Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain — reviewed by Anne Rooney

 

Testament of Youth is not a children's book by any means, but it could well suit young adult readers. Vera Brittain's memoir of her own teenage years in a time of even more turmoil than our world faces right now is inspiring, though sombre. Brittain wrote the book in the 1930s after mulling over the material and wondering for a long time how to present it, but it deals with her coming of age in the First World War. She made a few false starts, once trying to fictionalise it, before settling on a narrative that quotes letters and diaries in places and elsewhere recreates what she lived through as though she remembered every word spoken. It works, and is a most touching and, at times, harrowing account of the worst of times. 

In some ways, the world of 1914 — only just over 100 years ago — is jarringly distant. The family wait for letters, spend agonizing days unaware of whether their loved ones have survived a 'push' on the western front, and hear conflicting news reports that are only slowly resolved into anything definite. In a world where we know what is happening the other side of the world seconds after it's happened, it's strange to step back into a time so dislocated from distant events. 

Yet there is much in Vera's story that will be familiar. She goes to university — a rare achievement for a young woman — but leaves because of the war. Those freshers who have just fled their universities ahead of the latest lockdown might share some of her feelings of wretched disappointment and being cheated of what they had earned. The turmoil into which ordinary life is cast feels familiar, though our turmoil is not of the same order of magnitude. I think what will speak to young people in Brittain's account is the feeling of loss. Not just the loss of individuals, cruelly and wastefully slaughtered, but the loss of youth, of a generation's spirit, of their energy, optimism, innocence, confidence and enthusiasm for life. She reflects, looking back, that what they lost was irrecoverable. The time before the war is a shimmering phantasm of a life gone forever. There is some of that feeling now, as we realise the things we took for granted. They were the most basic, unexamined pleasures — going to a café, meeting friends in their houses, watching a movie, wandering in and out of shops without queuing, picking up something someone dropped and passing it back to them...

We don't know how long the pandemic will go on. Two years? Three? More? Like the First World War, many people expected it to be short at the start. No one is being honest even now about the real prospects, just as they weren't in the war. In Britain, it comes with the additional catastrophic disruption of Brexit — another event that has stolen so much that our young people grew up expecting to have available to them. The Testament is not a cheery book in any sense, but I feel it speaks to the spirit of our age, particularly to our young people. The young people in the book show such fortitude and compassion, as many of our young people are doing now. It is not cheery, but it in some ways it is heartwarming and hints at hope. We could all do with some hope right now.

Anne Rooney

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Doomsday Book by Connie WIllis, reviewed by Anne Rooney

 

 

 

"People, mostly wearing masks, were out again, coming back from the grocer's and queuing in front of the chemist's. But the streets seemed hushed, unnaturally silent."

 

This is not a new book; it was first published in 1992, and it's been very successful so you might have read it already — but it merits re-reading as it's become so topical. 

 

The novel is set in both the future and the past, though the future is now a good deal closer than it was in 1992. The world of 2054 is remarkably like 2020 in many regards, though there are a few amusing archaisms alongside rather astonishingly prescient details. Britain, or specifically, Oxford, of 2054 is in the grip of a pandemic. Simultaneously, the medieval history department of the university has dispatched a young historian, Kivrin, to the Middle Ages, intending to get her there in 1320. The rising panic of the modern pandemic is played out against the fears of  Kivrin's paternalistic and protective tutor Dunworthy that she might have been accidentally sent into the Black Death, 28 years later. By a strange coincidence, our own pandemic has come 24 years too early. Some of the technology, apart from the time travel, is plausible: the implanted recorder that lets Kivrin dictate her notes to her hand, the extension of the Tube out to Oxford. Other bits are slightly off: the characters use video phones but they are still landlines, remote access to the computer systems is pretty primitive and people walk between venues to pick up information written on pieces of paper. But these are minor points; only the primitive landline-equivalent of Zoom becomes distracting.

