Our season starts for real next weekend with a home match against Ross County. Wolves got a late penalty to get a draw. Cuana curled a late shot, which Joe Hart did well to save, which would have given Wolves a winner their play didn’t merit. Even this early, it looks like Wolves will struggle to stay in the English Premier League. Even if the penalty was soft, the Celtic defence had a frailty we’ve perhaps come to expect. In Europe we’d be punished.
Joe Hart had a couple of poor clearances. Before the first minute, he misplaced a pass to Liam Scales. That’s the same Scales that was on loan to Aberdeen. He too misplaced a few passes. Ever reliable Greg Taylor got a bit of a chasing here from Nunes. He got booked for holding him back. Stephen Welsh was meant to be leaving, but here he was in central defence. Iwata filled the right-back position where Johnston (or Ralston) usually plays and proved to be our best defender. He later moved to central defence after Welsh was taken off. He did OKish, the others just aren’t up to Celtic class. Celtic remain vulnerable to cross balls. We’ve known that for two seasons. Cuana, despite scoring from the penalty spot, also missed two or three headers from close in from which he should have scored. He missed a sitter from a cutback with no keeper to beat, with Joe Hart and Iwata and Welsh scampering around after giving the ball away.
To balance that out, for most of the game, Joe Hart had little or nothing to do. McGregor and Hatate strolled this. The Japanese international hit the bar after six minutes after being played in by Maeda. Kyogo scored a glorious goal after seven minutes after being played in by Abada. Kyogo also hit the bar minutes later from a McGregor pass that cut the defence in two. Maeda also had a few near misses in which he should have perhaps scored. When Kyogo went off in the second half, it was notable that Maeda played through the middle. He should have scored one or two. Most notably from an O’Riley pass, which bobbled in front of goal. Oh is now third choice centre-forward. Most goals, preseason have come from Maeda, so it’s a merit thing.
We got a look at the new boys in the last thirty minutes. Yang and Kwon showed some energy, as you’d expect. Yang hung back a few times looking for fouls. That won’t happen when he’s up to speed. Holm also came on. The wonder kid of Norwegian football might not get a start. I can’t say I’ve seen enough of any of them to say how they’ll do. It doesn’t seem that long ago that Kyogo was coming on a substitute winger at Tynecastle and we were chasing the game (which we lost).
Preseason friendlies don’t matter, but they do. We want Celtic to win every game (and obviously Rangers to lose every game, even if it’s tiddlywinks). Our goalkeeper and defence remain the main worry. We’ve signed a Polish/German centre half. I’m assuming he’ll take Carl Starfelt’s place. I’ve not been a fan, but he’s slightly better than what started the game here. Carter Vickers is a certainty to start most games if he’s fit. There are lots of ifs. We might have what the first incarnation of Brendan Rodgers called ‘a million wingers’, including James Forrest. His testimonial is this week, but it’s our defence that lacks depth and quality. Leicester fans would have told you the same. We need to get it right. I don’t have any answers, but as always, we need a rub of the green. Brendan Rodgers said the draw felt like a loss. It wasn’t and it doesn’t matter. If we draw or lose to any Scottish teams, then the pressure really will build. He’s smart enough to say the right things. The new Celtic are like the old Celtic. I’m not sure we’re any better. But I hope we’re moving in the right direction.
Vintage Classics has republished Babi Yar. A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) describes Babi Yar as ‘a document in the form of a novel’.
What the author means by that is in the first line of the first chapter, Ashes (after the Preface): ‘This book contains nothing but the truth.’
Kuznetzov was born in 1929 in Kyiv. His mother was Ukrainian. His father a Soviet who was relocated when the Germans invaded, 21st September 1941. As a twelve-year old, he lived in Kyiv was his mother, grandfather and grandmother when the Nazis came. His mother was a schoolteacher and lessons had been in Russian. Now school lessons were in German. She left to work in a factory. He kept a diary in Russian when he was fourteen. In the Preface this is explained more fully. His text was in Russian (translated into English). The capital spelt Kiev. Not Kyiv in the Ukrainian format.
He also noted as a writer in the Soviet Union he wasn’t allowed to write the truth. ‘Anti-Soviet stuff’ had to be removed before it could be considered for publication.
