Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English

About the Author: This is a debut novel from Stephen Kelman was shor listed for the Mann Booker prize in 2011.  he was brought up on Marsh  Estate Luton similar to the one that is portrayed in this story. He attended University of Luton where he studied marketing and worked in a factory until he started writing.

Pigeon English is inspired by the death and the circumstances under which Damilola Taylor lived.  The book is written in a Patwa style of Pigeon English.  It portrays the life and innocence of Harri Okapu.  He is the son of an immigrant family from Ghana, an absent father and a mother who is doing her best to raise Harri in a hostile environment of a Peckham Estate.  Everyday Harri observes the activities of gangs and knife crime.  His innocence is overwhelming and at times painful.   He witnesses the murder of his friend and turns detective.  This places him at risk. He is murdered in the stairwell of the block of his flat, an uncomfortable similarity to Damilola Taylor.

One member of the book considered strange that it was written in the first person who was dead! Most of the group thought the book covered some difficult and real issues facing young people today. The book was written in 'street style' dialect which some of the group had difficulty understanding and interpreting the language used.  One member of the group particularly felt that this was an issue book and did not enjoy the read.   The story presented the challenges of young people being brought up in an environment where gangs were prevalent.  In particular the young age at which both girls and boys were groomed, especially the pressure they were under to conform in order to stay safe.  They then sank further and further into their control.  The story offered no answers but hi- lighted the issues and the hopelessness of trying to resist.  There was much discussion as to who was the perpetrator with a couple of suspects. 

Generally the book was well received, although considered to not that well written it covered real issues, whether some of the group believed it or not.

The next book is Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot

Katherine Mansfield - The Garden Party

About the Author: Born in New Zealand in1888 she came to England to finish her education. She was a regular contributor to The New Age and her first book In a German Pension was published in 1911, she married the editor of The Rhythm for which she was writing at the time.  She contracted turbuculosis in 1917 and much of her life from this time on was I pursuit of health.  This disease cut her life short and she died I 1923.  

The Garden Party was her final book.  The short stories represent her observations of human behaviours in ordinary circumstances,  especially that of fragile emotions, half understood feelings.  There is great Beauty in her language, no better expressed tha in two of the stories, Miss Brill, a lonely lady who likes nothing better than to go and sit in the Park at the Park Tea Room and imagine others lives from her observations.   On this particular occasions she hears a less than complementary account of herself by a young couple. She is devastated by this and returns heartbroken to her lonely room.  The Garden Party relates a story of privilege and the apparent absurd prioritisation within those echelons.  A young man dies at the gates of their Estate and the priority is to get the Garden Party underway.  Only one member of the family visits the house and is confused by the emotion that is apparent there. 

The group enjoyed the fact that they could dip in to the book and read a complete story.  Between us all the book was read in its entirety with each member taking something fome each of them. It was unanimously agreed that Katherine Mansfield's writing was beautifully descriptive expressing tangible emotion and observations.

The books on offer by Debra and Stepen were;

Jeffrey Eugeneides.   Middlesex

Elizabeth Haynes.  Into the Darkest Corner

Tea Obreht. The  Tigers Wife

Stephen Kelman Pigeon English 

Pigeon English was selected 

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

About the Author:  Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857 originally Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. His parents Polish patriots died when he was a child following their excise. He was brought up by his Uncle. Conrad developed a passion for the sea and he travelled to Marseille where he served on

French merchant vessels before joining a British ship on 1878 and served on these ships for eight years.  He then took up writing, he continued to write until his death in 1924.  Conrad today is regarded S one the greatest writers of English fiction.

The story describes Marlow's search for Mr Kurtz, the company agent and his dealings with the natives of the Belgian Congo.  

The quality of his writing belies the fact that Englilsh is not his birth language.  He has very descriptive style portraying the beauty , the ugliness and the passion of his experience within his prose.  The obsessive persuit by Marlowe of Mr Kurtz  is often merged with his own passion.  The 'Darkness' portrays the Congo and it's apparent savagery.  It must be noted that this writing reflects the time and there are many descriptions and expressions that are very much a reflection of its time, the overt racism ithat much of it is based on is hard to swallow in 2012

Marlow speaks much of the darkness and in some ways the group felt that this  implies that Kurtz's insanity was caused by the knowledge that the natives were naturally subservient or savages.  Because of their perceived lower state of their, Kurtz was led to enact his position of power and that is how he lost his humanity.   Some of the treatment of the natives was brutal and severe with many of the lucid descriptive passages difficult to read because of their vivid description.

