Private Peaceful – Michael Morpurgo

“I’ve seen larks over no-mans land. I always found hope in that.”

I read this book because I was telling a boy I baby-sit for how I had suddenly found myself extremely moved by books about the war. I recommended he read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and, in return, he gave me this book to borrow.

Tommo Peaceful is just a child when the story begins. His father has passed away and he lives in England with his mother and his older brothers, Charlie and Joe. On his first day at ‘big school’, Tommo meets Molly. He falls instantly in love with her.

As Tommo, Molly and Charlie grow into young adults together, Tommo realises that his brother has fallen in love with the same girl. Worse than that, Molly returns his love. In a moment of madness and full of eagerness to prove that he is not a little boy anymore, Tommo signs up to join the army. Desperate to project his brother, Charlie signs up too.

From the start we are aware that things go wrong for Charlie and Tommo. Parts of the book are written in the present tense, whilst the rest is reflecting on occasions from their childhood. Tommo’s musings over his current situation divulge enough that we know that he has found himself in an incredulous situation, the details of which are not revealed until the last few pages. I anticipated predictability, but the ending is politely surprising, desperately sad and, as is mostly the case with novels for young people, there is teaching behind it. I don’t want to divulge too much more in case I ruin it for anybody.

This is a novel for older children, so it’s easy to read. If you had a day you could probably manage it in one. Even as a ‘grown up’, I can confess that I did learn something from it.

It isn’t so overly horrific that you couldn’t give it to your teenager. I think it would probably make them think more carefully about the sacrifice boys not much older than them made during the war and, in my opinion, that can only be a good thing.

If you’re an avid reader then I’m not sure you will like this, unless you are extremely open minded or a teenage boy. If you don’t plan on reading it but you have been left intrigued as to what happened, then feel free to ask me about the story. Or Google it. 

Atonement - Ian McEwan

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."

As far as I am concerned Atonement is up there with Birdsong. It is absolutely one of the best things I have

ever read.

I have a rule that I don’t read books if I have already seen the movie adaptation. I don’t much see the point in that. I like to be surprised by my books.

This did surprise me. Greatly. Firstly because the movie adaptation is pretty close to the original book. Secondly because this didn’t take away from my enjoyment of it at all.

Cecilia and Robbie have known each other since they were children. They have lived on the same grounds and played together their whole lives. Cecilia, who was born into a family of privilege, lives in the mansion house at the top of the grounds. Robbie, whose mother is the maid, lives in a cottage at the bottom.

Their differences were never an issue until they went to university, where they suddenly took to ignoring each other. This story begins when they return to their homes after three years in Cambridge. Things are different between them and neither one of them knows why.

Robbie realises it before Cecilia does. He writes her a letter and gives it to her younger sister Briony to deliver. But Briony is nosy. She reads the letter and allows her imagination, which is already full of misconceptions and misunderstandings about her sister and the maid’s son, run away with her. The consequences permanently alter all of their lives.

I don’t want to tell you too much else about what happens. You should read this book. I couldn’t put it down. The characters are vivid and lovable, the story is enthralling and full of twists. In the beginning you will certainly think that this is just a love story, but be warned that it definitely is not. It seems that way for a lot of the book, but by the end that you will see that there are lessons to be learned from it. The last chapter will smash everything you thought to pieces. Especially if you haven’t seen the film.

As it goes the film is a pretty good adaptation of this book. It seems to be scene for scene correct, as far as I can remember, with the exception of the last scene and the last chapter. In the film Briony reveals her story smashing secret to a camera, but in the book she seems to keep it to herself. I don’t know which is better. The latter leaves you yearning for justice, which I suppose is a good thing. When a book leaves you pining for something then it has clearly imprinted on you, and I suppose that is what an author should strive for. I do wish that some of the questions had been answered, though I can’t tell you which ones without ruining it for you. I shall just say ‘Does Briony tell her parents the truth in the one day?’.

I recommend this. Especially if you like books about the wartime period, which I have realised recently I do seem to enjoy.  

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

"Because when we love we always strive to become better than we are." 

I am really confused about how I feel about The Alchemist. On the one hand the story and its repetitiveness irritated me. On the other hand, I am not ignorant enough to think that this is a simple story about a shepherd and his adventures. 

