"The garden of evening mists" by Tan Twan Eng

An audio book.

The epiphet points out that there's a goddess of memory but not of forgetting. Later in the book somebody points out that we may have forgotten that there was a goddess of forgetting.

The narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, a respected female judge in Malaysia, has just retired earlier than she needed to. She's been told that in the coming year she'll forget a lot. She has bouts when she doesn't understand language. "Memories I had locked away had begun to break free like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep these broken floes drift towards the morning of remembrance". After spending so much of her life wanting to forget, she now wants to remember - "I pull myself from the quicksand of memories". She'd spent 3 years in a Japanese prison camp. She was maimed there (2 fingers cut off for smuggling food from the kichen). Her sister was a whore for the soldiers. Teoh became a translator for the camp leader. She was let out just before everybody else was killed. She'd been an informer.

There's a mix of cultures - Japanese, Chinese, Malay - combined with mock tudor buildings. Mangus came from the South Africa, married to Emily. Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, English and Japanese is spoken.

In her 20s she was a researcher for the War Crimes Trials, trying to find out where her sister was buried. She studied Law at Girton college, Cambridge. Aritomo was a gardener - Japanese. She wanted him to design a garden in memory of her sister. He'd only do the job if she became her apprentice. He'd the palace gardener for Hirohito. He taught her the ancient wisdom of garden design. She became his lover. She's warned that she mght be a target for CT (Chinese Terrorists), having sentenced them in the past. Her servant's brother wants to surrender (he gets a reward for doing so). She helps. The new High Commissioner visits. His security entourage say to Cho that they suspect Magnus of helping (or paying protection money to) the CT. And they don't trust the Aritomo either. They want Teoh to spy for them. Aritomo had already given Mangus a tattoo. He wants to give the narrator a big one, on her back - with a garden theme. Having finished the tattoo he disappeared, leaving a letter to be sent to his son. Aritomo was the last to see the tattoo - no other lovers.

Returning to the mountains after 36 years she sees a heron like the one she saw 40 years ago. She'd like it to be the same one. She wants to restore the garden to the way it was, but there's no plan to follow. Frederick (67) is the house-keeper. Long ago she slept with him. She says she wants to sell off Aritomo's woodcuts. She calls Tatsuji, who's writing a book about Aritomo. She shows him her tattoo, saying she'd like it preserved after her death. He tells her that the Japanese used Malaya to hide treasures (the "Golden Lily" project), and that Aritomo might have been involved with selecting sites etc. She realises that her camp might have been a site.

In a framed story Tatsujia tells how he was Japanese suicide pilot and had to abort because his plane was broken. He met his teacher who wanted to sabotage the plane - were they in love? The pilot's father was a plane designer who killed himself in the pilot's presence, in shame.

The CT raid again, taking Mangus and killing him. Emily dies soon after. Mangus hadn't been paying protection money - the gardener had been, for her sake.

Bats were "trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the unspoken moments of our memory?". Fredrick offers to nurse her.

I didn't realise how plotty the book was until later. I enjoyed the book. I didn't like the phrase "light brown in colour". The concentration-like details aren't new, alas.

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (informative, if bland ... The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page ... The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long)
• liketellingthetruth
• maxxesbooktopia (The pacing is not the best part of the novel. I thought it dragged sometimes and some scenes in the novel flew by too quickly. For example, the scenes about the guerrillas went by so quickly that I cannot actually understand the guerrillas intentions and why they did what they did. The scenes that dragged are normally scenes that can be cut out of the novel and it will make no difference in the end)
• goodreads
• an interview, with a sketch of the garden

"To be in the same world" by Peter Kane Dufault (Worple Press, 2007)

He's American, went to Harvard, a non-academic, with poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, etc. Ted Hughes wrote of his work that it's "So fresh and new and itself ... wonderful stuff". I've never heard of him.

He likes physics, in a rather name-droppy way. Titles include "On gravity as a curvature in space-time" and "Un-unified field."

"Acer americanus" (about 6 pages long) has interesting interactions of trees, moon, and self - "Sap is still running sometimes/ as night comes and one's bootprints stiffen/ and overhead among black branches/ the stars bud out"; "'There is only one kind of power,'/ my father said, 'but many kinds of men./ There's only one kind of gravity -/ but there are wings and there are stones.'". The inclusion of mentions of Harding (37th president) is less successful.

