Cove by Cynan Jones

 

112 Pages

You can buy "Cove"...Here

You can follow Cynan Jones...Here

• The Blurb...

Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return. With its taut narrative and its wincingly visceral portrait of a man locked in an uneven struggle with the forces of nature, this is a powerful new work from one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction.

• Our Review..

This is a beautifully written short story. The plot is minimal. i.e man on kayak at sea gets struck by lightning, tries to make it back to shore. Clearly inspired by The Old Man and The Sea. But the description of this simple plot is exceptional. It feels akin to an academic exercise in literal descriptive techniques.

First of all, after the lightning strike, the author splits the narrative into two parts. The physical battle for survival and the attempt to rescue his mental capabilities. After the lightning strike as well as the bodily injuries, his memory has been wiped. All he is left with are the instinct to survive and the merest hint of a ghost of a memory of a woman.

The writing format is short separated sentences or paragraphs so that you are hit with point after point in rapid succession. It's like being machine gunned.

The prose however is not straight forward and simple. It is lyrical and opaque. It has numerous similes and metaphors, which I love. It makes the reader work. The reader has to decide whether the sentence is real or imagined or even symbolic. The writing style is much more to the Dylan Thomas end of the writing scale than say Cormac McCarthy.

Which brings me to another point. I began reading this in my usual way, quickly and business like but the writing is just so rich and poetic that I found myself slowing down, savouring every word and reading aloud to feel the rhythms. 

Why then only 3 stars? I'm afraid the end let it down a little for me. It just seemed to happen abruptly and a little to ambiguously. I just don't like the endings to be even a little open to interpretation. 

All in all a visceral, descriptive short story about how fleeting life in physical and spiritual form can be.

 

• Selected Quotes..

"He let the light in bit by bit, as if sipping it with his eye,"

"The smell of the jumper triggers something, but it is like a piano key hitting strings that are gone."

"He saw beneath him a flock of jellyfish, like negligees."

"If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend."

"He had a sense, out here, of peace. He could feel not only the proximity of the bay but a proximity to himself. He thought: Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?"

• If You Like This Then You May Like...

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (for poetic type prose)

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• About The Author...

Cynan Jones was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove.

 

He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.

 

His work has been published in more than twenty countries, and short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta Magazine and The New Yorker. He also wrote the screenplay for an episode of the BAFTA-winning crime series Hinterland, and Three Tales, a collection of stories for children.

 

Cynan Jones was the 2008 Scritture Giovani Hay Festival Fellow, has tutored extensively for Literature Wales, the Arvon Foundation, and other writing bodies, and wrote and presents CBC's online Writing Short Stories course. For a number of years he was the RLF Writing Fellow at Aberystwyth University and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 

His latest work, available now from Granta books, is Stillicide, a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4 that aired over the summer 2019. 

(from cynanjones.com)

The Memory by Judith Barrow

 

You can buy "The Memory"...Here

You can follow Judith Barrow...Here

You can follow Welsh women's publisher "Honno"...Here

• The Blurb...

Today has been a long time coming. Irene sits at her mother's side waiting for the right moment, for the point at which she will know she is doing the right thing by Rose.

Rose was Irene's little sister, an unwanted embarrassment to their mother Lilian but a treasure to Irene. Rose died thirty years ago, when she was eight, and nobody has talked about the circumstances of her death since. But Irene knows what she saw. Over the course of 24 hours their moving and tragic story is revealed – a story of love and duty, betrayal and loss – as Irene rediscovers the past and finds hope for the future.

• Our Review...

In an effort to get out of my comfort zone of vicious crime and dystoptian chaos I have read The Memory by Judith Barrow. To my shame it has been sat on my TBR for too long. It is published by Honno, a Welsh womens publishing house. Isn't that a great concept. Good for Welsh women authors and good for readers everywhere. 

Every chapter has two sections. The first takes place during the course of one day, where we follow Irene caring for her dementia suffering, incontinent mother. Irene does this with a mixture of love and resentment, all whilst being physically and emotionally exhausted.

The second part of each chapter deals with the story of Irene's life and how she came to be where she is now. It also tells the tale of her Downs syndrome sister Rose and the deadly secret that Irene and her mother silently share, that comes out into the light towards the end.

Very relevant in today's climate of unaffordable housing, super expensive care homes, crumbling NHS. Society in general may be forced to going back to a time where you lived at home with your parents and when the time comes you give them end of life care.