An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago dreams one night of a treasure that he knows in his heart is his destiny. Affirmation from a gypsy and a meeting with an extremely knowledgable king confirm that his dream was in fact a premonition, and he sets off in search gold. What he acquires on the way turns out to be much more valuable than what he seeks. 

If you're a spiritual person, this book might affirm your belief. It might encourage you to look for signs and whisperings in your own life about destiny and fate. At the same time you might become frustrated with it in the same way that you might become frustrated by your religion. It will cause you to question why we bother doing anything if everything is written and decided for us anyway. It might give you an excuse to plod along with your ordinary life, safe in the knowledge that what is meant to happen will happen. Or, it might just encourage you to go out in search of a more exciting destiny. 

What I loved the most about it was its tolerance of the three faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all feature, and its characters, when they battle, do not fight over religion. In fact, they all accept each other despite their differences in belief, and appear to accept each other's Lords in the presence of one another. It's as if they all accept that they are worshipping one creator. 

The Alchemist is less than two hundred pages, so can be read in under a day, and I think it is well worth investing that time in it. It is a story of self discovery and God. If you're an atheist I don't think you will like it. If you're contemplating religion or are spiritual, then I think you have things to gain from reading it. It might encourage you to listen a little harder to life's omens. It will certainly give you a renewed optimism. 

Recommended. 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres

“After the war...”

Whilst reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin there stirred in me as much surprise as when I read Birdsong. It is a book about the devastating impact of war on young people in the early 1900s.

Pelagia is a beautiful teenager living on the island of Cephallonia. Brought up without a mother, her father has turned her into a forward thinking, intelligent young woman. Still, she falls easily for the charms of a local fisherman. When war tears them apart, she allows herself to become obsessed with his lack of response to her letters. Convinced that he has forgotten her, she forces herself to forget him.

Later in the war, after her fiancé has returned, admitted he cannot read and write and then disappeared to fight again, Pelagia meets Captain Antonio Corelli, who is placed within her home as part of the Italian occupation of her island. He is a man so full of charm that the locals refer to him as the ‘crazy captain’, and he falls absolutely in love with her.

When the Italians turn on the Germans and the British fail to evacuate them, Corelli and Pelagia are faced with their own mortality. The war brought them together and it is about to tear them apart. In a world in which war is everywhere, they are just one couple in millions trying to navigate their love through a world of destruction.

This book is, at heart, a love story. I fell in love with it almost immediately. The beginning is reasonably slow. You will find yourself waiting for Corelli to arrive and he doesn’t until almost a third of the way through, but towards the end it becomes entirely obvious why we needed to read about a time when Corelli did not exist in Pelagia’s life. It is so that we can fall in love with her father, with the gentle giant in the village, with the pets that she takes care of and the olive tree in her garden. It is necessary for us to fall in love with these things so that we can be devastated when everything is ripped apart.

I fell in love with Antonio Corelli and I think that it is very important that this happens when a woman reads a love story. I also found myself remembering those who were both young and old during the war, the alternative impact it had on their lives in relation to their age, the experiences they shared and the events that they witnessed. I cried and I laughed when I read it.

At the end I had learned some lessons. Like how important it is not to waste time. And how detrimental it can be not to tell the truth about the way that you feel. And how stubbornness can ruin lives. And how, even though we might grow old, we are always going to be the exact same people. Thirty-two pages before the end I started crying, and I didn’t stop until there were just two pages left. On those two I laughed. 

I recommend this book if you love Birdsong, romance novels or war literacy, but to be honest I think it’s a great book for anybody. I learnt stuff and felt stuff. I don’t know what more you could want from a novel. Highly recommended.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

Overrated?

Perhaps the raving reviews of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo were what ruined it for me. Everyone who heard I was reading it told me that I was going to love it. One particular friend told me that she was avoiding reading the last installment in Stieg Larsson's famed Millenium series just because she didnt want it to end.I was promised a twist so fantastic that I was anticipating the end of the book from the very beginning. It was bestowed the honour of being the first book I purchased on my Amazon Kindle, and I sat down to read it excited to be at the beginning of a book that had been on my 'to read' list for a long time. I waited eagerly for the excitement to start. And waited. And I waited.

