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Irish Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Love Forms by Claire Adam: A novel of cumulative force
Love Forms Author : Claire Adam ISBN-13 : 978-0571339549 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £16.99 Love Forms is a novel about what we bury and the surprising ways it resurfaces. The first scene takes place in 1980. Sixteen-year-old Dawn Bishop, heavily pregnant, boards a boat from her home in Trinidad to a convent in Venezuela. There, she will give birth and give up the child for adoption. Her white, upper-class family has handled the logistics and made a pact: when she comes back, all of this will be forgotten. But the body remembers. So does the mind, even when it tries not to. The novel, narrated by an older Dawn (divorced, living in England, mother to two grown sons), doesn't follow a straight line. It moves by echo and examination, circling back through memories that are sometimes pivotal, sometimes seemingly incidental. Yet it never drifts. Each new memory has a weight; it shifts the balance of the narrative, reconfiguring the relationship between the events that precede it. This isn't a confession but a reassembly, a story that evolves as the narrator tries to sort through it in her mind. [ Claire Adam on St Patrick's Day in Trinidad: 'We'd come back from school to find all the Irish ladies boozed up and laughing their heads off' ] The catalyst arrives in the form of a message from a stranger claiming to be Dawn's lost daughter. After years of searching through online forums and being met with false leads, this may finally be the connection she has been seeking. But this is not a novel about reunion. It's about what happens when realisation comes too late. Dawn's voice is the novel's anchor: wise, perceptive, and eminently likable. She is a well-drawn portrait of the average middle-aged mother, who has seen far more than she lets on, and carries her experience lightly. ''Girl,' I said. 'It's not easy!' I meant it in the way only Trinidadians would understand, the marvelling at how strange the world was, how incomprehensible.' Her sturdiness, laced with exasperated humour, prevents the subject from becoming unbearably leaden. READ MORE Love Forms is a novel of cumulative force. There's no catharsis or revelation, just the quiet pressure of the past pushing against the present. As the title suggests, it's an examination of two intertwined meanings: the varied forms love takes, and the complex, often strange process by which love itself forms within us. Claire Adam brings a refreshing seriousness and sincerity to these mysteries.
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Charles Chadwick obituary
My father, Charles Chadwick, who has died aged 92, was a British Council officer involved in a career that took him to Africa, South and North America, and finally to Poland. There, as the council's director, he administered its Know-How Fund to help pay for libraries in Kraków, Gdańsk and Poznań following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After retiring from the British Council, in 2005 he had a surprise success as an author when a novel he had written more than 30 years previously, It's All Right Now, was published by Faber and Faber when he was 73. The manuscript had been rejected on various occasions in the past, but had been taken up again by the literary agent Caroline Dawnay, who managed to get Faber & Faber interested. The story of its final emergence made the national news and gave hope to many aspiring authors. Charles was born in Swanage, Dorset, to Trevor and Marjory (nee Freeman), who were both schoolteachers; his father volunteered in Prague during the late 1930s to help run Nicholas Winton's Czech Kindertransport. After attending Charterhouse school in Surrey, where he captained the cricket team and twice dismissed the future England captain Peter May, a fellow pupil, he did his national service with the Royal Leicesters in Korea. There he trod on a landmine shortly after arriving, and ended up losing his lower leg. After recovering at various military hospitals he followed his younger brother William to Canada, where he studied English and French at the University of Toronto. After graduation Charles spent nine years working for the Colonial Service in what is now Zambia, first as a district officer reviewing local civil cases, then lecturing at a staff training college in Luanshya and finally teaching administration in Lusaka. In 1972 he left to work for the British Council, beginning in Nigeria and then spent a year in Brazil (1975-76). After a five-year spell at its London office (1976-81), he worked for the council in Canada (1981-88) and then in Poland until his retirement in 1992, when he was appointed CBE. Following the surprise publication of It's All Right Now, Charles had another previously rejected novel, A Chance Acquaintance, released in 2011. Three more, Letter to Sally, My Sister Julie and Josefa, could not attract an English publisher but were accepted by a German company, which translated them for the German market. In retirement in London, Charles became a school governor and in 1994 was appointed for a short spell as regional coordinator of a European Union election observer team in South Africa. In 1965, he married Evelyn Ingeborg, a violinist; they later divorced. In 1998 he married Mary Teale. Mary died in 2018. He is survived by two sons, me, from his first marriage, and Samuel from his second, and two grandsons, Huw and Mackenzie.