"The pony stallion" begins with

In dusty blockhouses of oak- planking too high to leap, too think for their musketry of hooves, the pony stallions trumpet at one another, march and wheel, their tails and manes a-breeze like a massing of flags. They're exactly the same size as rocking horses!

Later the rocking-horse and pony interpretations are played against each other in a way I rather like. The line-breaks puzzle me though. The poem has 4 7-lined stanzas, which don't share a pattern. There's some end-rhyming here - "oak/think"; "breeze/size". There's some syllabics - 8/8/7/8/8/6/6. I don't think there's a method to it.

His "thoughts ...", "Notes on ..." and "Perceptions ..." poems begin rather slowly. For example, "Notes on Nostalgia" starts with "Just now many long for the Past/ as though one could live there. But/ nobody ever lived in a Past./ In the Past maybe they lived,/ but to them it was always Now - / as it is with us - a Now/ more like that of a brook or a cloud/ than a stone's or a tree's, meaning/ they never could hold on to any thing/ or any shape for long, even/ when for their very lives they wanted to ...". It warms up later, but poems like "Scenario" and "The chief writes a speech" never get going.

Other reviews

• Michael Tolkien (Dufault is perhaps one of America’s most important and undervalued writers ... His weighty if not unwieldy book divides into two contrasting sections: the first is a treasury of object lessons from present and retrospective correlated experience of the natural and human worlds; the second is a series of scathing reflections on a corrupt political and financial establishment. Here the well-rooted, hard-bitten pioneer of the first part stalks about on rhetorical stilts. His verse becomes inaccessibly allusive or abstract, longer pieces drag, pithier ones are dry or flat. A problem for me is that the psychology behind what’s criticised is analysed in abstruse verse while particular episodes are presented separately and without clear connection to the defined malaise.)

"Apparitions: a hurricane" by Damian Smythe (Templar Poetry, 2012)

A 9-line poem for each of the years from 1962 (his year of birth) to 2010. Each poem is 3 stanzas of 3 10-syllabled lines, the rhyme scheme being aba/bcb/cac.

I don't get the poems.

"Without you" by Sakia Sarginson

An audio book.

The prelude starts with "It was April when I drowned, a month after my 17th birthday."

Suffolk, July 1984. Faith is thinking about her sister Eva (7 years older than her) who drowned 3 months before (a sailing accident with her father in the boat). Her body hasn't been found. She knows about Selkie legends, and the local legend of a man with webbed feet.

Eva is being held captive by Billy on an island where the army used to do tests. A voice had told him that he'd find a girl and save her. He's awaiting further messages. She daydreams about her house, food and her boyfriend Marco, a Goth musician. There's the usual captive/captor relationship-building.

Her parents are coping - over-polite to each other. We learn how they met, when Max was a trainee solicitor and Clara was auditioning for acting parts having been brought up in Egypt then sent to boarding school after her parents were killed in a bombing. After 4 miscarriages they decided to adopt (unofficially, secretly - from nuns). They live in a 6-bedroom house. They start to employ a live-in au pair, Sophie (French). Faith argues with schoolmates who say bad things about Eva. She befriends a black boy Joe, whose mother is Sandra. They live in a caravan. She begins to believe that Eva's on the island and that Sophie (who's fatherless) fancies her father. She gets 2 boys (one of them Joe) to help her launch a boat to go the island. She can't swim. Joe breaks a limb. Faith's warts disappear?!

Clara is scared that Eva's family will reclaim her. She's dark-skinned. Faith was a surprise, a natural birth. Max wants to move away and start again. Clara finally agrees. She still distrusts Max about whether he'd made Eva wear a life jacket.

Bored Eva decides to learn about Billy. He was a soldier in Northern Island. He killed. His grandad, who he liked, was Eva's grandmother's boyfriend. She informs him that his grandad's dead. She was told by a barman that she was adopted. He tried to rape her. When she and her father were on the boat for the last time she told him that she knew she was adopted.

Faith canoes to the island. Billy finds her and takes her to his hide-out. When he's told that the girls are sisters (and he hears voices) he lets them go. They get back home.

Eva defends Billy. She's interested in meeting her biological family. The barman's found dead. Eva thinks that Billy killed him. There's a big explosion on the island.

It's difficult to be original about the captor-captive relationship. Faith's language doesn't sound like an 10 year-old's. It doesn't even sound like a 10 year-old's thoughts expressed in adult language. Some other uses of language are questionable too -

• "I don't know whom I'm apologising to"
• "the rigid craters of herself relaxing and expanding with relief" - uh?
• "after the rain, the air was complicated" - with smells, but I've seen the phrase and idea used before.

