Nights are still long

Anything You Do Say
by Gillian McAllister

A surprising novel – I’d call it a psychological thrillomance. Two young women, best friends, go out to a London pub on a Friday night, where they are harassed by a big man in red trainers, who won’t let them alone, grabs one of them and grinds into her. She is frozen, freaked out, wanting to be polite, not knowing what to do. The two women leave the pub and go separate ways.

One of them is followed, the indecisive one, always a postponer, avoiding responsibility and unpleasantness. On some deserted steps she feels the man coming up behind her, looks down, sees red trainers. And her arms just reach out and she pushes him as hard as she can.

What follows is amazing, because it’s a conceit I would normally completely avoid: alternating chapters where she either calls an ambulance and sticks around, or flees the scene. Every bit of it hair-raising, tragic, and completely believable. Particularly we see the finest nuances of what happens in her previously tender and loving marriage. The writing is excellent!

I believed the whole thing, and could do easily see how it could happen like that – I, too, when in some way attacked, tends towards the frozen and polite. I’ll look for more books by this writer. She brought out a controversy here, and scenes of a police station, and terrible guilt, and an unravelling relationship, a sort of thing that I too would generally like to avoid, and kept me so interested and admiring that I stuck it through to the ending – also believable and non-gimmicky.

It was also curious to note that I felt guilty whilst reading it, even though it was fiction, and I have so far never done anything like that! But I’ve had nightmares where I did, and woke up gasping with relief that it was a dream. Collective unconscious?

Gypsy Boy
by Mikey Walsh

A moving and original memoir by a man who grew up in a Romany clan famed for its pugilists: every boy had to learn to fight, from the time he was a toddler. Men and boys from other families, as well as his own, routinely expected to bare-knuckle fight with him. And his dad, a famous fighter, was also a complete despot, violent and punishing to his wife and son (though not his daughter). Every day the little boy had to fight with his dad and every day he was beaten bloody, shouted at, locked in a cupboard, insulted, etc etc. Because he never won, and was seen as a disgrace to the clan.

There is nothing romantic about this Gypsy tale. We see into the life in detail, and it is very interesting – the colour and glitz and excess and swearing – and the sexism, archaic and defensive and foolish – the ancient fear of woman that makes stupid cultures repress them and exalt posturing, braggadocio, homicide.

The boy, it turns out, IS gay – and he will be killed for it if his dad finds out.

He says, “But of course I tried to deny it to myself, desperate not to be the one thing that would really destroy me as a Gypsy.”

He has to run away… How to survive out there in the despised Gorgia world? He can barely read or write.

What I loved about this book – besides the good heart and sweetness of its author – was how the naive writing had so many touches of originality. Here’s a description of his first encounter with his uncle Levoy: “Someone dug his free hand into my shoulder. ‘Going to grow up a fighting man like your dad then?’ I turned around to see a man with a face like a rolled-up pair of socks, with an ear missing and an eye like a boiled onion. I tried not to stare.”

The awful violence – and clan members of both sexes routinely indulge in brawls and shouting matches; life lived large (and knee-jerk) – is if not balanced, at least mitigated by what happens to the author after his escape. I found the whole story gripping.

Cult Following
My Escape and Return to the Children of God
by Bexy Cameron

This was a distressing book. I’d read a few memoirs by escapees from the COG, and it sounds like a particularly joyless organisation. Kids suffered the most, but everyone suffered. So much common garden variety totalitarianism, fascism, corporal punishment, sealed borders, persecution of enemies, etc etc. And un-beautiful, grim and laborious daily life. And the weirdness and criminality of not only ignoring sexual abuse but actually condoning and prescribing it. And, like fundamentalist Mormons, they go on eschewing birth control in order to produce huge litters for Jesus. Then there are more kids to despise, use for labour, and diddle heartlessly.

The author grew up in this milieu, basically as a slave, in many countries. Africa, India, the States, England… and she was so traumatised that the book veers all over the place twitchily, nervous, panicky, then calm again. She has definite talent, but the edginess and self-doubt and tattooed youthfulness were trying. There was no smoothness or mastery, as one would expect there to be none; but towards the end some strength came in and brought with it a certain centring and fusion.

Here’s what she did as a grownup that was interesting: she went with friends, professional documentary makers, and visited various communes in the States to try to film what was the state of the children. She herself had had a life-changing moment at eleven when a Guardian reporter had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She had been taught that she would die as a teen, a martyr for Armageddon, so the idea that she might grow up was amazing to her.

Towards the end she says, “I have been told by religion, therapy, society, films, God Himself that forgiveness is the only way to find peace and that it’s a gift. But really the gift I needed was one I had to find myself: standing here today, honouring the truth.

“My journey to finding peace with my past has had less to do with forgiveness and more to do with going from being the victim of my childhood to parenting myself, holding my own hand and spending my life with people who really love me. It lies in processing the anger within me with the ferocity of a lioness and creating something meaningful from the childhood I was given.

