list.co.uk/books
SOCIAL DRAMA DES DILLON An Experiment in Compassion (Luath) ●●●●●
It takes one to know one, we’re told, and Des Dillon’s painfully honest account of living with alcoholism certainly bears that out. It’s 20 years since the Coatbridge-born author hopped on the wagon, yet the words he writes on the subject are as raw and sensitive as a freshly opened wound. The ‘experiment’ in question takes place largely between two brothers, Stevie and Danny. The former a recovering alcoholic, the latter living from one trip to the booze aisle at Asda to the next. Compassion also pours forth from their friends and family; though often misguided it’s always heartfelt.
As the story unfolds, Dillon moves forwards and backwards in time, slowly painting portraits of victims of abuse, neglect or simply circumstance, who find comfort in the warm flow of alcohol. Yet in amongst the violence and paranoia lies hope, love and a great deal of wit. And it is this that Dillon captures so truthfully: the backstory behind the Buckfast. (Kelly Apter)
Books REVIEWS
SHORT STORIES ALAN BENNETT Smut (Profile/Faber) ●●●●● In an interview last year, Alan Bennett (76), admitted that as he grew older he cares less and less what people think about him. He wasn’t referring to beastly reviewers and their beastly reviews, but to those who might be shocked at the
increasingly overt depictions of sex in his work. Smut with its ‘two unseemly stories’ cranks up this heat to 11.
In ‘The Greening of Mrs Donaldson’, we meet a pleasant middle-class widow who believes her own marriage would have been pretty much like she imagined many others: good to start with, then ok, and finally stultifyingly dull until the release of one partner’s death broke the tedium. To alleviate her widowhood stasis, she does a bit of acting at her local hospital, throwing herself into various afflictions for the benefit of trainee medics and the pompous Doctor Ballantyne, who clearly has a thing for Mrs D. But the filth only begins when, against the strict wishes of her naggy daughter Gwen, she takes two students in as lodgers. Struggling to pay the rent, they suggest a novel solution. For ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’, we meet a typically
surface-dull Bennett creation. Graham Forbes is a banker whose mother is disappointed in his choice of wife, though it’s unlikely she’d prefer to know that he has long been paying men for sex. At the same time, her own husband keeps her away from the internet so she remains unaware of his secret life. Both tales gently shine a light onto the darkness which exists behind the curtains of many conventional suburban homesteads, but lack a sense of urgency and drive. Bennett may have thrown off certain shackles but it has resulted in his trademark wit being sadly clamped. (Brian Donaldson)
FAMILY DRAMA EDWARD ST AUBYN At Last (Picador) ●●●●● The conclusion of St Aubyn’s Melrose family saga, At Last is car-crash fiction. As much as you disgusted by his boorish upper-class creations, their eccentric mores are still gripping. The clan and its extended oddballs have gathered up through the narrative eyes of Patrick Melrose to ‘mourn’ his mother Eleanor.
The cold beating heart of this finale is the long- dead patriarch David, whose idea of fatherly love was incestuous rape and throwing a toddler into the deep end. Yet, Patrick’s real scorn is reserved for the women in his life: his freshly deceased mother for leaving him in his father’s brutal hands; separated wife Mary who takes the duty of planning the funeral away from Patrick; a teasing waitress at the post-funeral bash: ‘pointless bitches’ the lot of them. Occasionally entertaining and enlivened by St Aubyn’s jaunty prose, At Last is undermined by a loathsome cast. (Brian Donaldson)
FICTIONAL MEMOIR JANE HARRIS Gillespie and I (Faber) ●●●●● We first meet Harriet Baxter in 1933 Bloomsbury, as our elderly narrator embarks on her memoir. The focus from the off is on a magical encounter with ‘soulmate’ Ned Gillespie, Baxter soon becoming deeply embroiled in the lives of this talented young artist and his friends and family. For Jane Harris’ second novel, she guides us, as Baxter, between contemporary London and 1880s Glasgow in a warm, conversational style with lyrical descriptions of Scottish streets and scenery. But before long, sinister undertones are hinted at and clues are
CRIME THRILLER DENISE MINA The End of the Wasp Season (Orion) ●●●●●
Denise Mina continually fights the war on Scottish crime cliché in terms of prose, plot and characterisation. This second DS Alex Morrow novel is a consolidation of her recent move towards the mainstream, in which the author still manages to spring surprises. This is not a conventional whodunit – the reader knows the perpetrator’s identity from the start. Instead, Mina concentrates on the complex psychological motivations of her cast of characters, something she does brilliantly. A glamorous young woman is murdered in her
cleverly planted; all building the tension for the tragedy to come.
As events start simultaneously unravelling and falling into place, all trust and truth is questioned, and Harris excels in twisting the story into something altogether more unsettling than we could have anticipated. It takes a skilled writer to reduce the reader to a mere plaything in the author’s hands, but with Gillespie and I, Jane Harris dazzles us in every possible way. (Camilla Pia)
home while a disgraced banker hangs himself in his garden. The heavily pregnant Morrow works the case methodically, alongside narratives from Kay, a single mum down on her luck, and Thomas, the dead financier’s spoilt teenage son. Mina’s great skill is in keeping the reader hooked despite the lack of cliffhangers and twists, something she achieves through perceptive social insight and a refreshing eye for odd details. (Doug Johnstone)
28 Apr–26 May 2011 THE LIST 37