Araminta Hall: everything and nothing (2011) Social Realism and Psychological Suspense

Posted in Books, British Books, Crime, Fiction, Novel, Psychological Thriller, Thriller, UK by

Ruth and Christian are – just – holding their marriage together, after Christian’s disastrous affair a year ago. But chaos beckons, and when the family are suddenly left without any childcare, Agatha comes into their lives to solve all their problems. But Agatha is not as perfect as she seems and her love for the children masks a deeper secret.

I read a review of this book on Lizzy’s Literary Life and something told me I might like it. And I did. It was one of those super fast reads, a book that I could hardly put down. Really riveting. The only complaint I have is that this is labelled as a psychological thriller. Although there is a part of it reminiscent of Ruth Rendell, it is like a background story and not really very gripping. At least not for me. Still I consider this to be a real page-turner for the simple reason that it captures chaotic family life in so much detail and explores some of the questions and problems parents who work full-time would face. I often enjoy descriptions of domestic life although I don’t live anything that is even remotely comparable.

Ruth and Christian both not only work full-time but overtime many days of the week. They both have careers that seem to absorb all of their energy and when they come home in the evening they face total chaos. The place is dirty, sticky and disorderly, the little girl is screaming constantly and throws one temper tantrum after the other. The little boy, at three, still doesn’t eat properly and drinks from a bottle. The nights are nightmares too. Ruth and Christian fight and when they finally go to bed, the girl starts to scream again. She always wakes at midnight and never goes back to sleep.

At the beginning of the novel Ruth knows she isn’t capable of going on like this. She needs a new nanny. And in comes Agatha. We know from the start that something is wrong with her. She lives in daydreams and lies to her employers and to herself constantly. Something bad has happened in her past, a trauma that she cannot overcome and tries to repress with her imagination.

Family life improves considerably after she has started working for Ruth and Christian. She is super organized and makes Ruth feel deficient. To make things worse, Christian accidentally meets the woman he has had an affair with and starts seeing her for drinks.

Something bad, coming from Agatha, is lurking in the background and we know things will go very awry. But as said, this is completely toned down. I was fascinated by Ruth. Christian was not particularly interesting. Just one of those guys who thinks he has the right to have an affair when his wife is pregnant for the second time and is not that much into him during that time.  Ruth shows every sign of a severe depression and what I found interesting is the fact that this did not start right after she had the first baby but several months later. As if the bubble of enchantment that the little baby brought burst suddenly. From that moment on she struggles. I could feel the exhaustion of that woman and I know that this is very realistic. Women around me have mentioned it. If you are unlucky and have a baby that doesn’t sleep well and you need to go to work every morning… Ruth is a journalist and her work is very demanding. There is always someone waiting to jump into her position should she show signs of weakness.

I also hear the type of questioning very often that Ruth utters. Is it OK to work full-time and have children? Is it OK to have someone else looking after them? I think in the book the problem isn’t only that Ruth works full-time but that both work overtime and that she tries for too long to cope with everything else as well. She is afraid that having a nanny means defeat. And she thinks that women like Nigella Lawson are an example for the fact that it is possible to have and do it all yourself.

There is a strange fascination in seeing people at their most vulnerable, when their masks are down. That’s what made this book so riveting for me. And I think the questions it asks are very important.

I would be curious to hear from anyone who has read it.

This was Araminta Hall’s first novel. I really wouldn’t mind reading the next one too.

Literature and War Readalong March 25 2011: The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

Posted in Books, British Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel, Readalong by

There is still plenty of time for anyone who wants to join the Literature and War Redalong this month to get a copy of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. It is only 90 pages long which makes it all the more feasible. If all those of you who expressed an interest in this book will read along we might be quite a crowd. We will see. There are at least two different paperback editions available. I got the one from The Modern Library with an introduction by Verly Klinkenborg. The other one is a Virago edition with an afterword by Sadie Jones.

Rebecca West’s book is unique as it was published in 1918, before the war had ended. She tells the story of a returning soldier who suffers from shell-shock. I am particularly interested in this topic and curious to compare her handling of it with Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy which is for me still one of the greatest books on WWI, shell-shock and the development of the new medical discipline, psychiatry.

I was very surprised to find out that The Return of the Soldier that seems so well-known in the English-speaking world has not been translated into German. The only two of her books that made it into German are Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Fountain Overflows.