This genre is very different for me. I think it's fair to say its target audience is female. It hammers on the emotional heartstrings. It effects one more than your bog standard crime thriller. I had at least three emo speed wobbles leading to occular seepage. In short if you want a good old sob this is the book for you.

The author definitely has a gift for sweet, melancholy, nostalgia. Its painful and warming at the same time, like a deep muscle back massage, picking a scab or sticking a thumb into a day old bruise. A glorious ache. Heartbreaking at times  uplifting at others, Irene's life is grim intertwined with a small strand of love and happiness, probably like most people's. It's a tale of duty, of doing the right thing even if it is for the wrong person and even if it costs you your happiness. Think Remains of the Day but with mother and daughter rather than master and butler. 

The book will wring your heart like a dishcloth.

• Selected Quotes...

"He says I’m beautiful. I joke that he’s looking at me after one too many pints of beer but he doesn’t drink that much and besides it’s not funny. It’s as though I’m rushing towards old age before I’ve actually lived."

"Sometimes I think I’m only getting through life on memories."

"I rolled the last of my cornflakes around my mouth with my tongue, holding them long enough to soften, so that when I chewed it didn’t sound in the silence."

"Once, in desperation and to my shame, I even forced them into her mouth and tried to make her have a drink of water. She nearly choked. After that I gave up. So now I wait with Sam. This woman will be the death of me. Or me her."

• If You Like This Then You May Like...

Mother Love by Thorne Moore

Emmet and Me by Sarah Gethin

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

• About The Author...

Although I was born and brought up in a small village on the edge of the Pennine moors in Yorkshire, for the last forty years I’ve lived with my husband and family near the coast in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, UK, a gloriously beautiful place.

I’ve written all my life and have had short stories, poems, plays, reviews and articles published throughout the British Isles. But I only started to seriously write novels after I’d had breast cancer twenty years ago.

 Four novels safely stashed away, never to see the light of day again, I had the first of my historical family saga trilogy, Pattern of Shadows, published in 2010, the sequel, Changing Patterns, in 2013 and the last, Living in the Shadows in 2015. The prequel, A Hundred Tiny Threads was published in August 2017. All published by Honno

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

 

You can buy Brave New World...Here

You can find out about Aldous Huxley...Here

288 Pages

• The Blurb...

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.

You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.

Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost.

• Our Review...

Compelling glimpse of the future set in what would be the year 2540 AD. The novel was written in 1932. So now in 2022, we are in 90 years into a 608 year journey i.e. 15% of the way there. And you can definitely see traits developing in our society that could end up in a Brave New World. 

I think Huxley would be amazed at how far along we are with regards to things like IVF, mass medication, paypal/bitcoin, fake news, Tinder and rampant capitalism. When you take it all into consideration its a bit scary how far down the line we are.

In reality this book is an extreme thought experiment. What would happen if you mixed the theory of mass production. (ala Henry Ford motor cars) which was still relatively new during Huxley's time and the theory of Pavlov's Dogs (link here) applying it to humans and then taking it to the extreme. We don't need AI to destroy our humanity, we can do it ourselves with bio-engineering.

The title Brave New World is taken from Shakespeare's Tempest where Miranda meets outsiders for the first time in her life and says. ‘Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, That has such people in’t.’

The book follows a small cast of characters. Bernard and Helmholtz are both Alphas in the caste system but both are not quite right, not quite totally docile. Lenina a bog standard Delta and John aka The Savage, a man born in the old fashioned way not involving test tubes and jars and who was brought up on a reservation of wild indigenous tribes.

Humans are mass produced in labs. They are kept happy and content by programming and drugs. There is a constant flat-line of life. There are no wars, disasters, plagues, poverty or unemployment. All great you may say but there must be balance, so there is no love, no individualism, no self-reliance, no great artistic or cultural progress. Even scientific progress is highly restricted. Is the prize worth the cost? I think that would depend on who you ask. I think those in the lower strata of society may well conclude that the basics of life plus a lack of want are well worth missing out on opera, Shakespeare and quantum entanglement theory. But I think Love would be the big loss. The Love not just of a partner but of family too. Imagine no wife or husband, no mother, no father, no siblings, no grandparents. Is life worth living without Love? 

It is a short and easy read.