"The Italian secretary" by Caleb Carr (Little, Brown, 2005)

A Sherlock Holmes story.

Holmes and Watson are called to Hollyrood, Edinburgh. There's been 2 recent murders - Sinclair (an architect of historical building) and McKay (a plasterer). In the time of Mary (Queen of Scots), David Rizzio was killed in the same way - multiple stabbing. The train they take is attacked by a Nationalist Scot and a bomb thrown into their carriage. They defuse it and later meet Mycroft who tells them that 9 attempts have been made to kill the Queen, all by young men whose pistols were loaded with wadges of newspaper. One man, Alec Morton, escaped, last seen in Bremen - are the Germans behind the assassination attempts? Mycroft regularly talks to the Queen, who's at Balmoral. He leaves.

They stay at Holyroodhouse, lived in by Lord Francis. There's a skeleton staff which includes Hackett, a butler with a badly fitted glass eye and Robert, a ghillie. They examine McKay's body - so many bone breakages that it's floppy. They find a young girl, a niece of Hackett's, pregnant thanks to Will Sadler (brother of the ghillie). They hear a ghost. The niece says that someone gets money by doing ghost tours for tourists. Holmes and Watson book a place on a tour, finding out that the Sadler brothers organise them.

They discover that Lord Francis and Will run the tours, Robert an unwilling aide. The money they've earned is hidden in the haunted wing, in a mattress. The Nationalist Scot was the Lord in disguise. Mycroft (away with the Lord at Balmoral, where the Queen is), is at risk. Mycroft returns. He and Sherlock conclude that the 2 murders were to do with covering up the tours, and that the assassinations weren't orchestrated - they were copy-cat crimes. Will and the Lord would suspect by now that Sherlock is onto them and would attack. Sherlock has insufficient evidence against them for the murders. They prepare for an attack in the night.

A window's smashed. A crossbow bolt flies in with a note on it. They want their money back. A flaming body launched by a trebuchet hits the house. It's a security guard, his bones smashed by the impact. Police arrive. Perhaps a ghost appears, perhaps in the form of a goshawk. The girl escapes, jumping from a window, caught in a blanket.

Enough plot for a novella. Too many words.

Other reviews

• Tac Anderson
• krauser pua (For the first thirty or so pages it appeared promising as his prose style imitates the vocabulary and verbosity of Conan Doyle’s Watson but then it all starts to fall apart. ... It takes Carr fully three pages to convey the action of walking up a staircase and reaching the Queen’s old room. It should’ve taken one paragraph. This is painfully slow writing made all the worse that it’s utterly boring and none of the added details does anything to add richness to the scene, the characters, or the plot. The only deduction is Holmes recognising the face of a man he meets, a couple of hours after the same man stared right into his face but had a red beard. ... He finds out about the plot because they stumble into a girl who tells them the full story.)
• Colin Greenland (In the crowded field of Holmesian pastiche, Carr's characterisation is outstanding. ... Unfortunately, he's not such an admirable narrator. ... Though Carr's version reproduces superbly the peculiar éclat of Holmes's often absurd but spectacularly correct "deductions", he's a terrible windbag. The mystery isn't much of a mystery, and it's interrupted far too much by explanations of things Doyle could take as read: who Mary Queen of Scots was, for instance.)

"The Tidal Zone" by Sarah Moss

An audio book set near Coventry.

Emma (a doctor) and Adam (it's his PoV - he's the main carer) have a daughter Miriam (15) whose heart stops at school (earlier she'd had "episodes", but her mother had dismissed them). She recovers, staying in hospital while doctors try to diagnose the issue. They also have another, younger daughter Rose.

He has a PhD but only does a couple of hours a week lecturing on the Arts and Crafts movement. He wonders about things/buildings being venerated merely because they are old. Miriam suggests that his interest in history is an avoidance mechanism. He knows a lot about Coventry cathedrals and the bombings (he compares the war-time anxiety of sudden death to how he feels about Miriam). One of the designs for the new cathedral was for an underground "bomb shelter" building. The murals were made by a camouflage expert. Miriam is bright, vocal, political. Adam becomes conversant with hospital codes and conventions - some of the young staff look as if they're "entering a Fun Run dressed as a nurse". Other parents have "broken narratives".

