Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

The plot of “Night Boat to Tangier” isn’t what drew me to this book. Two aging Irish gangster wait at a Spanish port for a particular boat to arrive as they mull over the past and seek answers to what happened to one of their lost children named Dilly. Stories about gangsters usually put me off because many seem to revel in a kind of machismo that makes my eyes roll. But I enjoyed Kevin Barry’s previous novel “Beatlebone” so much that this is a writer I’ll eagerly follow no matter what subject he writes about. His writing feels quintessentially Irish. It plays with the meaning of language, draws sharp characterisations and evokes humour through a lot of dialogue, confidently navigates between the absurd and the alarmingly realistic, isn’t afraid of a dirty joke but also approaches life’s big questions with a lot of profundity, veers towards the melancholic and it lingers on the meaning of Irishness itself. Barry’s new novel even plays upon one of the greatest works of Irish literature of all time: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. It encompasses all this and a lot more while relating the story of Maurice and Charlie’s life as they sit on a bench in this strange liminal space.

I admire how poignantly Barry is able to construct a scene which contains a lot of funny discussion that’s also underpinned by more serious emotions which hang suspended in the background. He states how this works at one point when describing “They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling.” While long-term friends and colleagues Maurice and Charlie have a definite mission being at this Spanish port they also have a lot to discuss which hasn’t been said between them before. They sift through memories and jump between periods of the past to consider how they got to this point, the real value of all their drug smuggling escapades and how they’ve become so estranged from the people who matter the most to them. It’s a process of learning how to live with what they’ve lost rather than trying to forget it: “There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness.”

The prospect of a novel which is largely a conversation that veers between topics like death and masturbation might sound too ponderous to many readers. But there’s a lot of tension in the story as their process of interrogating some people who pass through the port contains flashes of violence or the threat of violence. Many surprising revelations and twists in the plot occur as well while they consider periods of the past and how their relationship is much more complex than it first appears. I also enjoy how this foreign port is a location where they can consider their conflicted feelings of national identity. In some ways Ireland is a place they deeply resent: “Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.” Yet, it’s also somewhere they’re fiercely attached to both in its people and its landscape contoured by a living past. The daughter Dilly takes the form of a new kind of global citizen still tethered to this vast Irishness which Maurice and Charlie wrestle with, but her radical self-creation is less likely to be crushed by its weight.

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I’ve been meaning to read this novel for quite some time. Firstly, I have a particular interest in stories about communal life since I came close to joining a commune when I was a teenager. Hawthorne based the novel’s intentional community of Blithedale on the real utopian farming commune Brooke Farm which Hawthorne helped to establish (although apparently he didn’t adhere too strongly to its values.) Secondly, the second novel in Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet is called “A Bloodsmoore Romance”. I’m not sure if Oates’ book plays upon Hawthorne’s novel at all (other than in its title) but I figured it’s best to read the classic novel first. Perhaps my motivations for reading this novel slightly soured my experience of it because the story is more Romance than it is about the actual community of Blithedale.

It begins with its narrator Miles travelling to the newly founded intentional community of Blithedale in the dead of winter. He’s a poet so isn’t accustomed to the rigorous work of agricultural life which meets him when he gets there. Like many well-meaning intellectuals who go to found alternative societies, he quickly finds the practicalities of the enterprise overwhelm him: “we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor… matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.” Therefore, it’s quite funny he quickly becomes ill and spends all his time in bed rather than working the fields or milking cows. But few details are given about the structure of the community or its core values. Instead the story becomes consumed with a beautiful resident named Zenobia who always has an exotic flower in her hair as well as a mysterious young woman named Priscilla who arrives. The novel primarily concerns the mysterious backstory of these women’s lives and Miles rivalry with a philanthropist and fellow resident Hollingsworth.

The tone of the story felt quite uneven because it strays into a slightly gothic or supernatural territory with legends about a veiled lady and tragic family histories conveyed. But then it will diverge into debates about certain philosophical ideas based on Transcendentalist theories or discussions about the rights of women. The dialogue involving ideas about the difference between the sexes was difficult to read because it makes so many old-fashioned generalizations. I felt the same way about reading “Summer Will Show” last year in how that novel makes such broad statements about Jewishness.

