Review: Vivien Horler

Everything is Tuberculosis – A history and persistence of our deadliest infection, by John Green (Ebury Press)

Around 1940 or 1941 my Aunty Thelma contracted tuberculosis. It was in the early days of World War 2, and she worked for a company that had been making compressors for the mining industry before pivoting to munitions as many British manufacturing companies did.

She was not quite 20, and having a lovely war. She was engaged to a man who drove a sports car, she had a flashy diamond ring, and according to her younger sister – my mum – was partying till late and then going straight on to work in the shell shop.

They made explosive shells in the shell shop, which was housed in an old, damp building, and she got sick.

This was more than a decade before streptomycin became available as a cure for TB, and so she was treated, as people in the UK were in those days, in a sanatorium in a place called Tehidy in Cornwall.

The ward she was in had a roof and three walls, with the fourth side open to the elements all year round. In winter they would watch snowflakes drifting on to their beds, she told me (although in truth it doesn’t snow much in Cornwall). Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Remain – A supernatural love story, by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan (Sphere)

A supernatural love story? Not my usual fare.

There’s a telling exchange between the main guy, the architect Tate, and his friend Oscar.

Tate tells Oscar he’s not in a good space, and Oscar responds: “I’m guessing you and Gigi had a fight?”

Mystified, Tate responds: “Gigi?”

Oscar: “GG? Ghost Girlfriend?”

In fact the ghost girlfriend is called Wren, but other than that, Oscar is on the button. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph)

You wouldn’t think a novel about a rather formal, acerbic 70-something woman from Annapolis, told solely in the form of letters and emails – mainly letters – would become a bestseller.

But you’d be wrong – The Correspondent topped the New York Times bestseller list in December. Of various reviews I’ve read, I think The Times said it best: “A warm, funny gem of a novel.”

Sybil Van Antwerp lives alone in a house with the view of a river through the trees. She is particular, precise, likes to write her letters with a fountain pen on good paper she gets from the UK. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

An Inconvenience of Penguins – Epic voyages in pursuit of the world’s most beloved bird, by Jamie Lafferty (Wildfire)

Some people collect stamps or medals – Jamie Lafferty collects penguins.

He’s a Scottish-born freelance travel writer, and in the Galapagos he conceived the idea of seeing and photographing all 18 species of penguin.

Now the thing about penguins, with the broad exception of our African penguins, is that they tend to be found in far-flung places like Antarctica and South Georgia and the Galapagos – all difficult or expensive to get to, hence the title of this book.

It also didn’t help that Lafferty had very little money, which made him dependent on helpful travel editors and travel and cruise companies that were willing to give him a free trip in exchange for some positive copy. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Swift – A memoir, by Melinda Ferguson (Ride or Die, an imprint of Melinda Ferguson Books)

When you get to the last line in this memoir, it’s hard not to weep.

The story catches us up in a desperate attempt to save a baby bird. Most of us have tried to do that at some stage – haven’t we? – finding a baby bird fallen out of a nest, putting it in a box with some water or even milk, and waking in the morning to find it dead.

This isn’t that story.

It’s about the courageous rescue of a Little Swift, a bird that, like some swifts, flies for up to two years without landing; eating, sleeping and even mating on the wing, and nesting only to breed. If you’ve seen a swift on a perch or a phone wire, chances are it’s a swallow.

But the story of Swifty is only one strand of Melinda Ferguson’s heart-wrenching memoir – it is also about the sudden death of her partner Mat, and her determination to save the bird so that it can carry Mat’s soul on.

Do not be put off at this point. This isn’t a woo-woo book, it’s a story of a desperate quest written by a woman in the throes of grief. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Follow Me to Africa – A novel by Penny Haw (Sourcebooks Landmark)

Seventeen-year-old Grace Clark finds it’s a long way from Tewkesbury to the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, where her estranged father has dragged her so he can meet the famed archaeologist Mary Leakey.

A sulky Grace thinks the only thing worse than being somewhere you don’t want to be is discovering no one else wants you there either. Grace has overheard Mary telling her father: “We can’t have a teenager hanging around. This is a dig, not a discotheque. She’ll have to do something.”

Grace surveys the area – it looks dry, scorched and ragged. Her father doesn’t feel the same way: “Look at this place. Isn’t it magnificent? It’s nothing like Cambridge. Or Tewkesbury. Nothing like anything you’ve seen before.”

To which Grace responds: “Thank God.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi (Fontana)

Theo of Golden is a novel about an old Portuguese man who comes to stay in Golden, a small college town in the southern US state of Georgia. He makes friends and spreads love.

There’s a bit of a mystery – who is this old man who seems to go through life without a surname, and why did he come to Golden? There is some violence, not too much. Mainly it is a story about love and wonder and beauty and companionship.

There were times, especially at the beginning, when I found the novel less than compelling. And yet I kept reading, and I’m so glad I did. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Wildest Beauty, by Michiel Heyns (Human & Rousseau)

The World War 1 battle for Delville Wood on the Somme in France, was the most devastating fight South African soldiers have ever taken part in.