 

In Willis's pandemic, conspiracy theories and misinformation are as rife as they are in our own. People decide that it's a flu from India and so Indian people are stigmatized — even though early evidence suggests it originated in the USA. '"They're saying it's some sort of biological weapon... They're saying it escaped from a laboratory.'" EU sceptics jump on the bandwagon claiming the pandemic is a good reason to leave the EU. (OK, she was out a few years with that one.) People criticise the NHS (which is thankfully still going in 2054), defy the lockdown,  try to work around quarantine rules and struggle with their PPE and masks. I suppose the traits of exceptionalism and defiance are basic human characteristics that any good novelist would pick up on and corral into service in a situation like this, but it's rather satisfying to see them here. A priest comments that people will initially have a burst of enthusiasm for religion and will then take shelter and hide away. Medical refusniks are the anti-vaxxers of 2054; they refuse to comply with safety measures, many of them belonging to fringe religions. The disease spreads as easily as covid-19, with people contracting it after attending a dance, or bumping into an infected person in the street. There is even a shortage of eggs, masks and toilet paper. "'Why aren't you wearing your mask?'/'It causes my spectacles to steam up.'" Even the cock-ups are the same: "Colin brought the contacts charts. They were a disaster. No attempt had been made to correlate any of the information..."  It all looks horribly familiar.

While modern Oxford struggles with its pandemic, Kivrin has her own battles in the Middle Ages, with little going according to plan. Despite all the careful preparations by the history department, her knowledge of the period is far from perfect. She struggles when the small child she becomes increasingly attached to is injured and she recognises that contemporary medicine can do little for her. Knowledge, truth and misinformation are major themes in the novel. Kivrin's academic knowledge of Middle English and the Middle Ages, considered rock-solid fact in the world she left, turns out to be distorted and incomplete, arousing suspicion and causing her problems. How much of what we 'know' is not actually true? The science might, as in the case of the pandemic, reveal its errors in the end, but without time travel we will never know whether we have got history right. This concern with the contingency and elusiveness of truth is as modern a theme as the pandemic around which the book is built. And it's beautifully if accidentally illustrated in the edition shown here: the iconic plague-doctor mask used to conjur up the Black Death on the cover is anachronistic as it wasn't developed until the sixteenth century. I'd like to think that was deliberate, but it's probably just incompetence. Really, if you can face another pandemic or two this is worth a read or re-read.

Anne Rooney

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The Skies Above My Eyes, by Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer; reviewed by Anne Rooney

This lavishly illustrated concertina-book is a guide to what you can see when you look up. It's such a simple concept, yet so original. It folds out to a massive — whatever an upwards panoroma is. An up-orama? You can just sit on the sofa with a child and flick through it. But if you have a fair bit of empty floor space and can open it out, it's well worth the effort to do so. That makes reading part of a larger physical activity that might appeal to kids who don't like to sit still and read.

The up-orama is double-sided, with one side revealing what you might see looking up in a city and the other what you might see in the countryside. It's an inspired solution to the problem of including children living in very different types of area, as well giving an opportunity for a 'nature' side and a 'technology' side. Each side is one beautiful, detailed and ornate picture, with blocks of text for each item in the illustration, covering everything 'up there' from birds and planes to planets and stars. There are heaps of amazing details, from how window-cleaners clean the glass of towering skyscrapers to which bird can fly higher than Mount Everest and what comets are. It deals with the different levels of the atmosphere and distances in space. I really like that it's entirely interdisciplinary. It's not 'just' about animals or technology or Earth science or space but blends all these as needed in a book with its own very distinctive angle.

It has a bit of an imposed narrative in that it traces a journey up and then down, though I read it with MB as two 'ups', town and country ups. I guess if you do as they say, it's an 'up-and-down-orama'. There are so many little snippets of info, each with its own picture, that you can use it as a starting point for discussion or research on dozens of different projects.





To use it to best effect, it's nice if you can lay it out on the floor, but you can use it like a book if you don't have space.