Even as I turned in to the epilogue  I was certain there was still more to come. Surely my mind was about to be blown. This can't be it. Can it? It was.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is, in theory, a fantastic story. A young girl has been missing for many years. Her uncle Henrik has never overcome her disappearance. Mikael Bloomvisk is a journalist shamed with a libel conviction. He is recruited to investigate the disappearance and promised information which will help him retribute those who have destroyed his career. On his way he meets Lisbeth Salandar, a disturbed, angry and talented young woman. Together they set out to solve a mystery which stumped even the most passionately involved policemen. The book is drenched with themes which enthral me - religion, crime and journalism. The charactes are kept associable through love affairs and sexual relationships. It is a story stitched together with historical facts and interesting statistics.

The book is slow paced and at times a difficult read. The core of the story is so interesting that I found myself bored by what appeared to be filler events. Many of the occurrences began with the promise of drama and then fall flat, and I found the idea that Mikael Blomkvisk, a man who is written as not particularly attractive, should have no fewer than three lovers throughout the course of a very busy year slightly unbelievable. Admittedly I haven't read the next instalment. There is every probability that Larsson not only ties up his loose ends, but explains what it is about this protagonist that makes these very different and beautiful women drop to their knees.

Had I not been told that this would be the best thing I would ever read I may not have been disappointed. I actively searched for the solutions to the problems written before me and more often than not I found them. I am not an avid reader of investigative novels and so am not well practised in guessing conclusions. I have an idea where the majority of the story lines are heading, but I don't know when I will read the rest of the series in order to discover them. I do not feel the desire I had imagined I would to carry on. I believe The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a book best enjoyed when one has not had its spectacular reputation confirmed by their friends.

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

A Book To Sing Songs About

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is not a book I fell instantly in love with. Nor did it have me captivated from the very first page. I am ashamed to say that, though I had heard of it, I had no idea what it was about, and that I turned the first few pages encouraged only by curiosity and my new years resolution to commit myself to reading more. I did not find it particularly interesting at first. In fact, I was instantly put off when I realised the first chapter was set in France in 1910. I am used to fluffy novels by modern authors, in which a strong, inspirational and average looking woman learns life’s lessons in exaggerated circumstances.

I am glad that I had no idea that this book was about the war, as I am almost certain I would not have read it. I am embarrassed to say that, whilst I am grateful for everything that was done to defend our country, I have no real interest in imagining the horror or reading about the pain. Not because I thought it would hurt me, but because, I believed, it would be dull and unnecessarily dramatically written. It is a set of circumstance which happened many, many years before I was born, that I was forced to learn about in order to pass exams throughout several stages of my education, and an event which is stereotypically rambled on about by the older generation. It has never occurred to me to stop and think about it properly. To admire the men who gave their lives for us as actual individuals instead of merely a group of soldiers.

Never have I ever had my opinion shifted so violently. Faulks did not just bewitched me with his simple but spectacular tale until the very last page, but he also dragged me from my ignorance regarding literacy and the boringness of the war. This is a tale of young men who gave their lives away, loved each other and lost their friends. It is about heartache, bravery and an almost incomprehensible passion for the freedom of people they have never met.

Never have I thought so deeply about what it must have been like to have been a young man on the front line. But when I discovered in part two that the main protagonist Stephen, who I had already been forced to fall in love with in part one of the novel, was fighting in France in the first world war, I succumbed to imagining what it must have felt to be a man like him.

I am not a man. Nor have I ever fought in a war. Still, as Stephen slept in trenches and watched his friends die, Faulks made sure I stood right there by his side. And when he climbed a ladder over the top of the trench into no mans land and marched toward the enemy lines I felt as though I was walking right beside him.

“To his left Stephen saw men trying to emerge from the trench but being smashed by bullets before they could stand. The gaps in the wire became jammed with bodies.”

Through this novel, I suddenly became aware that men as young as my brother and as old as my father once willingly walked into a hail of bullets and gave their lives just so that we could survive. Its over spoken an cliched, but once I was given the chance to actually stop and think about it, I felt overwhelmingly proud of them and incredibly sad.

“Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names.”

I believe utterly that Sebatian Faulks anticipated my response. And so ingeniously he gave us the character Elizabeth, Stephens granddaughter and inhabitant of the 1970’s. When she is introduced, she knows less than we do about her grandfather, and, though I was slightly agitated to have been dragged away from 1916 and the action, I was excited for her to discover what he had been like.