Rebecca West was only 24 when she wrote this novel but already an acclaimed journalist and women’s rights activist. This isn’t an account of the front line but purely a story that takes place on the home front.

Shell-shock is extremely typical for most WWI accounts. It seems as if there had never been so many cases of shell-shock in any war as in WWI. Psychologists state that one of the reasons for this lies in the trench warfare. Being in the trenches for such a long time infused the soldiers with a deep feeling of helplessness that makes shell-shock much more probable than any othe type of warfare. The moment the soldiers were allowed to leave the trenches and move about shell-shock was far less frequent.

Here is the link to the Rebecca West Society if you want to find out more about the author, upcoming conferences and events.

The Return of the Soldier has also been made into a movie.

Joseph Roth: Hotel Savoy (1924)

Posted in Austria, Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel by

Hotel Savoy

Written in 1924, Hotel Savoy is a dark, witty parable of Europe on the verge of fascism and war.

I read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March years ago in school and had sworn at the time that I will re-read it and read as much as I can of this incredible author. A while back I stumbled upon a really nice discovery in a local bookshop, a little slipcase containing seven of Joseph Roth’s novels. It consists of Hotel Savoy (Hotel Savoy) (1924) Hiob (Job) (1930) Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March) (1932) Beichte eines Mörders (Confession of a Murderer) (1936) Das falsche Gewicht (Weights and Measures) (1937) Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb) (1938) and Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (The String of Pearls) (1939).

Roth is one of three Austrian authors (the other two being Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer) who wrote about the end of the Danube Monarchy. The end of an era, the changing of the times, is often central in his books.

I decided to read Roth’s books chronologically and started with Hotel Savoy.

What an absolutely wonderful novel this is. Beautifully written, astonishingly varied in style, themes and characters. How can you capture so much in under 120 pages? The style is very different from Radetzkymarsch but not less enchanting. His sentences are very special, often composed of a list of nouns which might have been a challenge for a translator.

I am happy, once more, to shed an old live, like I did so often these past years. I see the soldier, the murderer, the man who was almost murdered, the resurrected man, the captive, the wanderer.

Or this powerful sentence:

I enjoy the floating feeling, calculate how many wearisome steps I would have had to climb if I wasn’t sitting in this luxurious lift, and I throw down bitterness, poverty, homelessness, migration, hunger,  the past of the beggar, throw them deep into the shaft, from where they cannot reach me, the hovering one, ever again.

Hotel Savoy is a “Heimkehrer Roman”, the story of the former soldier Gabriel Dan who after WWI and several years of having been a prisoner of war in a Siberian camp returns to Poland. He is a descendant of Russian Jews and one of his uncles lives in the city in which he stops. He wants to travel westwards to Paris or any of the other big Western cities. As far away as he can get from Russia and a painful past full of deprivations, it seems.

He moves into a room on one of the upper floors of the grand and glamorous looking Hotel Savoy. As pompous as it may seem from the outside, the interior is rundown.

The first three lower floors are reserved to rich people, bankers, aristocrats, factory owners and patrons. The upper floors belong to the poor who cannot pay their rent. After a few weeks their suitcases and luggage is confiscated and they are left completely destitute.

What a colorful group of people they are in those upper floors. Dancers and clowns and people who return from the war or people who have lost everything in one foolhardy transaction. They are eccentrics and lunatics and more than one of them is terminally ill. There is singing and dancing and cheerfulness and a lot of dying going on.

Gabriel hopes to be able to extract some money of his rich uncle, Phöbus Böhlaug, but to no avail. His uncle’s avarice is frightening.

There is nothing else to do for Gabriel than stand at the train station daily and hoping for work. Every other week the train station is flooded by prisoners returning from the camps. One day he meets one of his old comrades the peasant Zwonimir.

What a character, this Zwonimir. Full of life, exuberant, funny and droll. He makes friends easily has a funny sense of humour and detects everything phony in the rich and pompous people around him.

They work hard and enjoy themselves in the evening, drinking copiously, going to cabarets and the vaudeville, walking through the city, exploring the quarters where only Jews live.