His father went from commune to commune in the States. For him, Europe was more an art gallery than a continent. We're told (I don't know why) about Indigo and Rainbow in the commune, the need to fetch a doctor. He's comfortably off now, having inherited (American, with Jewish parents). Adam's mother died swimming in the sea - maybe her heart stopped like Miriam's did. After 2 weeks Miriam returns home. Adam's father is there. Miriam can't go back to school yet. She worries whether she should be buried or cremated. She may have permanent cognitive deficiency. Adam becomes over-protective. He hasn't had sex for weeks. He's the one who has to deal with the internal politics of universities, hospitals and schools. We see the world (things big and small) through Adam's eyes. He's often the only father at gatherings. He escorts other people's sons to the toilet.

Rose has a bout of wheeziness at a swimming pool. Emma says she wants another child. They make love. They visit his father on the Cornwall coast where he grew up. He and the girls explore rockpools while Emma looks at her phone. They think about holidays - "like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison".

Adam's explanation to Rose about what happened to Miriam at school repeats much of what we've already been told, which doesn't seem quite right. Other episodes are re-told too - not from a startlingly new PoV, but prefixed by "Once upon a time" with self-consciously narratological asides. And Adam ruminates. I know something about the internal politics of universities and hospitals, so those parts seemed rather tame to me. I didn't understand the fable at the end - the book hasn't used them before. Adam's father's life story is of some use to the main theme but I think that could have been reported in a paragraph without the father needing to appear.

Other reviews

• Penelope Lively
• Mandy Wright
• ellethinks (Adam and his wife Emma exist in our world, where their division of household labour is viewed as progressive and vaguely alien ... weaving poetic interstices among the episodes of action that draw them all together, give the reader a chance to breathe. The Tidal Zone is full of social commentary that passes off so casually, usually in dialogue and quite often in sarcasm, that you don’t see it until it’s already happened.)
• thefictionfox (What could have easily become a melodramatic or overly-heavy slog was kept light through its relatable and likable characters. Most easy to like is Miriam herself, as a smart and sassy teen, who doesn’t take any over-protective “bullshit” from her dad. But cautious and protective stay-at-home dad Adam, and rational Emma who uses her medical knowledge as a GP to build up a wall, also make for a lovable cast. ... some minor pacing-issues around the 60%-mark)
• Rebecca Foster (Just as tidal pools mark the boundary between the land and the sea, this novel probes the liminal space between survival and death ... The extraordinary first chapter opens with “Once upon a time” and narrates the quotidian miracles of conception, pregnancy, birth and child development before making this personal, proceeding from “the girl” to “you” and finally to “I” in the second chapter. On several (perhaps one too many) occasions Moss repeats that fairytale opener ... I felt a bit too much time was spent on Adam’s father, and in the back of my mind was the niggling thought that this First World family is never facing true disaster because they have all kinds of safety nets in place; Moss’s is a very middle-class vision. I also think some readers could struggle with the slight aimlessness of the plot, though by the end you do get the sense that the characters are looking to the future in simple ways.)

"Towards the waiting sun" by Glen Cavaliero (Poetry Salzburg, 2011)

Poems from Granta, Poetry Salzburg Review and Delta, though he's had other things in The New Yorker, PN Review, Stand and the TLS (he's a fellow of the RSL).

In the introduction, Peter Scupham writes that "In a poetic climate which is choc-a-bloc with relativism ... this collection obstinately assumes the need for poetry to move the human heart". The 4 sections are "Dissolution", "Unlucky Numbers", "Here and There" and "Springboard".

There's quite a range of difficulty - of language and allusion. This stanza for example starts simply enough, but the meaning of the final 2 lines is lost on me.

But spring's a cheat, old men agree, and sagely they eschew the whore, repenting of their little spree and doing crosswords as before, though some of them resent their loss since life itself prevents their rest - hosanna knowledge of the cross constricted to the second best. ("Lament")

Some of the pieces are easy-going - knowingly so sometimes, though not in this poem (from the "Here and There" section, which is the lightest of the 4) -

August here's not bad, the fields are golden, spread like enormous rugs around the contours of a bulge in the ground you would not call a hill. ... The elms are all down of course that used to stand beside the church. And that's marooned in a field Nobody wants to cross ("Thingworth")

"Crosswords" might be very clever/cryptic. I don't understand it. I don't understand "Left about Turn". And the following from "Among the Farthest Hebrides" sounds stodgy

Forlorn in the salty gale I retain the bitter sense that though I am watched whichever way I turn everything that I know and feel would still be met with an indifference so complete as to annihilate all but the safety of the dead