‘Social realism requires an author not to describe, not so much what really happened, as to what ought to have happened, or at any rate what might have happened.’
Stalin, for example, confiding to Churchill that he had to deport and starve to death around ten million Ukrainians. This wouldn’t appear in Soviet literature, even after Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Georgian’s excesses. Official sources, Kuzntesov suggests, put the figure nearer seven million.
‘A Chapter of Reminiscences’, chapter 1: Cannibals would not be published in the Soviet Union. More likely, the author of such a chapter would be murdered or sent to Siberia, which was much the same thing.
The worst famine in the Ukraine’s long history occurred under Soviet ruin in 1933. It is the first thing I can remember clearly in my life.
My father drawn and tired was sitting on a stool, telling his story.
He had just returned from Uman, where he had helped put through the collectivization of the farms.
“So we forced the peasants to join the collective farms at the point of a gun…But they refused to work. They simply hung around doing nothing with their hands in their pockets…
So we told ‘em: “Either the collectives or death.” They replied, “We’d sooner die.”
“But what they eat—that is beyond belief. There are no longer any frogs or mice about and not a single cat is left. They cut the ordinary grass and stubble for food. They peel the bark off pine trees, grind it down to a powder and cook pancakes from it. And there’s cannibalism everywhere.’
Babi Yar was a ravine close to where Kuznetsov as a boy lived.
‘The river bed was of good course sand, but now for some reason or other the sand was mixed up with little white stones.
‘I bent down and picked one of them to look more closely. It was a small piece of bone, about as big as a fingernail, and it as charred on one side and white on the other. The stream was washing these pieces of bone out of somewhere and carrying them down with it. From this we concluded that the place where the Jews, Russians and Ukrainians and people of other nationalities had been shot was somewhere higher up.’
Left for dead, Dina Mironovna Promicheva was one of less than a handful who escaped the mass murder of around 68 000. Local Jews were shot in swathes by machine-gun fire. With history and hindsight, we know how mass murder works. Holocaust deniers start with the assumption it didn’t happen, and even if it did they dispute the numbers involved. Suggesting it was perhaps a few rogue guards. ‘Babi Yar no longer exists,’ even became Soviet doctrine. An attempt to fill in the ravine caused even more unpublicised deaths.
Sabra, the prickly symbolism of the new generation of Israelis, like to think they would have fought back then too.
Pronicheva’s eyewitness account makes nonsense of such generalisations. German propaganda was effective. Almost all Jews complied with the order to assemble. Even though the poorest of the poor were the Jews working on collective farms, Anatoli’s grandfather repeated what most were saying. ‘That’ll put paid to them getting rich at our expense’.
Artrem street was very long and the procession moved very slowly. People hired transport for their possessions. The sick and children were carried on people’s backs. When they reached the Jewish cemetery bordering Babi Yar and the gateway to their death, there was no turning back. Barbed-wire barriers had been set up to corral those about to be murdered.
Germans with Ukrainian police moved along a few people at a time. They dealt brutally with dissenters who disobeyed the order to get undressed and leave their belongings. Terror worked in keeping control and also to keep the crowd moving into corridors. Pronochieva tells how most people refused to believe they were being slaughtered, even when they could hear the machine guns. Disassociation and rationalisations of what was happening occurred. She felt an ‘animal terror’.
When she understood they were being executed those around her were naked and struck dumb. They passed through a long corridor formed by soldiers, who hit out with clubs to the ribs, stomach and groin. Screamed at them to keep moving. Those who fell, the dogs held by soldiers pounced on. When they came to the end of one corridor, they were beaten again. A steep wall of sand blocked off where people were being machine gunned. Their bodies falling into the ravine and being buried in the sand quarry.
The Red Army had run away and surrendered in their millions. The Germans set up prison camps and let them starve to death. Following the retreat of 1941, the building in the Palace of Labour used by the secret police of the Ukrainian Republic was used by the Nazis for the same purpose.
‘Sometimes people on the streets outside could hear screams coming from the basement. It was generally believed that as far as ordinary mortals were concerned, they could only enter the building. It was very rarely that they came out again.’
