The Quickening by Mari Biella. Review by Bill Kirton

Susan Hill is quoted as the most accomplished of our contemporary writers of ghost stories. She’s certainly an excellent writer but, for me, her work isn’t remotely scary or disturbing. The Woman in Black is touted as a masterpiece of the genre and yet I found it predictable and devoid of the chills everyone seems to ascribe to it. This no doubt says more about me than about Ms Hill, and her fans will probably not even have bothered reading this far in my review. And, even if they have, they’ll consider me unqualified to comment on anything in the genre.

But it’s the fact that others have compared Mari Biella’s The Quickening with Ms Hill’s works that provokes my remarks because to me there seems to be a significant difference between the approach of the two writers and the impact of their stories. Ms Biella makes no assumptions about the reader’s susceptibilities. All aspects of her story, the rational and the immanent, are given equal weight. Her characters and their relationships are beautifully, carefully drawn and delineated. She knows them so well and follows their shifts of mood and their changing perceptions with the lightest and yet surest of touches. Her writing is measured, thoughtful. She chooses the words she puts into her first person narrator’s mouth with care and skilfully reproduces the tone and rhythms of the late Victorian era in which the events take place. Most of all, her book’s uniqueness stems from the fact that she manages to close the gap between the rational and the supernatural which sceptics like myself find so difficult to negotiate.

The vast, impossible distance between the quick and the dead is, if not overcome, at least brought into question. The rational-minded Lawrence Fairweather despairs at his wife’s persistent refusal to accept the loss of their younger daughter. His wish is to move on from the tragedy but the child’s continued ‘presence’ for his wife and their other daughter closes all avenues. It sits at the centre of the narrative, determining its pathways, insinuating itself into everything, challenging him.

His account of the events begins in apprehension. Its slow burn intensifies as the story builds and, as he relates details of changes in his wife, we become aware of subtle psychological changes in himself. Simultaneously, in the broader context, the opposing forces of the real and the imagined begin, barely perceptibly, to overlap as seemingly irreconcilable elements gradually merge and fuse.

The result is a shiver which is qualitatively distinct from that produced by more conventional hauntings. Here, the external trappings of the story – its historical period, geographical location, oppressive mood and surroundings – follow those conventions, but the hauntings are internal, of the mind. They occupy the same space as reason. And, even to a sceptic like myself, they seem to be equally valid.

This is an excellent work, a pleasure to read. Ms Biella makes the ghostly accessible, possible, legitimate.

To Die a Dry Death by Greta van der Rol

Review by Bill Kirton

Yet again, I find myself starting a review with a disclaimer. This book was written by someone who is now a friend, but I read and made notes on it long before I got to know her. I’ve explained before that friendship is never an issue in my appreciation (or otherwise) of books and, in this case, it’s completely irrelevant. Which is very convenient because I’m about to enthuse about it.

It’s a fictionalisation of an actual event – a mutiny far more dramatic than that of the Bounty. An online search will give you plenty of articles on the story of the Dutch East India Company’s ship the Batavia, which, on her maiden voyage in 1629 ran aground on a reef in the uncharted ocean off Western Australia. The survivors, including women and children, found themselves on islands where food and water were scarce. The ship’s captain, the company’s representative and some of the crew set sail in a longboat for the port which gave the ship its name (today known as Jakarta). Their intention was to alert the company to the event and return to rescue those left behind and retrieve the valuable cargo. What happened on the islands is the stuff of nightmares.

And it’s these nightmares – with the imaginative reconstruction of the whole episode, its characters, their motives and the outcomes – which are chronicled in the pages of this tremendous page-turner of a book. So thorough is the author’s research and so sensitive and skilful her handling of it all that it really does read as a chronicle rather than as fiction. The characters are given individual life, their conversations carry the immediacy of the events through which they’re living, and the extremes they endure and inflict on one another are conveyed in balanced, modulated prose which remains clear and restrained even when describing unspeakable cruelties and barbarism.

As well as fighting thirst, hunger and the elements, those left on the islands are subjected to internal strife between soldiers and sailors, men and women, Dutch, French and Germans, all pawns in a power struggle which is a microcosm of the 17^th century’s mores. If the sea has been cruel, those who lust for power and control surpass it many times over. The ingredients for an action-packed adventure are already there but it’s the confidence with which they’re handled, interpreted and realised that lets us share the intensity of all its horrors. We’re dealing with a specific culture and its sensibilities but the rawness of its humanity transcends them to give the whole an authenticity and a visceral realism which we live with the victims. For the reader, this is time travel.