The group felt that overall the language of the writing was beautiful, most of the group felt it was dark and depressing and was an example of greed and exploitation which was prevelant at this time.

The books on offer by Karen this month are short stories;

Guy de Maupassant:  The Best Short Stories

Hector Hugo Monro:  The Collected Short Stories of Saki

Jennifer Egan:  A visit from the Goon Squad 

Damon Runya:  Guys and Dolls and Other Stories

PG Wodehouse: What Ho!

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw

Katherine Mansfield:  The Garden Party

Tye book th taw selected was Katherine Mansfield:  The Garden Party

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

About the Author:  William Fiennes is the best selling author The Snow Geese and the Music Room.The Snow Geese, published to wide acclaim in 2002, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Hawthornden Prize and  spent two years as Fellow in Creative Arts at Wolfson College, Oxford.  Since 2007, he has been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London and at Cranford Community College, Hounslow.   He is Director and co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools.  William Fiennes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

What we thought of the book:  William Fiennes had just left for university and was studying as graduate when he became seriously ill.  He had to return home and having embarked on his adulthood had had to return to the family home and become a child again.  He also had alot of time on his hands and he became reflective. He had never forgotten a book that he had been read as a child 'The Snow Goose' by Paul Gallico which had influenced a young and impressionable mind.   The story which spoke of restlessness and longing for change had resonance with his own emotions having had his transition into manhood interrupted by his illness.  He began to study birds and maps and planned to follow the path of the snow goose who flew at the same time every year, about  six million or so, from their wintering grounds on the Gulf Coast of America up to their Arctic breeding grounds.

He realises his dream and sets off on a four month, two thousand mile journey by plane, hired car Greyhound bus, train and finally a snowmobile.  He meets a variety of people whose characters are genuine and quirky, however none of whom are caricatures.   He eventually arrives at the breeding grounds and after a long wait experiences the 'invasion' on the snow geese on this tranquil environment.   He writes vividly about his impression of thirty thousands geese taking off and landing and describes it  as 'the sound of steel being hammered on anvils'. He is inisistant that in this experinece it is the journey that matters and not the arrival which is ironical as when he catches up with the snow geese in Northern Canada where the residents have also been anticipating their arrival then they kill them for food!

On route he is helped by local people who provide him with hospitality and one even asks him, he is a stranger to them, to house sit while she goes away.  Many of the local people give him a home when he needed it and there is a reflective meditation on home and what it means to people.  He contemplates the theme of the common need for 'home'. 

Not every one read the book and some became irritated by the lenghty descriptions.  Both Mary and Gaynor felt this intitially and then once they realised that this was not leading to any excitement and that it was a journey, they enjoyed it and went with the flow.  The descriptions were detailed and reflective, the length of them irritated some. Cathrine for one did not enjoy this and described it as 'formulaic'.   Lorraine only read part of it, as did Steve who felt there was too much about the natural history of the geese.  Mary enjoyed the book and especially liked his encounters with some of people he met.  Mike particularly enjoyed the description and the encounter on the train.  

Overall those who read the book felt it was charming and littered with cameos of North Americans through the mid west and the route north through Canada to the Inuits in the Arctic.  Interestingly the further north he went the more trusting of him, as a stranger, the people he met were.  However the criticism was that although it was a book that had good reviews it did not will the reader through a journey to a promised ending - perhaps we were taking it too literally and needed to be more receptive to the meditative and spiritual journey that William was undertaking?

The books offerd by Cathrine and Charles were:

Darwins Radio - Greg Bear

Mostly Harmless - Gerald Douglas Adams

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Far Side of the World - Patrick O'Brien

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre


The Group chose Heart of Darkness - the next meeting at Karen's.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

It appears that this book it out of sequence and I do apologise to the readers and followers of this blog.

About the Author: Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. She currently lives in Atlanta with her family. The Help is her first novel.

What we thought of it: Nearly all the group thought that it was a very brave book to write. The story itself was about a group of married white women and their black maids. The maids generally work long hours and also raise the children within their care. 'Skeeter' returns from University and unlike the women that she went to school with and her mother she wants more form life than a man and a ring on her finger. She wants to be a journalist. She normally seeks solace with Constantine her maid but whilst she was away Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell her where she has gone. Abileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

Some members of the group considered Skeeter to be taking an extreme risk to write an account of life with a white family in Missippi at that time from a black woman's perspective. Abileen the maid also took that risk as she may be unemployable should it become known what she was doing. She had already lost her son who was attached when others looked the other way. The apartheid that existed at that time shocked some of the group at the realisation that this was within our life time and only in the 1960s. Hilly and her friends being rude to the maids and believing that they were dirty, also sharing this with their children. The turning point for Skeeter was Hilly's project for all the black maids to have separate bathroom outside of the house as 'they carry different diseases' from white people.