A trip to Babi Yar was the most likely outcome. Anatolis’s grandfather and grandmother had been serfs. Soviet rule did not bring freedom. He was nostalgic for old times. When, for example, ‘A beggar hung out his socks to dry; Another beggar pinched them’.
Although their daughter was a schoolteacher, book burning meant little to them. His grandfather, like many others, welcomed German rule with a bout of looting. Education was not for the masses. Adolf Hitler’s speech, 27th April, 1923, set the tone, which sounds familiar.
‘What we have to do next is to change our whole system of education. We are suffering from far too much education. Importance is attached only to knowledge, but excessively clever people are the enemies of action, what we need is instinct and willpower.’
Hunger was the teacher. German propaganda promised a great new life for those who volunteered to work in the Third Reich. Blocking off streets and picking up men and women to work in factories and farms proved more effective. Anotoli’s schooling finished aged 12. He was sent to work until he 14 and could be deported West for labour.
‘The old maths teacher at our school, Balystuk, died of hunger. Towards the end he tried to work as a labourer. The factories were reopened and workers were given a wage of 200 roubles a month.
A loaf of bread in the market then cost 120 roubles, a tumbler-full of underground wheat 20 roubles, a dozen potatoes 35 roubles, and a pound of lard 700 roubles.’
Work did not set you free. ‘Man lives to eat.’ Anotolis’s conclusion was based on his experience of starvation. He suggest of the majority of people on earth labour for little gain. ‘And it’s not because they prefer it that way, but because there is no other way for them.’ Life is brutal and short. A good meal makes heaven on earth.
Babi Yar is a memorial to the truth. The author reminds us not to forget those cries. But he also offers a belief ‘no major crime against society can remain undetected’. He finished his book in 1969. He started writing it as a boy in his mother’s cramped house. He asks, ‘is there more barbarism ahead?’ The answer, of course, is being played out now, not only in Ukraine. Russia, China, India and all nations including those in the West that have scapegoated minorities and refugees and embraced nationalism. Read on.
I wasn’t sure I’d finish this book. I’m snobbish enough to continue reading because the author’s previous novel had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. There’s more than one way to being wrong. At the end of The House of Doors, I felt that flush of acknowledgment of being in such fine company. I’d need to look out for Tan Twan Eng’s other books.
Let me explain my foolishness as the class hatred of the lies and propaganda of Downton Abbey and its ilk. The book has a simple structure. Chapter One, for example, Willie Penang, 1921 begins:
‘Somerset Maugham woke up choking for air. Violent coughing rocked his body until finally, blessedly, it subsided and he could breathe again.’
I’ve read Somerset Maugham’s On Human Bondage. Like most novels I’ve read, I retain little more than two neurons loosely spliced. I imagined the theme was giving everything up for love, only for the protagonist to find himself failing and falling down the social order. I was surprised to find out Maugham was homosexual, because the protagonist was male and in love with a woman.
Tan Wan Eng quotes Maugham’s The Summing Up: ‘Fact and fiction are intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other’.
Somerset Maugham, Willie to his friend, and former flatmate Robert, has fled England and a disastrous marriage to Sylvie Wellcome to Penang. He has a six-year-old daughter. Four of his plays are running concurrently in London. His ten novels and two sets of short-stories have made him one of the best known and richest writers in the world. He’s achieved respectability and fame. The jumping-off point for a life-changing moment: Willie receives a telegram informing him that £40 000 he invested in a scheme has disappeared. He’s bankrupt. The protection that money gave order to his affairs and hid the shadow side of his life, his homosexuality, is gone. While Maugham can return to England, his secretary, and younger lover, Gerald Haxton cannot.
Robert Hamlyn is a successful barrister in the Straits Settlements of Penang. There’s great social cachet having a successful author staying with them. Wives don’t count for much. Robert married Leslie when he was 42 and she was 22. She tutored music and piano, could talk like a native in their language. She could safely be talked down to by the more important wives before she married Robert. They had two boys. Leslie, his wife, became one of the elite.
Around 80 000 white Europeans control much of Asia. But it’s dreadfully stifling and full of intrigue as the court of Queen Victoria. Willie needs to write another bestseller to keep his life afloat and his secret life hidden, but he needs material.
Book 2.
Leslie, Penang, 1910.