This would be brilliant for lockdown or summer holidays. Because of the format, it doesn't feel too 'bookish' — it feels like an activity. You could take it outside and see which things you can spot, or make your own up-orama from your garden or street. It's a brilliant concept, beautifully executed and well researched. Thoroughly recommended!

Written by: Charlotte Guillain
Illustrated by: Yuval Zommer
Published by: Words and Pictures, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-910277-68-3
Price: £14.99





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Moll Flanders & Fanny Hill — reviewed(ish) by Anne Rooney

This is a bit unorthodox, but I'm going to look at two similar takes on the same idea: fictional lives of 'women of pleasure' by Daniel Defoe and John Cleland. Both books are of the 'prostitute memoir' genre which enjoyed some popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some were ostensibly the first-person narratives written by actual prostitutes, though both these were written by male novelists who acknowledged their authorship. The original title of Fanny Hill (1748) is Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a title which could have been used by any of these books. The full title of Moll Flanders (1722) is The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. Both are in the picaresque style, presenting a sequence of adventures/mishaps that are tied together into a meandering fictional biography. Both follow a familiar pattern of a beautiful young woman forced by a combination of circumstance and libido into a string of sexual adventures related, particularly in the case of Fanny Hill, in considerable graphic detail. The pattern follows a fall from virginal grace through rape (FH) or naively entering a relationship (MF) and the fortunes and misfortunes that follow.

These are not tales of depravity, despite having been framed as such by previous generations of censors and moral arbiters. Both women genuinely love at least some of their partners. Both avoid falling into the kind of penury that would lead them to the fate of the 'two-penny uprights' that haunted parts of London. They have lives with 'keepers' — clients who pay to maintain them in an apartment of their own in exchange for sexual exclusivity. They suffer misfortunes such as inadvertently marrying a brother, being widowed, left with a small child to support and other such fates that could befall anyone. They are brought to grief and joy by a combination of events and their own characters. They are sympathetic characters; Moll Flanders is ashamed by some of the things she has done, and afraid of consequent damnation as well as of social disgrace. This gives a scurrilous tale a veneer of morality, one which is made quite explicit with reference to how it's necessary to tell the details of the debauchery in order to make the moral point about Moll's rehabilitation. Of course, the point of the novel was not the moral lesson, but the titillating narrative of debauchery.

Both books are by men, for men. The women are attractive, enjoy sex, and never stoop so low as to lose the sympathy of their intended readers. Some of the readers no doubt used prostitutes themselves, or would have liked to do so. To read that the prostitutes enjoy the sex would perhaps have salved their consciences and/or added to their pleasure. It is, of course, a thoroughly sanitised version of the life of a 'woman of pleasure'. There are no botched abortions or deaths from sexually transmitted diseases here. The women are not frequently beaten, robbed and otherwise abused by their clients. There is some glee in the fleecing of the male clientele, particularly in the sale for a high price of the same maidenhead on repeated occasions. But of course the reader would never be such a fool as to be taken in like that... While these are both well constructed novels with literary merit, the prostitute-memoir genre also embraced much briefer and more trite narratives which followed a formulaic but probably realistic pattern of descent from pride and beauty to degradation, poverty and despair. These generally delivered a self-righteous moral message at the same time as titillating the reader.

Fanny Hill was published in expurgated form through much of the 20th century. I've not looked to see which bits were removed, but I can guess. The scenes of lesbian sex and the S&M episodes were probably a bit much for puritanical tastes, and perhaps even the more graphic bits of regular heterosex. These were the scenes that no doubt best sold it to its first readers. But it's notable that both Moll and Fanny remain lovable, are in the end financially secure and do not suffer the fate of so many of their real-life counterparts, of violent death, prison or penury. There is nothing here to make the client of prostitutes feel too bad about his habits. Fanny Hill, in particular, does not suffer adverse consequences or even shame. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is often considered the first pornographic novel in English. Cleland wrote it in while in debtors' prison, and boasted that it contained no lewd words — which is true, but there are plenty of lewd acts.