The evocation of the main characters gives the story its urgency, its insistence; the shipwreck itself is high drama and conveyed with extraordinarily detailed realism. The debate about whether priority should be given to salvaging the company’s property or the people on board is not an abstraction but an aspect of the writer’s characterisation of those at the centre of the narrative. And, at the same time, the author deftly uses narrative ‘tricks’, such as when she conveys the horrific crimes being perpetrated in a hospital tent not by direct observation but through half-perceived shadows and stifled noises.

The journey on the long boat is intercut with the progressive barbarities being enacted among the survivors to sustain the novel’s pace and the different factions within those two separate strands add to the narrative’s density. In fact, it’s legitimate to talk not of the book’s narrative but of its narratives.

The story ends with a very clever twist. Before that, though, we experience the basest expressions of the worst in human nature. There is honour, courage, love, compassion but there’s also an increasingly intense experience of horror. This is Lord of the Flies multiplied several times and in its adult manifestation. It betrays the uneasy coexistence of civilisation and savagery, the corrosive contagion of violence. In fact, horror becomes a pastime.

This, of course, is a novel, a fictional account of a historical incident and, in a note at the end, the author suggests further reading. But it’s hard to believe any book could come closer to conveying the essence of this astonishing series of events. If ever there was a five star read, this is it.

Review of Raised by Hand, Lifted by the Tides: by Willett Thomas

'Lil Bit' Lily Dalton's story begins on 'Ditch Thursday' 1953, the day

she almost drowns in the Massaquatta River. For Lily this is the start of 'a strange and fateful summer', the start of 'that period in a young life with pretty pink dresses no longer stem a watershed of tears.' She is living with Miss Beulah, her 'Bubbah' (the woman she considers to be her grandmother) in Arcadia, a poor and racially divided waterway township in Florida. Brief letters written home to Miss Beulah from a period more than a decade earlier, offer glimpses of the cruelty of a time when a young black man could be hanged for presuming to come too close to a white woman. However comfortable Lily and her Bubbah might be, however understanding Miss Dare the school teacher, Arcadia is a community defined by institutional inequality. The novel lives with this fact until almost its end when final revelations pull all aspects of the stories together and remind the reader of the true horror of segregation.

          'Lil Bit' has seen something nasty in the Massaquatta but, because Arcadia is a community where power is despotically exercised by adults over children, as well as by whites over blacks, she is left both physically and metaphorically to drip and shiver in silence. She cannot tell her story at the time that it happens.

          The events of the next two years and all the characters of the township are observed by Lily. This is not limiting but enriching. It adds humour, irony and a child's innocence -- as well as the understated pathos of her situation. Although Lily's understanding is only partial, her knowledge of her community is sufficiently well grounded to convey its habits and prejudices convincingly to the reader. Time passes. Lily's understanding grows. At last she finds a way to make herself heard. She discovers new and surprising truths: she makes good decisions.

          There were times when I found this slowly unfolding story a little unclear and I'm still not entirely sure whether my moments of uncertainly sprang from my complete lack of knowledge of the way of life being described or the fact that I was reading with time lags and snatches. I did wonder whether in fact just a few more signposts would have helped with the clarity of the construction. I don't find flicking backwards and forwards on a Kindle as easy as it is in print format.

          The writing however was a consistent pleasure. Willett Thomas has an absolutely distinctive voice, warm and idiomatic and as the story gathered pace towards the end – and as Lily gained sufficient maturity to make some hard choices in her own right – I felt that Thomas's technique of gradual unfolding had been entirely justified. As another reviewer commented 'there's a lot going on in this book'. I wouldn't necessarily endorse the product description that the reader was being taken on a 'tumultuous ride ride filled with adventure and mystery' but yes, the story certainly did offer its own convincing answer to 'the age old question: What does it take to be a family?'

          I wish I had known a little more about Willett Thomas before I began to read. She is clearly the least egocentric of authors but some context might have helped. I discover now that she is a young, award-winning African-American writer working in Baltimore where she is the president of Write of Passage Inc. This is a training, and publishing organization formed in 2010 to assist unsung and under-served artists and writers hone their craft and to achieve economic success. 10% of all the 2013 Kindle book sales for Raised by Hand will be donated to the 2014 free workshops for Baltimore City Youth. Currently Willett Thomas is writing a novel in instalments for the Baltimore Post Examiner.

          An author to watch and admire, I suggest. 

Raised by Hand, Lifted by the Tides: a southern child's memoir

by Willett Thomas

reviewed by Julia Jones