I've been indulging myself recently, reading books written by Gather members: Damian McNicholl's A Son Called Gabriel, Moya Goatley's Basket of Rain, and Brazil, the spectacular historical saga by Errol Lincoln Uys that I reviewed several weeks ago. Contrary to my usual method of reading several books at a time I found these books too good to read in fragments especially as all three provided me with my favorite pastime -- the journey into other cultures and countries.
A Basket of Rain takes place in modern day London. Doris, Goatley's heroine, is close to her ninetieth birthday and has recently lost her beloved husband Frank, leaving her bereft of more than his presence. Her feisty will seems to have abandoned her as well. Despite the attentions of her worrisome older daughter, and a part-time housekeeper who prods and challenges her, she has no desire to re-involve herself in the motley surroundings where she's lived most of her life. She spends her days at the window, conducting mental conversations with her deceased husband until Ritzy, a vibrant teenager of Jamaican descent decides to pay Doris a visit. Doris does not want to be visited; nor does she want help. She's trying to get rid of a well-meaning but incredibly boring neighbor who insists on paying her charity calls (the "poor dear you must be lonely" type visits) and she has a family.
"Find someone else," she tells the girl. The girl thinks she is being rebuffed because she is black, and Doris, distressed that she might have given this impression, agrees to a try it "for a while." An acquiescence that will eventually thrust her back into involvement with life. The ethnically and culturally diverse "war zone" of the neighborhood where Doris lives provides the author with such a colorful palette of accents, personalities, and challenges that we are swept into A Basket of Rain as quickly as its heroine's life begins to change. Goatley's wit had me laughing out-loud at times, but there are darker places within that neighborhood where she must take her heroine. True to the book's title, A Basket of Rain, the conflict and violence tucked within the surface charm of its pages will eventually leak from the weave of the story making it one of hopefulness; a gift I often wish more novelists would offer a darkening world.
It is unfortunate that Amazon.com has only one copy of this book available for sale, at the astronomical price of 60 plus dollars. Best to contact Moya or your library to see if you can get a copy.
Damian McNicholl's A Son Called Gabriel takes place in the turbulent era of IRA violence in Ulster. I normally don't use a book jacket's wording to review a book but the simple phrase "deeply felt and often funny coming of age novel" are exactly the words that I would use to describe this memorable book. While reading A Son Called Gabriel, I stole hours from my writing time in order to stay with this story.
Gabriel, McNicholl's main character, is a touchingly earnest, tender-hearted, and vulnerable young boy. He is innocent of the deceitful motives hidden within older boys' desires to play with him. He reluctantly agrees to play when the games are couched in the language of playing "doctor and patient," and innocently begins to enjoy the feelings he experiences while playing this game. When he hears a relative declare that boys playing with boys in that way is not just unnatural but sinful, he is thrown into anguish. What, then, about those "lovely pains" he experienced while playing, he wonders. Were they also evil? Was he evil because he had played those games? Stricken, he falls on his knees to beg God for help.
With this event, McNicholl introduces the reader to the battle a young boy who recognizes that he is not like other boys tries to wage against his inclinations. His struggle to be normal, to believe that he is normal, takes place within the daily life of a devoutly Catholic family dealing with its own conflicts in a beleaguered country at war with itself. McNicholl writes about the struggle between faith and sexual attraction with forthrightness, driving us ever deeper into the quandaries that plague the human heart when confronted with the discrepancies between dogma, culture, and human nature. In Gabriel, McNicholl give us a character so real and endearing that I was saddened A Son Called Gabriel ended when it did. I wanted to follow Gabriel into adulthood.
I have been unable to add links within these articles lately so forgive me for adding the URL address here.
Moya Goatley
Basket of Rain
Damian McNicholl
http://damianmcnicholl.gather.com/
A Son Called Damian
Errol Lincoln Uys
My review of Brazil
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Comments: 9
In just a few short paragraphs you managed to create in me a yearning to read both books, Moya's because I've already witnessed here on Gather what a fine and sensitive writer and poet she is, Damian's because his subject material intrigues me mightily, since I myself was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family with a mother of Irish heritage, went to parochial school and felt myself tempted with sexual demons as well, though more along the lines of Joyce's Portrait of An Artist than Gabriel's same sex conflict. Both Moya's and Damian's books also sounds powerfully compelling because of the way you indicate they develop their characters out of a context that arises from foreign settings, and one of the reasons so many of us immerse ourselves in fiction is to be transported to different worlds through unique subjectivities which extend our own sense of what it is to be a human being. Both of these books clearly accomplish that goal.
Thank you, Beryl, for offering an authorly review that is a model of a wondrously talented writer speaking into the work of fellow writers on a true author-to-author basis; I didn't see a hint of the 'superior' Critic in this, the public intellectual who must tear down authors like trees in order to feed his own ego and the supposed "demand" (of course an artificially created 'want') for public humiliation, which happens so often nowadays. Beryl, you write, you read, and you give back: The ideal loop of creative focus.
http://s1.amazon.co.uk/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y08Y5629642Y3181777
Moya