to the point of their deaths and the manner in which they recalled their experiences. The inner reflections of the Japanese soldiers sickened me, including the fact that for one character, time eroded his memory of his crimes and nurtured stories of his goodness and extenuating circumstances:

"As the years passed, he found he was haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it." Page 375

Having suffered through these viewpoints and acknowledged Flanagan's attempt to highlight both sides of the conflict, I wanted to glimpse the moment Dorrigo realised he'd survived the war and was going home. This would have gone some way to offsetting the misery they endured, is that why it was excluded? What was it like for Dorrigo to taste real food again? How did he feel seeing himself in a mirror for the first time? Putting on fresh clothing? I wanted to know every detail of the treatment the Australians received, how they were rehabilitated and the ongoing problems they suffered afterwards.

Also completely missing from the book was an Author's Note or Acknowledgments section. I had to go elsewhere to find out that Richard Flanagan's father was a Japanese prisoner of war and that the main character of Dorrigo Evans was inspired by the life of Weary Dunlop. This would have been useful to know in the beginning or at the very least in an Author's Note at the end.

There were so many heartbreaking moments during this novel. The gruesome beating of Darky Gardiner that his comrades were forced to watch - and his later death - only to discover his connection to Dorrigo after the war was devastating. Reading the perspectives of some of the Japanese soldiers right up until their deaths was disturbing and I wanted to cry or vomit when I read Jimmy Bigelow's bugle was later sold by his daughter in a garage sale. Whilst only characters in a book, this was so well written and researched that their experiences and personalities seemed as close to real as you can get. I don't think I could recommend this novel to any reader in good conscience knowing just how distressing the content is, but I acknowledge it is a profound and important Australian novel.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and is a haunting novel about the savagery of war, camaraderie of men, national identity, legacy and the depths of love.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M. Graff

The Only Plane in the Sky - An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff presents a minute by minute picture of 11 September 2001 from the lived experience of countless people connected to the events at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that day. These include accounts from those who evacuated the buildings, those who were trapped and those who survived the collapse. It also includes testimonies from first responders, hospital staff, air traffic control, US military, passengers on Air Force One and more. In addition, the accounts from people whose loved ones died on the hijacked planes or in the Twin Towers and Pentagon are also included.

These accounts have been gathered meticulously from original interviews, recently declassified documents, never-before-published transcripts, previously published books and oral histories from almost five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends and family members. It also includes real radio transmissions from the hijacked planes.

The accounts have then been sorted chronologically so that in addition to the overarching narrative, we get perhaps 1 minute of this person's perspective, then 2-3 minutes of that person's experience and so on. The audiobook has been narrated by different actors who are reading all of these first person testimonials and accounts.

I'd heard this audiobook was a unique listening experience but I didn't think this choppy format was going to work for me. Still, I gave it a chance but was worried I'd find the snippets of introduction before each 'entry' distracting (e.g. Gordon Johndroe, Assistant Press Secretary, White House / Bruno Dellinger, Principal, Quint Amasis North America, North Tower, 47th Floor).

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find this was an effective means of communicating the events of the day and the rhythm of entries meant the reader could pause their listening at any point and easily pick it up again. The audiobook is just under 16 hours in duration and the accounts aren't one offs as we return to the individual perspectives according to the day's progression.

Once I realised I didn't need to remember the full cast I was able to concentrate purely on their testimonies, like this one*:

"As I hit Vesey [Street] between Church and Broadway, the first thing that struck me was the amount of women's shoes. I couldn't understand it. Then I realised women had run out of their shoes, the high heels and what have you. There were women's shoes all over." James Luongo, Inspector NYPD, Chapter: World Trade Centre Evacuation

I didn't know that many witnesses heard shots fired at the World Trade Centre during the evacuation phase which understandably created concern as it was believed terrorists were shooting civilians as they were running out of the building. It was later confirmed to be Police Officers shooting out the lobby windows so people could escape the building quicker but you can just imagine the fear and confusion at the scene.

On September 11 2001, I was up late watching the news in Australia and remember seeing the events unfold live on TV after the first plane hit the North Tower. Images of people waving items out of the windows above the impact zone was haunting, as was the realisation that some of them were jumping to escape the heat and smoke. In this audiobook, a person on the street recalled the sound of falling bodies resembling the fierce flapping of flags in the wind, growing louder as they neared the ground.

You might imagine reading or listening to these testimonies would be depressing after a few chapters, but while I did find it a sobering subject I was also inspired by the bravery and courage witnessed on the day. It also helped me to better understand the confusion and chaos of the events as they unfolded around the country. I watched live on TV as the Pentagon was hit and when both towers fell, and perhaps that's the reason I'm still moved by the events some 24 years later. I'm not interested in the political climate, who was to blame or the military retaliation that followed, but the examples of fortitude displayed by everyday people in the hope I could do the same if it ever came down to it.

The Only Plane in the Sky - An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff is powerful and touching and recommended for readers interested in the personal stories of those who unexpectedly found themselves involved in an unforgettable - and previously unimaginable - terrorist attack.

