Common Ground By Naomi Ishiguro

 

Part 1

This account of Stan and Charlie finding a friendship and then having circumstance pull them apart again is sad in the inevitability of it. “Society” said their friendship couldn’t work, and society acted to prove itself right.

Maybe many people read themselves into characters that are outsiders, do people generally overstate our own troubles or is that just my anxiety at work? It is Stan the loner that is bullied at school that connect with rather than Charlie the traveller – looking through Stan’s eyes we are attracted to the confidence of Charlie, but we see there is a troubled inner life below the surface.

I have had to take it back to the library as it is reserved by anyone reader before I got to Part 2 ...

Where Stands A Winged Sentry by Margaret Kennedy

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Writing in the period between the fall of France and the Blitz Kennedy gives a particular view on the Second World War, from that moment when Allied Victory was not just uncertain but unlikely.

She talks about the way BBC news reports mix the news of the war in with other items so that the bad news does not come at you full in the face, until …

“But the day of reckoning came at last.

Ever-increasing gravity. Anybody could understand that. Forty million people gasped and woke up.” (p13)

Comparing UK and USA she reflects that “The explanation, I suppose, lies deep in history. On our side we think of liberty as something which, in theory, we have always had. Our whole progress has been to… build constitutional walls around it which will enable us better to cultivate it. On their side they think of it as something whole and indivisible which was won at one stroke, and which dwells in their Constitution.” (p118) Our laws protect rather than create our liberty.

Slightly in pasting in a discussion of Nanny’s somewhat jingoistic views Kennedy notes that even Nanny “said herself that we must try to get a United States of Europe” (p158) – it is interesting to find this phrase in use in 1940 when tend to think of it as a more recent coinage by those wishing to attack the EU project.

Kennedy, for all of her progressive views writes from a secure position of privilege – when they go down from London she is pleased to be without maids, but still has Nanny with her, and the family take lunch each day in Hotel, this simpler existence is not entirely simple. And some of her views are problematic, down-right offensive, she talks of gypsies in the manner that has got Enid Blyton black-listed by many, and then thinking about potential for Nazi invasion on neutral Ireland in attempt to encircle the UK she is extreme “...we shan’t be one little bit sorry for the Irish. A taste of the Nazis would open their eyes, after all the song and dance they have made about English oppression.” (p101) Like so many writers we have to handle their complete work with some care, and not simply airbrush bits we dislike.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible by Jonathan Goldstein

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk  

These witty retellings of Bible stories help you to look again at what actually is within the text and what is received as an interpretation handed down alongside the text.

Adam and Eve is probably the strongest, maybe because it is perhaps the most familiar tale and so the playfulness resonates most easily, but also perhaps because the Biblical account is slight – there is the most room for the imaginative – both for Goldstein and indeed for “tradition”.

Creating in Crisis Polari Anthology No.1

This collection of prose and poetry is rich, with COVID in the background but shaping the work. 

 

I found Rachael Llewellyn’s Rebecca Left Her Body particularly affecting as Marcus comes to terms with the death of his sister, the pain of loss and the pain of having to face the darkness that lead to someone taking their own life. 

 

My Anxiety Lives as an Acorn in My Stomach by Thomas Stewart is powerful in its personification of anxiety - “A cold, almost silent, whisper. Saying that it will always be there.” and captures the sense when asks...

“Do you ever have that feeling

where everything is really good and therefore

you feel terrified?”

 

Thinking more directly on COVID David Woodhead in Fortunate to Survive “But some of us – in fact, many in my social circle, myself included – have lived thought a pandemic before. In truth, we are living through a pandemic still. HIV/AIDS took hold of our friends and lovers and killed them, brutally, violently. That pandemic changed our identities and our politics as gay men, our relationships and aspirations. The mothers who lost their sons and the men who lost their lovers still bear its consequences, day in, day out.” When treatment has removed the power of HIV to be a death sentence, so I have friends living with HIV not dying from AIDS, and PREP proves effective prevention – a liberation but also with each pill a reminder that the pandemic is contained not eliminated.

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

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This is a collection of deep intensity…

Extract of The Boy

…

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk

down a sidewalk without looking back,

I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was.

calling and calling his name.

Extract of The Cold Outside

…

Soon I will die, he said, and then

what everyone has been so afraid of for so long will have finally happened.

and then everyone can rest.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.

And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.

It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those

wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.

Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

I am living. I remember you.

And the most beautifully painful of them all – in a state of grief we don’t understand just like that silly Buddy.

Buddy

Andy sees us to the door, and Buddy is suddenly all over him, leaping
and barking because Andy said: walk. Are you going to walk home? he said.

