Every so often, a book comes along that draws you in from the first page. You become completely wrapped up in the setting and you really care about the characters. When that happens in an author’s debut novel, you know you are dealing with a genuinely exciting new voice. That is the case with The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey which is the best fiction book I’ve read this year, and I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t remain so. Hopefully this review will encourage you to read it for yourself and experience the alchemy of story and setting for yourself.
The Story
This novel takes place in Yorkshire in 1979 where the spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper hangs over the whole county, and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister is seen as a great thing by many and anything but by many more. The murders have made people suspicious of each other and, for some, the situation has become so all consuming that they are thinking of moving away from the county. This is the situation Miv finds herself if when her Dad, Austin, mentions out of the blue that he is thinking of a fresh start away from the county. Miv can’t imagine leaving her home or, more importantly, her inseparable best friend Sharon. Miv asks her Dad if it’s something to do with the murders and he admits that this is partly the case. In order to avoid a situation she can’t imagine, Miv decides that she must investigate the murders herself in case there is something that the police have missed. She gets, initially at least, wholehearted support from Sharon and the two start to turn their gazes to some of the people in their own town who appear to have something to hide. It turns out they do, but not in the way that Miv thinks. Sadness, violence and tragedy combine as they turn their gaze on the hidden lives of those around them who find their way onto The List of Suspicious Things.
My thoughts
We all know the novels that try to set up a time and a place with a blitz of ‘iconic’ food brands, drinks, cars and music. Instead of bringing you into the world, it keeps you outside because you can see what the author is doing. They are like the websites and Facebook groups that try to grab your attention with cries of ‘Remember this?’ which is OK if you’re scrolling but incredibly distracting if you are reading a novel. The List of Suspicious Things has a far more effective approach to bringing you back to the world of 1979. Like a series of half remembered days, the spare descriptions of the surroundings and the lifestyles anchor this story in those days at the end of the 70s where the country was changing socially but not yet materially. I grew up ‘down South’ as they would say in this book, but I recognised the people and the streets because at that time the country had more in common than it seems to have nowadays. The chipped Formica, the corner shop where you got your sweets and just about everything else and that house you went to where your friend had a far brighter lifestyle at least on the surface. All of that was there, familiar and absolutely redolent of my mid teen years. Away from that surface of seemingly simple lives lived in simple styles, you had the casual and sometimes brutal cruelty dished out to anyone with a point of difference. What this book does so well is to bring you Miv’s point of view where she sees things that adults don’t but often fails to understand what she is seeing. Mixed in with her first person narrative, you get glimpses into the lives of the people she and Sharon are investigating. Omar, the corner shop owner with his constant battle against racism, the nagging pain of a personal loss and the feeling that he will never fit in. Mr Ware, the borderline bullying school teacher that we all had in the 1970s and 80s has a very different side that he keeps hidden. Helen, the school librarian whose husband has isolated her from everyone she knows including her own father. These characters and many others are shown to have their own struggles and it is Miv and Sharon who become inadvertent catalysts to bring those struggles to a head. Even her family have their secrets. The gruff, no nonsense Aunty Jean, who came to take over the household after Miv’s mother stopped speaking and retreated to her bedroom, turns out to have hidden depths that Miv is only dimly aware of. Until we step into these lives ourselves, we too are only dimly aware of what goes on behind those closed doors. It is so cleverly written that the pieces fall into place almost without you realising.
The book is full of humour, sadness, tragedy and stoicism. All human life is here and it leaps off of the page because of the incredibly skilful writing of Jennie Godfrey. At times, I quite literally gasped out loud at some of the twists. Then as I realised what had happened and why it had happened the shock turned to sympathy and sadness. It is a beautiful book that connects you with what it means to be human and part of the society around you. This is destined to become one of those rare books that I will want to reread at fairly regular intervals. I cannot wait to find out what Jennie Godfrey is going to write next, but I just know it will be amazing. This is my book of the year so far and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Only about 400 people have ever travelled to more than 150 of the world’s 190 or so countries. The Travelling Ape, Michael MacKay Richards, is one of that select group. He has reflected on those experiences and written a book that is, by turns funny, shocking, sad, and always thought provoking.