* In researching the spelling of James Luongo NYPD for this review, I came across the September 11 Digital Archive where you can listen to his testimony of the events along with many others.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

* Copy courtesy of Pan Macmillan *

Always Home, Always Homesick is a memoir by bestselling Australian author Hannah Kent, focussing on her relationship with Iceland and the writing of her bestselling novel, Burial Rites.

Hannah Kent first visited Iceland straight after high school at the age of 17 when she participated in a Rotary exchange student program for a year. Living with different host families, learning the language and adapting to the culture and wildly different landscape was a life changing experience for the author.

Occasionally she mentions differences in language and culture that made me laugh out loud. One of those was her description of eating whale blubber for the first time and her response when asked by her foster family whether she liked it:

"It's like..." I hesitate. "Like biting into a lipstick. Made of fish." Page 74

However, buried deep within the travelogue and culture shock is the genesis of Burial Rites. I read the historical fiction novel Burial Rites in 2014 and was incredibly moved by Agnes' story. Agnes Magnúsdóttir (daughter of Magnus) and a farmhand by the name of Fridrik were convicted of murdering two men in March 1828. Agnes was the last person to be executed in Iceland and was beheaded in January 1830. Hannah came across the site of Agnes' execution while visiting Iceland and later became consumed with the case.

In 2013, Hannah Kent was featured in a piece called No More Than A Ghost on Australian Story where she described her writing and research process for Burial Rites. She revealed that many bizarre and weird coincidences took place throughout the writing process and it was this I was hoping to learn more about.

Thankfully I didn't have to wait long, and Hannah disclosed the following very early on:

"I come from a line of women who sometimes do dream things that are other and strange and not quite dreams at all, and there have been times in my life when my sister and my mother and I have known things, avoided things, warned of things dreamed. We don't usually speak of it outside of our tight trinity. It spooks people. But we three know the feeling of these not-dreams and I recognise it in that northern sea, in the boom of its crashing waves and their spray against my face, and the hidden river running to meet it. I lick my lips and anticipate salt. I wait for a greater understanding." Page 2

The first half of the memoir is Hannah's experience as an exchange student and it did take a while before this element re-surfaced. During this period I was moved by the connections she was able to make, largely due to her dedication to learning the language. Just as in Burial Rites, the writing is evocative, introspective and enlightening and raised many points for the reader to reflect on.

It wasn't a surprise to read she was homesick for her Australian home in the early months, but years later Hannah found herself homesick for Iceland, leading to the title Always Home, Always Homesick.

Other than the whale blubber and hákarl (rotten shark), the descriptions of Icelandic food made my mouth water and I'd love to try the kleina (donut) and the porridge made from fresh cow's milk. Trying to recreate some of the recipes in her home kitchen in Australia years later, the author reflects:

"But the truth is that all this cooking is an act of grief. I am engaging in ritual, locating a place and people I miss deeply, trying to create a little of the culture I miss." Page 151

The second half of the book moves into Hannah's life beyond the year of exchange, into her studies, PhD and research about Agnes. I was amazed to learn the full extent of her research, including more time living in Iceland and the reference material she was able to dig up in the archives and by meeting and engaging with the locals.

It was here that the author began to mention Agnes' presence and guiding hand although I had the sense there was a lot more going on than she felt comfortable sharing in this memoir. Perhaps it was dialled back out of fear of isolating the reader or perhaps the publisher suggested it be toned down, but the mere fact that others Hannah met during her research (like the actress Maria Ellingsen who played the character of Agnes in a 1995 movie about the case) had their own interactions with Agnes makes me believe that an intuitive person like Hannah would have experienced more than she shared on the page. 

As an example, in 1995 an Icelandic medium was urged by Agnes to guide a team to the burial location of two heads from the day of Agnes' execution so that they could be relocated. The remains were previously thought to have been buried in consecrated ground at a church but in truth were hastily disposed of near the site of her execution 165 years earlier.

Hannah's connection to Iceland has deepened over the years and she stayed in touch with her host families and friends and watched new generations born while time marched on in her own life too. Now married with children, the author manages to convey the importance of literature, storytelling and reading in Iceland and it's easy to see how this would have been a magnet to a young poet and writer from Australia.

I was also impressed to learn about Iceland's insistence on linguistic purism which extends to the naming of all babies born in Iceland. The Personal Names Committee must approve all baby names and if a name isn't included on the approved lists and if approval is sought for a name that doesn't reflect Iceland's structural and spelling conventions they're rejected by law. While this may sound rigid and inflexible to some, I can't help but admire a culture committed to protecting their heritage and ensuring their language is preserved generation to generation as the world continues to shrink.

All in all, Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent was a reflection on the trials and tribulations of being a writer, the wonder of language and our connection to the past. Containing next level nature writing - recommended for fans of Robert Macfarlane - in an almost square format that was a delight to hold in the hand, it's also about daring to step beyond your limits and the transformative discoveries and lasting bonds that can emerge as a result.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★