Leslie offers him her shadow side as a gift. Her ostensible relationship with Dr Sun Yat-Sen. Like Willie he’s a doctor, but his medicine is revolution. He aims to overthrow the corrupt imperial dynasty of China. It’s bad form for Leslie to associate with such a character.
Ethel Proudlock has called Leslie as a character witness in her murder trial. Her alibi is her attacker tried to rape her. In the Kuala Lumpur courts, had it been a native involved, it would not have gone to trial. But the man she shot was English. Sex and scandal that threaten to unravel secrets that were best kept hidden.
Morality has more forms than the Tao. Tan Twan Eng ties his characters together and plucks them apart. Read on.
Alexandro Bernabei we know,is great going forward, but can’t defend. His only other competitive goal was against Ross County, where he scored a screamer. He scored a break-away goal here. Coming from the right-back slot on the half-way line, he tried to play in Kyogo, but caught the ball wrong with the outside of his boot and it went towards the corner flag. He chased it down. The defender played it back to the keeper. He fluffed it and Bernabei had a tap in.
Maybe that’s an omen. I always like omens when we win. Maybe he will get better at defending, but I doubt he’ll displace Taylor. And if Tierney ever was to make his way back (I very much doubt it) Bernabei is dust. I’ve also like the looks of Vata and Ben Summers. The latter came on after ninety minutes with young right-back McPherson getting a face wound. Pre-season, and the younger players tend to get some game time. There’s talk of O’Riley and Abada leaving. We don’t need it, but if the money was right, I’d take it. Other players will come in. Holm made a second-half appearance. Tidy enough, but difficult to say how good he is. I’d love to see Hatate on a long-term deal like his compatriots. He’s getting more of the ball under Rodgers and we look more dangerous.
Celtic play their last game of the Japanese (Asian) tour next Saturday against Wolves in Dublin. That’s Irish for you.
A different team for each half. Celtic were generally better and created more chances in the first-half. Gamba Osaka, Kyogo’s stomping ground, better in the second. Maeda continued with his fine pre-season form. Having an early offside goal disallowed when he was clearly onside. Similarly, Suzuki scoring for Osaka just before half-time, with both Celtic full-backs playing him on, but it too being chopped off for offside.
Osaka hit the inside of the post in the second half and Siegrist making a double save and somehow keeping the ball out of the net. Then again, his first save was poor. I know he’s been injured but I’m not convinced by Siegrist. Losing six goals in a midweek match isn’t good. But pre-season doesn’t count. I take the position with Joe Hart, I took with Siegrist. We need an upgrade, how badly, I’m not sure.
The new look Celtic look very much like the old Celtic. The new manager looks and sounds like the old manager. Ange—well, I’m no longer interested in what he says or does. Celtic being a stepping-stone sticks in the craw. We know most players follow that path. Maik Nawrocki, for example, is not here for the love of any kind of green we know, unless you’re as rich as my partner, Mary (and she’s a Hun). But most of us agree, its defence we need more bodies. Better players. Rangers, for example, have lots of players over six-feet in their team. They’ve added to that number.
My usual rant involves saying I never rated Carl Starfelt. But I’ll give him pass marks today and last season. Greg Taylor proved me wrong. Yet the thought of Kieran Tierney returning hasn’t got me whooping with joy. He’s Celtic through and through. Better than what we’ve got. But his massive salary would bring a different kind of pressure, not just on him, but other players, like Kyogo, demanding parity. If we’re going to bring any player back make it Virgil.
Maeda with his midweek hat-trick, and two efforts today, stole the show. Rodgers hints that he’s going to play him through the middle. I don’t know if it’s a worry, but Kyogo has been playing deeper behind Oh. Out top scorer is best when playing on the shoulder of the last defender. With few touches in a game, that’s where he got so many of his goals. Wait and see.
These games, and a new manager, give other players a new mindset and a new start. David Turnbull, for example, has threatened to be the next big thing, but fallen short. He’d a good 45 minutes, a turn and shot, which was saved by the keeper (he was offside). Return of the old. James Forrest returns to the starting line-up in his testimonial season. He was back to his best in the first-half. Let’s hope he stays fit. But again, we’ve a million wingers coming in. For Haksabanovic, you feel it’s either stick or twist for him and the club this season. His second-half performance showed promise, but also petulance. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
Iwata at right back. That’s interesting and shows his versatility, but I’m not sure he’ll nail down a starting position in midfield. Liam Scales is back, for how long, I’m not so sure. Scales came in and played in the centre of defence with Lawal for the second half. The young Irish man played in that position for Shamrock Rovers. Not sure he’ll stay.
