Parade’s End

by Ford Madox Ford

This seemed a good choice for my free month of Audible. However, I had only reached about the middle of Book Two when my free month expired. I wanted to finish listening, and indeed am beginning to feel that audiobooks are a good thing for me, and worth the £7.99 monthly fee.

I still haven’t chosen my next book to use this month’s credit – but I have at least finished listening to this outstanding and very enjoyable four-volume work.

I found the story accessible, moving and, in parts, very amusing. It is closer to Proust than anything I have read in English: a meandering storyline; introspection and “stream of consciousness”; characters who pop up again and again in the story; characters who are admirable, despicable or just plain hopeless.

Bill Nighy tackles this long, at times rambling text with its cast of upper class and working class characters admirably. His regional accents are well performed – though if I have one criticism, it is of the way the ‘lower’ classes in post-WWI Sussex all seem to speak with Northern accents. Nighy is not great at French or German either – but I think we can forgive him this. After all, I am not much good at acting!

This was a great introduction for me to the world of audiobooks. And also to a book that I hope I will come back to.

The Book of Night Women

by Marlon James

Purchased on Kindle on a whim – I was looking for something to read while away from home and my TBR pile, downloaded a sample and was hooked.

The story contains some horror and violence, unsurprising when you consider that this is the story of a slave girl on a Jamaican plantation in the late eighteenth century.  Lilith is feisty and intelligent.  This picture of plantation life is seen mainly but not entirely in the context of house slaves, of whom Lilith becomes one when she is rescued as a teenager from the house in which she was raised, and where she has just murdered a ‘johnny-jumper’ (slave used by the masters to oppress other slaves).  Homer is Lilith’s rescuer, mentor and surrogate mother during the rest of the story.  Homer is also a founding member of the ‘Night Women’, a small band of rebel slaves whom Lilith joins.

Lilith is seen as trouble and is moved into the much less compassionate – if such a word can ever be used in the context of slavery – household of the fiancée of her owner.  Here, she brings about the downfall of the household and plantation (spoiler alert – but I am not going to reveal all by explaining how this happens).

She later becomes the mistress of an overseer and, for a time, seems to live a life of relative security in her own domestic setting.  This is never going to last, nor does it.  Enough said.

The language of the book is Jamaican patois of the 18th century as imagined by its author.  It is eminently readable and understandable, and even without a glossary you can make an educated guess as to the meaning of various words.  it is imaginative and, though violent, not without a lot of humour.  After A Brief History of Seven Killings I was ready to read anything by Marlon James.  This, earlier, book did not disappoint.