Reading the World
A Global Journey Through Literature
  • Home
  • Blog
  • MEDIA
  • Rules

Paper Planes and Growing Pains on the Island of Guernsey

1/18/2020

0 Comments

 
[NB: Having already gone into the national status and some history of the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the conclusion to my previous blog review of ‘Broken Ghost, set in Wales, I shall jump straight into the book on this stopover]

As a reader whose school days are well behind him (though not too far from the 1990s when the book is set) and with the wrong set of chromosomes for the presumed audience; I approached Paper Aeroplanes by Dawn O’Porter a little warily…

The basic premise: it's the mid-1990s, and fifteen-year-old Guernsey schoolgirls, Renée and Flo, are not really meant to be friends. Thoughtful, introspective and studious Flo couldn't be more different to ambitious, extroverted and sexually curious Renée. But Renée and Flo are united by loneliness, loss and their dysfunctional families, and an intense bond is formed. Although there are obstacles to their friendship (namely Flo's jealous ex-best friend and Renée's growing infatuation with Flo's brother), fifteen is an age where anything can happen, where life stretches out before you, and when every betrayal feels like the end of the world. For Renée and Flo it is the defining the time of their lives.

As it happens, I needn’t have been wary - from the very first few pages, the author had me absolutely hooked on Renée and Flo’s stories, told from alternating viewpoints within the chapters. This isn’t some rose-tinted school days nostalgia-fest, and Renée and Flo are both flawed characters, but I completely bought into their friendship - I was rooting for them to get together and mentally booed every time Flo’s borderline psychotic ‘friend’ Sally came onto the scene.

The thing is, with a few obvious differences, this book is relevant to all age groups, and anyone who has ever been a teenager… The concerns are broadly the same: familial isolation, obsession – generally ending in disaster - with losing virginity, low-self-esteem, teachers as the enemy or as parent substitutes, bodily awkwardness and the need to be ‘in’ at any cost. This book is certainly as relevant to boys as girls and especially so for the ‘Grange Hill’ generation; where nostalgia was to be found, if not rose-tinted! 

Dawn O’Porter is not one to gloss over the realities of her female protagonists bumpy journey to womanhood – the confusion, anxiety and downright inconvenience of periods are regularly depicted (as a content warning, this book has more graphic blood scenes than your average Stephen King novel..,). These elements are by no means gratuitous or intended to challenge, they are simply told matter-of-factly with various tones of humour and occasional embarrassment (including a particularly excruciating scene cautioning against wearing white jeans!). Sex gets the same treatment – at once mysterious and sought after yet generally awkward and anticlimactic for the first time (the inconvenience of spilt semen is not romanticised here!!).

But that is not to say the main issue, as it were, of this novel is bodily fluids… this is an engaging emotional rollercoaster I really wasn’t expecting. Nostalgia is a funny old emotion, and this book is full to the brim of it. I was at times transported back to my own teenage years (which are much further back than I realised) and every raw emotion of love, lust, jealousy, sadness and extreme happiness as the memories attached to them came back to me. If you want to laugh out loud, feel sad, remember the good and the bad times of this unique time of life, then Paper Aeroplanes is a book worth reading.

Downsides? Not really, though O’Porter’s writing is simple and without any mannered linguistic flair, this is clearly a deliberate move and her conversational / diary-like style suits the genre perfectly.

My only gripe is that things wrap up a bit too neatly at the end and felt a bit rushed because of it. There is now, however, a sequel published (Goose), which will hopefully elaborate on how things have panned out. The fact that I am keen to catch up on the misadventures of Renée and Flo (and evil Sally!) in later life is testament to the charm of this book and its characters.

Next up was due to be an excursion to the neighbouring Channel Island, the Bailiwick of Jersey. However, sadly, the literature of this location tends to be largely based around the German Occupation of the Islands in WW2; an event which seems as embedded in the national psyche as the gun emplacements that remain dotted across the landscape. As such, novels tend to be set in the 1940s and a mix of action/romance for the most part.

Therefore, I am grateful to Matt Fiott, Executive Director of Arts Jersey, whose organisation not only demonstrated that Jersey has a thriving contemporary arts scene, but also kindly responded to my query by suggesting a modern day novel set predominantly in Jersey that sounds fascinating (What I Tell You In The Dark by John Samuel). Sadly, the book in question is not in print here in Australia and proved beyond the means of Amazon Australia or other booksellers down under; so I am currently waiting for it the travel around the globe itself, from an online bookseller in the UK.