“…the violation of children’s human rights are not part of any parent’s right to freedom of religion.”

When I finished reading it – which I was quite glad to do – I pondered thusly:

All cults have sexual abuse in them.
All religions have sexual abuse in them.
All towns have sexual abuse in them.
All neighbourhoods have sexual abuse in them.

I have theories about why – many branches of pondering – and probably many things are true. Too much to say here.

Proof of Heaven
A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife
by Dr. Eben Alexander

A neurosurgeon, a dyed-in-the-wool scientist, suddenly falls into a week-long coma with rare bacterial meningitis – difficult to catch, even more unlikely to survive. It’s a very bad case and the doctors don’t see how he can live. But after a week he suddenly opens his eyes and is full of joy. He had spent the whole week in a place of bliss and love and consciousness, which he said was so much more real than our normal reality that it was like coming out of a movie theatre into the sunshine and fresh air. So he wants to share about it.

This is a good book to read if you are feeling discouraged, sad, worried, pessimistic. Nice for this time of year. What he describes is so beautiful, and so beyond fear, that it will lift you up. Love, he says, is the basic stuff of existence. Evil is like a tiny spice here and there that is necessary so that free will could be brought in. But mostly it’s all love and awareness. Body or no body.

Of Human Bondage
by Somerset Maugham

I discovered Somerset Maugham’s short stories as a teen and just loved the writing. I remember lying in shallow surf on Mykonos frying myself (I was doggedly unwise then) and enjoying the contrast with the rather dry prose and the faraway scenes. I later read a novel, Cakes and Ale, and found it rather harder going.

Meanwhile, I read somewhere that he was gay; and while reading this amazing semi-autobiographical novel I kept thinking of Alan Hollinghurst – a superb novelist who, being modern, is allowed to write about gayness with full disclosure. The only glancing references in this book are things like “At the boarding house there were a few rather mincing old bachelors.”

So – and myself really knowing nothing about the subject – I was curious to examine the portrayals of women, and marriages. And certainly the hero suffers from a lot of distaste / disgust for female bodies here and there. In the end though I was just blown away by the portrayals of human imperfection, the trials and determinations of the hero, the leisurely pace through a rich and difficult era (well, difficult for women and poor people). Sometimes a classic is just the thing we want.

An orphan with a club foot goes to live with his spoilt, unloving vicar uncle in the country. We read of his education, the inevitable bullying, and then his struggles to find a career which suits him, and the messes and agonies on the field of romance. He has a stint as an art student in Paris, where we are treated to lots of philosophising and bonhomie, and spends time in Germany and London. Eventually he studies medicine. Along the way, people tend to fall in love with whomsoever does not love them back, and much suffering ensues.

The writer was not in a hurry. He really stretched his neck out and went for it, in a most thorough and detailed manner. I was really engrossed in the book, and recommend it to anyone who wants to escape rapid fire cellphone life for a bit and just wallow in the human condition, as it was 120 years ago in those countries, and of course how it still is in many ways. The hero is thoroughly fallible, but ends up earning our respect for his humanity and his stick-to-it-iveness.

Why Does He Do That?
Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
by Lundy Bancroft

The author at the time of writing had spent 15 years working with abusive men, within a few different programs in the States. He is a pioneer in the subject, since there hadn’t been such programs before. It’s a really interesting book – clear and informative – and what comes through again and again is his exasperation with the abusers: he says that by and large men don’t become abusive because of emotional problems or because of having been abused themselves, but because of the stories they tell themselves. Entitlement, superiority, victimisation, a sense of ownership – and the nasty guy feels he is fully within his rights to bully, manipulate, punish, and all the rest of it. He finds his own stance rewarding, and has no incentive to change.

Many of the men were forced to go to the programs by law, and Bancroft said that he soon learned that if a man seemed to be doing well in the program, DO NOT invite him onto a radio program to share about it – he gets a swelled head and within 3 days will assault his partner!

The author tells us that this book, and the programs for abusive men, are really for the women in their lives. He doesn’t seem to think there’s a lot of hope for the guys, and is mostly concerned with protecting women from them. So there are lists of warning signs, and suggestions for what to do if your man scares you.

It’s a useful book anyway if you’ve ever been abused or bullied – even by a woman. You get a strong feeling of support, and encouragement to trust your gut. And it’s an interesting thesis, that it’s the stories the abuser tells himself that are really in charge. These inner-monologue stories are laid out for us succinctly!

As are the stories women tell themselves in order to make allowances for the guys’ bad behaviour.

I like this book – it’s frank and clear and very valuable. It cuts through waffling, manipulation, and all kinds of nonsense, and brings us back to basic human rights and dignity.

Highly recommended!

These reviews were first posted on Facebook

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