There were occasions when the novel would make an interesting statement which would stand out for me. I was particularly compelled by how he discusses people who devote themselves to a particular cause: “This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle.” This feels very true in the way some people can let a certain ideology overtake everything about their identity so that they come to be defined only by this one idea or cause. This reminded me of the main character in the recent novel “Old Baggage” who is a feminist searching for meaning after her protest efforts help secure women’s voting rights.

I also found it difficult to engage with many of the book’s arguments because it seemed like they were riffing off from very specific concepts I wasn’t familiar with or parodying certain ideas like that of Charles Fourier. If you’re well versed in these theories this might have value but much of it felt like in-jokes which I couldn’t understand very well. The narrative also has a jerky momentum to it so I found it challenging at times to understand exactly what was happening or even the meaning of certain twists in the plot. After finishing the novel I even had to look up summaries online to explain some of the novel’s conclusions.

I felt very ambiguous about the narrator himself as well. He becomes so consumed with the trio of characters Zenobia, Priscilla and Hollingsworth that he drifts away from the Blithedale community to voyeuristically observe their interactions and untangle their histories. That’s why this novel felt like it was more about the romance aspect of the title than the commune. Perhaps that emulates many people’s experiences going to intentional communities like this where ideals gradually become completely subsumed in favour of the drama of interpersonal relationships. The trouble is this storyline didn’t feel very interesting to me and I’d have much preferred to read a novel like Susan Sontag’s “In America” where the dissolution of the utopian ideal is detailed in its physical breakdown as much as the social turmoil of its inhabitants. It’s haunting how Miles at one point feels like a ghost drifting on the outside of the community, but I had little sense of how the Blithedale eventually dissolved because the story was more consumed with melodramatic plotlines.

So I felt this was an interesting book, but not a very satisfying read. While I was reading this novel I tweeted about it and Joyce Carol Oates responded that I should read Hawthorne’s American Notebooks so, while I was engrossed in this novel at the beginning, maybe I should have switched books before getting tangled in Hawthorne’s uneven narrative.

The 2019 Booker Prize Longlist

Given the judges of this year’s Booker Prize, I was expecting a high calibre of novels listed for this year’s longlist and I’m not disappointed. I loved reading and would highly recommend “Lost Children Archive” and “Lanny”. Many more of these novels are ones I’ve been wanting to get to, but I’m especially pleased to see authors like Kevin Barry, Bernardine Evaristo, Valeria Luiselli and Max Porter who seem like they haven’t achieved as wide a readership as they deserve. I have read but don’t feel quite so strongly about “My Sister the Serial Killer” and “An Orchestra of Minorities” but nevertheless I still appreciated these two novels. I’m so keen on the novels I haven’t read that I think I will attempt to read the whole longlist. You can see me discuss all the books and my thoughts on the list as a whole in this video here.

It’s so interesting that one of this year’s biggest publishing events Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” (the much-anticipated sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale”) is listed since it won’t be published until September 10th. The judges’ only comment on the novel is “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-discolosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.” Quite often when books not-yet-published are listed for popular book prizes the publishers will rush publication to take advantage of the swell of interest, but I’m guessing we won’t see this strictly embargoed novel till it’s scheduled publication date (which happens to come after the shortlist announcement on Sept 3rd.) In the meantime, I am eager to reread “The Handmaid’s Tale” to refresh my memory of it. “The Man Who Saw Everything” and “Quichotte” haven’t been published yet either, but I think we’re more likely to see their publication dates bumped up.

How do you feel about the longlist? Any novels you’re disappointed not to see? Any you’re keen on reading now?