Members of the first SA Infantry Brigade were instructed to take the wood and hold it at all costs, and the costs were devastating. SANDF figures show 3200 SA soldiers – officers and men – entered the wood on July 15, 1916, and 750 emerged alive at the end of the battle in September.

Wikipedia quotes a German officer in the battle saying: “… Delville Wood had disintegrated into a shattered wasteland of shattered trees, charred and burning stumps, craters thick with mud and blood, and corpses, corpses everywhere. In places they were piled four deep. Worst of all was the lowing of the wounded…”

This is the horror into which march 19-year-old Stellenbosch twins Danny and Charlie.

Danny and Charlie are non-identical twins with Danny the “swot” and Charlie is the golden boy, the hero rugby player. Danny finds people tend to define him in terms of Charlie: “Oh, you’re Charlie’s brother.”

Danny feels Charlie is his other half and loves him devotedly; Charlie clearly feels less strongly about Danny. And when the novel opens, Danny is battling with this lack of reciprocity. Charlie is explicit, telling his brother to stop coming to support him at rugby matches, if “that’s what it takes to get you off my bloody back, Danny”.

Another thing upsetting Danny is the influence of Charlie’s new friend, the creepily devout and supercilious Andrew Sinclair, a British immigrant who is openly contemptuous of the little Stellenbosch society where he and his family have come to live.

One night over dinner Charlie announces he and Sinclair are going to enlist with the Cape Town Highlanders, to go to war “on the side of right and justice and God”.

Danny is torn. Signing up has never crossed his mind, but how can he let Charlie go off to war alone, even if he knows his brother will keep his distance?

Danny also thinks about his Scottish-born mother, to whom he is close. Her sons anchored her in South Africa, he thinks; if they both left she would be “sick for home, in tears amid alien corn”.

He has another impulse, “entirely ignoble”, that if he stays behind, his mother will mourn Charlie and disregard the son who stays.

Eventually Danny decides to go, partly because his friend Matthias is going, but mainly because of Charlie.

And off they go, to Potchefstroom for basic training, then on to Britain in a troop ship. And eventually they end up in France.

This is less a war story than a coming-of-age story, with Danny coming to terms with his sexuality and learning to be independent of his family, especially of Charlie, who is glimpsed on station platforms and on ship’s decks, usually in the company of the odious Sinclair.

On the journey to become a soldier, Danny becomes mates with a motley group of chaps, some who have matriculated from Bishops and other private Cape schools, others less well educated. The platoon and the section become family, the people with whom Danny debates everything from the meaning of life to the meaning of war and comradeship.

If I’ve made Danny sound pathetic, I’ve done him a disservice – he is clever and ironic and self-deprecating, and the conversations he has with his fellow servicemen, particularly the smart and cynical Meerkat, are interesting, insightful and often funny.

His experience in Britain becomes pivotal – he has an encounter with a wounded officer in London that changes his life, and he stays with a great-aunt in Scotland, a trip that sheds light on his mother’s life before she ever was a mother; light that Danny absorbs, but Charlie rejects absolutely.

The actual battle, the horror of war and how it affects Danny – and Meerkat and Charlie and Sinclair – takes up but 20 or so pages, but they are 20 powerful, devastating pages.

I read on Wikipedia that after the war, the devastated Delville Wood was replanted with oaks and birch by the SA government, and there is a moving monument there to the fallen.

The Wildest Beauty is a deeply moving, thoughtful and brilliant book.

Review: Vivien Horler

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate)

I have a weakness for storm-tossed islands. I have been to Tristan da Cunha, to South Georgia and the Falklands and am fascinated by the people who choose to make their lives in these farflung, remote places where nothing is sure.

Wild Dark Shore is set on the fictional island of Shearwater, but is based on Macquarie Island, a sub-Antarctic Australian island halfway between Tasmania and Antartica.

In a note on the setting, bestselling author Charlotte McConaghy describes Macquarie as 34km long and 5km wide, and a World Heritage Site home to more than four million seals, penguins and seabirds.

It has a research station where, at any one time, between 20 and 40 researchers work.

But that’s just part of the inspiration. The fictional island has a seed vault containing many thousand species of seeds intended to save them for humanity in the event of a cataclysm. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Enough – Your health, your weight and what it’s like to be free, by Ania M Jastreboff and Oprah Winfrey (Bluebird)

When the new treatments for type 2 diabetes – with brand names we’ve become familiar with, such as Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro – were discovered to help people who did not have diabetes lose weight, there was indignation.

People who did not have diabetes were taking them, causing a shortage among patients who depended on them. This was outrageous.

Fat people should just control themselves and their urges, and leave the life-saving treatments for those who really needed them.

Well, this book might help change your mind.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of American contemporary culture knows that media star Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight over the years. In a preface to this book, Oprah writes that for more than five decades much of her life would be dedicated to fighting her weight. Continue reading →