What constitutes a good season for Rodgers? Usually, it’s the treble. He needs to win the league. Simple. Probably with one of the two cups. Preferably both, but we allow for a blip here. One of those terrible refereeing decisions or a sub-par performance and losing two goals from corners. As long as it’s not Rangers, we’re OKish with that. Some kind of run and luck in Europe would be good. Winning the Champions League. Wait and see.
Hi Everyone! Today I’m sharing news from my author friend Ritu Bhathal, who’s here to tell you about her new book. Read more below:
Ritu Bhathal
Author name: Ritu Bhathal
Genre: Desi Fiction, Chickpea Curry Lit
Books: Marriage Unarranged, Straight As A Jalebi
News: My second book has finally been released! Straight As A Jalebi is book two in the Rishtay Series, following the Gill family in what is described as Modern Historical times, at the turn of the Millennium. Book three will follow in 2024.
Who knew that an innocent trip to India in the year 2000 would have such an impact on his life?
Sunny had only gone as a chaperone for his sister and her best friend and to attend to a few business matters. He’d ended up with a deal that would change the shape of his professional future and possibly…
The Journey Home is a short book, self-published by Debbie Fanning. In subscript at the bottom of the cover is the message she wants to convey after being raped by two men on Burns Night, 25th January 2003, when she was twenty-one: ‘Finding my voice and taking my power back after a devastating assault’.
‘I’m OK. You’re OK.’ That’s the name of a philosophy and a way of listening and doing. It’s one of those convenient lies. Rape and brutality are not buttons that can conveniently be sown back onto a body. Whenever. Get over it. The body keeps the score.
Bamidele Jermaine Alli (Dele Alli) is an English international footballer and millionaire, but in the self-hatred and self-mutilation, he’s not worlds apart from a former nursery head- teacher in Clydebank.
Most rapes and sexual assaults take place in the home. Victims, like Dele Alli, know his or her attacker. Debbie Fanning did not. She felt a hand over her mouth and was dragged down a back lane outside Queen Street station. Our justice system continually fails to prosecute, which mostly means fewer resources and less money is being spent on victims. An increasing number of rapists get away with it. Femicide numbers are growing.
Rage is not the enemy. But the battleground where mind meets body. Touching points of vulnerability. Righteous anger protects the sense of self. Debbie Fanning’s Journey is not complete. It never is. But I guess the message she wants to give the reader is one of hope. Read on.
Where the Crawdads Sing is Delia Owens’ debut novel. A New York Times Bestseller and a Reece’s Book Club pick. Although this is Owen’s first novel, she is also a bestselling author of non-fiction as a ‘wildlife scientist’ in Africa. She lives in Idaho. Write what you know. It’s no great leap to imagine the young Kya, ‘the Marshgirl’. Her brutal coming-of-age marked by oneness and appreciation of the natural world not being far from what Owens’ imagination roams. She’s not preaching a truth, like Rachel Carson Silent Spring, but highlighting as our blue world turns green, that when it’s gone it’s gone, and we will follow.
Kya, an isolated wee girl, growing into a beautiful adolescent woman shunned by white and polite society, grows inward and outward into the natural marsh life of 1960’s America, much the same time Carson was preaching to the unconverted about the dangers of glyphosates, and faced a conservative backlash.
Listen to the poetry of the opening lines of the Prologue to get a feel for the world in which Kya lives and breathes and has her being.
‘1969
Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into sky. Slow-moving creaks wander, carrying the orbs of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese.
…On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp, which would have absorbed it silently, routinely.’
Novels ask questions of the reader. Who or what (if anything) killed Chase Adams. Listen to his name and you’ll know he’s one of those blessed all-American boys whom no man can touch.
The structure of the novel dances between Kya—her impoverished upbringing 1952, when she was six, and her Ma left the family—and that day in 1969, when Chase’s body lay in the marsh.