The contents
This book is in four parts. The approach he takes throughout is to look at his experiences in a range of countries, blending anecdotes with insights as he develops his arguments. The anecdotes come from countries on every continent with the exception of Antarctica, and are never less than fascinating. He is engaging and very honest about his failings, frequently using these failings as the excuse for a very funny story. He is also quite happy to call out his fellow Westerners, not to mention the occasional local, but he does so with a lightness of touch that causes no real discomfort in the majority of cases.
Part 1 is a reflection on why we travel that covers psychology, anthropology, philosophy and history. He considers the effect of travel on our creativity, our perception of time, population growth, the majesty of big cities and the way that travel makes people better disposed to their fellow human beings. As with other parts of the book I found his arguments interesting but by no means agreed with all of them. Part 2 about the positive view he holds of humanity is definitely not one I instinctively share but I gave them due consideration and found myself wondering whether my world view was too pessimistic. The last chapter in Part 2 looks at religion and, suffice to say, he is not a fan of the central premise let alone the effect that he sees it as having had on human thought and their treatment of others. If you are religious you may find this chapter quite difficult, but I urge you to give it time and reflect on his viewpoints. I found a number of the elements of this whole section extremely eye opening and they certainly gave me cause to reconsider some ideas. This isn’t to say that I was converted, but I definitely decided to be more flexible in my attitude towards other people after reading this section.
Part 3 moves from the personal to the political with a very interesting take on capitalism, democracy and their competing models. His visit to North Korea was one the most unsettling parts of the entire book. Indeed, it was one of the most unsettling parts of any book I have read in ages. You are left in no doubt as to the appalling effect of the dictatorship, and here The Travelling Ape uses his day job as a political and economic researcher to excellent effect as he lays bare the way that partition has sent the North of the continent into permanent decline and the South into almost permanent growth. His argument that capitalism and democracy are better than any other system, despite the flaws that he lays out in detail, is pretty much case closed as far as I was concerned, and I am no great fan of the modern version of the economic model. Part 4 becomes much more personal as he looks at happiness and how people in the West are arguably less happy than we should be. It isn’t a hectoring chapter telling us that we should be happier, more a chapter examining the disconnect between our situation and our perception of that situation. He uses his travelling experiences to typically interesting effect as he develops his arguments and counter arguments. Finally, he takes the reader through seven key changes he made to his life to help him feel happier. I can see three of these perhaps working for me on the basis that the other four will be pretty much incompatible with my basic nature! That said, even those four make sense. It is the perfect end to a book that never allows the reader to disengage their brain.
Final Reflections
As someone who has lived abroad I always thought this book would be for me and it was, but not in the way I expected. It challenged what I now see as my increasing parochialism where the travel bug that I had seems to have left me behind. It asked me questions, sometimes uncomfortable questions, about my attitudes to people, countries and life in general. Finally, it told me that when energy and opportunity combine I really need to get back out there. It is truly a book that can change your outlook if you let it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Find out more at https://thetravellingape.com/
I addressed the personal connection that I have with A Kind of Spark in this article from April 2023 Almost exactly a year later I have read the prequel to that amazing book and I am going to reflect again on the power of writing to take you back to people and places in your life. Keedie by its very nature turned into a much more difficult and confronting read than A Kind of Spark, mainly because we meet Keedie at a time in her life where things are much more difficult because of the people around her, namely her fellow school pupils and of course the teachers.
The Story
When we meet Keedie, she and Nina are coming up for 14, and are at Juniper Senior School, but the easier relationship they had when they were younger has disappeared. Keedie is something of an outcast while Nina has gained admission to the cool set. Unfortunately for Keedie, that set contains some of the people most responsible for the bullying at the school which she is on the receiving end of. When she realises the extent to which bullying has affected the school, she sets herself up as a one person anti-bullying agency. This works well at first as she is able to help a number of her fellow students and her non-violent approach makes it very difficult for those on the receiving end to complain. Unfortunately, she finds out that when she exposes the school’s lack of action in this area she ends up in the firing line herself.
