SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

In the midst of the Blitz in London in 1943, an event took place in Bethnal Green that was so extraordinary it is not understood completely even to this day. On March 3, 1943, when the air raid warning sirens went off, thousands of people headed, as usual, toward the nearest bomb shelter, the local Tube station, a one-entrance location which could accommodate up to ten thousand people within a few minutes of their arrival. Some had come here many times and knew that they could reserve cots and places to sleep for the night. Others just took their chances, hoping that the emergency would not last long and that they would be able to return to their homes soon afterward. On this night, something unique happened. One hundred seventy-three people died of asphyxia within a minute of their arrival at the station, all suffocated in the crush on the first twenty stairs of the entrance. Author Jessica Francis Kane, who found and studied the original government inquiry into the reasons for this catastrophe, draws on the facts of the real Bethnal Green case to create a fictionalized version of what went wrong.

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How long has it been since you have read a novel with a thematic line so unusual and so well explicated that reading the book changed your way of seeing the world? This novel was one such experience for me. Metaphysical, historical, and utterly different from anything I have ever read, Giles Foden’s Turbulence kept me (neither a mathematician nor a student of physics) turning the pages, no matter how theoretical and dense the novel sometimes became with its science. Fascinating personal stories are interwoven with the scientific plot, giving the novel immediacy, even for a devout non-scientist. Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, the novel is a study of weather forecasting and all the factors which must be considered in making long-range predictions, especially as the allies consider the D-Day invasion.

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Author Jenn Ashworth takes the concept of irony to new heights in this psychological novel which rivals Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in its intensity, and it is in her irony that this novel achieves something that McCabe’s novel does not—it is pathetically funny at the same time that it is terrifyingly slow in its revelations of Annie’s past life. In the first six pages, Neil, Annie’s new next door neighbor, asks her if “the family,” especially her little girl, have arrived yet. Annie asserts that he must be confused–that it is only her and her cat, no husband, no daughter. Every remark and every action from this point on capitalizes on the reader’s understanding of real life as the author shows it being played out in conversations among the neighbors and other residents of the community, while Annie twists and manipulates what she sees and hears so that her reality will be what she wants it to be. Ashworth manages to depict a main character with a perverted sense of self and gross ignorance of the conventions of social intercourse while, at the same time satirizing the very suburban society which Annie wishes to be part of—a major achievement pulled off with panache and darkly humorous flair.

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Filled with dry, ironic humor, Quartet in Autumn is a poignant depiction of the lives of four elderly people, who have worked together for several years. All of them live alone, and none of them have much of a life outside of their repetitive and intellectually deadening jobs. They treat each other only as colleagues and not as friends, both in and out of the office. The two women consider the two men to be merely “part of the furniture,” and the men have no interest in the women beyond their function in the office. As a result, they have never socialized, visited each other’s houses or apartments, shared a lunch hour together, or come to know each other as human beings. When the two women retire, life for all of them changes dramatically. When the men decide to take the “old dears” to lunch several weeks after they retire, the four of them have their first social occasion, with mixed results. Pym is very funny, her images and description of events incomparable. She calls a spade a spade, and her ironic depiction of old age is one that no one nearing that age will ever forget.

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Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of ROPE and GASLIGHT, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century. In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters. Set in 1943 at the Rosamund Tea Room, a boarding house to which some residents of London have moved to escape the Blitz in London, Hamilton lays bare the inner lives of his characters, not through interior monologues but through their behavior, their revealing conversations, and their interactions with others. (On my All-time Favorites List.)

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