The meet-cute, when plot fills in the gaps in time. A map orientates the reader. Kya’s shack on the marshland. She stayed with her father before he too disappeared. There’s always somebody leaving her is an existential truth. The Reading Cabin, worse than a shack, but it has a roof. Kya is a marsh girl, she can’t read. Not until Tate learned her. The Reading Cabin and a meat-cute of will she won’t she, but we know happiness has no fixed point. Point Beach faces the sea. Jumpin’s Bait and Gas, a jetty and lifeline to young Kya. Colored Town, blacks are hidden away from the affluence of Barkley Cove, where Chase Adams lives like a young god. Lastly, on the map, Fire Tower.
Fire Tower is the loaded gun pointed at Barkley Cove.
‘Sheriff Jackson said, “Vern, there’s more to do here, but it doesn’t feel right. Chase’s wife and folks don’t know he’s passed.”’
Jackson has to dig deeper. The timelines of his investigation and Kya’s dalliance with Chase have to twist into a knot that holds true.
We have a love story that’s a lust story. Kya reads about ‘sneaky fuckers’, which made her laugh, a technical term for toads that croak what they’re not.
Then we have a love story, which is a love story. Romeo and Juliet of the Marsh. Tate and Kya. Kya and Tate. She’s fifteen and he’s eighteen. They’re so much in love it can’t be statutory rape. But Tate leaves her purity intact. Because he’s the good guy. The reader figures quests and questions will be asked. But in the long narrative arc the purity of both will be rewarded. The job of Owens as novelist, and not as naturalist, is to twist the knife.
She does a fine job. The murder mystery is resolved. True love runs true. The good people of Barkley Cove, who shunned and stigmatised Marsh Trash and Marsh Girl, are themselves put on trial. It’s not J.B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls. More a kinship with Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and set around the same time.
Where the Crawdads Sing does indeed sing. Another novel with a female protagonist. An international bestseller that questions the natural order of America’s addiction to destruction of (marsh)land in the creation of wealth for very few. Mya, Marsh Girl, shuns those that would drain the swamp, which provides sanctuary for more life that we could get down low and get to know in one lifetime. But that’s fiction for all the Trumpets out there. The rich-man, poor-girl plot doesn’t lay an egg, but neither does it have enough grace to fly. Now there’s a movie. Books are a higher form of pond life. Read on.
Part One of The Optimists, begins with a quote from Fergal Keane, Season of Blood. It was Rwanda, of course, Keane was referring to. The same place politicians such as Nigel Farage want to send refugees in the British Isles. The same place Fergal Keane admitted broke him. Here we have the first line:
‘After the massacre at the church in N—Clem Glass flew home to London.’
Clem Glass, an international photographer, is equally broken. A candidate for Graham Greene’s category of A Burnt-Out Case. In modern parlance he’s suffering from PTSD. Glass is wondering how to live from day to day. Clare, his elder sister also has had some kind of mental breakdown. She has booked herself into a private hospital. His dad is living in a monastery, and asks Clem to check on her and help her out.
Clem agrees, riding on a vision of normality and doing the right thing. But he’s searching for a model of survival. Silverman filed copy, wrote the epitaph, giving an account of the mass murder and genocide of woman and children, in a church in a fictional Rwanda. The survival of a young girl, left for dead, was particularly haunting. (Keane offers a similar account.)
Part 2, has Clem leaving his sister and dad behind, flying Air Canada to Toronto. Clem is hoping Silverman can show him a way to survive. Silverman has left his wife in New York. His way of coping is good deeds—without the religion—he feeds the poor and homeless.
Clem comes home, not sure what to do about himself or his sister. He muddles on. There is some hope that the perpetrator of the genocide in the church and surrounding countryside with be prosecuted. They go and stay with his mother’s sister, who has a condemned cottage they can use. Hmmmm. If you’re optimistic enough, Read on.
I picked Teresa up last week, Thursday. She’d her brother’s funeral today. She was carrying two plastic bags, stuff from the Coop and Jimmy’s medication from the chemists. She stood waving her arms, standing at the clock across from Dalmuir Library. I tooted the horn and parked at the traffic lights.
‘I thought you were a taxi,’ she said.