However, this presents me with a chance for an unscheduled visit to the Isle of Sark, a royal fief which is separate from the UK and which forms part of the Channel Islands under the jurisdiction of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. It is probably one of the most unusual places on my entire journey - having a population of just 500 (including the nearby island of Brecqhou) and an area of just 2.10 square miles (5.44 km2).

Sark is one of the few remaining places in the world where cars are banned from roads and only tractors and horse-drawn vehicles are allowed… even the Sark Ambulance Service operates via two tractor-drawn ambulances.

Until reforms in 2008, Sark was the last feudal state in Europe. The Seigneur of Sark was, before the constitutional reforms of 2008, the head of the feudal government (in the case of a woman, the title was Dame). Many of the laws, particularly those related to inheritance and the rule of the Seigneur, had changed little since they were enacted in 1565 under Queen Elizabeth I. Whilst passing over a number of powers to the Crown in 2008, the Seigneur still retains the sole right on the island to keep pigeons and is the only person allowed to keep an unspayed dog!

Whilst Sark has, as you might guess, no airport it does have a regular ferry link with the neighbouring island of Guernsey. The Isle of Sark Shipping Company departs St Peter Port Harbour in Guernsey at 9.30am and arrives 9 miles and 55 minutes later at Sark’s Maseline Harbour for just £13.75 one-way.
​
Given Sark’s tiny population one might imagine finding a suitable book to be even more difficult; however I struck lucky with this and found a book which is already starting to draw me in – The Last Kings of Sark, by Rosa Rankin-Gee, of which more soon…. 

Picture
0 Comments

Broken Ghost: A Visionary Tale of Welsh Myth and Modernity

1/9/2020

0 Comments

 
Niall Griffiths’ latest novel Broken Ghost begins at dawn, three people simultaneously see a vision on a Welsh hillside – the shape of a woman briefly suspended in the sky. One of the witnesses, Emma, hears the words: “dig”, “bridge”, “wild”. For days afterwards, Emma, Cowley and Adam experience powerful sensations of wellbeing and contentment, despite their troubled lives.

Adam is a recovering addict, precariously clean after time in a rural rehab facility (which is about to be axed by austerity cuts). Emma has spells of anxiety and is addicted to bouts of promiscuity, escaping into the crush of anonymous bodies; she is also a loving if flawed single mother to Tomos. Cowley is a violent, volatile building-site labourer with a sideline in bare-knuckle boxing who is barely able to read. His trauma and bitterness are empathetically portrayed and connected to the sexual abuse he suffered in childhood. Griffiths memorably conveys these main characters and others through an energetic, immersive mix of vernacular inner thought and long flights of contrasting lyricism by the author.

We sweep through the charged days of a broiling post-Brexit Welsh summer. Emma’s casual online posts about the collective vision prompt a massive and unintended internet response; the news goes viral, and a mighty gathering of people - in search of meaning or God or some sort of high - begins to assemble on the slopes where it occurred. All three main characters are slowly drawn back there. This is a subversive, compelling concept that easily carries the momentum of the novel to a menacing climax. One of the many trolls who respond online writes: “Yes, these are our witnesses; a slut and a junkie and a thug … these three are our Lucia and Jacinta and Francisco. Our innocent peasants.”

By drawing a clear parallel with the Fátima visions, in which three young Portuguese shepherds claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917, Griffiths taps into an interesting myth. If a Biblical event were to come, would it not be – as before – to the troubled and downtrodden? What makes the recipient of a vision worthy of it? By exploring such a theme – though never in an exclusively Christian way, there is more allusion to ancient Welsh mythology here – Griffiths has forged a complex piece of radical fiction, a Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time.

Though we never wholly grasp the fundamental sources of Emma and Adam’s existential crises, poverty and addiction are enough to account for their behaviour. Adam reminds us that “temptation isn’t so much everywhere as everything”. They are both dependent on benefits, risking eviction from their rented homes as their initial experiences of post-vision wellbeing fade and they unravel into self-destruction. Emma drinks gin and tonic in pubs, night after night on her solo sexual manoeuvres. A relapsed Adam accompanies his mate Brownie to Wolverhampton for a doomed drug deal, but before they have even scored any money they are buying alcohol from the train trolley.