Visiting Latvia and The Book of Riga

Recently I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Riga for the first time! It’s something I’ve always wanted to do since I have Latvian ancestry (my great-grandfather was born in Riga before emigrating to the US in the early 1900s.) I was invited by the Latvian Literature Platform to tour the city after they saw a video review I did of Nora Ikstena’s novel “Soviet Milk” in which I also demonstrated my family recipe for making Latvia bacon and onion rolls. So it was a thrilling opportunity to see the country for the first time as well as learn more about Latvian literature’s history and authors today. It was quite a moving experience being able to walk the streets of my ancestors, eat some authentic piragi rolls and I even got to meet a distant cousin of mine. I made a vlog about my experiences there which you can watch here.

While I was there I also read most of the stories from an anthology which was published last year called “The Book of Riga”. This includes short stories from a range of authors who write in a number of different styles, but each story centres around the city of Riga. One of the most beautiful parts of Riga is their relatively new National Library which sits right on the river. The story ‘Wonderful New Latvia’ by Ilze Jansone focuses on the character of Katrina who is a librarian in this library (and exhibits the typical introverted Latvian trait where she shies away from having much contact with actual readers.) The story describes how many Latvian citizens have emigrated to other countries over the years, but since the country achieved its independence there’s a refreshing level of new opportunities for people.

One of my favourite stories from the collection ‘The Shakes’ by Sven Kuzmins describes an office worker named Agnia who has a Swedish boss named Mr Jensen. It’s written in a somewhat absurd style as their normal office routine becomes disrupted when Mr Jensen notices a pattern of growing protesters in the city streets. It describes how public unrest is something which slowly builds until a country finds itself in the midst a full-scale revolution. This poignantly reflects Latvia’s history as a country which has been occupied by several different countries over the past few centuries, but who have finally achieved independence as a nation. And I enjoyed the way their unusual office relationship plays out where it rounds back into a normal routine.

Many Latvian writers exhibit a tendency towards being introverted and melancholic. This is neatly summed up in the Latvian Literature Program’s campaign #IAmIntrovert which proudly proclaims Latvia is a nation of introverts. Several of the stories in this anthology reflect that sentiment as well. This can be seen in the very first story ‘The Hare’s Declaration’ by Juris Zvirgzdins which describes a man in late middle age who has lost both his wife and his job and wants to commit suicide by leaping from the top of a Latvian monument. Another story ‘The Girl Who Cut My Hair’ by Kristine Zelve describes how “the only thing that two melancholics can accomplish together is to agree that it makes no sense for them to do anything.” These reflect a general mood amongst Latvian literature towards tragedy. On my visit to Riga I went to a presentation by a literature professor who described how some of the classic foundational texts of Latvia are devastatingly depressing tales. Rather than bringing me down, I find there’s something quite endearing about this tendency in a nation’s literature that mulls obsessively over life’s cruelties – especially since it’s a small country that has such a long history of being dominated and controlled by foreign powers.

I’m really excited to explore and read more Latvian literature now that I’ve visited the country and know more about its history. There aren’t a huge number of books that have been translated from Latvian, but I’m eager to read the ones that have hope to see more appear in the future. It’ll be lovely to keep up this connection to a country where I have an ancestral connection. I even have distant relatives who still live in Riga and got to meet one named Karlis while I was there. Of course, this is the Latvian version of the name Karl (which is my middle name that I inherited from my grandfather.) One of the highlights of the trip was meeting him and knowing that our names came from a common ancestry. So it was touching how the American Karl got to meet the Latvian Karl.

Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Earlier this year I read the moving memoir “Mind on Fire” in which the author recounts his experiences with manic-depression, suicidal thoughts and the destructive impact his mental health issues have upon his personal relationships. An experience similar to this is dramatically rendered in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s new novel “Starling Days”. It’s the story of Mina and Oscar, a young married couple living in New York City who temporarily move to London so Oscar can help his father prepare some run-down properties for sale. But Mina struggles with feelings of sadness which threaten to overwhelm her and self-harm. Her issues with mental health are portrayed with equal weight against Oscar’s no less heartrending emotional negligence being born as an illegitimate child who seeks to forge a connection with his aging father. Amidst their struggles, Mina makes a strong romantic connection with Phoebe, a red-haired English blogger whose presence brightens the world for Mina when she begins to feel overwhelmed by a suffocating loneliness. It’s noteworthy how this novel realistically and sympathetically portrays the experiences of a bisexual character. But Buchanan portrays all her characters’ journeys and dilemmas with a great deal of sympathy that made me feel wholly connected to them.