Irish Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen: Island life in a mythical world
Muckle Flugga Author : Michael Pedersen ISBN-13 : 978-0571387724 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £16.99 This debut novel by award-winning poet Michael Pedersen tells the story of a lighthouse keeper and his son on the island of Muckle Flugga, the northernmost inhabited point of these islands. Although a real island, the novel offers mythic versions of both Muckle Flugga and the Edinburgh of our other protagonist, Firth. In the world of Muckle Flugga, people are writers and lighthouse keepers and candlemakers, and although the real world provides a framework, it's easy to forget once immersed in the novel's lush landscapes. Pedersen's linguistic register encompasses both high drama and whimsy, and he excels at immersing us in the vivid seascapes of the island and its surroundings. The plot tracks the redemptive connection that blossoms between Ouse, the solitary but inspired lighthouse keeper's son, and Firth, the despairing and morally compromised writer who visits the island to fulfil a childhood dream before a planned suicide. The lighthouse keeper, known only as The Father, casts a shadow over proceedings. He is a convincingly-drawn tyrant and although twisted by grief, we come to understand the man he once was. The island itself proves a magnetic character, infecting the dreamscapes of the characters in a manner reminiscent at times of The Magus by John Fowles . Here, the natural world is transcendently beautiful but charged with agency: 'The same stars that reflect dreamily in Muckle Flugga's windowpanes are those that send ships spinning in circles until the sea's ready to claim them…' READ MORE As a debut, there are quirks in the writing that can prove frustrating – it takes a number of chapters before the dialogue between the characters begins to flow, with the omniscient narrator often telling us things we might enjoy discovering through real-time interaction between the characters. The italicisation of the dialogue has a similarly distancing effect. Although the descriptions are lyrical, there are times when a sentence such as 'What's outside hits him like a flying hug from a fond face in a faraway place' suggests a preference for profusion over precision. However, this is a singular and ambitious debut, and those who enjoy a serving of fantasy with their literary fiction will find this an absorbing and immersive read.
Irish Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Sakina's Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag: Another compact masterpiece
Sakina's Kiss Author : Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur ISBN-13 : 978-0-571-39083-0 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £12.99 Vivek Shanbhag's magnificent novella, Ghachar Ghochar, translated from the south Indian language of Kannada by Srinath Perur, and published in English in 2019, drew rapturous acclaim from far and wide. In these very pages, the critic Eileen Battersby wrote that it was 'possibly one of the finest literary works you will ever encounter'. Now Shanbhag and Perur are back with Sakina's Kiss, another compact masterpiece, about the uniquely human delusion of being in charge of our own lives. Our narrator is a middle-aged IT worker, a husband and father, living in a big city in India, possibly Bengaluru. He's a genial fellow who wishes trouble upon no one, secretly relies on guidance from self-help books and is ever willing to compromise for an easy life. Rather than insist that people call him Venkataramana, the name given to him by his parents in honour of the family deity, he's allowed his name to shrink in length over the years, and now goes by Venkat. 'After all,' he reasons to himself, 'when you want to win a swimming race, you don't dive in carrying weights.' READ MORE [ Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal: A novel of immense range that deserves a very wide readership Opens in new window ] He and his wife, Viji, think of themselves as modern people: although their marriage was arranged by their families, they like to say that, actually, only the meeting was arranged, and the rest they did for themselves. After all, they liked each other right from the beginning, and they do seem to be a good match: on the first night of their honeymoon, the newly-weds open their suitcases to discover they have each secretly brought a copy of the exact same self-help book entitled – what else? – Living in Harmony. If it seems like a meet-cute Disney moment, that's because it is, and the author is way ahead of you. A knock on the door sets the novel in motion: two young men, university students, want to speak to the couple's daughter, Rekha. But she is out of town, uncontactable by mobile, and the men – thugs, as we soon see – aren't too happy about it. Ominous shadows from a dark underworld soon threaten to disrupt Venkat's peaceful life, and it remains to be seen whether his mantras will be of any help. By turns comic and unsettling, this is another triumph from Shanbhag.