My reactions
I found myself thinking back to my own schooldays in the 1970s and 80s before anyone in education understood or even cared about making allowances for children on the autistic spectrum. School is a place where any hint of a difference from ‘the norm’ is jumped on and exploited by the vast majority of your fellow students. Knowing that human nature is to all intents and purposes immutable, I am not surprised that the situation for those on the Autistic Spectrum is still pretty difficult. I read an article a couple of weeks back which said that bullies at school are more successful in life than the people they bully. It is depressing to read that, but not in the slightest bit surprising. Society reflects human nature which means that bullying is tacitly encouraged at all levels and those who are good at it succeed in any setting.
That said, at least children like Keedie have an idea of what is making them different from their fellow students, even if it doesn’t help in the thick of the day to day battle that school is. The statement can be a way of accessing support, although that support is very much dependent on budgets, but it can also be a way of singling you out for other students and staff. I think that the character of Miss Murphy was the character that really plunged me back into my secondary school days where teachers took just as much pleasure in bullying students who were different as the other students did. The Miss Murphys of the world at least made me determined to support students as she epitomised the type of teacher I was never going to be. She is all too real and an example of what is sometimes called the ‘banality of evil’. Keedie says it best in her response to her headmaster who says he wants to understand her motivation for what he sees as a revenge mission.
If I wanted revenge against every person, and I mean person and not student, who has said something unwarranted and nasty, pushed me in the stairwell, slammed a door on my fingers, called me a slur, tripped me in the playground, ripped up my work, pinched me, told me I’m a freak – sir, if I wanted revenge on those people, I’m afraid there would not be enough lifetimes to carry that out.
Keedie by Elle McNicoll (2024)
That speech just hits so hard if you were one of the outcasts in school because of something out of your control. It was the main reason why I have taken a little while to put this review together, as I wanted to process how it made me feel. I would love to have got revenge against all those bullies, but as bullies seemingly accounted for about 90% of the students and staff at my secondary school that was, as Keedie recognises, absolutely impossible. Do I still detest those people? On balance yes I do, because only one of them ever apologised to me, and I always felt that was to make him feel better rather than to genuinely try to make amends. However I have made a good go of things professionally and personally so I guess my determination to avoid going under is my answer to them.
Anyone on the Autistic Spectrum is going to struggle and they will always be targets however hard they try to mask and fit in with the rest of society. That is as true now as it was in the 1970s and 80s. The difference for those facing the same situation now as I did then is that they have Elle McNicoll in their corner. She understands what we go through, she communicates that to us with flashes of humour and a good measure of anger. I wish I had had someone like her writing for me all those years ago. I would have felt much less lonely fighting against the world day after day. Thank you Elle, and I look forward to reading so much more from you over the next few years.
28 Up saw two of the original 14 participants bow out, one temporarily, one permanently. Of the original three prep school boys, only Andrew took part. John said he had nothing to add to what he had said at 21, although he would return to the series 7 years later for 35 Up. Charles was a different matter. He had become an assistant producer at the BBC in the seven years since the previous programme. When he declined to take part, the producer Michael Apted rang him up and, by his own admission, ‘went berserk’ and completely destroyed the relationship he had built up with Charles over the previous programmes. Charles would make no more appearances in the programme and even tried to sue the programme makers to force them to remove all images of him from 49 Up onwards. He failed, but the programme did not mention him from then on, and he appeared only briefly in shots from the first three programmes of the three together. So, what of the remaining 12?