Really enjoyed the concepts presented. Only two points irritated. One of the main characters constantly quoted Shakespeare. Which in part was ironic in Huxley's society he was classed as a savage.  In addition I thought the end could have been more developed. But all in all hell of a book, one that will stay with me forever.

At some point I may do a compare and contrast 1984, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and Blind Faith. 

• Selected Quotes...

"on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great Lodon newspapers- The Hourly Radio, an upper- caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror."

"Words can be like X- rays, if you use them properly- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

"A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain."

"The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma."

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

1984 by George Orwell. Click our review...Here

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Click our review...Here

Blind Faith by Ben Elton. Click our review...Here

• About The Author

Aldous Huxley, in full Aldous Leonard Huxley, (born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, England—died November 22, 1963, LA. , U.S.), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence whose works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire. He remains best known for one novel, Brave New World(1932), a model for much dystopian Science Fiction that followed. Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and was the third child of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley; his brothers included physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley and biologist Julian Huxley. He was educated at Eton, during which time he became partially blind because of Keratitis. He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, and he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California. (from Brittania.com)

They're a 10 but...

 

Right then gang. A little bit of fun, fluff and nonsense. After seeing "They're a 10 but.. " book tag on the CriminOlly youtube channel, I thought that I'd have a bash myself.. Six books that are fantastic apart from one flaw. Have a squint below and see if you love six books that fit the questions. Here we go.

• Its a 10 but...is over 500 pages

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevesky. at 720 pages according to Waterstones is a hefty chunk of literature first published in 1866. It follows the trials and tribulations of Raskolnikov who murders a wicked pawnbroker. He justifies the heinous crime by telling himself that he will go on to be an exceptional man and exceptional men are not bound by the laws of society. Yet he finds that it is not the law that punishes him but his own internal moral conscience. Fascinating tale of our souls and its role in the structure of a just society.

• It's a 10 but...it's on pre-order

Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd. Bit of a cheat here because I have already read an ARC of this book. However at time of writing (Dec 22) this book is not out for a few months yet (Feb 23). It's the second in a series, the first is a good book too. Its tells the tale of a Paris cop, Eddie Giral, during the nazi occupation of Paris during WW2 and the investigation into an horrific murder. Eddie can trust nobody, and nobody trusts him. Check out our review here.

• It's a 10 but... it has red flags

The Road by Cormac Mcarthy. This tale of a dystopian future is now probably up there with 1984, Brave New World and Farenheit 451 in the literary cannon of future earth sci fi. Written by one of Americas most lauded authors, it is probably the most terrifying of the afore-mentioned novels. Red flags are everywhere gratuitous violence, cannibalism and suicide to name a few. It is, however, well done and it will stay with you long after reading. Check out our review here

• It's a 10 but... I was forced to read it in school.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. Fascinating coming of age tale. Hated it in school, later re-read and loved it. Autobiographical story of Lee's childhood in rural Gloucestershire circa WW1. Perhaps the most beautifully written book I have ever read. It showcases what is now a lost age with nostalgia but also truth. It touches on incest. The part that spoke to me most, however, was when a ex villager returned from NZ to visit family and was boasting drunkenly in the pub of his new wealth and talking down the locals. He was murdered and the limited police investigation was met with a wall of silence. As a young lad from the North Gwent Valleys I felt I could relate to that scenario some 70 years later.

• It's a 10 but... Left you an emotional wreck.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom. This is more like a cheesy guilty pleasure. Eddie is an old man and a mechanic at a theme park. He is killed trying to save a young girl from an accident on one of the rides. In the after life he goes through five meetings with people whose lives have affected him or on whose life he has had an effect. It is a weapons grade tear inducer with more than a touch of A Christmas Carol. It will make you think about you life and your loved ones who have passed on.

• It's a 10 but... is over 100 years old. 

War of the Worlds by HG Wells.  Written by the Grand-Father of Sci Fi. As a small boy in the 70s I was brought up reading stories and hearing tales of WW2. And then I read this. WW2 but on an even more massive scale. Imagine my shock when I found out it was written in 1895. It's not just the plot that is fantastic. The ending is elegantly thought out and the writing is sublime. The opening paragraph is now iconic. I bet when you read it you can't help but use the succulent voice of Richard Burton in your head. If you haven't had that pleasure then click on the link Here It's like chocolate honey for the ears.

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