This is only Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s second novel but I can already see she has a touching methodology in her fiction for portraying the lives of distinct individuals who are powerfully connected. Her first novel “Harmless Like You” depicts the lives of a mother and child in different periods of time. In a similar way, “Starling Days” gives equal weight to two characters’ perspectives and how their personal struggles create severe challenges in their relationship. But the author has a magnanimous way of rendering the daily reality of their situations without making any judgements. She conveys in their dynamic how there’s no perfect way to go about helping someone dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts. It’s not something that can be neatly fixed. It’s more like a balancing act between therapy, medication, attentive loved ones and an inner drive to continue. We see how Mina must consider these every day while also grappling with feeling like a burden because of her condition.

It feels as if Buchanan is slightly playing upon recent trends in literary fiction to invoke or retell Greco-Roman mythology through a modern perspective. In preparation for writing a tentative academic monograph Mina loosely researches stories of the few mythological women who survive in their tales since so many female mythological characters die through punishment, their own folly or cruel coincidence. Rather than creating her own fictional account of these women Buchanan references their stories amidst Mina’s own plight. It creates interesting points of comparison but also provides a poignant frame in which to see Mina’s journey as a literal struggle to survive amidst the beaconing hand of death. There’s also a playful sense that Mina is more able to understand the tragedy in these epic tales than the inscrutable complications found in modern life: “This world made so much more sense if it was filled with angry, hungry gods.”

As moving as I find Buchanan’s writing, she has an occasional tendency to needlessly complicate some sentences in order to emphasize the physicality of her characters’ movements. So she’ll write “Her hands picked up her phone” when she could have instead just written “She picked up the phone.” Or “His legs carried him down the stairs and to the hall” instead of “He went downstairs.” This clunky phraseology can be distracting. But overall her writing has a pleasing fluidity to it in evoking all the undercurrents of emotion within her characters’ lives as they navigate the world and interact with one another. This is most powerfully rendered in the dialogue and communication between characters who gradually disconnect from one another until the reader can feel the sad gulf which exists between them.  

The novel poignantly considers the complications involved in relationships steered by dependencies that are emotional, financial and/or sexual. It’s not necessarily bad that such dependency exists because it necessitates a level of openness and vulnerability that’s needed in a strong relationship, but it can create a hierarchy and possessiveness which can impact upon people’s sense of self-worth. Fully accepting yourself while also truly loving someone else is difficult. “Starling Days” powerfully shows the nuance of such connections and it gives the story a rare clear-sighted honesty.

The Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for Nature Writing Shortlist 2019

I was raised to be a nature lover. I grew up in the rural state of Maine in a house next to a horse pasture and my father’s extensive garden. Years before I read about Thoreau’s time on Mount Katahdin, I hiked to the top of it during a thunderstorm. I spent many weekends in my youth camping and canoeing on lakes. I may not have always enjoyed the mosquitoes, bitter cold of a Klondike derby or back-aching hours spent weeding the garden or chopping wood. But now that I live in a city every now and then I get a romantic feeling for staying in a cabin in the woods or at least spending an afternoon walking in a park. For some reason this year I’ve felt a particular yearning to read about the natural world and environment.

So it seems fortuitous that I happened upon The Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for Nature Writing whose shortlist was announced at the beginning of this month. It includes seven books on a range of subjects including personal journeys and politically-charged messages about climate change. The prize believes that the stories in these books are so important and urgent that they’ve sent a full set of the shortlist to the UK’s Environmental Secretary, Michael Gove, hoping that it will inform and inspire the government to take more deliberate steps towards taking climate action. Many people find it difficult to take action to improve and safeguard the environment until it becomes personal so I’m looking forward to exploring how these authors were inspired to interact with and learn from the natural world.