28 Up
Nick had moved to America by the time 28 Up was filmed. He had become a lecturer at University of Wisconsin specialising and lecturing in fusion science. Married to Jackie, he was building a career in the US after briefly working in the UK in the same field but concluding that the very low wages were a good indicator of the lack of importance attached to nuclear fusion in the UK. He is clearly very happy with his new lifestyle and extremely engaged with the academic side of life. When Jackie mentioned that she was able to work from home for about half the week as she had a computer at home, I just felt as though the US must have seemed light years ahead of the UK standard of living at the time. Given that 40 years ago the idea of working from home in academia was obviously widely accepted, it seems a great shame that it has become so controversial here and in the US in 2024. Jackie was clearly reluctant to be interviewed, but her guarded approach and comments about feeling so far away from family with so little opportunity to contact them apparently led viewers of the time to write letters about the marriage being doomed. She never appeared in the series again, but the fact that the partners of the original participants were becoming ‘fair game’ probably changed the nature of some of the interactions after this programme.
Tony had spent the seven years since the previous programme passing the Knowledge and becoming a London black cab driver and he had also married Debbie who had had two children by the time 28 Up came along. He really impressed me in this programme as someone who had become very comfortable in himself at work and at home. He spoke about education, which he had dismissed as unimportant seven years earlier, and admitted that it was a silly comment to make, expressing the hope that his children would make more of their own education than he had. He does however come out firmly against the idea of boarding school, saying that despite their other advantages those who are sent there lose out on so much family time, and that he as a Dad wants to be there to see every milestone of his children’s lives. Alongside his cab driving he was also training to become an actor after a couple of appearances as an extra. He was clearly not one to stand still, and his ebullience and humour were not only intact, but more obvious by the time he reached 28. You got the feeling that Debbie was perhaps effectively dealing with three ‘children’ at times (!) but they appeared to be very happy in their relationship. Particularly as he started from a lower base than most of the other participants, you could argue that Tony has been the most successful of the fourteen children up to this point, and he was definitely great fun to listen to.
Bruce, who was privately educated, was teaching mathematics in the East End of London when 28 Up was being filmed, ironically at Tony’s old school. He was clearly still very socially conscious at this point, having described himself as the only socialist in his village, and concerned about the inherent unfairness of life where opportunity comes much more easily to the upper classes. He sees his job in this instalment as a way of somehow ironing out the disparities and he has some choice words about the then Conservative government. Peter, who had also become a teacher made similarly disparaging comments, and those comments caused such a backlash in the tabloid press that he refused to come back to the series for nearly three decades. It was an unwitting, I think, insight into the influence of class that was the initial point of the series. Bruce got away with it because, I suppose, he was ‘one of us’ whilst Peter, a Liverpudlian of lower social status, was the chosen target because he was speaking out of turn about his ‘betters’. Well, that’s my take anyway!
Andrew, the remaining member of the trio of ‘posh boys’ had become a solicitor at the time of 28 Up and was married to Jane who described herself as a ‘down to earth Yorkshire girl’ in very cut glass tones! She was clearly from a similar social strata, but not, as she said herself, a ‘deb’! The two seemed to be very content both in their careers and their early married life and they already had a London flat as well as a country farmhouse that they were in the process of converting. Andrew always seemed a nice engaging personality, if quite reserved in front of the cameras, and in the way that he spoke you got the impression that he was getting more broad minded as the years progressed.
Paul and Symon, the two boys we first met at the charity boarding school when they were 7, could scarcely have had more divergent experiences in the next 21 years. Paul, now every inch an Aussie after living there for 20 years, had got married to Susie who had had two children, and now had his own business as a bricklayer. However, for me a couple of other elements of his life were of far more interest. Firstly, he was already a homeowner in a ‘working class suburb’ of Melbourne which looked every inch a middle class suburb to me and clearly part of the 80s version of the Australian dream that Erinsborough was based on. As with Nick in the US, you knew that there was no way he could have aspired to that standard of living in the UK had he stayed, something he somewhat uncomfortably admitted. Symon, on the other hand, was still working in the freezer store at Wall’s and had a wife and five children. He admitted that he had no drive to move or try for a promotion and was happy to see life chugging along. It left me wondering what would have happened if their life stories had been reversed. I got the impression that Paul would have succeeded in the UK but not reached the same level, while Symon would probably have been in a better situation but would almost certainly not have made as much of the opportunity. It makes you wonder how their basic natures and family backgrounds were part of the overall mix, as much as the differences between the ostensibly more egalitarian Australian society and the class bound UK.
