The Transition

by Luke Kennard

Bought secondhand after I received an invitation to a Birmingham University book group meeting (online).

The author is a poet in his ?thirties, a faculty member at Birmingham, and this is his first novel. The idea of joining an online book discussion appealed, and the book itself sounded readable (it was).

Karl and Genevieve are participants in a programme designed to give offenders an alternative to a prison sentence, help them to ‘turn around’ their lives with the incentive of a home and a new financial start. The appeal is strong, to a generation of renters who can barely make ends meet and wonder when or whether they will ever be able to afford to have children.

Being myself of the generation who, to our own kids, appear to ‘have it all’, the dystopia that The Transition represents feels quite personal. We – my contemporaries and I – didn’t have to make the choices and financial compromises that members of our children’s generation seem to face.

But to the book: it is also the story of a relationship, of mental illness and how one couple responds to it (there is no implied judgment from the author), of corporate pressure and ambition. I could relate to these themes, and on the whole felt that they were explored in a compassionate, believable way.

Any story set in the future is bound to construct some technological developments that may or may not be believable. Self-stocking fridges, driverless cars, huge databanks that know your every movement – well, these things could be just around the corner. I felt that in two centuries, tech would have moved on a lot more than that. But given that the story is about human relationships – personal and organisational – a greater emphasis on tech would have got in the way. I can forgive the author for some rather simplistic expectations of how technology and ‘big data’ might be a part of our future lives.

Summary: a good read, a creditable first novel… I will keep an eye out for more of Luke Kennard’s work, including his poetry.

Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

The author has recently published Bournville – a book I am keen to read, perhaps next month in honour of my husband Martin’s big birthday (he was born in Birmingham 70 years ago).  But rather than splash out on yet another £20 hardback, I decided to revisit Coe’s back catalogue.  I had really enjoyed The Rotter’s Club when it came out in 2001.  Martin also read and enjoyed it.  The Closed Circle, its sequel, didn’t do much for me.  So I left it at that, and this book – Middle England – passed me by when it was published in 2018.  However, looking at a few reviews convinced me that it would be a worthy precursor to the new book – and, what’s more, it would be available from the library.

Middle England is set, surprise surprise, in the Midlands.  The characters have mostly appears in Coe’s earlier books, but as I was quite rusty on these, it was as if I had not encountered them before.  And that is fine; if this is the first of Coe’s books you read, you will still get something from it.  Though you might miss the references to the events of 21 November 1974, when IRA bombs took the lives of 21 young people and injured 182 others – an event which takes centre stage in Coe’s earlier work.

The ‘outside world’ event that is at the heart of Middle England is the 2016 In-Out referendum on Britains’ place in the European Union.  It is clear that Coe – in common with the majority of educated middle-class people, dare I say – is a firm Remainer.  But he is able to give voice to other points of view through his characters, among whom Brexit remains a topic of conversation before, during and after the referendum campaign.  Their conversations about EU membership not only shed light on their characters, but also reflect the kind of real conversations that were going on all round the country at the time the novel is set.  And still are, but with a different flavour.

I enjoyed this book immensely, and am looking forward to reading Bournville in due course.

Die Enkelin

by Bernhard Schlink

I spotted this book in the station bookshop at Goslar railway station.  This has long been a good source of German books for me – they have a smallish selection, but this includes literary fiction, non-fiction as well as more lightweight novels.

I knew Schlink as the author of Der Vorleser (The Reader) and I also have a collection of his short stories, both of which I have read in the past, nearer to their publication.  This book is a recent publication, and I read the first one or two chapters in the bookstore while Martin was just outside, train-spotting.  The story sounded interesting from the start: a man comes home to find his alcoholic wife lying, this time, dead rather than passed out.

Over the course of the next few chapters the wife’s past story is gradually uncovered.  The couple met at an “East meets West” youth conference before the Wende (the “turning point” when the two parts of Germany were reunited in 1990, after the Cold War).  She grew up in the GDR, he is from West Germany.  Kaspar, now 70, gradually pieces together his wife’s great secret, after her death.  He travels to places she knew, meets up with an old friend and eventually tracks down the daughter she gave up as a baby.

The title of the novel, The Granddaughter, already gives away that the main person in the story, apart from Kaspar, is someone from the next generation but one.  14-year-old Sigrun is at the rebellious stage of life – and she has plenty to rebel against.  Her parents belong to a community of far-right activists seeking to restore the “real Germany” while living a lifestyle based on core values of agriculture, clean living and purity.

The book is really Sigrun’s story: an adolescent dealing with the problems of growing up, questioning her parents’ values and those of the community around her, at the same time knowing little else.  She is given a glimpse of a different life when her grandfather befriends her and persuades her parents to let her come on extended visits to his house in Berlin.  Here, he puts great energy into advancing her education, particularly in music and literature, but also showing her alternative values to those she has grown up with.  She displays a great aptitude for music, and he arranges for her to take piano lessons whenever she is in town.

Sigrun’s and Kaspar’s cross-generational relationship is a delight to discover.  They can relate as only grandparents and grandchildren cab do, without the interfering presence of the generation in between.  Troubled as Kaspar is by the new society promised by Sigrun’s home community in the village, her escape into drugs in the company of anarchist friends is at least as disturbing.

This novel had me as interested in the background (there really do exist such extreme right communities building a “new Germany”, mainly in the former GDR but also a few in remote areas of Lower Saxony) as in the characters themselves and their relationship to each other.  I think this is a book I may re-read.  It’s going to stay on the shelf for now.