This month’s book – The Long Take by Robin Robertson- was a big ask for the group. Robinson is a Scottish-American major poet now in his older years who has written about the devastated personal lives of returned American servicemen after World War Two. Walker, a reporter and war casualty meets and interviews many of these men, now down and out, frequently drunk and living on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. He too has frequent flash backs of the carnage and deaths of his platoon members in France. These men have been abandoned by a government who doesn’t care about them and abandons them to destitution on their return from the war. The book is written as a long poem in free verse and contains stunning images and  poems inserted into the narrative.
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Meg Dillon

​Our May reading was with Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, the story of a slave boy on a British Caribbean sugar plantation. Washington’s skill at drawing was recognised by the plantation owner’s brother who stole him away and travelled with him as his assistant. Many adventures followed including a balloon ride that crashed into the sea, time spent with scientists in the Arctic circle, then London, Amsterdam and Morocco.

The story explores the idea of freedom, for although Washington was ostensibly free he was burdened by memories of his cruel childhood and his search for his original parents.

​A thoughtful book enjoyed by most of the group.

Meg Dillon

An interesting first novel by a young author. It deals with the theme of ‘memory’ as a woman tries to reconstruct the facts about her past.

Abandoned by her mother when she was sixteen, in mid life she goes back to try and find those people she remembers who may have known something about her mother. In this painful journey she meets an unknown older half sibling whom her mother had also abandoned, his adoptive parents, a neighbor with a terrible secret and finally her mother living on a derelict canal boat suffering from dementia. She takes her mother back to live with her, but her reluctance to talk about the past and her memory loss contribute only partially to the sketchy details her mother reveals.

The author split up the chapters into multiple periods of time making it difficult at times to untangle the facts, perhaps a device by the author to emphasize how memory is distorted when we try to reconstruct our past. Not a book for a cosy winter read around the fireplace.
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Meg Dillon

Now in his 70s, Ondaatje reminisces about a London he knew in the late 1940s, bringing his extensive knowledge of the city to the fictional story of two children abandoned by their middle class parents and left in the care of  an eccentric and varied group of guardians, some of whom are minor criminals.

Through Nathaniel we see the underbelly of this city recovering from war. People scrabble to make ends meet:  travelling the Thames at night picking up contraband greyhounds; working in the laundry of a large hotel – Nathaniel starts to see the way adults organize their lives and abandons school to learn from life. Neither of the children realise their parents  work in the post-war  secret service and eventually the children are in danger from  their parents enemies.

Later in life Nathaniel tries to make sense of his teenage years and work out just what his mother did and why she left them. His isolation and loneliness seem to stem from these experiences and his abandonment of his teenage  girlfriend. Ondaatje explores the way memories of past experiences are unearthed and  explored when adults reflect on life seeking some understanding their behavior.

Lively discussions resulted from the very mixed responses to this book from our group.  

Our April book is Everything Under by Daisy Johnson. Anyone who has read it is welcome to join us in the Library at 2pm, Thursday 17th April.
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Meg Dillon

We read the 2018 winner of the Booker prize, Anna Burns, The Milkman  set in Northern Ireland  during ‘the Troubles’. Middle sister, the main character, struggles to manage her relationship with her maybe-boyfriend, while being stalked by an older man, the leader of the local paramilitary.

Her mother is a particularly bitter and resentful woman who has already lost two sons in the civil war and shows no sympathy for her daughter. The toxic environment of gossip and bitchiness that permeates this community weighs heavily on the girl. Despite all this some subtle humor can be found and towards the end there are small signs that some sort of improvements may help this community out of its hopelessness. 

A mixed response from the reading group, some enjoyed it, others found the prose style difficult. We will be comparing other books from the Booker Long List with this winner. Our book for March is Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and we will be meeting in the Benalla Library at 2pm on Friday 15 March. Anyone who has read the book is welcome to join us.
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Meg Dillon

The annual Man Booker Prize is awarded to the novel deemed best by an extensive panel of judges in Britain. Writers in both America and post-colonial countries can also enter. Each year the search is narrowed to a Long List of 13 books, then the Short List of 6 from which the winner is chosen.  These novels are not for the faint hearted! They often explore contentious contemporary issues or the lives of families or individuals experiencing  the difficulties of modern life.

The judges said of the Long List:   All of these books – which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race – capture something about a world on the brink. Among their many remarkable qualities is a willingness to take risks with form.  

​The 2018 winner of the Booker was The Mars Room  by American writer Rachel Kushner. You can google the 2018 Man Booker Long List to see the complete list.

If you are curious about some of the best contemporary fiction of the last year…please join us.  You will be expected to obtain your own copy of the books the group chooses to read, either by buying an e-book version, borrowing from a library, or purchasing a hard copy.

Meg Dillon