Now on to Neil, the participant with the most extreme change of circumstances. After having dropped out of university, 21 Up found him squatting in London. By the time 28 Up came around he was living off grid in the Scottish Highlands in a caravan, relying on a combination of occasional work and social security benefits. He was clearly quite vulnerable in terms of his mental health, and it was very sad to see the happy seven year old two decades earlier become the withdrawn troubled young man of 28. It was quite riveting TV as he opened up on his regrets and his challenges in a way that appears to modern eyes to be very unusual. He wasn’t doing it for publicity, he was genuinely thinking through things on camera with a cameraman in attendance and Michael Apted off screen asking the questions but otherwise staying silent as he expounded his ideas at length. When you compare it to modern TV which would be full of leading questions, mawkish background music and voiceover commentary that alters the feel of an entire situation, based upon the prejudices of the filmmakers, it truly is a different and much better form of documentary making. I’m not sure that we can put the process into reverse, but I would love to see the response of modern audiences to careful, sympathetic film making like this.
Now, we turn to the four young women who were part of the original 14 children. Sue, Lynn and Jackie are once again interviewed as a trio. It’s really interesting how these three young women have kept their same roles in the friendship with Lynn, still a school librarian and therefore appropriately, being the quiet one, Sue the seemingly happy go lucky member of the trio, and Jackie the outspoken and combative one. All three are, at the time of 28 Up, married with children and seemingly quite content, although unlike the male participants we don’t see them with their partners. Jackie comments on the sexist nature of the questions asked to the girls as opposed to the boys, a theme that she apparently returned to in future programmes. Lynn has not got a particularly prominent role in this programme, perhaps because her life was in a very similar position to how it had been 7 years earlier. There is, as Jackie observes, still this gender divide that the programme is guilty of in assuming that women will become wives and mothers and give up their employment.
Much to my delight, Suzy had turned things around by 28. The 21 year old chain smoker with a cynical view of marriage has been replaced by a happily married, effervescent young woman with a seemingly besotted husband, Rupert, and two children. She looks back with a mixture of sensitivity and humour at her younger self and although she still regards the whole programme as somewhat silly is far more at ease than we’ve ever seen her before. She and Rupert both boarded from a very early age, but when she is asked whether she might want the same for her children she says that it is far too early to live away from home. It’s interesting how she echoes Tony’s views in her very different way.
It was a fascinating two hours spent in the company of a dozen people who I have started to really invest in emotionally. I think that having watched the first four episodes in a month, I have seen patterns in the lives of these young men and women that have been fascinating and as someone who loves social history I have seen changes in views, surroundings and society at large that give snapshots of what the world was like in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It truly is the jewel in the crown of British television and I can’t wait to see these people at the age of 35 at the beginning of the 90s. See you next time!
James Blunt and Lucy Spraggan Royal Albert Hall London April 10 2024
This concert was a present for my wife who is a massive James Blunt fan. It was November 2017 that we last saw him live, so I bought tickets for us to see him at her favourite venue, the peak of acoustic perfection that is the Royal Albert Hall. Last time I saw him I wrote this review of a concert I absolutely loved, so on the quiet I was really looking forward to it as well! At the merch stand I bought the tour programme, a sadly rare sight these days, and a t-shirt for my wife promising that ‘Life’s Better with James Blunt’!! Let’s see if it was shall we?