Both books reveal depressing aspects of 18th-century life. The frightening predicament of Moll, Fanny and their colleagues is all too clear. A woman whose 'virtue' has been compromised is ruined and all the rest of her life will be a challenge. She will need her wits about her to survive. An unmarried woman has very few options for earning a living; a life in domestic service is hard and precarious (she can be dismissed at a moment's notice, losing accommodation as well as income at a stroke). If not a wife, it's best to be a mistress — a kept woman with a regular lover who maintains her. Lower than that is a straightforward prostitute, who might start off commanding a high price and being able to pick and choose her clients, but as her beauty (and ability to fake virginity) diminish, her price and opportunities necessarily fail. None, except the wife, is many steps from disaster. Even a wife, if not left a healthy sum, will soon come to grief if her husband predeceases her. It is impossible not to be moved by the terror and desperation that Moll and Fanny are prey to at times, simply by dint of being women in a world made by and for men.





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The Wall, by John Lanchester - reviewed by Anne Rooney

This is not a cheery book. Oh no. Not by a long way. I read this book on the bus to and from the hospital, day after day, visiting my dying mother. On reflection, that seems about right. But even if you don't have a dying person — and if you can tolerate any more despair in your life right now — it's an interesting take on the direction the UK is heading now, with its hostile environment to immigrants and refugees. And it will speak to any nation where someone or other in power thinks building a wall to keep out Others of any kind is a good plan. The transition to Other is easily made. Those most proud of their right to be Inside can so very soon be Outside. You can read it as an allegory of isolationist post-Brexit Britain, or Trump's USA, or a warning against the consequences of climate change. It's not sufficiently closely tied to any of these to be a strict allegory. But allegory's definitely waving her arms around, mouthing 'look over here'.

Set at an unspecified date in the future, the whole of Britain is surrounded by a coastal wall, 10,000 km long. This is policed, day and night, by national service conscripts who have to shoot on sight any approaching boats. You might not think Britain a good place to be, but there are always worse places, and one of those is the open sea. Another is Britain in the future. Immigrants who manage to get past the Wall can either by set back in the sea or become Help (basically domestic slaves). Anyone policing the wall who lets an Other in — no matter how heroically they tried to prevent it — is put to sea in a boat. A few people, called Breeders, have children and are let off Wall-duty, but most people refuse to bring any offspring into this terrible world.

The tale follows the fortunes (or misfortunes) of Kavanagh, a new arrival, as he begins his two-year stint working on the Wall. The overriding experiences on the Wall are of cold and boredom. The fear that Others will come and they will have to fight them is real, but preoccupies him less often than the rigours of an entirely comfortless life. Very slowly, he forms bonds with other people working on the Wall. Eventually, he does have to fight. And that's when things change. The second half of the book is very little like the first and more of an adventure story. It's not a particularly happy adventure, and Kavanagh often rather wishes he were back on the Wall.

It's a strange book because it is so clearly in two halves. But so often our lives are turned around by a single event. What happens to Kavanagh when the Others attack the Wall changes the course of his life entirely, through no fault of his own. The quiet monotony of his life in the first half conveniently gives him time to ponder the state of the world. This is maybe a lazy bit of world-building, but it's so natural to reflect on what he's left behind and why he's on the Wall that it doesn't look clumsy as you read it.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the book is that people, Kavanagh included, accept the way things are. There is no hint of rebellion against Wall duties. Normal middle-class people are happy to take a Help-slave. Perhaps that's no surprise. Another thing that is consistent, then and now, is the fury of youth with what the older generation has made the world. But it's rather impotent fury. As Kavanagh says at one point to an older man who hopes to advise him, 'Why don’t you travel back in time and unfuckup the world and then travel back here and maybe we can talk.’ Perhaps we can have some potent fury some time soon that will help us step back from this fate.




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Encyclopedia of Grannies, by Eric Veillé; translated by Daniel Hahn; reviewed by Anne Rooney

Did your granny look like this? Nor mine. But today's grannies are different and this guide to modern grannies is just what you need if you are stuck with anachronistic expectations of grannies.