To me. And Buddy thinks him and now, and he’s wrong. He doesn’t
understand the difference between sign and symbol like we do–the thing

and the word for the thing, how we can talk about something when it’s not
even there, without it actually happening–the way I talk about John.

Andy meant: soon. He meant me. As for Buddy, Andy meant: later. When he
was good and ready, he said. Buddy doesn’t understand. He’s in a state

of agitation and grief, scratching at the door. If one of us said, Andy,
when Andy wasn’t there, that silly Buddy would probably jump up barking

and begin looking for him.

As Far As You’ll Take Me by Phil Stamper

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There is a lot going on in this book, and I am not sure if it all holds together – it is an enjoyable read if perhaps you avoid pushing the narrative too hard – for example Marty suffers from anxiety and yet does all these things with an ease that 17 I certainly wouldn’t have found, also there are some layers of the back story that never get unpacked - like what is the real issue behind Marty’s Mum’s seeming rejection of the UK - these are left hanging in the air and for me this resulted in a lack of a properly rounded sense of the people and events.

Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Telling this tale through the eyes and voice of Richard, who had lived most of his life in GDR, and overnight seen the Berlin Wall and then GDR itself disappear, shows us, without being bombastic, that borders and nations are inherently fictions – and the decisions about who is allow to cross them therefore arbitrary.

I read this alongside Borders & Belonging by Pádraig Ó Tuama & Glenn Jordan – which explores the Book of Ruth and one of the prayers they include at the back begins

God of bodies,

if it is true that the earth is yours

and all within it,

then yours are the rocks and grasses

on every side

of every border…

The consequences of this for our treatment of asylum seekers, and migrants of all kinds, should be profoundly different from the current attitude of the UK and most other countries.

Richard reflects at one point that “The Africans probably had no idea who Hitler was, but even so: only if they survived Germany now would Hitler truly have lost the war.” (p50) And we can say the same about the UK.

These echoes of Germany’s past give a particular punch – but it is one we should not pretend we can side step.

Seeing an excessive police presence outside the place the refugees are staying, for Richard it “is already clear to him – the newspaper will report on the high cost of this deployment, and this country of bookkeepers will be aghast and blame the objects of the transport for the expense, as used to happen in other periods of German history, with regards to other transports.” (p209) Clearly we also blame the migrants for the costs we create for ourselves because of our lack of hospitality.

“...it occurs to Richard – it’s occurred to him many times now – that all the men he’s gotten to know here (these ‘dead men on holiday’) could just as easily be lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And conversely all the Germans who were murdered during the so-called Third Reich still inhabit Germany as ghosts, sometimes he even imagines that all these missing people along with their unborn children and the children of their children are walking beside him on the street, on their way to work or to visit friends, they sit invisibly in the cafes, take walks, go shopping, visit parks and the theater. Go, went, gone. The line dividing ghosts and people has always seemed to him thin, he’s not sure why, maybe because as an infant, he himself come so close to going astray in the mayhem of war and slipping down into the realm of the dead.” (p222)

The happen-stance of life and death, or being born a citizen or born a migrant, are so much the roll of the dice – we need to really on check our sense of entitlement, the congratulations we give ourselves on our essentially undeserved passport.

There are also reflections on Richard’s own grief, and the childless Richard thinking on beyond his own death “The old farmhouse cupboard missing a piece of its crown molding [sic] surely won’t share a household after his death with the cup in which he always makes his Turkish coffee in the afternoon…” (p9) our lives are a collection of meanings, memories, and things pieced together as a unique jigsaw – even if some of the pieces endure they will never be fitted together the same way again.

There are questions about what we actually mean by a “free” society - “Is the only freedom the fall of the Berlin wall brought him the freedom to go places he’s afraid of?” (p25) “One morning, he himself became the object of these tearful welcomes: the East Berliner who’d lived on this street that had been cut in half for twenty-nine years, crossing over on his way to freedom. But he hadn’t been on his way to freedom that morning, he was only trying to get to the University, punctually taking advantage of the S-Bahn station at the western end of his newly opened street. Unemotional and in a hurry, he-d used his elbows to fight his way through this weeping crowd – one of the disappointed liberators shouted an insult at his back – but for the very first time, Richard got to school in under twenty minutes.” (p33)

Richard is no saint, and that is part of the power, it is a slow process of befriending that opens him up, and there is some deep pain in his own life as well as the men that he tries to help. Richard says I realized “that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.” (p283) It is sometimes in dealing with one trauma that we bury an other more deeper pain.