Mundanity aside, what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the sheer vibrance of its lyrical flights. Griffiths’ prose can explode into myth and fantasy despite the grim normality of the setting– it is a pantheistic celebration, a Dionysian prayer to organic life and decay. As well as a wry observer of human frailty, Griffiths is a nature writer with a matchless eye for metaphor, whether he is looking at a dying sheep or a feeding dragonfly. So we find here, among all the extremes of human behaviour, the measuredness of an author who can communicate great beauty: “the hills remaking themselves within the gauzy mist … the land itself reaching towards self-awareness and flicking out from itself flecks of life that sing and that fly”. River eddies are “smudged under gnats and syrupy in their coilings”. Scents include “the vanilla of gorse, the pine’s turpentine”.

This important novel comes from a tradition: from the green eulogies of Dylan Thomas and Caradoc Evans, to the harsh urban grit of Irvine Welsh. The result, though, is something new, a passionate response to nature and to the countryside, which is rarely encountered in contemporary British fiction anymore. In its singular and unfashionable way, Broken Ghost is also a question without an clear answer – the fundamental matter of whether the vision was real, and whether that even matters, whether salvation can come from within as well as without, is ultimately the concern of this brilliant and rare novel. An equally rare 5 stars from me.

NB: In respect to the novel’s title, you might be interested to look up the term ‘Brocken Spectre’ – though I’d advise waiting until finishing the novel to avoid a possible spoiler, of sorts.


Reinvigorated by this novel, and the clear mountain air, I take leave of the UK once more and head to the island of Guernsey in the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

Along with the Isle of Man and the Bailiwick of Jersey, this forms one of three island British Crown Dependencies off the coast of the UK (though the Channel Islands are geographically closer to France). The Bailiwick of Guernsey comprises the jurisdictions of Guernsey, Sark and Alderney; each with its own parliament, legislature and currency. It is a monarchy under the ‘Duke of Normandy’ (aka Queen Elizabeth II) with an appointed nominal Lieutenant Governor, and a UK Government representative (currently the MP for North East Hertfordshire!).

Had enough? Me too – just don’t forget to (re)watch the ‘UK Explained’ video I posted earlier…

Given the ridiculous permutations, cost and time involved in getting a coach, train, then car ferry to Guernsey I opt for a three hour twenty minute train to Birmingham New Street (hello again, England), then take the one hour ten minute domestic flight from Birmingham to Guernsey Airport… it comes in at less than $200 and I make a mental note to make a contribution to carbon offsetting with the savings…

The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the German Army during World War II and the scars remain – not just in the concrete bunkers and gun emplacements that dot the landscape; but in the very psyche of the Islanders…along with the small population this has made finding a local novel that is contemporary, rather than a war-time memoir, or action-packed WWII potboiler, difficult.

I was therefore, delighted to come across the recent Paper Aeroplanes by Dawn O’Porter – with not a Nazi in sight! The publisher blurb goes thus:

“It's the mid-1990s, and fifteen-year-old Guernsey schoolgirls, Renee and Flo, are not really meant to be friends. Thoughtful, introspective and studious Flo couldn't be more different to ambitious, extroverted and sexually curious Renee. But Renee and Flo are united by loneliness and their dysfunctional families, and an intense bond is formed. Although there are obstacles to their friendship (namely Flo's jealous ex-best friend and Renee's growing infatuation with Flo's brother), fifteen is an age where anything can happen, where life stretches out before you, and when every betrayal feels like the end of the world. Paper Aeroplanes is a gritty, poignant, often laugh-out-loud funny and powerful novel. It is an unforgettable snapshot of small-town adolescence and the heart-stopping power of female friendship.”


Not being quite the target audience, I was a little wary - but reading it just made me realise how universal the wonderful, awkward and terrifying years of teenage-hood are to everyone – regardless of gender, background or decade…I really enjoyed this book and will eulogise about it in my next post 😉

 
Picture
0 Comments

    Author

    Reading the World: A Global Journey through Literature

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    December 2017
    November 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    September 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    November 2012

    Categories

    All
    2012
    2013
    2014
    2015
    2018
    2019
    Africa
    Asia
    China
    General
    USA

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.