Declaration of interest: My grand-daughter calls me "Ba" because grannies are old and I'm not old. It was very reassuring to read that some grannies are 58 *and they still count*. Hurrah. I was very reassured by this book.

It begins with a run-down of the types of grannies you might encounter, including those from the city and those from the salt flats. Then it answers all sorts of crucial questions about grannies, such as how old they are, what's inside a granny, how bendy they can be, what moods they have and what you might find in their beds. A few questions are raised but not answered, such as why they have creases and why they go on buses. I guess these are mysteries beyond the wit of man to solve.

This excellent encyclopedia comes with all the usual paraphernalia of a good reference book, including:

a contents page;

a glossary;

and a bibliography.

It's a fabulous, quirky, cheery, bright and dip-into-able book for grannies and owners of grannies alike. The illustrations are a delight. All kinds of happy grannies and grandchild in glorious technicolour. Even those that have grey, permed hair are not dreary. This is just the kind of up-beat exposure grannies need.

Quite apart from the book being full of fantastic insights into the secret world and true nature of grannies, it's also very beautiful. The design even keeps in mind the perils to which grannies are commonly exposed. It has rounded corners, which means when your grandchild waves it around and pokes you in the eye it doesn't hurt as much as other books. It has beautifully cheery end-papers in orange and blue so you easily find the start and end even in a dimly-lit small person's bedroom. The spine is orange and the cover yellow so you can find it readily either on the shelf or in a pile of random child-detritus on the floor.

I have only one quibble with this book, and I'm surprised the editor at Gecko Press didn't pick this up — all the grannies are white. Really? In 2019? The book was originally published in French; perhaps French publishers are not up to speed with diversity yet, but it's a shame.

(Apologies for poor colour of the pictures; it's a dreary, rainy day and the scanner isn't working.)

The Encyclopedia of Grannies is published by Gecko Press, ISBN 978-1-776572-43-3



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After the Fall by Dan Santat. Review by Anne Rooney

What was Humpty Dumpty even doing on the wall? Why would an egg climb a wall? Well, it turns out he had good reason to be up there. The outcome of the reckless adventure, in Dan Santat's sequel to the nursery rhyme, is not quite as tragic as originally reported. Fake news, you might say. But it was still pretty bad.

This time, Humpty tells his own story. The king's men could put him back together again after all. Hurray for state-funded medicine. Well, most of him... 'It turns out there were some parts that couldn't be healed with bandages and glue.'

Humpty, it appears,  suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. It has a serious impact on his life. He can't enjoy things that involve any kind of height-scaling. This is made pitifully clear in his restricted choice of breakfast cereals, one of my favourite pictures and packed with details to explore with small readers:

Really, who wouldn't rather eat Crunch Tiger than Bland? Something has to change.

After the Fall is a brilliantly imaginative account of the life-limiting nature of PTSD and anxiety disorders, or — for those with no experience of such things — of how to conquer restricting fears or phobias. It's a picture book and story first and the 'issue' is seamlessly integrated. Not even integrated, which sounds as though it's been added later. It's the driving force of the book. Eventually, the passion that took him up the wall in the first place leads him to work around some of the limitations the fall has brought to his life and another accident propels him to face and overcome his fear.

The text is succinct and Humpty's voice is marked by grammatical simplicity. It's a style well suited to an egg, with no sticky-out bits or trailing bits, all nicely rounded off. The illustrations are a delight and carry as much meaning as the words. They are cleverly constructed with brilliant use of perspective. When Humpty looks at the wall towering above him, he is small and grey, the wall looming and dark, and he is separated from it by the bleak blankness of most of the double-page spread. It says far more about fear and hopelessness than words ever could.