Teresa is scheduled at the end of July to go for a cataract operation. Then she said I was an angel. I’ve never been an angel before, but I was, briefly, an altar boy. One eye at a time, sweet Jesus. Then she told me her elder brother had died. He was five years older than her. He was born when Scotland still had rationing. A treat was mushy peas with vinegar. Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation at Westminster, ushering in the Elizabethan era. People stood outside the shop windows and watched it on the telly. Until a beat cop came along and cried, ‘Hi Jimmy, move on!’
Teresa was worried about her Jimmy. He couldn’t breathe. COPD. She’d hardly been out of the house the last two years except to nip up to the shops and chemists. Her sister was coming to visit before the funeral. She picked up her bags and shook her head. ‘She’ll be in for a shock,’ she said.
‘Because he’s so handsome,’ I said.
Teresa liked that. I never knew Teresa without Jimmy. But I knew Jimmy without Teresa. They were married at a Registry Office in Glasgow in 1977. A good, caring, Catholic girl, not even pregnant. About an hour before the Queen arrived for her Jubilee Celebrations, nationalist slogans were removed from George Square cenotaph. Jimmy had an alibi and other promises to keep.
For a Drumchapel man, he’d done well. Half a bungalow and six acres of reclaimed swamp land for a back garden. He’d worked hard for it. Underground connecting pipes, but never passing underneath a picket line. When public life became Thatcherism, and every man for themselves, he knew it was time to get out. He never drove, but always worked, getting up at whatever ungodly hour, he and to get out of the house to get picked up.
Money was the entry fee to having a laugh. He could get out his guitar, chased immortality in song and danced till dawn. Make nights and the weekends stretch to eternity, or at least Tuesday. Not many remember Jimmy as being an athlete. Like most of us, he played fitba. Because he was wee and fast, he played as a winger. But by fifteen he was burnt out, ready to leave school and start real life. I guess it started as a joke to run a marathon.
There used to be two Jimmys. His big mate, Jimmy, had a moustache. Open-neck shirts. Flared denim. Shiny shoes. Sharp dressers. A wad of unspent wages in the pocket. Wee Jimmy had a matching ginger mouser. Their party piece was running naked from the old Club Bar and into Macs, where good men went missing, or went bad. Not that you’d get any sense out of either of them. It was the old joke, I didnae recognise you wae your clothes on. They wore mismatched clothes home. And there is a story about what wee Jimmy found in one of his oversized pockets.
They trained for a marathon. One pint for every mile. Hard to believe that when Jimmy couldn’t get a breath, he’d run three marathons. I think in one of them he was dressed as a chicken. Jimmy Saville smoked a cigar.
His old pal, the other moustachioed Jimmy, died of cancer a few years ago Wee Jimmy kept a bike in his garden hut. Gary Forbes and him went out along the cycle path and got to Bowling. Jimmy had a fag. Then went to the pub. His biking days were over.
During Lockdown, when Boris Johnson having unofficial parties at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country house, Jimmy had parked his electrical bogey at the stairs besides the tunnel, cutting under the canal, and into Singers Road. They weren’t protesting or investing in conspiracy theories. Gary Forbes, DJ and Jimmy had their hats and coats pulled tight as they shared the patter and a carry-oot. I got offered a can, but I was out on my bike.
Later that week, the battery on Jimmy’s bogey gave out. We wondered how we would get it home. Get Jimmy home.
‘I’ll walk,’ Jimmy said.
But we knew he couldn’t. It wasn’t that far, not for us. DJ and me had him sit on the cushioned seat, and we pushed him from the rear end, up onto the metal bridge. Down the slope towards Glendevon and home. The battery on the bogey kicked back in. Like the old days, when every second car on the street used to be bump started on a hill. I’d like to say Jimmy powered away, but he didn’t. We walked beside him.
There was a stack of funerals at that time, we couldn’t attend. Jimmy could manage out less and less. Housebound. He claimed even the ghost of Charlie Mac no longer haunted him. Throwing up in his living room. Smashing his head off the glass table and breaking both, while claiming the blood on his hand wasn’t his, and what the fuck! When we had drunk ourselves to beyond the point of no return, Jimmy’s like has gone, but we’ll be there for Teresa. Thursday, 20th July, 3.30pm. RIP, Jimmy.