Looking through the books, the ones I’m most drawn to reading first are “Underland” by Robert Macfarlane and “Thinking On My Feet” by Kate Humble. I saw popular author Macfarlane in discussion about his new book a few months ago at the Southbank Centre where he described his impressive journeys to some deep places in the earth to experience layers of time and connect to literature about journeys into the Underworld. In recent years, I’ve developed a desire to go on walks much more so I’m intrigued to read about Humble’s account of her walking year. She explores the manifold physical and psychological benefits of going on long walks through nature as well as describing people she encounters who have found different sorts of inspiration or solace from in their rambling.  

I’m also quite keen to try reading “The Easternmost House” by Juliet Blaxland who spent a year living in a house on the Suffolk coast, an area that’s experiencing rapid erosion. She witnessed first-hand the cliffside coming closer and closer to the house in a relatively short span of time. I’m also intrigued to read “Wilding” by Isabella Tree as I remember seeing her being interviewed on a news show about how she and her husband allowed their intensely farmed land to go wild and the surprisingly quick renewal of the ecosystem. If I get time I’ll also try to read Julia Blackburn’s “Time Song”  about her search for truths about sunken land that once connected Britain to the European mainland and Mark Cocker’s “Our Place”  which exposes the devastating affects we have had on the wild world. I began reading Luke Turner’s memoir “Out of the Woods” earlier this year, but there was something about his style of writing I didn’t get on with so I put it aside – despite its exceedingly beautiful cover.

Most of the book prizes I follow are focused on fiction so I’m glad this prize has given me a springboard to discover and read a variety of non-fiction books about the natural world. It’ll be interesting to see which book is declared the winner on the 15th of August. Let me know if you’ve read any of these and your thoughts about them. Or let me know if you have any favourite nature writers!

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

I've wanted to read more of Nelson's books since I first encountered her breakout 'The Argonauts' a few years ago. Her approach to contemplating certain ideas and their personal impact is so striking and thought-provoking. I picked up this book (first published ten years ago) because she gave a fascinating talk at the Southbank Centre in London. 'Bluets' considers her powerful attraction to the colour blue, its manifestations in ordinary objects and art as well as its symbolism in paintings, songs and writing. She originally intended its subject to remain within these boundaries and join in a literary tradition which considers colour. But when writing it she also included references to the break down of a love affair and her close friendship with a woman who has become a quadriplegic. Her musings weave through the analytical and personal to present a striking way of thinking about our perceptions, emotions and language. 

I've also always felt the appeal of the colour blue. It has a warmth to it but also induces a melancholy feeling. People have always remarked on how strikingly blue my eyes are. Once I was in a group where we were asked to organize ourselves in a line from people whose eyes are deepest brown to those whose eyes are the brightest blue. The group decided my eyes are the bluest and for some reason this felt like a great compliment to me. Nelson considers “Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).” It's a romantic idea but a ridiculous one. This is part of the reason I appreciate Nelson's point of view though. She takes her research and political views seriously but at the same time she playfully toys with the theoretical and enjoys the teasing pleasure that can be had with language.

I appreciate that Nelson describes how her collection of blue objects feels meaningful to her even though she can't recall their origins or significance. All that's left is their beauty. I think we have a similar relationship to cherished memories of events and people in our lives. There's a feeling that resonates when we recall them even if we can't recreate all the details of the past. She describes how “blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.” Quite often she describes experiencing the colour blue like a sensation that is beyond words – as are the feelings it generates. Therefore, she sets herself the impossible task of trying to describe something which can't be summed up, but what she provides instead are approximations and discussions around the meaning of the colour blue.

Nelson also engages in serious dialogue with writers, philosophers and artists from the past who have written about colour. Sometimes she looks to their texts for knowledge or support for her own theories. Other times she repudiates the folly of their reasoning. For instance, she takes issue with the way William Gass asserts we can't see what we really desire in reality and that it's better to look in fiction for it because there the desire can be perfectly encapsulated in words and our imaginations. Nelson asserts: “I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the alter. Your loss.” There is both pleasure and pain to be found when engaging in reality with all its attendant imperfections. It'd be a mistake to close oneself off to its jagged contours.