I always enjoy novels set in hotels. They are full of interesting characters from the most diverse social backgrounds. In this inter-war period hotels were often the only place where people could stay. It took those who returned from the war an awfully long time to get back to their homes and they had to stay somewhere on the way. Others had lost their houses or just fled the countryside.

It is a fascinating microcosm this Hotel Savoy. The very poor and the very rich rub shoulders.

One of the central episodes is the arrival of Henry Bloomfield an incredibly rich banker who left Europe for America but returns once a year to his hometown. No one really knows why he chooses to come back to this little town when he could stay in Berlin.

While he resides at the Savoy, people cue up to talk to him and present their business ideas hoping he might finance them. Gabriel is lucky and is chosen by Bloomfield as temporary assistant. He will listen to all the stories and sort the valuable ideas out.

This novel has really everything. It is funny, sad, picturesque, touching and bitter-sweet and the ending is perfection. Roth describes people, the hotel and the little town with great detail. And every second sentence bears an explosive in the form of a word that shatters any illusion of an idyllic life. Roth served in WWI and never for once allows us to forget that the horror of one war and subsequent imprisonment have only just been left behind  while the next one is announcing itself already.

I was reminded of other novels set in hotels, pensions or clubs like Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel (Grand Hôtel), Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Assouline’s Lutetia, Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac.

I am sure there are many more. Do you know any others?

I translated the quotes from the original German. Any mistakes are entirely my own.

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2008)

Posted in Movie, Movies based on books by

What a fascinating movie. The acting is absolutely outstanding. We see Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and a stunning Viola Davis. They are all equally great. It has been a while since I have seen such fantastic acting. Doubt is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by John Patrick Shanley which explains why it is quite wordy. I could imagine that I would also have enjoyed it in the theater but like this it was maybe even better.

The movie plays in the 60s in a catholic school in the Bronx. The liberal and kind pastor Father Flynn for some reasons attracts the suspicion of the stern Mother Superior Sister Aloysius. When he preaches a sermon on doubt everything is clear to her. No matter what anyone says, no matter what he himself pretends, sister Aloysius is convinced, Father Flynn has engaged in an “unsuitable” relationship with one of the students, the first black boy to ever go to the school.

What follows is a witch-hunt. The more the father denies it, the more she is convinced. She is such a heartless, strict and domineering woman. She allows no joy or change. Every tiny little mishap has to be punished severely. This is reminiscent of the mother in Elfriede Jelinek’s outstanding and bleak novel The Piano Teacher.

We wonder all the time why she is so much against him, why she does want to see him fall. Because he is kind and she is incapable of kindness? Because he wants change and there is nothing she hates more? Because he points out that people do not appreciate her ways, pupils fear her? She has an answer to everything, she is very eloquent, her speech is full of witty and sarcastic repartees.

Sister Aloyisous and her self-righteousness did infuriate me such a lot until – and this is the true marvel of the movie – I started to doubt as well. Maybe she was right? It could be, couldn’t it? How often do we not hear of child abuse by Catholic priests? We also have to realize that despite being a zealot and a fanatic, she thinks she is doing good.

If you like great acting, you should watch this. If you want action, then rather leave it out.

The movie takes place mostly inside of the school but we also see some nice pictures of New Yorker brownstones and the little yard inside of the school walls. We see the seasons change which is quite beautiful. The weather plays an important role. There are heavy storms, wind and rain that seem to mirror the tumultuous feelings of all the parties involved.

One of the best scenes is when Sister Aloysius  confronts the mother of the black student and the mother tells her that as long as someone is kind to her boy, she doesn’t care what kind of interest he has in him. Viola Davis plays this role incredibly well. A few words make us see her and her boy’s miserable life with a brutal and abusive father who hits him whenever he can.

The best however is how this movie manages to show how hurtful gossip and slander are. It reminds us of being more careful with the things we say about others.

Haruki Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart (2001) aka Sputoniku no koibito (1999)

Posted in Books, Fiction, Japan, Literature, Novel by

The narrator, a teacher, is in love with the beguiling, odd Sumire. As his best friend, she is not adverse to phoning at three or four in the morning to ask a pointless question or share a strange thought. Sumire, though, is in love with a beautiful, older woman, Miu, who does not, can not, return her affections. Longing for Sumire, K (that is all we are told by way of a name) finds some comfort in a purely sexual relationship with the mother of one of his pupils. But the consolation is slight. K is unhappy. Miu and Sumire, now working together, take a business trip to a Greek Island. Something happens, he is not told what, and so K travels to Greece to see what help he can offer.