Barbara Kingsolver thanks Charles Dickens in ‘Acknowledgement’ for writing David Copperfield. Similarly, I’d need to thank Book Club Mom. I hadn’t heard of Kingsolver, but her blog made me want to read the book. 546 pages, what we used to call epics. But for Charles Dickens, with his newspaper serialisation, Copperhead would be labelled a short story. Dickens had a wonderful handle on people’s names. Like epigrams, he matched them to his characters. David Copperfield thus becomes under Kingsolver’s alchemy Demon Copperhead. Her setting is not the satanic mills and black soot of the British Industrial Revolution, but Lee County amid the legalised Purdue plague of Oxy-script mills that killed 500 000 Americans (and still counting).
First chapter. Demon introduces himself as narrator.
‘First I got myself born. Like a little blue prizefighter.’
Demon, in his search for adolescent redemption, is reminded by his art teacher, Mrs Armstrong, that art is work. Demon knows about child labour. He’s been working since he was ten. Chasing the Oxy dragon costs $80 that makes the billionaire Sackler family even richer. Demon breaks that down to two days working in a store, or a week’s work in the rubbish tip outside Mr Jolly’s, knocking a nail into car batteries to salvage the acid to make crank. Purdue, with their computer models, targeted Lee County to make super-profit on their drugs, and the American way of life. The army and navy, in their gold braid, set up store in the schools picking up the slack for the armed services, with great success after 9/11 and pedalling the mythology of kicking ass.
Mr Armstrong teaches schoolboy Civics in Lee County. Painting rainbows. History becomes literature that resonates with Demon.
‘That Holden guy held my interest. Hating school, going to the city to chase whores and watch rich people’s nonsense, and when you come to find out, all he wants in his heart is to stand at the edge of a field coaching little boys before they go over a cliff like he did. I could see that. I mean see it, I drew it, with those white cliffs on the Kentucky border, where Miss Barks took me that time. I’ve not ever seen rye growing, so I made him the catcher in the tobacco. Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and foreign, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.’
Barbara Kingsolver won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2023) and was co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Demon Copperhead.
Martha Gills turns that on its head and asks if female novelists need a women’s prize for fiction.
Debut novelists are mainly woman. Women, like Kingsolver, dominate the New York Times’ bestsellers list. Women buy 80% of books. For every man in the publishing industry there are two women. Women like to read about strong female characters.
Charles Dickens gave women a gender role of supporting characters to men or boys. In Dombey and Son, for example, a shipping magnate rejects his daughter’s love and falls for a femme fatale, bankrupting his family, morally and literally. Dicken’s contemporaries such as Wilkie Collins have the beautiful Women in White as a doppelganger. A jumping-off point for murky deeds in a man’s world. George Elliot had to be recognised as a man before she could write about women and men. The androgynous Angus who is somehow also Agnes is Shakespearian, not something Dickens works into his world of fiction. Kingsolver has all kinds of women orbiting Demon Copperhead and shaping him into the boyish man he will become.
Demon’s little ‘bleach blonde’ mom is Dickensian. Smoking her Pall Malls and living in a trailer. Demon’s nemesis, Stoner, who muscles in on his mom and family life, equally so. Mrs Peggot who rents the trailer to his mom, but also acts as his mom. That’s Dicken’s Mrs Peggoty. A body to hide behind. A woman that does what needs to be done in a man’s world. Her presence an act of empathetic love. Matt Peggot, known as Maggot, her grandson also needs mothering. His mother in prison. She stabbed her sadistic wife-beating husband seventy-six times. Wrongly convicted, the Peggot family believe, but that’s justice for the poor. Her other daughter, June, is hot like all the Peggot girls, but she’s also got herself an education Got herself out of Lee County. Little more than a girl, she’s bringing up her niece Emmy. The Peggoty world hangs together with mom and dad. But Demon is not a Peggot. He’s part of the Melungeons of Appalachia who came to dig coal and make a life.
The beginning of his odyssey is a search for his grandma after Stoner and the social services rip the heart out of a small boy and leave him in a lay-by exposing the American dream for what it is. Read on.
odonnellgrunting 