The support act for last night was Lucy Spraggan, whose name was familiar but whose songs weren’t. She bounced on to the stage with an enthusiasm that didn’t wane for 40 minutes. Her first two songs, Run and Lucky Stars were a good introduction to her style, lyrically interesting and accompanied by tunes that lodged into your head quite quickly. She told the audience that it was her job to warm us up for James Blunt and to make sure we were in good voice. A cover of 500 Miles by The Proclaimers led to some fairly enthusiastic communal singing which, we were assured, was louder than the audience the previous night at the same venue! Why do I have the suspicion that every audience is told this? 🤔🤣 Anyway, whatever the truth Spraggan’s warming up was very effective throughout. My favourite song of the set, Blues Song, had a very amusing story attached of her experience playing in a Blues club in Sheffield (if I remember rightly) where she delivered a set with no blues songs. A heckler pointed this out and she went home and wrote a blues song that night. She returned to the club a few months later, saw the same heckler and dedicated the song to him! He walked out apparently, probably through embarrassment, and missed a very amusing and authentically bluesy song as a result. My other favourite of the set was Balance, the title track from her 2023 album, a reflection of some very difficult times she endured and dedicated to her therapist. The lyrics were extremely honest and personal and I thought it was an excellent song in every respect. As a warm up act she was absolutely perfect, so if you haven’t heard Lucy Spraggan in many years, do yourself a favour and head over to Spotify
The main man himself took to the stage just after 9pm and from the start he was outstanding. James Blunt may be a figure of fun, a role he has amplified himself through his hilarious social media posts, but as an artist and a live performer he is deadly serious. A one-two start of Beside You and Saving a Life from the most recent album, ‘Who We Used to Be’ was delivered with punch and panache. He then told the audience that everything he had done so far on this tour was just practice for us, his most important audience! He also said that he was only playing new songs tonight and we couldn’t do anything about it because he’d locked the doors and he already had our money! 🤑 It was the same easy humour that he displayed on his tour in 2017, but he was rewarded with a huge laugh and an equally huge cheer when he ‘relented’ and played a couple of old tracks.
The new album, which Janet had listened to a number of times, is a reflective and in the case of some tracks very sad album. Dark Thoughts was a tribute to Carrie Fisher who was a close friend of his, but nothing could prepare me for The Girl That Never Was. I knew that the song was about loss, a loss that my wife and I had also suffered many years ago, and it brought me to tears as I listened to the heart breaking lyrics. It is one of the most powerful songs I have heard in years, and it wouldn’t be the last time he brought me to tears in his set.
It’s really interesting reflecting on how skilfully he balanced the sad songs and the upbeat crowd pleasers. In less adept hands the evening could have been brought to a halt by the sadness and the upbeat songs could have sounded out of place, but they never did. Why is that? Well, I think it has everything to do with his stage persona and his real persona being so similar. Yes, he is larger than life to the extent that any performer has to be, but he wears his heart on his sleeve, isn’t afraid to show his vulnerable side and is as genuinely grateful for the love and support of his audience as any act I have ever seen. He seemed close to tears himself at the reception given to his songs. After You’re Beautiful, which led to the expected mass singalong, he looked out at the audience with a sense of wonder and said, ‘I’m such a lucky little bugger!’ and the way he said it was just one of the most genuine, heartfelt moments of this or any other gig I’ve been to. I would say that he is one of the finest concert performers I have seen in over four decades of gig going. His voice is outstanding, his guitar playing excellent and his piano playing out of this world at times, especially on a cover of Slade’s Coz I Luv You. The encore started with the gut wrenching sadness of Monsters, a song about saying goodbye to his father, that once again had me in tears. You have to be incredibly sure of yourself and your audience to start an encore that way, but it was perfect. Then he did the song I’d been waiting for all evening, the magnificent Bonfire Heart, one of the best songs of the last 20 years in any genre. He followed this up with fan favourite 1973 and one of the best concerts imaginable ended in a wave of love and affection to and from the stage.
So if your wife or girlfriend (not to stereotype but the audience was quite female dominated!) ‘drags you along’ be prepared to enjoy yourself immensely as you surrender to the talent, humour and genuine emotion of the one and only James Blunt, a live performer from the very top rank.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 