Sputnik Sweetheart was my second Haruki Murakami. The first one I read was South of the Border, West of the Sun which I liked a lot but I was told many times that it wasn’t a typical Murakami.

It was a strange experience to read Sputnik Sweetheart but not because of the book, I didn’t think it was all that weird but my reactions to it were weird as it reminded me of a lot of other books I have read before. Instead of enjoying it my mind started to rush around like a hungry little monkey looking for food and trying to solve the riddles of the 1001 allusions. If I hadn’t been so busy doing this, I would have enjoyed it much more while reading it but looking back on it I think it is a marvelous book. Unusual, original and fascinating. And furthermore, having finished it, I saw that what happened to me, this mad chasing of “clues”, is probably not completely unintentional. I think the author is well aware of our European triggers and pulls them one by one.

I read quite a few reviews who stated that it wasn’t easy to describe what the book is all about. I don’t think that’s true. It’s a pretty straightforward story and you can summarize it in a few sentences. The problem is that wouldn’t do the book any justice as plot line is not Murakami’s main concern.

K, an elementary school teacher, is madly in love with Sumire, a strange, intelligent, loner type girl who wants to become an author. Sumire however falls for Miu, a married woman and 18 years her senior. They meet at a wedding reception and due to a misunderstanding related to the writer Jack Kerouac, Sumire’s favourite author of the month, Sumire calls Miu Sputnik Sweetheart.

Ever since that day Sumire’s private name for Miu was Sputnik Sweetheart. She loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?

Sensing that a change is needed in Sumire’s life, Miu offers her a job. Part of this job is a trip to Europe. The two women travel from France to Italy and from there to Greece and there Sumire disappears. Miu asks K to come to Greece and help her look for Sumire. He travels to Greece but the whole adventure proves to be futile.That is the story in a nutshell.

The central theme of this novel is loss. In many different forms. And getting lost and being lost, and losing as well as never reaching what we want. The people in this little universe that is Sputnik Sweetheart all chase something. Most of them love someone who loves someone else. They feel trapped and isolated like little satellites circling aimlessly through space.

So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that is stolen from us – that is snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

They also chase dreams that seem unreachable. Sumire who wants to become a writer, can’t write a real novel, Miu who wanted to become a pianist had to give up the piano.

And there are the side stories of lost animals. Sumire had  a little tortoise-shell cat that climbs a tree and is never seen again. K had a little dog, his only childhood friend, whom he loses too. And there are the black cats. Since I am an owner of black cats I could relate to this very well. Many of Murakami’s novels are populated by black felines.

K’s and Sumire’s love and friendship is a very beautiful one. They are both loners and bookish people who talk endlessly on the phone. It is sad that Sumire does absolutely not feel attracted to K. Despite the attraction Sumire’s feels for Miu, K is her true love.

I have read a few newspaper articles that came out at the time of the publication of Sputnik Sweetheart in Germany and quite a lot of them stated that Murakami wasn’t really a Japanese author because there are endless references to European culture. It is true, that this is surprising. In this novel, he enumerates many European composers like Mozart and Brahms, and also European performers. Apart from one book, Soseki’s novel Sanshiro, every book, movie or city that is mentioned is European.

Does the fact that a Japanese author cites so many European things make him less of a Japanese writer? I absolutely don’t think so and believe that on the very contrary,  this is a typically Japanese novel. The excellent evocation of futility of beauty for one thing, but then also the mix of genres (adventure story, ghost story, detective and love story) and the quoting of books. And quoting is only one thing, there is also a subtle intertextuality. Does K not remind us of the K in Kafka’s book? And the Doppelgänger motif is reminiscent of a lot of German literature.

Maybe we have to study modern Japanese paintings to be able to get Murakami.

Be it as it may, I’m extremely glad I read this book and am looking forward to the next one.

As a little visual impression of Murakami’s books I attached another Murakami’s work.

Both paintings are by Takashi Murakami.

This was my first Murakami for the Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge. Other reviews of this and other Murakami novels can be found there.

Literature and War Readalong February Wrap up: How Many Miles to Babylon?