I thought then about an image my grandmother has in her bedroom of her father in military uniform. He died before I was born and, like Elizabeth in the beginning, I view him merely as a piece of history. He is not a man, or a dad or a brother. I would never have known the difference between him being the person he was or someone else. He has impacted little on my life, and only ever been a passing thought or a brief mention in a conversation. When I read Birdsong it made me sit and wonder. What might he have seen? Who was this man and what had he known? And interestingly - What will my own great grandchildren think about me? Will they know of me? If they do will they be proud? It is frightening to think that I might be responsible for a whole line of people who, in the end, know nothing about me and care very little.

I decided to ask my Grandmother about her dad. Agitated by the fact that I did not even know his name, I did not want to draw attention to the fact that I had never thought to ask her about him, so I started by asking her if he had fought in the war. It turns out he had. His name is Harry, he was born in 1911 and he was in the navy. Through Birdsong, I found myself thinking about a history which happened not very long ago and was a reality for as close as three generations ago. It stimulated my curiosity and made me want to learn.

I do not believe I have the imagination or the writing ability to communicate clearly enough what a beautiful string of words Birdsong is. I was disappointed to reach the end, partly because I did not want it to end, and partly because the end was slightly rushed. I wanted to know in as much detail of the rest of his life how Stephen’s ended. I wanted to know further the intricacies of his mind and how he lived out his life.

Ultimately, this novel is a story of raw, brave and unabashed love. So detailed, truthful and descriptive is this text that I felt intrusive and embarrassed on several occasions whilst reading it. I blushed so profusely on one particular train journey that I never dared read it again on public transport. That is not to say I wouldn’t have liked to. If it had been up to me I would never had put it down.

Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

An Exceptionally Good Book...

After reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, I was perturbed to realise that I had no choice but to read Helen Fielding's 'Bridget Jones's Diary' next. We had only a limited number of BBC recommended novels in the house and, unfortunately for me, my housemate Catherine had already laid claim to 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks.

Still, I turned the first page with optimism and enthusiasm, assuring myself that reading a book about a women so geniously portrayed by Renee Zellweger in the 2001 smash hit movie of the same title, would at least be an experience. I love that movie. And I was right.

Bridget Jones's diary can in no way be described as literary genius in a complicated sense. It is a cleverly concocted and realistic piece of writing which most single women in their twenties and thirties can relate to, with a few ludicrous and inane storylines thrown in for dramatic effect.

But its genius is exactly that. I doubt there are many women who cannot relate to certain aspects of Fielding's witty writing.

Though I did not find myself laughing out loud as often as I would have liked, there were certain aspects of Bridget's life I found myself nodding in recognition of.

Who has not fallen for an idiot of man? We can all relate to Bridget's completely understandable but extremely unsensible obsession with her boss Daniel Clever, a man who is clearly cheating on her from the very beginning, but is so devastatingly sexy that the very idea he might fancy her leaves her deluded beyond belief. Of course he is using her. Of course he dumps her for a fit American. Of course her friends act as though they are surprised about it as she is.

Which of us can honestly say that we have not marvelled at the ever-changing digits on our scales, which see our weight fluctuate up and down within range of just four pounds within hours? I have more than once been seen to weigh myself, take some clothes off, weigh myself, have a wee, weigh myself again and not lose a single pound, only to stand on the scales the next day and have put on two.

And as for the mother... I had a conversation with my own mother recently which went something like this. "Mam, why is there cauliflower on my plate?"

"Because you like cauliflower?"

"No, I don't like cauliflower."

"Yes you do!"

Though everyone's mother may not be quite as dramatic as Bridget's, I think we can all say it is the exercised right of a mum to tell you what you like, who you should fancy, what you should wear...

"Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes..."

As a light read, Bridget Jones's Diary is brilliance. A hilarious insight into the life of a middle-class British woman, it is a story of an insatiable desire not to accept second best, an unwavering belief in true love and a tireless tale of real friendship. If you have seen the film you have by no means read the book. A worthy read from a gifted and intelligent writer with obvious first person insight into the hearts and minds of middle  aged women everywhere.