Some members of the group felt that the racist themes and the injustice of apartheid were sensitively dealt with in the novel. Each event relaying the racist theme through the interplay of the relationships between Hilly and her friends and also the interplay between each of the characters and the maid. It was interesting to note that Minny who after losing her job in town because she could not keep her mouth shut, found a job with a newcomer to the town. Minny's new employer is not influenced by Hilly and her friends as she is also an outcast and despite her efforts does not 'fit' within the social group and is not accepted into the social circlw.

Skeeter meets with Abileen and Minny to write the book and includes several anecdotes from whilst they were working with Hilly and her friends. Although Skeeter is discreet working at night she has a near miss where she leaves her satchel with her notes in it at Hilly's. Minny is a fantastic cook and one of the stories she tells relates to a time when she was in Hilly;s employ and she bakes pie into which she puts faeces. Hilly eats two pieces. When Skeeter eventually publishes her book it is this event, that despite the names being changed to lightly disguise the town and it's dwellers, that Hilly recognises herself. At which point she insists that Abileen is dismissed from her employer who is one of Hilly's friends and fronts out the humiliation.

It is difficult to judge whether it was Skeeter's intention to have an underlying theme of racial equality or whether it was a bi-product of a selfish act in order to have an exclusive and controversial story to make her name in journalism. Did she consider the fall out and the impact that it had on the Abileen and her friends? Apart from the obvious initial embarrassment did it really have an impact locally in addressing racism at that time? Was this the intention solely to escape from her ailing mothers clutches and her boyfriend who on hearing of the content of her book breaks off the relationship. Ironically Skeeter also discovers that her mother had direct involvement in Constantine's disappearance.

The book now has been turned into a movie. By all accounts the story has been re-produced in a light hearted way with much emphasis on the style and the humour. The film skirts over the issue of racism which is the fundamental theme of the book. It is difficult to understand how this issue can be avoided when it is the core of the civil rights movement in America. Is it because the primary purpose of the film a bit like Skeeter's book is that it needs to be a Box Office success.

There are no choices at the end of this review. However the next book in this blog will be The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

The Drunkard's Walk, How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow

About the Author: Mlodinow was born in Chicago Illinois of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. His father had been a leader in the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule in his hometown in Poland and then spent more than a year in Buchenwald concentration camp. When Mlodinow was a child he had been interested in both mathematics and chemistry and was tutored in organic chemistry whilst at high school by a professor of the University of Illinois. His interest turned to physics whilst he was on break from University which he spent at a kibbutz. When having little to do in the evenings he read The Feyman Lectures on Physics which was the only book in English in the kibbutz library. He undertook extensive research in physics and developed a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in quantum mechanics and pioneering work on the quantum theory for dielectric media.
About the Book: The Guardian Book review provides the following insight to the randomness theory that permeates this book. 'A chance is what you take when you cannot calculate the odds. If the odds are in your favour, then in the long run, you'll win. What are the chances that you could flip a coin 10 million times and get heads every time? Very high, according to probability theory. Go on flipping and, over a period almost indistinguishable from eternity, you'd get myriad uninterrupted stretches of heads or tails. The catch is you'd never know whether you were in a stretch of 10 million consecutive wins or losses until after the event.That is the second lesson of this delightful book: risky ventures, long shots and random outcomes have a way of looking like good bets, but only after the event. Almost everything that happens in life is contingent upon a series of unconscious gambles: of turnings taken, of chance encounters and unconsidered choices - in short, the drunkard's walk of the title. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it was easy enough to track back to the warning signs and condemn the high command for not having read them correctly. But this was to impose a selected pattern on what - before the bombs began to fall - would have been a bewildering array of conflicting intelligence amassed over many months from listening posts around the globe. Pearl Harbor wasn't a random event - somebody planned it - but until it had happened, such an attack could have been predicted in many places, or not at all. The dilemma for all gamblers is: just because such a thing is probable, does that mean it is going to happen this time?'
The Review: Surprisingly the people that were thought may not like the book did- is this Mladilow's theory in action? One of the over riding conclusions is that it is dangerous to judge ability by short term events. Most events it is claimed seem random or may even appear to follow a pattern, this can be luck and not necessarily skill.