After the FallDan Santat
Andersen Press, 2018
978-1-78344-635-3

Another story about an egg...
If this is all too cheery and feel-good for you, and you want a more tragic egg story, I recommend Minnie Gray's Egg Drop. My children voted it the most devastatingly upsetting picture book of their childhood. 'The egg was young...' still elicits cries of 'Stop!'



Anne Rooney
Website
Dinosaur Atlas (illustrated by James Gilleard), Lonely Planet 2017

Winner, Judges' award,  School Library Association Information Book Award, 7-12, 2018
Shortlisted, Royal Society Young People's Book Award, 2018








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Vampire Dawn by Anne Rooney: reviewed by Gillian Philip

Real Vampires - as the ageless Spike would tell you in many a fetching internet meme - Don't Sparkle. Anne Rooney's don't, that's for sure. Nor do they disappoint.

icanhascheezburger.com

The Vampire Dawn saga is a cleverly constructed series of short novels in the hi-lo style, ideal for the reluctant reader but no small fun for the enthusiastic one, either. The stories are compact and bijou - ideal for devouring on a bus journey to school, say - but packed with incident and character, not to mention blood and guts. If you know a teen or a slightly-pre-teen who isn't particularly keen on romance but likes a decent bloodsucker, point them in the direction of Vampire Dawn.

The books are readable in any order, but it would undoubtedly help to start with Die Now Or Live Forever. The whole story begins here - in the fine tradition of horror movies, with a group of mildly bickering friends on a hike in the woods. In this case it's the Hungarian woods, which seem to be populated by especially big and Hungary mosquitoes (boom boom).

This is the lonely spot where Juliette, Omar, Finn, Ruby and Alistair stumble across a dead body that doesn't stay dead for long. They also run into the (temporary) murderer: a downright panicky Australian called Ava, who doesn't understand why she's just had to stick a tent peg through the heart of her beloved boyfriend.

And in the morning the appeal of sandwiches and ginger beer seems mysteriously to fade, and the group begins to look peckishly upon the bewildered Ava...

knowyourmeme.com

The other books in the Vampire Dawn series focus on each individual member of the group, and what happens to them in the aftermath of their ill-fated camping trip: Juliette (Drop Dead, Gorgeous), Finn (Life Sucks), Omar (Every Drop Of Your Blood), Alistair and Ruby (Dead On Arrival) and Ava herself (In Cold Blood). Pretty much at random I chose Ava's story: some time after the events of Die Now Or Live Forever, the bewildered Australian girl is stumbling around Kosovo in a borrowed fur coat, with no memory of how she got there. All she knows is that she's hungry, and that she doesn't feel as jittery around a creepy and dilapidated circus as she normally would. In fact it could be a source of raw meat of several kinds...

Given the tightly restricted word count of each book (around 6,000?), the various characters and their relationships are briskly and efficiently drawn. Alistair, my particular favourite, is an OCD boy who likes to count things.

bbc.co.uk

For the teen who's especially keen on traditional vampires, there's even a guide book: Bloodsucking For Beginners. Like the mysterious Ignace, a handsome stranger who seems to have strolled into the group's lives out of a 1930s black-and-white horror movie, it's full of advice for perplexed immortal newbies...

These books are terrific fun, and they're a great, snappy read. I adore the device of giving a book to every character, and Anne Rooney (who apparently doesn't eat meat in case she gets too much of a taste for blood) has clearly had a lot of fun with the genre's tropes and traditions. Yet she never loses respect for the primal, terrifying ferocity of vampires. There's romance and teen angst here, and the delights and agonies of friendship, but there's plenty of blood too - just as there should be.

I can't imagine many teens who wouldn't love a brief trip to the world of Vampire Dawn. I had a great time. (Also, the covers are fabulous.)


Die Now Or Live Forever
Dead on Arrival
Life Sucks
Every Drop Of Your Blood
Drop Dead, Gorgeous
In Cold Blood
Bloodsucking For Beginners

By Anne Rooney; published by Ransom Publishing, April 2012

I mean, that guy's scary. He just IS.

www. gillianphilip.com

growingguides.com

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