Posted in Books, Ireland, Readalong by

I wanted to thank all of you who have participated this month. I loved the book and enjoyed the discussions.

Even though there is also a friendship at the heart of How Many Miles to Babylon? this book is totally different from Susan Hill’s novel Strange Meeting which we read in January. As you can easily see my review doesn’t emphasize the role of the friendship between Alec and Jerry as much as Anna’s or Danielle’s (and here as well) does.

I realized when reading the other posts and a few of the comments that some had a bit of a problem with this novel. There were different reasons for this. For one Alec doesn’t appear to be a very likable character, he was even called a coward by some. For several reasons I never thought of him like that and was wondering why. I realized that from the start, I was totally fixed on his going to be executed. I saw him like some Breaker Morant character (which he isn’t) and thinking he did something that would have this consequence set the tone for me from the beginning. Another point of criticism which, with hindsight, seems fair, is the fact that the WWI elements are toned down. WWI seems to serve more as a pretext for the tragic story and to write about Irish history. WWI itself is rather just a backdrop. I did not mind this at all but can understand that this can bee seen differently.

I think we all equally agreed that the mother in this book was an extremely negative figure, the whole family situation, as Kevin pointed out, is highly dysfunctional.

What I couldn’t really solve was the question about the title. Why did she choose this nursery rhyme as the title for her novel? In an article on the net I found one tiny hint, saying that it did underline the relationship between the soldier and his superior.

On Wikipedia I found this list which enumerates how many times the rhyme has been used in popular culture

In popular culture

In literature

In film

In popular music

  • It is parodied as “How many miles to Babyland?” on Lenny and the Squigtones– a comedy album by the characters Lenny and Squiggy from the 1970s sitcom “Laverne & Shirley”.

This is quite a considerable list. It eludes me why this rhyme is so popular with writers and I am still open for any interpretation why Jennifer Johnston chose it as her title.

Jennifer Johnston: How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974) Literature and War Readalong February

Posted in Books, Fiction, Ireland, Literature, Readalong by

Alec and Jerry shouldn’t have been friends: Alec’s life was one of privilege, while Jerry’s was one of toil. But this hardly mattered to two young men whose shared love of horses brought them together and whose whole lives lay ahead of them. When war breaks out in 1914, both Jerry and Alec sign up – yet for quite different reasons. On the fields of Flanders they find themselves standing together, but once again divided: as officer and enlisted man. And it is there, surrounded by mud and chaos and death, that one of them makes a fateful decision whose consequences will test their friendship and loyalty to breaking point.

We know from the beginning of this novel that it is not going to end well. Alec is held in detention and knows that he will die. Because he is an officer and a gentleman, as he states, they have given him his notebooks, pen and ink and he writes down the story of his life. The story spans from his lonely isolated childhood in rural Ireland to the war-torn trenches in France. The tone of the novel is melancholic, full of nostalgia for a world that has been lost and is at the same time infused with the profound love of a country.

By now the attack must be on. A hundred yards of mournful earth, a hill topped with a circle of trees, that at home would have belonged exclusively to the fairies, a farm, some roofless cottages, quiet unimportant places, now the centre of the world for tens of thousands of men. The end of the world for many, the heroes and the cowards, the masters and the slaves.

Alec’s childhood was a lonely one. Caught between two parents who hated each other and who kept a polite and icy distance, he was the pawn with which his mother played. He didn’t like his mother, a haughty, cruel but beautiful woman whose strict rules and relentless following of etiquette ruined every childhood joy. What his parents do not know for a long time is that Alec has a secret friend. Alec and Jerry have a lot in common. Their love of horses, their sense of humour, they share so much, unfortunately not the social class. Alec is an only child of a wealthy Anglo-Irish couple whereas Jerry is part of the Catholic underclass. When their friendship is found out, Alec’s mother freaks out and decides to go on a 4 month trip to Europe with Alec.

When Alec comes back he doesn’t see Jerry anymore. Jerry is working while Alec is still studying. And then the war breaks out. At first there seems to be only a rumour of war. Jerry knows it long before Alec hears it and most people think it isn’t really true.