In a way I'm surprised I found this book to be as emotional as it is intellectually stimulating. Normally I get frustrated when authors withhold details that convey the core impulse driving them to write about a particular subject. Nelson refers to the breakdown of her relationship only glancingly and yet I felt the weight of its enormous loss all the same. She describes the debilitating feeling of being alone: “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” She also asks “what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?” Perhaps it's not so mad to be in love with a thing that's so beautiful specifically because it's incapable of loving you back. If it can't reciprocate feelings it's also incapable of rejecting you.

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Last year I went to visit Berlin for the first time over a long weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a city that’s still so haunted by the after effects of war. Certainly there is more to this thriving city which is dynamic and fascinating in many ways but walking through the streets there are evident battle scars around every corner. Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that this would be the case because it was turned into a battlefield during WWII and then became a city literally divided by the Cold War. Given these facts it’d be virtually impossible to write about Berlin in the late 20th century without referring to the reverberating effects of these traumas.

Ben Fergusson rightly does so in both his first novel “The Spring of Kasper Meier” which describes the city soon after it was jointly occupied by the Allied powers and in his new novel “An Honest Man” which takes place in the time immediately preceding The Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989. But these stories are filled with so many twists and surprises that they give a fascinating new perspective on this vibrant capital. He captures the lives of ordinary citizens in this shifting political landscape and focuses specifically on the lives of gay men during these periods. “An Honest Man” is centred around the life of Ralf, a teenager in Berlin with an English mother and German father. When Ralf encounters a Turkish man named Osman at a swimming pool he becomes embroiled in both a passionate love affair and a mysterious tale of espionage which completely upturns his life. It’s an utterly gripping tale of self-discovery and intrigue.

What’s often so striking reading about the lives of young people in such a politically contentious area is that the reality of its accompany tensions have become so completely normalised. Of course it seems normal to them because it’s all they’ve ever known. So for Ralf and his close group of friends who spend their summer going to the pool or watching arthouse films thrust upon them by Ralf’s cultured friend Stefan the fact of the wall’s presence is something glancingly referred to as they go about their lives preparing to go to university or pursuing their studious fascination with the natural world. The politics of it colour everything about their lives but doesn’t really impact them – until Ralf gets involved in spying on someone who may or may not be a Soviet informant. I admire how Fergusson evokes their lives fully capturing the sensory experience of this time and place.

Osman or “Oz” introduces Ralf to the music of Turkish folk singer Müzeyyen Senar. Here she sings "Kime Kin Ettin de"

There have been many coming of age novels written about gay men discovering their sexuality. But I appreciate how Fergusson gives a different spin describing the contoured dynamics of Ralf’s desires. He finds himself drawn to men yet he’s had a very close emotional and sexual relationship with his girlfriend Maike who is a fascinating character in her own right. He also has a strong platonic friendship with Stefan. But when Ralf finds a sexual connection with Osman the author evocatively describes the all-consuming freedom and heated passion of their relationship. It immediately overturns all the homophobic sentiments Ralf had previously expressed for a newfound acceptance of himself. Of course, this liberation doesn’t instantly make him into an entirely good person. The fact that Ralf is something of a dick (as his actions are frequently described throughout the novel) adds to the way he feels fully rounded and, like most teenagers, often more preoccupied with his own interests rather than the feelings of those closest to him.

I recall watching news footage of The Berlin Wall’s destruction when I was a child in 1989 and I remember wondering what it must have been like for all those people who finally didn’t have to live with this immense physical and political barrier any longer. So it was thrilling when the reality of this event is described in a climatic scene towards the end of the novel showing all the chaos and release of emotion which accompanied this new freedom of movement. “An Honest Man” achieves what’s best about historical fiction as it makes you reconsider how the dramatic events surrounding a large-scale political upheaval had different effects upon the lives of so many people who found themselves at the centre of it. And it does so with a story that’s both thrilling and filled with sensual delights.