A monthly discussion group of ten members centred on an individual book supplied by the Burnham Library for that month, generally from titles suggested by members. There are also refreshments - generally tea or coffee with biscuits or cake.

September 2024

Small Things Like These

The impact of Claire Keegan’s novel, Small Things Like These, derives from the “small things”, whether it is the rhythm of daily life in a small Irish town described in evocative detail, or the small steps her protagonist Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, takes as he begins to question what is right. The rituals of ordinary living, such as the making of the family’s Christmas cake, were familiar and resonant. What was less familiar was the power wielded by the church in this rural community.

Furlong feels an outsider, the son of an unwed teenage mother, and has had to work hard to achieve social acceptance.  But the respectability he has gained by keeping “his head down” and staying “on the right side of people” in order to ensure success for his five daughters comes into conflict with his sense of justice when he meets one of the girls living at the Good Shepherd convent and working in its laundry. He comes to see the minutiae of daily life, described beautifully and memorably by the author, as suffocating but the detail also suggest the loss he would suffer if its stability is upset.

The novel is dedicated to “the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries” and the author’s intention is to make the reader think, for the plot hardly develops and is certainly not resolved. It ends on a cliff-hanger: what will happen next?

The fact that the novel is set in 1985 and the last of the Magdalen laundries was not closed until 1996 suggest that a happy outcome is very much in doubt.

Small Things Like These is the shortest novel we have read as a group but it is one that will definitely stick in the mind.
- Frances Harris

July 2024

At last, a book that we all loved and which provoked some interesting discussion.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is set in wartime France and tells the story of two sisters who respond to the Nazi Occupation in very different ways. Isabelle, the younger sister, reacts with anger and defiance, risking her life to join the Resistance. As she tells her niece, Sophie: if you įump off a cliff at least you´ll fly before you fall. Vianne, her elder and more conventional sister, proceeds much more cautiously, trying to avoid conflicts for the sake of her daughter as she adjusts to life without her husband – he is taken prisoner early in the war.

Each sister in her own way shows tremendous courage: Isabelle in leading Allied airmen over the Pyrenees to Spain; Vianne in hiding Jewish children to stop them being deported.

The author is very skilful in describing with vivid effect the impact the occupation has on a small village where everyone knows everyone else: where they have to live with too little food, no heating in a very cold winter, and where anything of value that they couldn't hide away has been looted; where they have to see friends and neighbours deprived of their livelihoods and homes and even their lives when they are sent to the concentration camps.

The strong female characters are a result of Hannah's aim to emphasise the part played by women in war-time. (She based her character of Isabelle on a young Belgian woman who had created an escape route out of Nazi-Occupied France.) She certainly succeeds in bringing to life the dangerous and daring choices made, in order to save their children and way of life.

Hannah makes it clear that central to the novel is the idea that, "in love we find out who we want to be, in war we find out who we are.” She poses the question: What would we do to survive?

None of us felt that we could really answer that question, but we could all agree that The Nightingale was an exceptionally good choice.
- Frances Harris

February 2024

The Fall of Giants and The Woman in Black

Our first two books in 2024 couldn’t have been more different, especially in length. The Fall of Giants, the first book in Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy is 864 pages long, whereas Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is a mere 139 pages in length.

Both are worth reading, especially if – in the case of Fall of Giants - you have time to spare, although not every member of the group managed to get to the end.

Ken Follett’s novel begins in 1911 when a thirteen-year-old boy, Billy Williams, begins working down the mines on the same day that George V is crowned and is the story of five families. Billy’s family is inextricably linked with the Fitzherberts who own the coal mine where he works and when Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London, their destiny becomes entangled with that of Gus Dewar, an ambitious young aide to Woodrow Wilson and with two orphaned Russian brothers, the Peshkovs, whose plan to emigrate to America falls foul of conscription, revolution and war. This is the time of the Russian Revolution and, of course, the Great War of 1914-1918 – the war to end all wars.

In contrast, the events of The Woman in Black occur over a few days. The story is narrated by Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, who is summoned to attend a client’s funeral in the village of Crythin Gifford and journeys to her house situated in the salt marsh beyond Nine Lives Causeway: a house that cannot be reached at high tide. He has no idea that, as would be expected in a ghost story, Eel Marsh House guards the memories of a pitiful secret, nor does Kipps understand, until it is too late, that the mysterious Woman in Black is intent on revenge.

Ken Follett’s novel is very good in conveying the drama and historical information of a particular period. He is masterly in bringing to life the social conditions and the gulf between the various social classes and this aspect provoked discussion about the motives of war, especially the impact of greed for power and wealth (depressing in that we could see the parallels with modern times). In having such a broad canvas it is difficult to bring much emotional depth to his large cast of characters, which some of the group felt was a drawback as they lost interest in them.

The Woman in Black, on the other hand, had a small number of characters who were conveyed with an emotional intensity that worked but it was felt that, as a ghost story, the novel was not as frightening as the film. (Some of the scenes for the film, starring Daniel Radcliffe, were shot locally, inspiring extra interest.)

I personally liked the descriptive qualities of Hill’s writing. Her depiction of the marshland mist conveys its eerie quality beautifully. “[It] was salty, light and pale and moving in front of my eyes all the time. I felt confused, teased by it, as though it were made up of millions of live fingers that crept over me, hung on to me and then shifted away again.”

Both Fall of Giants and The Woman in Black were interesting choices in their individual ways and while the responses were varied, they were both grippingly told.
- Frances Harris

January 2023

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is a novel about loneliness. Eleanor, the main character, leads a simple, structured life, wearing the same clothes to the office, eating the same meal deals and buying two bottles of vodka to drink at the weekend. She feels that nothing is missing from her timetabled existence. She tells her social worker that she is “fully integrated into the community.”
She might believe that but the reader doesn’t. She is in fact an emotionally isolated character.
One simple act of kindness begins to shatter her carefully constructed life and she learns to navigate the world that everyone else appears to take for granted and begins to find the courage to face the dark corners in her life she has tried to forget.
There are many reasons for her isolation that are gradually unpicked as the novel progresses and her friendship with Raymond, the IT specialist at the company office, develops.
While unspoken sadness permeates the novel it is also full of quiet warmth and touches of humour. This is often a result of Eleanor’s naivety and lack of knowledge about the world around her which is expressed in her articulate, slightly old-fashioned language. One example of this dichotomy is in the description of her favourite mug which she bought in a charity shop: “it has a photograph of a moon-faced man. He is wearing a brown leather blouson. Along the top in strange yellow font it says ”Top Gear”. I don’t profess to understand this mug. It holds the perfect amount of vodka, however, thereby obviating the need for frequent refills.”
This debut novel which won the Costa Book awards in 2017 has become a staple for book groups as the ideas it contains - nature v. nurture and the importance of connection with other people, for instance, can lead to interesting discussion. Certainly the events of the past few years, notably Lockdown, have given us a better understanding of the need for interaction with others.
There wasn’t complete agreement about the novel, one member finding the heroine irritating, but generally it was felt that Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was well worth reading.
- Frances Harris