One of the examples given is that of the Maserati boss who was giving away a car and it behind some doors, he opened one of the doors and showed the booby prize. Mladilow claimed that the odds increased of selecting the correct door if the person guessing changed their original choice.
There was some interesting debate about what is predictable and what is though to have been foreseen when considering it from the retrospective position. Some of the group though the book did not quite do it! Two members of the group considered it to be a belief system that you either had faith in or you did not. This was apparent during the discussions. The book was not one you could pick and read sequentially, the chapters were not the development of a theory or a story - it was one that needed to be dipped in and out of. Although some of the annecdotes presented to represent a theory were believable and interesting to some but it left others cold.

The book on offer were:

Deadly Ambush - Raymond L Cox

Jo Nesbo - The Snowman

The Snow Geese - William Fienes

The Music Room - William Fiennes

The Man from Beijing - Henning Mankell

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

About the Author: Rebecca Skloot is the daughter of poet, novelist and essayist Floyd Skloot. She received a BSc in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is a former vice president of the National Book Circle Books. She is faculty member at the yearly Mid-Atlantic Summer Creative Nonfiction. Writers Conference and has taught creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Memphis. She is also a writing mentor with the Creative Notification mentoring program.

About the Book: Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in August 1920 and died October 4, 1951 aged 31. She was born to a family of tobacco farmers in Ronaoke Virginia. Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta. Eliza, her mother, died giving birth to her tenth child in 1924. Henrietta's father felt unable to handle the children, so he took them all to Clover, Virginia and distributed the children between relatives. Henrietta married her fits cousin David Lacks who had already been living with Henrietta's grandfather when she came to live there at the age of 4. They already had two children when they married in 1941 and surprised many in the family as they had been raised like brother and sister. They eventually had five children together after having moved to Maryland. Within four months of having her fifth child in Johns Hopkins Hospital in November 1950, Henrietta was diagnosed with cancer. Elsie was described by the family as "different", "deaf and dumb" and in 1955 died in the Hospital for the Negro Insane where she had been placed in 1950, around the same time Henrietta discovered that she had lumps and unusual bleeding.
She described the sensation as having a knot inside her and was eventually diagnosed at Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer. This was the only hospital in the area that treated black women. She underwent a course of treatment which involved having radium tubes sewn into her with a follow up of radium treatment at the X Ray department at a later date. During this treatment they removed without her permission, a sample of cancerous and also a sample of non cancerous tissue. Henrietta eventually died of uremic poisoning after almost a year after her initial diagnosis. She was remarkably uncomplaining whilst she underwent extensive often uncomfortable and painful treatment.

The significance of the cells that were removed were that they behaved in a unique way and continued to multiply after her death. The have continued to grow to this day and have become known as HeLa cells . They have supplied the world with tissue cells for the research and study of oncology and have been made a hugely important contribution to medical research.

The Review: Many of the group were shocked as to how her contribution to medical science has carried on without her or her families consent or knowledge. This was revealed to the family during the research into this book. Many were shocked at the exploitation of her and her family. One member of the family likened it to the family being raped. Karen said that the first 150 pages were important for science and the family history. Rolf did feel that it was a work of fiction and it had re-created stories that had grown up around it. The story of Henrietta Lacks has directly lead to the development of medical ethics and transparency in the taking of tissue samples and also contributed to the ethics within the organ transplant process.

Henrietta's family did not know about the tissue sample and the fact that it had been sold throughout the world. Ironically the family could not even afford medical insurances and had not known or benefited from the contribution that Henrietta had made. Some of the group felt that the family dynamic as told was really annoying and the region appeared to be full of people accepting their lot in life. Reference was made to the film Precious which some members of the group felt had demonstrated what happens in the slums regarding the disregard for the rights and the exploitation of individuals.

Why are these cells so productive? They are believed to contain a specific enzyme but why and how is not known.

Overall the book was considered a very important and interesting read although some felt it was overly long.

The books on offer from Rolf were:

Persian Fire - Tom Holland

The Rule of Law - Tom Bingham

Alexander the Great - Paul Cartledge

The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins

The Drunkard's Walk - or how randomness rules our lives - Leonard Mlodinow

Uncle Petros and Goldbachs Conjecture - Apostolos Doxiadis

The groups chose The Drunkards Walk