We paid very little attention to the war when it happened first. Belgium and Flanders seemed so far away from us. Our fields were gold and firm under our feet. Autumn began to stroke the evening air with frost. Smoke from bonfires was the only smoke to sting our eyes. Cubbing began in the early morning, the earth temporarily white with mist and dew. A few familiar faces disappeared. War was on the front pages of the newspapers daily brought from Dublin on the train.

Many do not feel that this is their war or that they should assist the British. Tensions inside of Ireland start to be palpable, tensions that bear the foreboding of the things that will come, the striving towards independence. However people who feel loyal towards Britain send their sons. Alec’s father considers it to be foolish to go to a war when you are not forced to go but his mother, out of spite and vengeance against his father, drives Alec away.

Meanwhile Jerry had already enlisted and the two young men meet in the training camp near Belfast in which they stay for six weeks until they get shipped to France. Their superiors do not like to see an officer talk to an enlisted man. Alec, due to his social class, has become an officer immediately.

When they finally arrive in France they stay separated. Alec shares quarters with a British officer, Bennett, a guy with a lot of humour, while Jerry sleeps with the other enlisted men. Still the three of them meet occasionally and ride about the country together.

They hardly see any action for a long time and stay far off the trenches for a while. When they are finally sent to the front line they will spend a lot of their time cleaning and reconstructing the badly damaged trenches.

We spent three more days in the front trenches, mainly shoveling and making props. It rained a considerable amount of the time. Sometimes sleet cut into the men’s bare hands, and at night there was sharp frost that covered the bottom of the trenches with a thin film of ice. We extended the line to our left. It was hard work moving the earth, heavy with water, always crouching till ones back and shoulders ached pitifully. The men hated it and worked slowly, grumbling most of the time. For most of the day there was concentrated shelling of the German lines by our artillery. The shells screeched over our heads sometimes for hours at a time. After a while I became so used to the noise that I felt strangely unprotected when it stopped, then slowly the process of thinking had to begin again.

The cold is unbearable and Alec suffers a lot from it. They constantly drink rum as it is the only way to warm up. Here again Alec and Jerry are caught talking together and the superior officer forbids it. But that is not the only trouble they are in. The Irish are not appreciated at all. On top of that there are rumors of a movement that wants to fight for the independence of Ireland. Jerry is suspected to be part of that movement and one day he confides in Alec.

“I don’t know how you can contemplate ever fighting again.”

“It won’t be like this. There’ll be no trenches, no front lines. No waiting. Every town, every village will be the front line. Hill, rock, tree. They won’t know which way to look. Even the children, for God’s sake, will fight them. It won’t be like this, I promise you that. Oh, Alec, it’s some thought.”

When Jerry receives a letter from his mother in which she informs him that his father has gone missing, he runs off to look for him and the tragedy unfolds.

I loved How Many Miles to Babylon? I think it is a beautiful book. It doesn’t teach you as much about WWI as Strange Meeting (see post 1) but it says a lot about Irish history. I found this look at the first World War from an Irish perspective extremely fascinating.

As Jennifer Johnston said, she wanted to write about the Troubles but didn’t feel ready yet. This is the prehistory of the Troubles. The Irish War of Independence started right after WWI in 1919 and was closely followed by the Irish Civil War. This succession of wars was the reason why Ireland stayed neutral during WWII. They simply couldn’t afford to be in another war in such short time.

How Many Miles to Babylon? hints at all this. But it is not only a very Irish novel because of the historical elements but also for its imagery, the symbolism and the many references to Irish mythology and culture.

The motif of the swans is a recurring element. There are swans on the lake on the property of Alec’s parents, they see swans in France, some soldiers shoot a swan which does upset Alec terribly. Since Alec reads W.B. Yates at the beginning of the book I think the swans are an allusion to Yates’ famous poem The Wild Swans at Coole which seems to mourn a time long gone.

In contrast to the gratuitous killing of the swans stand the mercy killings. Wounded horses are killed, a wounded man is killed…

I really liked this enchanting novel. I loved the poetical prose, the melancholic tone and the feeling of nostalgia that pervaded it.

What did you think of the novel in general and its treatment of WWI?

Other reviews:

Anna (Diary of an Eccentric)

Danielle (A Work in Progress) and here as well

Fence (Susan Hated Literature)

*****

How Many Miles to Babylon? was the second book in the Literature and War Readalong. The next one will be Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Discussion starts on Friday March 25, 2011 .